Convergences: Hyatt Place keycard totally looks like a Damien Hirst dot painting.
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| Damien Hirst |
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| Hyatt Place keycard |
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:
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
- Formal constraints for story due on 2/9/12
- Formal constraints for story due on 2/23/12
- Formal constraints for story due on 3/8/12
- Formal constraints for revision due on Thursday 4/12/12
- Portfolio Requirements
- Supplementary Stories, Poems, and Essays Worth Your While
VN Sighting in J. Winterson Memoir
I had two English teachers. The main one was a sexy wildman who eventually married one of our classmates when she managed to turn eighteen. He said that Nabokov was truly great and that one day I would understand that. "He hates women," I said, not realizing that this was the beginning of my feminism.
"He hates what women become," said the wildman. "That's different. He loves women until they become what they become."
And then we had an argument about Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, and the revolting Rosamund, whom all the men prefer, presumably because she hasn't become what women become...
The argument led nowhere and I went trampolining with a couple of girls who weren't worried about Dorothea Brooke or Lolita. They just liked trampolining. (122-3)
A Fine, Fine Fall Day for Grafftti 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
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.'
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.
'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.'
From London Fields:
*
'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
Sighting: Nicholson Baker on Steve Jobs
Nicholson Baker nods at Nabokov in his Steve Jobs eulogy for the New Yorker:
We’ve lost our techno-impresario and digital dream granter. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, in a letter, that when he’d finished a novel he felt like a house after the movers had carried out the grand piano. That’s what it feels like to lose this world-historical personage. The grand piano is gone.Read the rest of the piece at http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/10/17/111017ta_talk_baker#ixzz1bF6x4se6
Nabokov in Glenn Kenny's Review of The Big Year
(The rest of the review over is here.)...Which is, as one of its characters takes pains to tell another, more ignorant character, quite a bit of a different thing than "bird-watching." (One is reminded of the American editor who thought the last line of Vladimir Nabokov's "Bend Sinister" was "A good night for nothing," rather than the author's extremely correct "A good night for mothing.")
(Not, incidentally, Mr. Kenny's first or last Nabokov reference. He penned a very Kinbotian preface to Tom Bissell's Speak, Commentary.)
Semi-Transparent Semi-Alive Sighting! Nabokov in Dawn of the Dead
Hand Puppet!
Also: Selected Shorts aired Corddry's reading of "Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote" this weekend. You can listen to the MP3 here.
On October 12 (this Wednesday) is the other Selected Shorts performance! If you are in New York please go and let me know how it went!
Yay!
Selected Shorts is totally broadcasting "Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote" this weekend! (http://www.selectedshorts.org/fall-2011-selected-shorts-radio-schedule/). Yay!
Reading Tomorrow! (Thursday 9.29)
!!!
"This season, all of our stage performances at Symphony Space will feature a commissioned short story. For BASS 2011, we commissioned a story from Juan Martinez and it will be performed by Cristin Milioti. You may remember Cristin from last season on 30 Rock where she played comedian Abby Flynn, Liz Lemon’s foil."
I'm psyched beyond the telling! (Also, and by the way, the short thing that I wrote is titled "Best Worst American.") Read the rest of the Selected Shorts news piece here.
Nabokovilia: Sam Savage's Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife
I had always imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line: something lyric like Nabokov's "Lolita, light of my fire, fire of my loins"; or if I could not do lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." People remember those words even when they have forgotten everything else about the books.