Whirr: 06/01/2001 - 06/30/2001

More funny Nabokovilia in NPAAL! It's a whole chapter, "Interlude: The Pollack-Wilson Letters." Here's an excerpt:

...Myself, I am trying to put pen to paper, but when your work looms before me like a Hydra of prose, I am cowed. I hope your testimony before HUAC is a sucessful one. All my love to Vera-Ellen.
Regards,
Bunny
December 6, 1956
New York City
Dearest Bunny,
Well, Europe: The Forgotten Continent has been published in the States, despite the efforts of the lawyers to keep it safe from our impressionable youth. Already, the moralistic firestorm has begun, and the calls for a public burning emanate from the more hayseed corners of this disturbed republic. In that vein, I reread your Memoirs of Hecate County last night, and, I must be honest, fell asleep around page 15...

All a parody of this exchange, natch.

Stray funny metaliteray bits in NPAAL: "...the old stone farmhouse in Vermont where several classics majors brutally murdered a classmate who couldn't keep his mouth shut..." (in the Acknowledgements); "...as I do so, suddenly everything I have ever written is unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because freelance journalists who have sex w/ a one hundred-year-old woman do not have a second opportunity on earth." (in "It is Easy to Take a Lover in Cuba.")

Nabokovilian moments in The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature:



DATE	AUTHOR'S LIFE		LITERARY CONTEXT	HISTORICAL EVENTS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
1936	Begins fourth grade.	Faulkner: _Absalom, 	Spanish Civil War
	Publishes essay, "Does	Absalom!_		begins.
	Faulkner Write Too	Nabokov: _Despair_.
	Much?" in _American
	Mercury_.

(...)

1953	_Salinger Alone_; 	Nabokov: _Lolita_.	Josef Stalin dies.
	_Europe: The Forgotten
	Continent_. Marries
	the novelist Mary
	McCarthy. Divorces 
	the actress Mary
	McCarthy.

1957	Publishes biography	Pasternak: _Doctor	America seethes
	of Stalin. Plots	Shivago_.		with paranoia.
	with Nabokov to kill	Ginsberg: _Howl (or, 
	Pasternak. Hangs out	The Ballad 
	with the Beats. 	of Pollack)_.
	Spends time in Cuba, 
	with Castro.

What I'm reading right now is The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, by Neal Pollack.

Finished The Old Curiosity Shop. It rocked. It rambled, but it rocked nonetheless. It is relatively young Dickens, and tremendously fun, and susprisingly dark and gothic near the end.

Another Curious word: purl (p. 426). (In ref. to beer, so that the definition is doubled, alluding both to the stream and to the gold, no?)

Curious word: avoirdupois (p. 268).

The Old Curiosity Shop, Chapter 23:

AS THE COURSE of this tale requires that we should become acquainted, somewhere hereabouts, with a few particulars connected with the domestic economy of Mr Sampson Brass, and as a more convenient place than the present is not likely to occur for that purpose, the historian takes the friendly reader by the hand, and springing with him into the air, and cleaving the same at a greater rate than ever Don Cleophas Leandro Perez Zambullo and his familiar travelled through that pleasant region in company, alights with him upon the pavement of Bevis Marks.

So, who is Don Cleophas Leandro Perez Zambullo?

1707: Alain Rene Le Sage's "Asmodeus" in which a young student of Alcola (Don Cleofas Leandro Perez Zambullo) is visited one night by the cheerful demon Asmodeus who claims "It is I that have introduced into the world luxury, debauchery, games of chance, and chemistry." Tobias Smoillet translated this into the popular "The Devil on Two Sticks." Is Chemistry really devilish? Well, this fantasy has many shrewd social insights into the real life of Madrid.

Curious words: flageolet (p. 148), sexton (p. 188).

What I'm reading right now is The Old Curiosity Shop. (Free Gutenberg e-text file here. Excellent BookReader freeware here.)

Finished Wonder Boys!

Nabokovilian moment on page 312:

"You have to keep with it," I told him. "You have to read on." I was making the argument I had made to myself, over the years -- to the harsh and unremitting editor who lived in the deepest recesses of my gut. It sounded awfully thin, spoken aloud at last. "It's that kind of a book. Like Ada, you know, or Gravity's Rainbow. It teaches you how to read it as you go along. Or -- Kravnik's."