NaboPop: Nabokov's Pale Fire in Spike Jonze's Her

The Vintage paperback edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is visible just above and to the right of Joaquin Phoenix in this frame of Spike Jonze's new movie Her (screen capture below totally stolen from Zemb.la; thanks to the Nabokv-L forum for the tip):


See also: Nabokov's Ada pops up just behind Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man.

Sighting: Pnin in Best American Stories 2013

Elizabeth Tallent on her story "Wilderness," and on professor types in fiction (as seen in the back matter of 2013's Best American Short Stories): "Maybe it mattered less, but there was also the grain-of-sand/oyster vexation of fictional professors' almost always being assholes, with Pnin as the fantastically lovable exception to the rule. In fiction, professor is predatory, student is prey. This ironclad dyad goes to bed without caring much about the intricacy, anxiety, and comedy of teaching. So there's room" (337).

The same anthology also features Lorrie Moore's "Referential," a tribute/take-off of Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols."

Nabokovilia: Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch

Nabokovilia in Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

Apart from that, and the door where the blonde had disappeared, the only light came from a lamp which threw a sharp white circle on melted candles, computer cables, empty beer bottles and butane cans, oil pastels boxed and loose, many catalogues raisonnes, books in German and English, including Nabokov's Despair and Heidegger's Being and Time with the cover torn off, sketch books, art books, ashtrays and burnt tinfoil, and a grubby looking pillow where drowsed a gray tabby cat. (574)

Also:

Clearly this Everett ("poor as a churchmouse" -- his phrase) was living off her money, Uncle Welty's money rather, old Europe preying off young America, to use a phrase I'd employed in my Henry James paper in my last semester of school. (463)

 Compare to this bit in Nabokov's "On a Book Entitled Lolita":

...an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as "Old Europe debauching young America," while another saw in it "Young America debauching old Europe."

 Bonus bit: Tartt quoting Nabokov on what she wants from awesome books.

Nabokovilia: Rebecca Makkai's The Borrower

I love love love Makkai's short stories, but somehow never got around to reading her terrific novel, The Borrower, until just now. There is a Nabokov nod right off the bat!

They say I'm the most terrific liar they ever saw in their lives. And that one, old lecher-lepidopterist, gabbling grabber, stirring his vodka-pineapple from the high narrow shelf of N-A-B, let me twist his words. (You can always count on a librarian for a derivative prose style): Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what I envied, what I thought I could fix. Look at this prison of books. (2)

More Nabokovilia:

(Did he have a predecessor? asks Humbert.
No. No, he didn't. I'd never met anyone like him in my life) (6)

Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness... (30)

Possible Nabokovilia! (Echoes of the Quilty/Humbert conversations.)

"I'm Glenn," he said. "I'm the penis."
"I'm sorry?"
"The pianist. For tonight." (37)

"Do you pray?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Do you play. Piano." (39)

Lovely bit echoing Lolita's "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art":

Here are the pictures, then. Gather around and look close: runaways and borrowers, angels and aurochs and actors, crafty villains and small, scrappy heroes. Now, complain that the girl in front was blocking your view. Squint hard and ask why the artist drew it all wrong." (322)

Alien Terminator!


I'm looking into Cartagena's role in the exploitation film industry and landed on the Franco Nero vehicle Top Line (aka Alien Terminator). The Wikipedia article only mentions the UFOs and the aliens, but this Colombian web site does a better job at noting the potential awesomeness of this thing:

Franco Nero plays a drunkard who discovers a UFO in the Cartagena jungle. He finds himself chased by armed Nazis, dangerous bulls, and a Terminator-style robot played by the Colombian actor Rodrigo Obregón.


Also here is the movie condensed into its best 12 minutes by someone on YouTube:

Convergences: Scooby and the Narcos, Archie and the Undead

Scooby and Archie are both taken to some pretty dark places -- the first is a totally imaginary scenario (in a novel that also gives you Homes Simpson in a noir called D.O.H.), the second an actual thing you can pick up. Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge provides an imaginary Scooby Doo set-up that actually sounds just a smidgen less dark than what the Archie folks are going to do to Archie in a five-issue run.

 Scooby Goes Latin! (1990), from Pynchon's Bleeding Edge:
"Hi, mom." She wants to enfold him forever. Instead lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellín, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost -- what else -- of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan.

 The cartoon comes back on, the villain is brought to justice. "And I would've gotten away with it, too," he complains, "if it hadn't been for those Medellín kids!"

 From this NPR story on Afterlife with Archie:
Reggie Mantle runs over Jughead's fluffy pup Hot Dog. (Of course Reggie started it!) Jughead takes Hot Dog to Sabrina the teen witch, who using the Necronomicon and channeling Pet Sematary, brings him back to life. (And messes it up, 'cause that's what she does!) Hot Dog bites Jughead, who ends up consuming victims at the Halloween Dance. (He is always hungry!)

Convergences: Poets & Geologists & Driving & Mermaids.




 John McPhee tells you not to hitch a ride with geologists. Martin Amis tell you who not to hitch a ride with poets. Montaigne says, Who needs a car when you have a tail?


McPhee's Annals of the Former World:
Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, a roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane. (...)
"If I'm going to drive safely, I can't do geology."

Amis's The Information:
Poets can't, don't, shouldn't drive. (British poets can't or don't drive. American poets drive, but shouldn't.)

Horace, by way of Montaigne:
Poets can create monsters at will; say a fair maid with the tail of a fish, that is, a mermaid.

Nabokovilia: John Fowles' Daniel Martin

From John Fowles's Daniel Martin:

If I had a preferred line in the modern novel, it was the one that began with Henry James and descended through Virginia Woolf to Nabokov; all, in their different guises, of the confraternity, the secret society, who have known, and known exile, from, la bonne vaux.

We all like to think such personal preference reflects a general criterion, but of course it also, always, stems partly from personal failing -- betrays what we lack, what we long for from and in our lack, what we long for from and in our lack. I made one other note that morning.

 If a life is largely made of retreats from reality, its relation must be of retreats from the imagined.

HBO: Stacking TVs On Top of Other TVs Since 1998

Enough people have said enough things about the parallels between Sex and the City and Girls, Shoshana included. One thing's for sure: If you are a hotshot fictional New York artist, and you're in either show, you will totally have a thing for stacking TVs on top of other TVs:

Girls ("Bad Friend," 2/27/13)

Girls ("Bad Friend," 2/27/13)

Sex and the City ("Models and Mortals," 6/14/98)

Sex and the City ("Models and Mortals," 6/14/98)
HBO: It's not TV. It's TVs on top of other TVs.

Bonus: Actual art installation involving TVs stacked on top of other TVs. David Welch's Totem Goals (more at The Morning News):

Vivian Darkbloom in Pretty Little Liars

"Very few people know Vivian's true identity," says the Pretty Little Liars wiki.

Vladimir Nabokov's anagram, Vivian Darkbloom,  has appeared in Ada and Lolita (and in the Acknowledgments page of Arthur Philips's The Egyptologist). She now also appears in the ABC Family series Pretty Little Liars, where Vivian is the alter-ego of Alison DiLaurentis.

Thanks to the Nabokv-L Listserv and to Jansy Mello for the tip.

Montaigne and the Tauntaun

Montaigne on the historical precedent for the apparently-scientifically-improbable Star Wars bit where Han Solo stuffs Luke Skywalker into the Tauntaun: The army that Bajazet had sent into Russia was overwhelmed with so dreadful a tempest of snow, that to shelter and preserve themselves from the cold, many killed and embowelled their horses, to creep into their bellies and enjoy the benefit of that vital heat. (From On War Horses in The Complete Essays.)

"Lolita is Famous, Not I," Visualized

In Strong Opinions, Nabokov claims that "Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name." This Google Ngram Viewer graph appears to prove him right.

But: If you remove "Vladimir" (making his name maybe 50% less unpronounceable) and remove the smoothing, the Ngram Viewer graph tells a different story: "Lolita" triumphs over Nabokov only in 1955 and 1958, the dates of Lolita's France and American publications. (Big ups to Chris Manon for pointing this out.)


Craigslist, Montaigne-style

Montaigne's dad points out the need for Craigslist several centuries before it finally came around:

My late father, a man that had no other advantages than experience and his own natural parts, was nevertheless of a very clear judgment, formerly told me that he once had thoughts of endeavouring to introduce this practice; that there might be in every city a certain place assigned to which such as stood in need of anything might repair, and have their business entered by an officer appointed for that purpose. As for example: I want a chapman to buy my pearls; I want one that has pearls to sell; such a one wants company to go to Paris; such a one seeks a servant of such a quality; such a one a master; such a one such an artificer; some inquiring for one thing, some for another, every one according to what he wants. And doubtless, these mutual advertisements would be of no contemptible advantage to the public correspondence and intelligence: for there are evermore conditions that hunt after one another, and for want of knowing one another's occasions leave men in very great necessity.

Nabokovilia: Updike's The Afterlife and Other Stories

From Updike's The Afterlife and Other Stories:
"Don't make me laugh. I'll get urinary impotence." It was a concept of Nabokov's, out of Pale Fire, that they both had admired, in the days when their courtship had tentatively proceeded through the socially acceptable sharing of books. She managed. In Ireland's great silence of abandonment the tender splashing sound seemed loud. Psshshshblippip. Allenson looked up to see if the hawks were watching. Hawks could read a newspaper, he hand once read, from the height of a mile. But what could they make of it?

Two Pieces in TriQuarterly

Two pieces of mine are up in TriQuarterly! While self-contained, they are excerpts from the novel-in-progress, whose second draft is about a month or two away from completion. The pieces are on the magazine's front page, but their Summer/Fall 2013 issue is HUGE (and awesome), and so it's easier accessing them via these direct links:

SIGHTING: Nabokov Wins One for the Islanders

Andrea Pitzer, author of The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, wrote an exceedingly funny McSweeney's bit where she replaces the eponymous hockey-player with the writer: Nabokov Wins One for the Islanders.

(This is not, incidentally, the first time Nabokov appears in McSweeney's. See also Nabokov Didn't Have to Put Up with Payroll and Less is Best, Mr. Nabokov.)

VN SIGHTING: "They appear to be very nice people."

From the blog associated with Andrea Pitzer's awesome The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, excerpts from an FBI report on Vera and Vladimir newly arrived in the States. The takeaway? "The NABOKOVs associate with no one in the neighborhood," but "they appear to be very nice people." Very nice people indeed! And happy belated birthday, VN!

Sightings: Nabokov at Cornell and Harvard

Isaiah Berlin
Nabokov is asked for translation help from a lovestruck Isaiah Berlin. Frances Assa summarizes what happens next:
I’ve been reading Michael Igniatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin. At this time (1949) Berlin was a pleasant but sexless Oxford don who suddenly, at age forty, fell violently in love. While teaching at Harvard that year, he was translating Turgenev’s First Love into English and unsure of how to translate the hero’s sudden rush of feeling when the beloved responds to his interest. Ignatieff tells us that Berlin was asking friends if it was correct to say “that your heart ‘turned over’ when your loving glance was first returned? Or should he say that the heart ‘slipped its moorings’?” and totally misses the comedy when he reports what happened when Berlin asked Nabokov for help:
"While at Harvard, Isaiah actually consulted Vladimir Nabokov—then a research fellow in Lepidoptera at the Harvard zoology department—on how to translate this particular passage. Nabokov’s suggestion—‘my heart went pit a pat’—left Isaiah unimpressed. Finally, he settled on ‘my heart leaped within me’."
Nabokov quizzes a student, the student flails and provides a wildly erroneous answer, and the following ensues:
Only after the exam did I learn that many of the details I described from the movie were not in the book. Evidently, the director Julien Duvivier had had ideas of his own. Consequently, when Nabokov asked “seat 121” to report to his office after class, I fully expected to be failed, or even thrown out of Dirty Lit. 
What I had not taken into account was Nabokov’s theory that great novelists create pictures in the minds of their readers that go far beyond what they describe in the words in their books. In any case, since I was presumably the only one taking the exam to confirm his theory by describing what was not in the book, and since he apparently had no idea of Duvivier’s film, he not only gave me the numerical equivalent of an A, but offered me a one-day-a-week job as an “auxiliary course assistant.” I was to be paid $10 a week. 
The full story for the above quote comes from Edward Jay Epstein's An A From Nabokov in the New York Review of Books. The first quote comes from Frances Assa's post to the Nabokv-L Listserv.