Nabokov - Day Three

-Brittney is the assistant monster blogger. Class notes and keeping track of the class.

****Talking about the Nabokovian commentary on the pictures that we have chosen of our childhood, making sure that we point out the fine details that perhaps the eye or brief bypasser may not look, make a simple picture enjoyable, alliterary, and interesting....maybe even funny****

**** If you do already have a blog, fill it with some goodies****

“I did not want to touch hearts, or even effect minds.... what I was reaching was to make a sob of the spine.” - Nabokov on his reasons behind writing Lolita

****Put a common place book into your blog, a place where you will put lines, sentences, even paragraphs that you can not resist..... you can open another blog and link it to the main one to create your common place book****

Nabokov actually turned one of the most repellent, disturbing subjects and (by slight of hand, a trick) he turned it into one of the most beautiful, touching books to ever be written....

The details that Nabokov uses are usually always in the service of another detail that may be useless to most, and yet loved by many.

Chapters 40-48 of Ezekiel will treat you to intense detail that will force you to construct a very complex reality, the type of details (in depth) as Nabokov would do.

Discovery – It's a discovery. Part of the enjoyability of Nabokov is discovering the world on your own.

Writing – he uses puzzles, games.... he does write books that you need to see the things that are hiding...symbolic....”everything is hidden, and it is part of your enjoyment of the book” - Sexson....

He now tells the story of the hidden objects being discovered by a child sitting, coloring on their “Draw on me” menu at dinner, and how it's related to reading Nabokov for the first time. It's just like it.

****Every group (in our group projects) is going to be devoted to a specific act of discovery that comes from Nabokov and reading his materials. Must be informative, must be enjoyable (“super-enjoyable” he says). This will be towards the end of the semester.****

When we get together in a group, we are using a communal source of information that he will not even know, never even expect.

****I am in group 6. We had them assigned today.****

His autobiography is a great field to produce answers that would otherwise not make sense in Lolita. - Sexson

James's favorite novel is “On the Road”, read his blog....

Nabokov says, “Parody is a game.” Very important difference between the two..... satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Nabokov took many trips with butterfly nets.... not with 12 year old girls.

Could there be a connection between chasing butterflies and chasing the unattainable 12 year old girl? Could there be something deep?

Beating down “The Alchemist” because we like the idea of the story, even though it's not that good.

“Lolita and Pale Fire could give you an experience you could never have with Dan Brown.” -Sexson (could get people angry at him for that)

Nabokov's final riddle – The whole second part of Lolita is a prank master following, beating down Humbert Humbert with clues that he can not solve.

“The Origins of Story” - ?Brian Boyd? -Talks about the discovery and the joys behind the low-brow, the high-brow literature. “We need stories as much as we need air. They are absolutely fundamental to human life.”

Book to read – Haroun and the Sea of Stories – Children's novel that does the job of an adult novel.

….Don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person.....

****He wants us to talk about the little treats we find at the edge of one page. Call everyone else stupid and talk about that little secret you found because you have knowledge that we do not.****

“The word real is the only word that MUST be put in quotation marks.” - Nabokov
Nabokov wants to reach a place where he can get to a place where reality does not have to wear those quotes like claws.

Is there a chess game, puzzles hidden in his books?

Vivian Darkbloom – Vladimir Nabokov – (He's there!)

What is aaron's middle name? Anthony

John Ray Jr.

Doppelganger....that's how you spell it....

The annotator does exist.

Speak Memory – pg. 34 – What is he talking about? Synaesthete.... a mixing up of the senses.... you visualize sounds and hear colors. Nabokov is one of the most.

- Writers who best exemplify art for art's sake best.... Nabokov and Wilde

Dostoevsky was a severe epileptic. They move into another sense of sublime area.

Synaesthetia.... January is blue, it starts up high and to the right.

“People with synesthesia
Main article: List of people with synesthesia
Determining synesthesia from the historical record is fraught with error unless (auto)biographical sources explicitly give convincing details.
Famous synesthetes include David Hockney, who perceives music as color, shape, and configuration, and who uses these perceptions when painting opera stage sets but not while creating his other artworks.[72] Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky combined four senses: color, hearing, touch, and smell.[3] Vladimir Nabokov describes his grapheme-color synesthesia at length in his autobiography, Speak, Memory and portrays it in some of his characters.[73] Composers include Duke Ellington,[74] Franz Liszt,[75] Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov,[76] and Olivier Messiaen, whose three types of complex colors are rendered explicitly in musical chord structures that he invented.[3][77] Physicist Richard Feynman describes his colored equations in his autobiography, What Do You Care What Other People Think?[78] Other notable synesthetes include musicians John Mayer and Patrick Stump; actress Stephanie Carswell; electronic musician Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin (who claims to be inspired by lucid dreams as well as music); and classical pianist Hélène Grimaud. Although it has not been verified, Pharrell Williams of the hip-hop Neptunes and N.E.R.D. claims to experience synesthesia,[79] and to have used it as the basis of the album Seeing Sounds.
Some artists frequently mentioned as synesthetes did not in fact have the condition. Alexander Scriabin's 1911 Prometheus, for example, is a deliberate contrivance whose color choices are based on the circle of fifths and appear to have been taken from Madame Blavatsky.[3][80] The musical score has a separate staff marked luce whose "notes" are played on a color organ. Technical reviews appear in period volumes of Scientific American.[3]
French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire wrote of synesthetic experience but there is no evidence they were synesthetes themselves. Baudelaire's 1857 Correspondances (text available here) introduced the notion that the senses can and should intermingle. Baudelaire participated in a hashish experiment by psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau, and became interested in how the senses might correspond.[14] Rimbaud later wrote Voyelles (1871) (text available here), which was perhaps more important than Correspondances in popularizing synesthesia, although he later boasted "J'inventais la couleur des voyelles!" [I invented the colors of the vowels!].
Sean Day, synesthete and the President of the American Synesthesia Association, maintains a list of famous synesthetes, pseudosynesthetes, and non-synesthetes who used synesthesia in their art or music.” -Wikipedia.org

Read Lolita before next week. No LIFE outside of this class.

Very telling sentence on page 125 of Speak, Memory.... read it.