VN COLLATION #23
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu

The 23rd on the 23rd. The 23rd VN Collation on the 23rd of April,
2000. (I can still remember when I didn't know what fatidic meant,
Thanks VN) I began this study on January 4, 1993, when the Web was just a promise and "Nabokov" a keyword with a finite number of  possibilities. Today, a search on "Nabokov" in any of the major
search engines results in over 20,000 "hits" and instead of a single
database I now search in several. "Nabokov" is still a magic carpet
as I sail past a familiar edifice or the ruins of a half constructed
or neglected Web page dormantly persisting on a still active server.
Or notice that Nabokov's formerly black and white translation of Tyutchev's "Silentium,"

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.

"...just for fun; a view of the evolving figure of Nabokov--a measure of his genius, the progression of his fame....."

PULITZER

As everyone knows by now, Stacy Schiff won this year's Pulitzer
Prize for her biography of Véra Nabokov. The paperback edition
is due out this month. Schiff divides her time between Edmonton,
Canada and New York City. Thus the Ottawa Citizen reports

Edmonton author Stacy Schiff, who has been bedridden because of  her pregnancy, reacted with ''total and complete disbelief'' when she learned that she had won a Pulitzer Prize for literature. Schiff, who is expecting her third child early next week, was not aware that she was even a finalist for the award, announced Monday. ''I had no idea. I was absolutely convinced for the first two minutes that it was a total joke,'' Schiff said.

IMAGES OF NABOKOV

A look at the works of photographers Fred Stein and Baron Wolman illustrate Nabokov's unusual positioning in the pantheon of 20th Century artistic achievement. Fred Stein, whose well known portrait of Albert Einstein helped make him famous, captured images of politicians, scientists and artists such as Georgia O'Keefe, Bertold Brecht, Adam Clayton Powell and Helen Keller. In 1958 he photographed Nabokov.

http://www.fredstein.com/Nabakov.htm

Several years later, Baron Wolman, the first photographer for the then fledgling Rolling Stone magazine, chronicled the evolution of what might loosely be termed the 60s counter-culture by taking pictures of artists such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Robert Crumb and Woodstock. The picture of Nabokov appears to be from the Ada period.

http://www.fotobaron.com/beyond/vladimir1.html

INFLUENCE

From the April 16, 2000, Entertainment section of the Irish Times

''I THINK fiction should be wild and rapacious. Each word should be written with the point of a diamond. I want the shiver up the spine, as Nabokov said of Kafka." Edna O'Brien

In the preface to her debut novel, Molly, Nancy J. Jones writes: "Molly is inspired by the title character of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. I have the utmost respect for Nabokov -- as both a writer and scholar -- and ultimately, I hope my vision of Molly Liddell pays tribute to him and his literary creation."
Jones places her heroine in the same situation as Nabokov's -- a young girl involved in a sexual relationship with a middle-aged man -- and, here and there, draws more subtle connections: Molly's stepfather is named Richard Richard, for instance, and she has a passionate interest in lepidopterology. Nabokov himself even makes a brief appearance.

"manage to be at once abstract, meditative and delightfully harebrained [are] also often tethered to accessible texts, intoned with halting, ironic cadences reminiscent of Robert Ashley and Laurie Anderson."

".... posed this musical question: At what point does a skipping CD player stop being a disruption of cultural reality to become an enticing reality all its own? In the piece called "Still Lives," a CD player is programmed to skip, slowly tracing several measures of music by composer Giuseppe Guami (1540-1611), while Collins recited text from writer Vladimir Nabokov's memoirs. The result: enchanting, maverick music.

WILSON, A Consideration of the Sources By David Mamet: Faber.

WHAT would happen if all of human literature were transferred into computer form, then accidentally erased? If the human race had only the shakiest impressions of its history, based on a random selection of unreliable documents, then where, and more importantly, who would we be? This is the premise of David Mamet's latest novel, Wilson, A Consideration of the Sources, a book which its publishers describe as a "modern-day Tristram Shandy"--though it owes as much to Nabokov's mock-scholarly footnotes to Eugene Onegin as it does to Sterne.

is a grandly ambitious multilayered work that simply knocks your socks off with its vast scope, erudition, formal inventiveness and sheer storytelling skills, while also opening up whole new areas for the novel as an art form.

In developing this monstrous novel, Danielewski draws from an astonishing array of sources, including a host of nonliterary forms such as architecture, the visual arts (Kubrick's "The Shining," Ridley Scott's "Alien," Ken Burns' documentaries, Escher's "House of Stairs" and other depictions of impossible spaces, even the Zapruder film) and philosophy (Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Bachelard, Derrida's "Glas"). The range of literary allusions and borrowings is equally impressive -- Poe, Melville, Pynchon, Joyce, King, the Bible (Jonah and the whale, blind Jacob), Greek myth (the stories of Echo and Narcissus, Prometheus, the Minotaur and the labyrinth) and, above all, Nabokov's Pale Fire; all figure prominently here.

" I'm still reading it in my dreams."

LITERARY TRAIL OF GREATER BOSTON: A Tour of Sites in Boston, Cambridge, and Concord Susan Wilson. Houghton Mifflin.

A sprightly and informative little guidebook, packed with tidbits about literary figures, publishers, bookstores, libraries, and other historic sites on the newly designated Literary Trail of Greater Boston.
Working with the Boston History Collaborative, Cambridge author Wilson has compiled a chatty, easy-to-follow companion to the three-part Trail. Opening with the Parker House Hotel, site of Charles Dickens's first American reading of A Christmas Carol, Wilson guides the tour-taker through three centuries of Greater Boston's literary history, paying homage along the way to some unexpected figures e.g., Ben Franklin, Kahlil Gibran, and Vladimir Nabokov as well as the expected Alcott, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whittier.

Against rats or dictators,'' Alberto Manguel writes in his introduction to this anthology, ''I believe that writers bring about a wild form of justice in their role as God's spies ... (I)n spite of the feebleness and randomness of language, an inspired writer can tell the unspeakable and lend a shape to the unthinkable, so that evil loses some of its numinous quality and stands reduced to a few memorable words.''

In his review of Brian Boyd's "Nabokov's Pale Fire" (March 5), Daniel Zalewski talks about trying to make sense of the seeming nonsense syllables received from the spirit world, "pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told." Apparently, anagrams of "atalanta" are the key here, referring to a breed of butterfly that appears later in John Shade's poem. But as a colleague of mine once pointed out, the lines can be read as rough homophones. One well-known instance of this process is the fractured fairy tale "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" ("Little Red Riding Hood"), and Luis d'Antin Van Rooten played this game brilliantly and bilingually in a book called "Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames" ("Mother Goose Rhymes"). In "Pale Fire," the cryptic lines become "pity to learn but not grow old with an answer till a far foreign land tale told." These words describe the shades of the underworld, as well as Hazel Shade, the suicide-daughter of the poet, and Charles Kinbote, the exiled narrator who comes from the far foreign land of Zembla.
David Galef University, Miss.

L's soothing sound (think ''lullaby,'' ''lollipop'') has been relished by wordsmiths through the centuries. Author and scholar Ben Jonson praised L in his 1640 English Grammar: ''It melteth in the sounding.'' In the poetry of many languages, L has helped convey softness, calm, flux, childishness, slipperiness, departure, or gradual release or surrender, including sexual. Remarkably, most of these nuances are honestly advertised in the title of Vladimir Nabokov's sensationalist 1955 novel Lolita.

we point out that "Andrew Field" is itself an anagram --- "Fie, lewd dran" --- a dran being Russian for poseur.) Thus Nabokov has here managed to create, with his usual exquisite skill, an extremely tasteless, short-sighted, smarmy, and illiterate precis of his days and works. That he could subsume his own stellar pyrotechnical writing skill (as represented, for instance, by Lolita and Speak Memory) to come up with this dog makes it worthy of Kinbote himself.

I don't know how much this will interest you, but in a recent episode of the awful sitcom 'Caroline in the City' I noticed, while waiting for my pasta to soften, that above Caroline's oak staircase leading up to her loft is a grand 'Lolita' poster, picturing what I believe is Dominique Swain sucking a lollipop and peering over her pair of oval sunglasses. I say it is Swain because, for one, it looks like her, and two, I am not familiar with the promotional material that came out for Kubrick's version, and thus would not know were I to see it.
The poster does have a sort of 'Americana' 50s pastoral look to it, with the block red LOLITA scrawled over a background white, which seems consistent with Lyne and company's attempt to 'retro' their ad campaign and evoke the images in the book...

Just a brief note to alert you to the existance of a current Pop Band named _Clare Quilty_. About a year ago I noticed that they played a gig in Atlanta, and now I have in my possession a copy of a CD they released in 1997 called Suga-Lik. .... They seem to be based somewhere in the southeastern U.S.

POETRY
Boris Levyi translates into English a 1922 Russian poem by Nabokov.

Until we meet again.....