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.
Word Spaces (17): Heather Christle
Today Heather’s The Difficult Farm is officially arrived and live from Octopus. If you’ve preordered, I believe they are forthcoming. If you haven’t, you should now.
On the event of this event, Heather has kindly shared some talkings about where she makes her words:
Where I write I have only been writing for three months if we are talking about the room. If we are talking about the chair then it has been just over four years. If we are talking about my head we should talk about what we talk about when we talk about my head. You go first.
Once I drew my chair when it was new (to me) and I had fallen in love with a man who had gone away for a while. I sent him the drawing and because I married him we still have it. The problem is that he looked through many files and areas and he can’t find it. He did find this postcard:
Never mind. It works like this:
Word Spaces (16): Nick Antosca
Hi everyone. Here’s Nick Antosca‘s apartment and a few paragraphs describing where he writes. He wrote Midnight Picnic in this apartment. Thank you, Nick Antosca, for taking the time to do this post.
I write in my bedroom. I have a large bedroom for New York, so I can fit a small couch in it. (My bedroom used to be half the living room, but we chopped it up when we moved in. Three people live in what was originally a one bedroom apartment.) My bed is in one corner and diagonally across from it is the black leather couch I sit on when I write (on my laptop). This is really not ergonomic, but when I used to write at a desk, with ergonomic pads in an ergonomic chair, my wrists and back hurt a lot. They don’t hurt now; I don’t know what that’s about, but that’s the way it is.
Word Spaces (15): Stephen Elliott
Stephen Elliott‘s post here makes me realize that I should reevaluate some of my assumptions about writers’ work spaces. Because I often write in one room at one desk at a certain time, it’s very easy for me to assume the same about others. This assumption is obviously flawed, but I cannot help myself. Having seen/read this bit about where Elliott gets his work done, I’m reminded that others’ habits can be quite different than mine.
Here’s Stephen Elliott’s essay on his word space.
I don’t always have a “writing space.” I mean, I have an office in the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, that I share with Isaac Fitzgerald. A lot of times there’s empty offices so Isaac sits in Jason’s office, and a lot of times I’m not here, especially recently when I was working on a television show and when I’m traveling, which is more often than I really like.
Rate my bookshelf
The books here are pretty good or whatever, but what I like is that this bookshelf is functional. Who wants to make me one?
Word Spaces (14): D. A. Powell
D.A. Powell lives/teaches in San Francisco and is the author of three previous books of poetry, Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, which was named a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His latest book is Chronic, out from Graywolf Press. You can read the title poem of the book at PoetryDaily, a review at the LA Times, and a longer essay at The Critical Flame.
In addition to the basic bio, I want simply to say that D.A. Powell is the sort of person you want on your side: he’s generous, kind, approachable. And very funny. If you have a chance to speak to him in person, do so.
This past weekend, he took a few minutes to send in some pictures/paragraphs of his writing room. I hope you enjoy, and, if you haven’t yet, please consider buying his new book.
His words/pics after the break.
Classic Word Spaces (4): Leo Tolstoy
View of the house from the gardens.
Matthew Simmons already did a quick feature on Leo Tolstoy’s Word Space (the desk in the photo from Matthew’s post, I believe, is the desk from Tolstoy’s family estate in Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow), but I wanted to post about his Moscow home, in which Tolstoy and his family wintered from 1882 to 1901. According to what I’ve read on various travel sites, he purchased the home to placate his wife, who had grown tired of spending so much time out in the country.
In this house, he wrote The Death of Ivan Illych, among other of his later writings, took up bicycling, played chess, met Tchaikovsky, etc.
After the jump, I’ve posted a lot of photographs. They are not my photographs. I did not take photographs of the house when I was in the house. The photographs come from a personal blog I found through Google image searches. The travel blog belongs to someone named Bryan Persell. Thank you, thank you, Bryan, whoever you are, for posting these pics in 2007. I’m going to type about each photograph the things I remember from when we toured the house in June. The things I type up are what our guide told us, but if anyone knows more or has a correction, please share in the comments.
Writing Spaces at Fictionaut Blog
Fictionaut has announced a new blog feature, Writing Spaces, “dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.” The first featured writer is Stephen Stark, whose writing space appears to be a tiny barn.
Those of you interested in writing spaces might want to check back every now and then to see what goes up. Should be a cool time over there.
(via Monkeybicycle)
Breakfast Reading….
Here’s a rumination on pancakes from Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist. The context is that a man is trying to convince his consciousness to fly out of a pancake house but is having trouble separating his mind and body, possibly because he just ate delicious, destructive pancakes…
We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes form feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake– Pancakes! Pancakes!— that we never learn to respect. We promise ourselves that we will know better, next time, than to order pancakes in any size or in any amount. Never again will we we tempted by buckwheat or buttermilk or blueberry flapjacks. However, we fail to learn; and the days go by, two or three weeks pass, then a month, and we forget about pancakes the domination over us. Eventually, we need them. We crawl back to pancakes again and again.