June 2005 Archives

...2 Night

fried.

wiped.

but.
saw.

pelican.

Pale Fire Peoples!

Welcome to Week 5 and the final push. It's been an action-packed week filled with revelations and disertations. Suicide? Prejudice? The Legend of Curdy Buff? It's all in there. I enjoyed this week's read and was surprised at points to find myself starting to become just a wee bit sympathetic with our narrator. Still, I will confess: Tout en ayant connaissance des traductions françaises de "John Donne" et d'"Andrew Marvell," j'ai mis ma tête vers le bas, et ai pris un petit somme court. (What oh what did we ever do before we had the Babel Fish?)

Next week: We wrap! Let's meet up on the far side of the index to compare closing thoughts. Speaking of which, a word to the wise -- this last patch includes a few revelations. Folks are doing what they can to avoid full-on spoilers, but if you're a bit behind this week's target, you might want to skim these comments with caution.

Thanks all,
-CV

Alameda's own Red Hills Review was nice enough to recently publish a few of my poems in their issue #2. But wait: the editor of this journal has seemingly inexhaustible lit-related energy and will be putting on a few RHR-related readings over the summer. The first of these is coming up -- this Thursday, June 30th, at 7:00 pm, at a stylin' indepedent Alameda bookstore called Spell-Binding Tales.

I'll be one of the folks reading that night (under my real name, no less). If you're in the area, it would be swell to see ya there. In case we haven't met afore, I'll be the one who looks like the animation in the corner of the screen, only without the facial hair that magically grows before your very eyes. Which I'm sure comes as a relief to many if not all...

Pouring all these
good things inside me.

Tea. Poetry. Pear tart. Lemonade.
Tea. Poetry. Lemonade. Lemonade.
Pear tart.
Lemonade.
Tea.

Pale Fire.
Pear tart.

Lemonade.

Hoping some of it sticks.

Pale Fire Peoples!

Welcome to Week 4! A nice long flight yesterday and some quality Father's Day reading time has me nearly caught up. It seems like once I hit the King's escape, things really started to move.

I was struck this week by two stylistic features this book has in common with Gravity's Rainbow (perhaps they define the Cornell School): a predeliction for silly names (Gahr?!) and a love for the tangential detail, though where N. spins them out like playful fractals that go on a sentence or three or four, Pynchon was laying down dense-packed multi-paged tangents designed to re-, de-, and cross- wire our brains. (I 'spose ya could argue that the whole commentary is like a 200+-page tangential detail, so mebbe Nabokov wins that battle after all.)

In related news, I've begun to read certain Kinbote passages with the voice of Dr. Evil. ("Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland.")

Next week: We've got just two weeks to go (can ya believe that?). To keep them roughly even, this week will be a little on the short side. Let's meet back up round about the "anonymous bard of the twelfth century," which is to say, right after the commentary on Lines 681, also known as page 188 in the Everyman's Library.

Here's another track on the Virtual LP. If you've played a few of these before, you might recall that I have a bit of a thing for piano/vocal standards like (to name two...) The Best Things in Life Are Free and For Every Man There's a Woman.

This time out, it's an update of a classic you all know and some percentage of you love. Feel free to sing along at home with I Love Lucy, written in 1953 -- lyrics by Harold "I wrote the lyrics to 'I Love Lucy'" Adamson and music by Eliot "Yes you did, my old friend, but leave us not forget that I am the one who wrote the music to 'I Love Lucy'" Daniel.

Thanks for listening and dropping by, -CV

time: 1:08 seconds; specs: 1 MB
Press Play to play.

Perhaps it's just a dream
but I do like the idea

of some days having
that boot on my desk.

Some days not.

Pale Fire Peoples!

Welcome to Week 3. It's very special week for me, because this is the first week when I'm officially a little bit behind, which means we're really rollin' now. I've been savouring it a bit too much methinks.

But enough about me -- how are you doing out there? And more to the point, have you checked out the Palefire Deathmarch Wiki yet, for the demystification of tricky vocab? (Created some say by "Cort," others say by "DavidG." But in such murky matters can the truth ere truly be known?)

Speaking of "Cort," don't miss his exhortation to write frothy heroic bather-verse (wiki-style, no less) at the tail end of the thread for Week 2. I could be wrong here, but I think he's talking to you.

Next week: Let's meet back up just past "the adjacent position of these rhymes," which is to say, right after the commentary on Lines 367-370, also known as page 149 in the Everyman's Library.

I pardon myself for burping.
I don't ask for your pardon.

I burp. I repent.
Case closed.

He can see
in her eyes

that she can see
in his eyes

the crazy.

As I walk out into the street
somebody's shouting at me
shouting in my face 
  with his teeth near my face.

He asks me if I'm scared of him 
I say no
he says I should be. He shouts I should be. 
  I say I'm harmless.

He shouts some more and then 
  someone else shouts over at him 
    -- someone somewhere -- I don't know -- across the street
  not at me this time more like for me.

And it sort of pulls me out pulls me into my car.
  And I don't lock the door cuz I don't lock the door
  and now I'm speeding away 
                        curving away
                           sliding out into 
                   the shouty night
           and I'm twisting back 
      over my tight right shoulder thinking:

  if I have to 
  if I have to
       if I really really have to

I can always run him over.

As I walk out onto the street
just the very second I leave the coffe shop
somebody's shouting at me
shouting in my face
with his teeth
near my face.

He asks me if I'm scared of him
and I say no and he says I should be.
He shouts I should be. I say I'm harmless.

He shouts at me some more
and then from across the street
someone else shouts over at him
not at me this time
more like for me
and I'm grateful.

It sort of pulls me out pulls me into my car
and I don't lock the door cuz I don't lock the door

and now I'm speeding out into the shouty night
thinking if I have to, if I really have to
I guess I can run him over.

Pale Fire Peoples!

Looks like we're off to an excellent start. Lotsa folks on the march, with fully 20 posts so far on last week's thread, including an excellent bit o' background on the Zemlya of it all, filed just last night by so-called "Cort." Good stuff!

This week is a bit of a paradox. We've now read the poem, so this would be an appropriate week for commentary on the poem before we read the, er, commmentary. On the poem. It's sorta like a thin crack into which our world may whisper out. So, you know, stay frosty out there.

Me, I was surprised by how flat-out funny the foreword was -- with occasional fore-shades of my beloved "Cruel Shoes" -- and then again at how sad the poem sometimes dips, especially Canto 2, as Other Dan noted in last week's thread. It's a regular Pale Fire Emotional Death Roller Coaster March is what it is.

What'd you think?

Next week: Let's dive into to the madness of King Kinbote and then meet up at page 105 in the Everyman's Library, which is to say, the end of the comentary on Lines 130, in other words somewheres round about a passing reference to "the interesting note to Line 149."

Great-great-grandparents Googling me
just checking in

cork thick-thumbed after
After Life.
Pop.

And every time they'd Google me
a bell would go off.
Some bright blue bell,
that would hover right behind my head.

It'd be like "g," and then they'd go to the bathroom.
The After Life bathroom.
And then "o" and they'd go to the bathroom again.

So for the whole thing
there'd be three weeks maybe even four weeks
in between bright blue bells.

And that's how it all went down from start to finish.
Only with some work stuff thrown in that I left out here
and a biplane explosion with my uncle on the plane.

He walked away unscathed, heroic smile
and the flames still ripping at the tarmac.

He gave me a heroic hug
but that's not the crazy thing.
That's not even close to being the crazy thing.

The crazy thing is: I don't even have an uncle.

I knew you
when you didn't
have a card with
Abe Vigoda's signature on it.

And I was nice to you then.

So just you remember that.

Is it too much
to want to be
the John Wayne
of poetry?