July 2005 Archives

Taking us from a to b.
Varying in heft.

Guileless.
Craftless.
Curving shiny sometimes

but still always essentially
linear.
Scribbly.

Stand in front of thirty.
"Which one is my favorite?"

But how could he
possibly
know?

Not just thank you very much.
But thank you very very
very very
much.

Boy am I glad that
trout don't eat cats.

Because if they did
we'd have to use kittens for bait.

And, well,

yuck.

This brain don't tire
of shore

shrinking to speck
as boat pulls away

as every day
I immigrate.

And the monkey breath!
You gotta pack that up, my friend

all smelling of termites and sticks
and other monkeys.

No one asked you to smell that way.
In fact, the assignation specifically connoted
replicating a contrary stench, to whit:
the non-monkey stench.

So why carmelize your ack ack ack ack ack, my friend, my friend?

Instead, hey --
flatten out your wallet.
Hey narrow your eye-wear.

Hey surge-protect
your estuary
knowledge core.

Gathering glass breath
into slushed dixie cups
chimney'd through milk wood
through worm weed
in whispers.

Marked pies with iron-crossed crust.
Heartfelt. Growing.
Red whispers.

Sliding up against
red-veined wood fences.
Slipping into character such that

white curves
twist toward
fading blue words.

Graffiti glass breath, my sweetie.

Popular chain-gang motif.

He looked like he was drawn 
not with a pen or a paintbrush
  but with the dull wet end of a used toothpick.

A dent. An imprint.
A soft image.

Leaving behind 
  a flaw designed primarily 
  to gather dust.

Artichokes with dark splotches, dry stems,
peeling soft near avocado papa-san.

Pump cheese? Please -- pump chew. Pump chew, you bastard!
Pump cheddar!

Fact: Belgium bats its Belgian eyes.
Hungary honey-shaded my heart.
Luxemburg -- well, you know how I feel about you, Luxemburg.

And Russia
me lap
am on.

Pale Fire Peoples!

As suggested last week, here's a bonus round for folks interested in re-reading the first section, talking about the Richard Rorty introduction to the Everyman's Library, and/or bringing other external sources to the party.

My 2 cents: I was a bit disappointed with the Rorty intro. Seemed to me he was commiting a Kinbote of sorts -- putting himself too much in the center of things. I kept waiting for him to say "When we first encounter so-called 'Gradus,' we are wearing those pants we thought we'd given away, but then it turned out they were just buried under some other clothes on our rocking chair in the back room."

Some of what he described as what the reader would go through rang true for me -- in particular the section on page x where he talks about the experience of reading the intro and the poem. But after that, I started writing "no" in the margin of my copy every paragraph or two. "The awed sense that royalty has condescended to treat us as a confidant"? no. "the revelation of some new and surprising fact about our remarkable host and commentator"? no again. I just didn't have that experience -- at the start, for me at least, Kinbote was a clown. It was only toward the very end that I was surprised to find myself getting a wee bit of sympathy for the narrator.

Those are quibbles, I suppose. My biggest beef is that so much of Rorty's essay hinges on the idea that Nabokov wanted us to forget about Hazel and then only come back to her in the end. (1) did we really forget about her? didn't seem that way to me. (2) I don't recall N. swinging her story back into view in the last few pages.

Still, it made for an interesting reading. Your thoughts?

Next up: starting on August 16th, Deathmarch 3: At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flan O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan), which, according to James Joyce, is "A really funny book." (I'm not making that up.)

Soon will come a time
when we'll move out to that house
by the brook.

And the weather will be fine.
And the broadband.

Pale Fire Peoples!

Just finished PF this very morning. Enjoyed the close very much -- it felt like a soft and very satisfying landing. Looks like many of the folks (at least the commenting folks) on the 'march appear to be in the "he's a nut" camp. But me, I didn't feel like VN was committing 100% either way. It felt to me like at least three stories kept in focus at the same time -- the story within the poem, the story of Charles the eccentric ex-King, and the inferred story of Charles the looped stalker. I'd been braced for some sort of neat "it was all a dream" ending and this more open-ended close was a bit of a relief. Or mebbe that's my delusion :-)

Either way, I'm glad I read this one. As with GR, it just felt good on the brain to be reading this ecstatic (to swipe Updike's word from the back cover) prose in small, savoured doses.

Next week: This is the thread for closing thoughts on the book itself. Next week, by popular demand, we'll add a thread for folks what want to re-read the poem, intro, and foreword, and throw any other external sources into the stew.

Thanks all,
-CV

Mosquitoes avoid the sunlight.
Likewise, vampires avoid the sunlight.

Think about that.

It would be eerie almost
except for the fact that
vampires aren't real.

And I'm not 100% certain that
mosquitoes avoid the sunlight.