Roadside Oddities: Novels of the 50s (ENGL347) Whitman College Spring 2012

Hi! Here's the material you'll need for Roadside Oddities: Novels of the 50s (ENGL347) Whitman College Spring 2012:

• Syllabus
• On the Wiki
• Our calendar of due dates and readings

Introduction to Creative Writing (ENGL 150-B), Whitman College, Spring 2012

Here's the material you'll need for Introduction to Creative Writing, ENGL 150-B, Whitman College, Spring 2012!

• The syllabus
• Our calendar of readings, events, and due dates
• Writing Exercises
• Supplementary Stories, Poems, and Essays Worth Your While

VN Sighting in J. Winterson Memoir

Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? offers up a funny, incisive chapter, "English Literature A-Z," where Nabokov appears throughout. (She is not a fan.) Favorite bit appears after the fold:

A Fine, Fine Fall Day for Grafitti Removal

The fine art of grafitti removal

A Fine, Fine Fall Day for Grafftti Removal

A day for Craig Baldwin's Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal.

Kermit & Kinbote

It's always delightful to see Nabokov referenced. It is particularly delightful to see him referenced in a review of the new Muppets movie:

When Gary brings his ultra-perky girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams), on a trip to Los Angeles, Walter tags along too, in great anticipation of visiting the Muppets' studio and meeting, in Vladimir Nabokov's phrase, "beings akin to him."

Limits are Possibilities

I'm a huge fan of formal constraints, and years ago was pleased by finding this bit in Chip Kidd's graphic-design bildungsroman The Cheese Monkeys:

Always remember: Limits are possibilities. That sounds like Orwell, I know. It’s not – it’s Patton. Formal restrictions, contrary to what you might think, free you up by allowing you to concentrate on purer ideas. As graphic designers you want the world as your palette. But beware: You can be crippled by too many choices, especially if you don’t know what your goals are.

So it's a thing I do for myself: set arbitrary rules, some rational, some less so, in whatever I write. It helps beyond the telling.

And so then it's no surprise that it's also a thing I love doing to my students: giving them assignment sheets with insane strictures, which they at first blanch at and then wholly embrace when they find themselves so pleased with the end results. This is the sheet I assigned near the beginning of the semester. And this is the one they just got for their final story. I am very much looking forward to the results.

Also! It's nice to see one's hunches and personal experience confirmed by science. And by Russell Smith, who also, I'm pleased to note, also asks that students produce more material than is seemingly reasonable to ask. But again: it's worth doing because it works.

Nabokovilia: Martin Amis (The Information and London Fields)

Little by little, bit by bit, I'll be reintroducing bits of Nabokovilia from the old site. Here is the first (additional bits of Martin Amis Nabokovilia available here.)

From The Information:

Even when he was in familiar company (his immediate family, for instance) it sometimes seemed to Richard that those gathered in the room were not quite authentic selves -- that they had gone away and then come back not quite right, half remade or reborn by some blasphemous, backhanded, and above all inexpensive process. In a circus, in a funhouse. All flaky and carny. Not quite themselves. Himself very much included.

He said, 'Is this without interest? Nabokov said he was frankly homosexual in his literary tastes. I don't think men and women write and read in exactly the same way. They go at it differently.'

'And I suppose,' she said, 'that there are racial differences too?'

He didn't answer. For a moment Richard looked worryingly short-necked. He was in fact coping with a digestive matter, or at least he was sitting tight until the digestive matter resolved itself one way or the other.

*

'But that was... Wasn't that just a maneuver? To avoid a homosexuality scandal," said Richard carefully. 'Advice from Gide. Before Proust went to Gallimard.'

'Nabokov,' suggested Balfour.

'Yeah but that was just a book of love poems. When he was a schoolboy.'

'Nevertheless. Philip Larkin. And of course James Joyce.'

*

Richard had hated all the poets and novelists too, but the playwrights, the playwrights... With Nabokov, and others, Richard regarded the drama as a primitive and long-exhausted form. The drama boasted Shakespeare (which was an excellent cosmic joke), and Chekhov, and a couple of sepulchral Scandinavians. Then where were you?

From London Fields:

When she arranged this meeting with Guy, over the telephone, Nicola stressed the need for commando or bank-caper synchrony ('Unpunctuality throws me utterly. It's tiresome, I know. The orphanage, perhaps...'); but this didn't stop her keeping him waiting for a good fifteen minutes ('Please, sit down!' she called from the bedroom. 'I do apologize'). She needed fifteen minutes. One to envelope her bikini in a plain white cotton dress. Another to give the bedclothes a fantastic worrying. What was the delightful phrase in Lolita: the guilty dissaray of hotel linen suggesting and ex-convicts saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores? The rest of the time Nicola needed for make-up...

• Thanks to M.R. Miller for providing both the London Fields source and the quote itself. 
• Martin Amis in Wikipedia

The Cat's in the Bag

Was about to pack for gym & found this thing in the bag. If I had a moment and was the sort of person who makes Sweet Smell of Success references to my cat I would have said, "The cat's in the bag and the bag's going to the gym." But I am not.