I try to piece out why I loved a Rachel Ingalls passage so much, particularly one that feels almost tossed off:
I love Ingalls's variation on the gothic-horror convention of not being able to leave a place you know you should absolutely leave ASAP, the icy humor in the heroine going, "Well, it'd be rude to. It'd make my boyfriend look rude to these strangers w/ their bathroom toads."
I’m late to Andrew Sean Greer’s delightful Less and loved everything about it, including its sly Pnin-ish narratorial technique and equally Pnin-ish hapless protagonist, Arthur Less. There were other, more overt Nabokov nods:
Though he was once an endowed chair at Robert’s university, he has no formal training except the drunken, cigarette-filled evenings of his youth, when Robert’s friends gathered and yelled, taunted, and played games with words. As a result, Less feels uncomfortable lecturing. Instead, he re-creates those lost days with his students. Remembering those middle-aged men sitting with a bottle of whiskey, a Norton book of poetry, and scissors, he cuts up a paragraph of Lolita and has the young doctoral students reassemble the text as they desire. In these collages, Humbert Humbert becomes an addled old man rather than a diabolical one, mixing up cocktail ingredients and, instead of confronting the betrayed Charlotte Haze, going back for more ice. He gives them a page of Joyce and a bottle of Wite-Out—and Molly Bloom merely says “Yes.” A game to write a persuasive opening sentence for a book they have never read (this is difficult, as these diligent students have read everything) leads to a chilling start to Woolf’s The Waves: I was too far out in the ocean to hear the lifeguard shouting, “Shark! Shark!”
Here’s another, less overt Nabokov nod:
“I am sorry, I have something in my eye.” Javier’s right eye is now blinking rapidly: a panicked bird. From its outer edge, a rivulet of tears begins to flow.
“Are you okay?”
Javier clenches his teeth and blinks and rubs. “This is so embarrassing. The lenses are new for me, and irritating. They are French.”
Less does not fill in the punch line. He watches Javier and worries. He once read in a novel about a technique for removing a speck from another’s eye: you use the tip of your tongue. But it seems so intimate, more intimate than a kiss, that he cannot even bear to mention it. And, being from a novel, it is possibly an invention.
And here’s the relevant Lolita passage if the bit above is unclear:
Tuesday. Rain. Lake of the Rains. Mamma out shopping. L., I knew, was somewhere quite near. In result of some stealthy manuevering, I came across her in her mother’s bedroom. Prying her left eye open to get rid of a speck of something. Checked frock. Although I do love that intoxicating brown fragrance of hers, I really think she should wash her hair once in a while. For a moment, we were both in the same warm green bath of the mirror that reflected the top of a polar with us in the sky. Held her roughly by the shoulders, then tenderly by the temples, and turned her about. “It’s right here,” she said, “I can feel it.” “Swiss peasant would use the tip of her tongue.” “Lick it out?” “Yeth. Shly try?” “Sure,” she said. Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball.
One thing I didn’t add: I actually almost never ate here, because it felt too fancy and expensive.
I had the opportunity to write about Philippe Halsman’s portraits of Vladimir Nabokov. The story’s up at Magnum Photos.
I like to go on little social media breaks now and then, which means that all the stuff I’d usually post on Twitter or Instagram or whatever gets moved to over here, though the index card below and nearly all the Post-It doodles in the next post were up on the usual places.
Here’s everything I’m doing at AWP (the more readable version is in the events page)! Are you going? Please say hi! I’d love to see you!
And also when you are a writer
A topology of all possible sequels.
Today’s drawing of a double-breasted blazer in a closet in Ft. Lauderdale idly wondering whatever became of his owner.
Here’s the pre-coloring-pencils version:
I tried and failed to draw a Ray Johnson snake from memory:
Which led me to think about failed Johnson bunnies and also U2’s Zooropa spaceman doodle that I copied and messed with until it became a dude buried at the bottom of a page:
Today’s Post-It doodle of the lizard people’s inevitable invasion of earth:
And here are the lizard people in black and white:
Snow! Stick!
The all-ink/no-color version follows below.
