Click for a larger butterfly.A butterfly of unknown (incognita) type dedicated to Nabokov's wife Vera.
Nabokov didn't drive, so his wife Vera chauffeured him on his summer trips around the USA collecting butterflies. On a summer butterfly hunt in the Pacific Northwest, Nabokov wrote the draft of the novel "Lolita," and then tried to burn it.
Vera stopped him from burning it.
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----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2009 7:20 PM
Subject: [F_minor] I simply cannot resist
In 'Wondrous Strange', Kevin Bazzana writes that Gould "was disapproving of books in which ideas were sacrificed to aesthetics or ironic detachment. Among the Russians, for instance, he did not like Chekhov, or the dazzling Nabokov, whom he thought immoral."
A bit of Vladimir Nabokov chosen by me for Glenn Gould:
“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random -- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern -- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
“I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.”
“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings.
The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish.
Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”
Gould fibbed; he obviously hadn't read Nabokov at all.
M*** J*****
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Mary
Of course Glenn has not read Nabokov!
And it's amazing that you have chose the same text as
Richard Rorty (one of my best loved philosofers) to ilustrate
his admiration for Nabokov in a famous interview with
Wim Kaiser in "Of Beauty and Consolation".
Jose A****** S*****
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----- Original Message -----
From:
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 6:15 PM
Subject: [F_minor] On the other hand Gould was right.
Gould was right about Nabokov.
There is nothing more immoral than a high mentality combined with low morality.
By the way, when is someone finally going to do some work on Gould's religious life and beliefs? They are usually left unmentioned in most works about him or what seems more likely guessed at by authors. His families view are almost always ignored.
But thanks for a new thread of thought.
Peter in Seattle
====================
I love that "high mentality combined with a low morality."
The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. At least to me.
Thanks, Peter.
The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. At least to me.
Thanks, Peter.
A*** in Santa Barbara
=======================
Bob speaketh:
=======================
oh for christ's sake, the guy wrote about 8 of the 20th century's most important novels, and was a world-class amateur lepidopterist, I think with butterflies named after him. He taught Russian literature at Cornell. (The years make it possible he may have had Thomas Pynchon as a student, even though Pynchon was an engineering major.)
I'm sorry you're still all upset about Lolita. Nabokov (said it rhymes with "your block off") was actually writing a love saga to his amazing new adoptive country. He wrote what he saw. That was his job, to write about what he saw.
You really need to ratchet up your entire understanding of what literature is, why people write it, why people read and need it, and why the Final Score is:
Censors & Dangerous Puritans 0
Nabokov 100000000000000000
btw the estate recently announced that against Nabokov's wishes, they are preparing the posthumous publication of his last novel ms. I cannot wait. I'm gonna sleep outside Barnes and Noble all night if I have to. This is extremely wonderful news, and the author himself is in no position to complain or thwart it.
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YES YES YES my hero!
Thanks for making this day more sparkling and grand.. ...
Cordialement
Danielle
==============
You tell 'em Bob.
Best regards,
F*** H**** Toronto
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to F*** H****
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god that jerk makes me so mad, and I refuse to waste valuable couch time to figure out why. here i am trying to be Sweetness & Light and celebrate Truth & Beauty, and then that schmuck opines, and I go all Donald Duck postal.
it is a very fine thing for both of us that he lives a large continent away.
N. sent the ms. of "Lolita" to his editor, and the editor sent him back a telegram: "If I publish this, we'll both go to jail."
Isn't it odd that nobody -- not cops and prosecutors, not our Great Moralists -- ever notices truly filthy, soulless, empty and dehumanizing porn, but it's the great authors, the explorers of the deepest parts of our souls, who wake up to find lynch mobs with torches on the lawn.
A few years ago, the DA in Oklahoma City raided a Blockbuster and forced the Todd at the counter to surrender the customer list, and then went around arresting every customer who had rented "The Tin Drum," accusing them of trafficking in kiddie porn. Unfortunately one of the customers he busted was a lawyer with the Oklahoma American Civil Liberties Union. (Academy Award 1980, Best Foreign Language Film.)
And what talentless scum scrambled to turn [Lolita] into a movie? Kubrick, James Mason, Shelly Winters, and Peter Sellers' first serious dramatic role. Nabokov wrote the screenplay.
The Legion of Decency put its foot down on just one scene, and said this one simply could not reach any theater audience in Christendom. Mason is banging Shelly Winters -- but out of the corner of his eye is looking at, and getting his inspiration from a little framed photograph of Winters' daughter Lolita.
I guess I love Nabokov because he simply rewrote and reinvented popular culture, the vocabulary of every language on Earth, the Meme Pool, calypso songs, the titles of porno websites and chatrooms. Swiss butterfly collector gave strokes to 2 gazillion puritans and turned the world upside-down, so thoroughly that we are all still standing on our heads. I could possibly have his daring, but alas it is unlikely I will ever be accused of having his talent.
===============
Bob speaketh to Seattle Peter:
===============
Oh yes, and it's also been proven that all the Grimm Brothers fairy tales are about sexual abuse of children. All modern people know that.
Peter, I really don't know what to say to you about anything. You're humorless, know little about music and seem not to be thrilled by much of it, and you know clearly Zero about literature.
Where on Earth were you schooled? By whom?
Perhaps my Swiss buddy was right -- it's the nasty weather in Seattle, it has turned your soul and imagination into a wrinkled prune.
I only wish your comments did not from time to time trigger a hot button with me. You SHOULD be so effortless to ignore.
I wish no one so gray, shallow, ignorant and colorless a world, so in the most charity I can muster: Start reading. Now. A lot. Anything and everything.
Everything you learned in Sunday School as a trusting but uncritical child -- now, as an adult, you have a responsibility to let the creators of literature and ideas speak directly to you and show you their dimensions of the world.
I have almost never posted words in the least critical of Our Master, but it has always been clear and obvious to me that, away from the keyboard, Gould had a deep lifelong problem with the worst elements and beliefs of the nastiest and most mean-spirited of Calvinism.
I find it odd he should have been so shackled and contaminated in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Ontario; you and he reflect a rigid stridency more common in, and recently far more dangerous to all, in the United States -- or, as the novelist Margaret Atwood calls us, the Republic of Gilead.
Sadly, going back to Colonial times, the Puritanical toxin has permeated and often seized political control of our country, always with disastrous and shameful results, and every cycle begins with an attack on literature and attempts to use the power of government to censor and ban it, and, if possible, imprison or exile those who create it.
Charles Brockden Brown's novel "Wieland" (1798) actually begins with a sad, almost pathetic preface begging the American reader not to condemn him to Hell for the act of writing fiction, and promising that if they will overlook his Sin of making up stories, the reader will find important Moral Lessons consistent with a (puritanical) Christian ethos inside.
Nothing in our clash of visions of the world can or should be settled by a poll, but I have received several private e-mails that were merry and grateful. To the best of my knowledge, neither the woman nor the man are registered sex offenders. Neither am I, feel free to check my town's police department website.
Bob
======================
Which proves his high mentality.
Lolita is a male sexual fantasy about child abuse. Ask any abuser.
Was this the book that bothered TS Eliot?
But good to get a response.
Peter
=================
----- Original Message -----Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 12:00 PM
Subject: [F_minor] On the other hand Gould was right
Pursewarden, a character created by Lawrence Durrell in "Alexandria
Quartet" wrote that all of his books shoud carry a label saying "Forbidden to old women of both sexes".
I am starting to believe that Nabokov books must carry that label.
Jose A****** S*****
Quartet" wrote that all of his books shoud carry a label saying "Forbidden to old women of both sexes".
I am starting to believe that Nabokov books must carry that label.
Jose A****** S*****
================
Hola José,
(Diacriticals often don't successfully make the trip via e-mail, so you know what I mean with your final e, even if it looks like a Cyrillic Q to you.)
Thanks for the Big Laugh of the Day. I'm a huge admirer of Durrell, his work and his life. (My wife loves his brother Gerald the zoologist. She thinks all English literature written after 899, when Alfred the Great died, is nasty and inferior. I am more appreciative of and comfortable with things written between the 11th and 21st centuries.)
I have a hot temper in the style of Donald Duck, and there is something about that jerk Peter in Seattle that just makes me start quacking incoherently and going postal/schoolyard. The Buddha, and I think the Sufis, promise techniques in which such jerks, and the dangerous and ignorant things they say and do, would simply vanish from my Universe, but I have not yet mastered these disciplines.
If you are a Durrell fan, there is a vanished treasure of American literature I would bring to your attention, the work of James Branch Cabell (1879 - 1958). In his day, his novel "Jurgen" was as shocking and villified as "Lolita," and was the target of a huge, noisy obscenity trial filed by (I love the name of this bunch) the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice.
The two-year trial and publicity rocketed "Jurgen" to the top of the charts, though this beautiful, funny novel and Cabell's others about the fictional medieval kingdom of Poictesme are great treasures of literature that did not need the assistance of the Society for the Prevention of Vice (although he thanked them in a preface to subsequent editions).
Cabell ("Tell the rabble / it rhymes with Cabell") was one of the most widely read Enlish-language novelists of the first decades of the 20th century; Twain was reading a Cabell book when he died in 1910.
The two-year trial and publicity rocketed "Jurgen" to the top of the charts, though this beautiful, funny novel and Cabell's others about the fictional medieval kingdom of Poictesme are great treasures of literature that did not need the assistance of the Society for the Prevention of Vice (although he thanked them in a preface to subsequent editions).
Cabell ("Tell the rabble / it rhymes with Cabell") was one of the most widely read Enlish-language novelists of the first decades of the 20th century; Twain was reading a Cabell book when he died in 1910.
If I were a competent dirweesh, I would have been oblivious to the brouhaha on F_Minor re Gould and Nabokov. But I write novels, well and just successfully enough to buy me a ticket to (North) America's miserable history of puritanism, and the contamination of and assault on literature and all the arts by the worst elements of Calvinism -- who, like the Undead, refuse to die, and have thrived in the New World for centuries. It is my job, when fools like Seattle Peter (and, sadly, GG) do their puritanical thing, to try to pound a stake in their hearts and make them stop bothering the world of beauty and ideas.
Thanks for a Huge Laugh, which even my wife (the English perfesser) shared.
Yours,
Bob Merkin
Massachusetts USA
7 comments:
It is officialy legal to buy Ulysses since the 30s in North America I think. Couriously it was never banned in Ireland though.
I would like to confess that I was only able to read it where Daedalus should go to his aunt or not, then I gave up. Now that book is so bloody difficult, those references drive you up the wall. CG Jung has said of Ulysses in an essay that it is like standing under a waterfall and I have often wondered if Joyce just wanted to show off how well read he was or if he was tricksy and 'avin a laff. But since me mates over at Librivox have just prepared an audiobook version I might check that one out since some books work better with me when I hear the words spoken.
As for Peter in Seattle, yep, definetly a twat. Isn't Lolita what you might call an archetype story, like Oedipus Rex ? If so, then Nabakov even ad the duty to tell this story to the world. In any case, maybe Lolita is just too "dirty" for Peter's moral standards, Desperate Houswives might be an intellectual challenge for that bloke....
I'm not sure how I did it, but I read the whole post.
Yeah, so ... what did ya think? Are you taking sides? Have you read "Lolita"? Or seen the movie (NOT the re-make, Kubrick's original)?
I tend to agree with Oscar Wilde's maxim from the beginning of Dorian Gray where he states that there's no such thing as an immoral book; it's either well or badly written, that's all. Great literature can be written on the most heinous or repellent of subjects but surely what matters is the way in which such ideas are argued and worded. As much as I admire Glenn Gould as a musician, and it is this for which he is primarily remembered, many of his so-called philosophies were drawn in order to justify his many and varied idiosyncracies - and my God!, he had enough of them - his fear of intimacy and need to control all areas of his life immediately spring to mind. If he had allowed himself the loss of personal control involved in such a venture, psychiatry would undoubtedly have been a long and ongoing venture for him - and a beneficial one too. But then again, would he have remained the iconoclastic Glenn Gould? Both Gould and Nabokov were both intellectual giants in their chosen fields of excellence.
I just don't want to live in a "Fahrenheit 451" world where people are robbed of literature by religious-based censors.
Btw J.D. Salinger just died -- in the USA "The Catcher in the Rye" holds the record of most banned book in public schools.
What Gould did with his sensibilities and his fingers (and the radio documentary) was ethereal art.
It's rather sad that his outlook on other arts -- literature specifically -- was heavily colored by Puritanism, Calvinism. His own work escaped Puritanical attacks because we don't usually analyze classical music with a religious or moral filter. Gould performed or recorded no music that was attacked like "Lolita."
I've seen the Kubrick film recently, now I feel compelled go back and reread the novel. I was a mere nymphet myself on first perusal, reading Lolita on the sly back in the early 70's at age 16 when I should have been doing my math homework or something. It opened my eyes, because I had not before ever read anything as adult, as complex and richly crafted, as hilarious and shockingly true about the surrealities of life in America. Until I was deep into the narrative I felt proud of my open-mindedness, amused by the author's brilliant wordsmithing and not in the least shocked by the book's central premise, that of the obsessive love of an middle aged (*old!* I thought then) professor for a nubile child, as my own sexuality was newly but fully awakened, and this was post Rowe vs Wade, an era of widely available birth control much touted greater sexual freedoms for women, even very young ones like myself... I felt could understand and even empathize with HH's passionate obsession for the ephemeral erotic potency of the young girl, Lolita. As I read on, it dawned on me that the character Humbert Humbert truly was a monster, and yet,as with that luckless, impossible that was Mary Shelley's monster, I found Nabokov had skillfully tricked me into feeing at least as much sympathy for the doomed pedophile as I felt for the child he destroyed.
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