Fractal literature

It’s hard going from a novel I’ve read twice, with the aid of the entire class and instructor I’ve been thoroughly digesting, to being on my own again with another piece of raw book. And it’s a tough one to cook. But I’ve been getting into it. To begin with; Does this book remind anyone else of Humboldt’s Gift? Maybe I should ask if anyone’s ever even read that? -Saul Bellow won the nobel prize for literature. Referred to by Nabokov as “miserable mediocrity”- anyway it reminds me of it. Then again I’m not very far along so who am I to say? Aside, I’m pretty sure that Charles Kinbote is totally crazy. –or maybe I am which, like Kyle, is becoming strong possibility- because there are all sorts of strange things being said, maybe I just don’t understand it yet, but on page 15 “…forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verse each, and damn that music.” Or on 93 at the bottom of the first paragraph an odd interjection of “Dear Jesus, do something.” Maybe the distraction has something to do with the “amusement park” that’s apparently in front of his house, but I think it may be beyond that. On a page I cannot remember Sybil says simply “What’s more, you are insane”. And what’s more Kinbote seems to do a lot of what I would consider sketchy behavior, i.e. creeping around these people’s house and looking in the windows.

But then I come to a sobering discovery: that I, we as a reader, are just like (simile), or we are (metaphor…stronger) Charles Kinbote. Always poking around some famous poets work, trying to dissect and discern meaning from scraps of possibly meaningless information. Take for example this blog-I don’t really know what I’m talking about but, I’m wicked giddy because I think ive found something. Even though I’ve yet to do the assignment of annotating a page, I feel like Kinbote in that I’ve got all these notes and side notes on all this stuff. When reading Lolita I had all these clues and maps kind of like Quilty, and man, its all catching up that I maybe metamorphing into a Nabokov character. Maybe I am going to deep, or still stuck on the Lolita fact finding mission, or maybe this is the point of reading., of dedicated reading. Because clearly this is book is beautiful, and the beauty of the story is the annotation. It is the beauty we can find in the description of a simple photograph. The deeper you go the more you find. even web blogging, And I can assure you classmates- as I have been reading almost everyone’s- butterflies are hatching from your blogs.