Juan Martinez Juan Martinez

Walla Walla back alley!
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Boyd on Nabokov the Psychologist

From the 2011 Autumn issue of the American Scholar -- Boyd on Nabokov as a psychologist:
Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed as “preposterous” the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s assertions that his novels eliminated psychology: “The shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology,” Nabokov said, “—psychology at its best.” Later asked, “Are you a psychological novelist?” Nabokov replied: “All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists.” 
(The rest here.)
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Fall 2011 Courses at Whitman

I'll be teaching three courses at Whitman College this semester. Here are the syllabi!
I'm also creating a page of supplementary reading material for all three courses, which will be accessible here.

ENG178A: Introduction to Fiction
ENG 150: Introduction to Creative Writing
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Getty Event Write-Ups

Two nice write-ups of the Getty event: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/selected-shorts-celebrates-the-written-and-spoken-word/ and http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/03/selected-shorts-at-the-getty-starring-tim-curry.html


Nate Corddry did an awesome job reading the piece, which was written years ago as a lark in the dead hours when I managed a computer lab. Had I known, back then, that someone was going to have to perform the thing, I may have removed the bit about singing portions of Don Quixote in Spanish or maybe even the thing about talking in a fake foreign accent, which is pretty much the whole piece. Corddry totally sang, though! And he did so beautifully. And he was way funny. So maybe it's just as well I didn't know.
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I Tell Your Feet What to Live In

In this month's Desert Companion, I tell you what sneakers to wear. Please note: This is a hiking issue! Do not miss the hikes, but wear hiking shoes. Do not wear the things I'm telling you to wear if you are planning on actually going around the Nevada wilderness (particularly the Nike Woodside, which though beautiful is from all accounts almost comically nonfunctional). The story is here and also embedded below and in the actual print issue found in all sorts of places. Read! Hike! Wear good-looking shoes! But don't do all three at the same time!


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Our Engagement Photos

Sarah and I got our engagement photos done via the kind work of three Canadians: our friend Leah Bailly and the two Vancouver-based photographers who flew to Vegas for a wedding-photography convention and wanted to do an editorial shoot in the desert and were looking for people about to get married.

Here are the photos! And here are more photos!

Thank you so much, Tegan and Bethany and Leah.
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Friendly Ghosts: Walking Las Vegas

Julio, one of the nice folk I met along the way.
I'll be leaving Vegas soon, and will be walking it from west to east by way of farewell. The first leg of the journey is up at Vegas CityLife. Here's a sample:

Desert Foothills Road teemed with folk, however, to a point where it felt like a parody of active pedestrian life. I walked in the company of dog-walkers and children and joggers. If you were filming a commercial for your new sub-development, you would have asked for fewer extras because it would not have seemed all that believable. So many people! And so photogenic! But there you were, surrounded by joggers of all ages, everyone in terrific shape, and by a froth of fully kitted-out bikers in expensive gear and the bright primary colors of spandex outfits you'd normally see in serious Tour de France stages, or on tropical parrots.

Photos of the walk are here. And I've gone ahead and embedded the map of the trajectory below:


View The Vegas Pedestrian in a larger map
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Sighting: The Onion (COMMENTARY: Hey, Man, I Totally Get It; I'd Watch A 2-Hour 'Biggest Loser' Special, Too (BY A COLLECTION OF NABOKOV'S SHORT STORIES))

COMMENTARY: Hey, Man, I Totally Get It; I'd Watch A 2-Hour 'Biggest Loser' Special, Too (BY A COLLECTION OF NABOKOV'S SHORT STORIES).
Excerpt: "Do you think you're the first educated person to choose reality TV over a series of long, exhaustive nights desperately trying to grasp whatever it is Nabokov was going for in "The Wood-Sprite"?"
Thank you, Gene!
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Nabokovilia: Stephen King's "Fair Extension" (from Full Dark, No Stars)

This bit is actually likely not Nabokovilia, but there given that King has nodded at Nabokov before, there is a slim chance that it  might be. Here it is, from "Fair Extension" (in the collection Full Dark, No Stars):

"No, no, no! This isn't some half-assed morality tale. I'm a business-man, not a character out of 'The Devil and Daniel Webster.' All I'm saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I'm going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you'd better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things." (269)

More choice bits from Full Dark plus the rest of the Stephen King Nabokovilia below the fold.


Stephen King on outlet malls (see too this bit on outlet malls from Put This On):
...and half a dozen other oversized retail operations of the sort that are called "outlets" (as if they were sewer drains rather than shopping locations). (283)

And on storytelling:
Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do -- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street. (366)
More Nabokovilia:


The Plant, Part 1
With your concurrence, I'm returning 15 book-length manuscripts which arrived unsolicited (see Returns, next page), 7 'outlines and sample chapters' and 4 unidentifiable blobs that look a bit like typescripts. One of them is a book of something called 'gay event poetry' called Suck My Big Black Cock, and another, called L'il Lolita, is about a man in love with a first grader. I think. It's written in pencil and it's hard to tell for sure.
(...) 
P.P.S. L'il Lolita is actually a pretty good title, don't you think? We could commission it. I'm thinking maybe Mort Yeager, he's got a touch for that sort of thing. RememberTeenage Lingerie Show? The girl in L'il Lolita could be eleven, I think -- wasn't the original Lolita twelve?
From Black House (written with Peter Straub)
They began with Chester Himes and Charles Willeford, changed gear with a batch of contemporary novels, floated through S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, and ventured emboldened into fictional mansions erected by Ford Madox Ford and Vladimir Nabokov. (Marcel Proust lies somewhere ahead, they understand, but Proust can wait; at present they are to embark upon Bleak House.)

From The Regulators
Good agent that he was, he had managed to maintain a neutral, if slightly glazed, smile on the ride from the airport, but the smile began to slip when they entered the suburb of Wentworth (which a sign proclaimed to be OHIO'S "GOOD CHEER COMMUNITY!), and it gave way entirely when his client, who had once been spoken of int he same breath with John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and (after Delight) Vladimir Nabokov, pulled into the driveway of the small and perfectly anonymous suburban house on the corner of Poplar and Bear.
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News: Pleiade Editions of Nabokov's Complete Works

The great Maurice Couturier on the difficult translation and nontranslation decisions made for the upcoming third volume of Nabokov's collected works in France for Gallimard (via the Nabokv-L forum):

A great pity, of course. The translations were revised, sometimes in depth, but that was not enough. For volume III, I will personally revise all the translations. "Ada" raises a different problem: Nabokov worked hard on the French translation; I can hardly revise his revisions. I will write variants instead in the annotations.

I take this opportunity to mention that many books were published in France on Nabokov in the last twelve months (partly as a result of "Lolita" being on the syllabus of the national CAPES and Agrégation). I attach the bibliography of my new book, "Nabokov, ou la tentation française", which ought to come out later this year; it lists all those books.
 The rest at the Nabokv-L forum here.
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I Tell Las Vegas to Cheer Up

Over at the Desert Companion, I tell Las Vegas to cheer up, though possibly in a way that may make the city more depressed than it was originally. Which is how it goes for pep talks sometimes.



Also! I tell you what to wear (along with the ever fabulous duo of Christie Moeller and Sara Nunn). Wear it! Or else! Bonus we-tell-you-what-to-wear at the site, where I quote Balzac on style! Balzac!


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Nabokovilia: Cleaning Nabokov's House

From the New York Post's Required Reading (via the Nabokv-L forum):
Cleaning Nabokov’s House
by Leslie Daniels (Touchstone)
If you’ve ever moved into a place before evidence of the previous residents has been expunged, maybe you can identify with what happens to Barb Barrett in Daniels’ debut novel. After leaving a lousy marriage and losing custody of her kids, Barb rents an upstate house where author Vladimir Nabokov once lived. There, she discovers what she thinks (and hopes) is a lost Nabokov manuscript — about Babe Ruth. The author actually does live in a house where the author of “Lolita” once lived, but, in real life, she says, “Nabokov exists only in the copies of his books on my shelves.”
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Bridges to Antiterra

Anyone interested in Ada is urged to visit Ada Online: it includes the text of the novel and professor Boyd's annotations. The site is accurate, beautifully organized, rich with insight and information, and is in every regard everything this particular page is not--which is to say that Ada Online is not


A monstrous, incomplete, and (most likely) inaccurate log of the literature found in Nabokov’s glorious Ada. For the serious footwork you have Professor Brian Boyd to thank -- I’ve used his endnotes from the Library of America edition of Ada (as well as Nabokov’s Vivian Darkbloom’s Notes to Ada). All mistakes are, of course, mine. Corrections and comments and clues are welcome.


I eventually hope to have hypertext links to all the works and authors on the table. ADA doesn't need this kind of context, by the way, but it comes in handy for a second or third reading. Page numbers refer to the Library of America edition. Asterisks point to double or triple puns or jokes made by Nabokov. I'll select a brief quote from the novel to illustrate the reference, but that won't happen for a while. Also, I've excluded multiple allusions to a poem or novel, limiting myself to one for illustration purposes (for more, look to Brian Boyd's notes for the Library of America edition or buy his excellent Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness).

Allusions to paintings, magazine articles, and songs are not listed.

Bracketed titles are either not yet in the Public Domain or they could not be found on-line, but they can be purchased from Amazon.Com.

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NEWS: Stanford Magazine's "Did Vladimir Nabokov's Sojourn on the Farm Inspire His Famous Novel?"

Lots of interesting, substantive, historically relevant and contextually appropriate stuff in this article. Here is a snippet that is none of those things but is jaw-dropping nonetheless:

Over the chessboard, Lanz confided a dark secret that Nabokov told biographer Field: the memorably dapper professor led a double life. On weekends, he drove to the country to participate in orgies with “nymphets.” He forced his wife to dress as a child. Another prominent Nabokov scholar and biographer, Brian Boyd, also concluded that Lanz was a “nympholept” after reviewing Nabokov’s extensive correspondence in the New York Public Library.
Lanz was best known for his 1941 book, In Quest of Morals.
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