2006 Updike interview re: Nabokov (and other things)
Lila Azam Zanganeh: I read that you weren’t a great fan of Ada.
John Updike: I thought the book was [coughs]—sorry I think I may be losing my voice.
Lila Azam Zanganeh: No problem.
NABOKOV SMIRKING IN INTERVIEW (SORRY, KINGSLEY, I LOVE HIS TRICKS)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA
Every now & then I watch this interview purely for entertainment value. Nabokov. My dad gave me one of his books when I was twelve or thirteen, I think, and shortly thereafter I had a dawning-of-comprehension moment, like, this guy [my dad] might actually be pretty smart/have good taste. Which, while not quite a Nabokovian epiphanic moment, actually is a revelation to an adolescent.
I’ve long had the impression that a lot of folks in the HTMLGiant/indie lit crowd don’t care for Nabokov* or at least orient more toward Bukowski/Burroughs/Kafka & what I think of as the “Grits” (i.e. writers whose lifestyles are associated with gritty shit and/or whose writing prioritizes visceral response over sublimity), but I pretty much consider it axiomatic that VN was a genius and maybe the most skilled manipulator of the English language who ever lived. Also, nobody has ever been more successful at translating synesthesia into art. (Btw, do you know what “Martian colors” are? I call that as a title for a book.)
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Classic Word Spaces (5): Vladimir Nabokov
On the last morning of my summer stay in St. Petersburg, I briefly left my wife and her family to walk to 47 Bol’shaya Morskaya, the childhood home of Vladimir Nabokov. The building, originally the mansion of the Nabokov family, houses on its first floor a museum, which I entered and was allowed to tour on my own for 100 roubles
To celebrate the publication of The Original of Laura, I’d like to post an illustrated account of my visit to the Nabokov Museum. I stupidly did not pay the extra 100 roubles to take photographs, so what follows are pictures I have lifted from around the web, sorry. I’ve also tried to explain, as best I can, what I learned of Nabokov’s life in this house – I consulted the museum website and Wikipedia when my memory failed me. I hope you enjoy, and please, if you have corrections/additions/Nabokov stories, share in the comments.
Nabokov Book Covers
Over at Design Observer, John Gall has shared this cool project of redesigned Nabokov book covers, which he created by taking photographs of specimen boxes. The boxes were assembled by a variety of designers, whom he names in the post. Have a click over.
(via @parisreview)
The Original of Laura
Knopf is publishing the book in an intriguing form: Nabokov’s handwritten index cards are reproduced with a transcription below of each card’s contents, generally less than a paragraph. The scanned index cards (perforated so they can be removed from the book) are what make this book an amazing document; they reveal Nabokov’s neat handwriting (a mix of cursive and print) and his own edits to the text: some lines are blacked out with scribbles, others simply crossed out. Words are inserted, typesetting notes (“no quotes”) and copyedit symbols pepper the writing, and the reverse of many cards bears a wobbly X. Depending on the reader’s eye, the final card in the book is either haunting or the great writer’s final sly wink: it’s a list of synonyms for “efface”—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out and, finally, obliterate. (Nov.)
Mean Monday: Fuck Everybody, I Hated This Book
Hi. I am in a really bad mood although I was in a worse one a few hours ago but I just paid a woman to make me lift weights for an hour and feel maybe a bit better? Hm. Nah. I came home from working out and spent 30 minutes or so cleaning up cat urine. My house still stinks to high hell. I hate my old cats. I am going to have them put to sleep. I hate them. They pee everywhere. Also, when I was working out? I smelled cat pee. I took my clothes out of a laundry basket full of clean clothes and so what that means is one of them got in the laundry basket and peed on my clean fucking clothes. Hi, lady who worked me out! I smell like cat piss! Be my friend! I was hungover when I got to the gym- hi, scotch and a pack of cigarettes, I hate myself more than I hate everybody else- but now I am not so hungover. One of my cats slept on my head though last night, so I am asthmatic today because of that. Fuck everything. It’s raining like crazy. READ MORE >
