You wanna hold hands in the cemetery
Oct. 26th, 2009 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexsarllOn Wednesday I went to Catch, which has changed a lot in the past few years, to see a show headlined by Tim Ten Yen, who hasn't. The bill also featured a band called Hot Beds, who had a song about how Christmas now starts in October which worked both as a critique of festival creep and a big overwrought festive ballad which they can get away with playing outside December because it's about precisely that. Good work. I was, however, primarily there for the 18 Carat Love Affair who, as well as the usual delights, deployed a top hat and ace new track 'Dominoes'.
Catch might not be quite as typically, terribly East London as it used to be, but Friday found me in an even more atypical East London venue, in that it was seven storeys up (I think that's even higher than Collide-A-Scope) and done up like some kind of voodoo surf kitchen. Even before I started drinking, I saw a pink elephant trot past; fortunately, investigation confirmed that others could see it too and it was in fact a small child wearing a pink elephant head. Probably. It says a lot about The Deptford Beach Babes that they find places like this to play. That's a compliment, by the way.
As Peep Show bows out (and was this series the best extended advertisement for contraception ever aired?*), the comedy baton is handed over and The Thick of It returns. The new choice of minister interests me; Chris Langham having been, shall we say, rather too open-minded about acceptable sexual behaviour, they've this time opted for Rebecca Front, who if anything has the opposite problem; we should probably expect a Jan Moir cameo before season's end.
"Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said." It's a long time since I read the book, I'm not sure if I'm even that bothered about the film, but this piece gives me massive respect for the man.
Like most people, my first Nabokov was Lolita; for my second I took a recommendation and tried Despair, which almost finished him for me, but last week I finally had a third try and plumped for Pale Fire and, well, he's not a one-hit wonder. I think Despair's problem may have been translation, the difficulties of which are alluded to more than once in Pale Fire; I suspect that for the foreseeable I shall be sticking to Nabokov's English works.
This isn't quite the damned, despairing yet oh so beautiful hymn of Lolita, though; it's a game, a story told through deluded, shoddy notes to a mediocre poem**, one character commentating on another character's work, yet isn't there always that problem with unreliable narrators that they must be reliably unreliable, must let the truth shine through in a way few real delusionists ever manage?*** And for all Nabokov's undoubted craft, there are times when one is sure that we're reading Nabokov's thoughts, not those of the pathetic pantaloon Charles Kinbote (and did Nabokov ever write a protagonist who was not a deluded deviant?) or homely, drunk John Shade. Consider:
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by this very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats."
When Kinbote tells us "I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel", we see Nabokov laughing over his shoulder. When he rhapsodises about language like that, however, we hear Nabokov speaking through him.
But then, I suppose it was only meant to be a game, and in a game fun counts for more than rigour. And it is a tremendously fun book, in a roundabout, mean-spirited sort of way.
Also, the last king of Kinbote's distant homeland, Zembla, is called Charles Xavier. The book came out one year before the debut of the X-Men, but somehow I can't picture Stan or Jack coping with Nabokov's prose.
*Though I have just found the perfect childcare solution.
**Well, the third canto has some moments of beauty, but otherwise we're in the authentically bathetic territory of the sort of sub-Frost American poet who gets good reviews of their collected works in the Guardian, but in which reviews the quoted excerpts convince you never, ever to read any of the work in question.
***OK, there's Angie Bowie's autobiography, but even that involved a ghostwriter whom I suspect of setting her up for a fall. Certainly, spending that much time in her company would make me want to do the same.
Catch might not be quite as typically, terribly East London as it used to be, but Friday found me in an even more atypical East London venue, in that it was seven storeys up (I think that's even higher than Collide-A-Scope) and done up like some kind of voodoo surf kitchen. Even before I started drinking, I saw a pink elephant trot past; fortunately, investigation confirmed that others could see it too and it was in fact a small child wearing a pink elephant head. Probably. It says a lot about The Deptford Beach Babes that they find places like this to play. That's a compliment, by the way.
As Peep Show bows out (and was this series the best extended advertisement for contraception ever aired?*), the comedy baton is handed over and The Thick of It returns. The new choice of minister interests me; Chris Langham having been, shall we say, rather too open-minded about acceptable sexual behaviour, they've this time opted for Rebecca Front, who if anything has the opposite problem; we should probably expect a Jan Moir cameo before season's end.
"Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said." It's a long time since I read the book, I'm not sure if I'm even that bothered about the film, but this piece gives me massive respect for the man.
Like most people, my first Nabokov was Lolita; for my second I took a recommendation and tried Despair, which almost finished him for me, but last week I finally had a third try and plumped for Pale Fire and, well, he's not a one-hit wonder. I think Despair's problem may have been translation, the difficulties of which are alluded to more than once in Pale Fire; I suspect that for the foreseeable I shall be sticking to Nabokov's English works.
This isn't quite the damned, despairing yet oh so beautiful hymn of Lolita, though; it's a game, a story told through deluded, shoddy notes to a mediocre poem**, one character commentating on another character's work, yet isn't there always that problem with unreliable narrators that they must be reliably unreliable, must let the truth shine through in a way few real delusionists ever manage?*** And for all Nabokov's undoubted craft, there are times when one is sure that we're reading Nabokov's thoughts, not those of the pathetic pantaloon Charles Kinbote (and did Nabokov ever write a protagonist who was not a deluded deviant?) or homely, drunk John Shade. Consider:
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by this very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats."
When Kinbote tells us "I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel", we see Nabokov laughing over his shoulder. When he rhapsodises about language like that, however, we hear Nabokov speaking through him.
But then, I suppose it was only meant to be a game, and in a game fun counts for more than rigour. And it is a tremendously fun book, in a roundabout, mean-spirited sort of way.
Also, the last king of Kinbote's distant homeland, Zembla, is called Charles Xavier. The book came out one year before the debut of the X-Men, but somehow I can't picture Stan or Jack coping with Nabokov's prose.
*Though I have just found the perfect childcare solution.
**Well, the third canto has some moments of beauty, but otherwise we're in the authentically bathetic territory of the sort of sub-Frost American poet who gets good reviews of their collected works in the Guardian, but in which reviews the quoted excerpts convince you never, ever to read any of the work in question.
***OK, there's Angie Bowie's autobiography, but even that involved a ghostwriter whom I suspect of setting her up for a fall. Certainly, spending that much time in her company would make me want to do the same.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 01:33 pm (UTC)'the gift', his last russian novel, is the most beautiful book i've ever read. though part 4 is damned near impossible without a good knowledge of russian history, though you get the jist even without it.
interesting point about the translation. he did do or oversee all the translations himself.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 03:27 pm (UTC)It could be that Despair simply wasn't that great, but now I've read enough to triangulate, the comparative clumsiness of it really feels like it could have been bad translation. On the other hand, maybe it was just earlier and clumsier work.
I suspect that the next one I'm likely to try (though not anytime too soon) would be Pnin, simply because I've had those teasing glimpses of him in Pale Fire.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 03:45 pm (UTC)'invitation to a beheading' is also brilliant. and the one he held in the highest regard of all his works.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 03:52 pm (UTC)I have an entirely unfair prejudice against Transparent Things simply because a band I know adopted its name during a period when they were flailing slightly.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 06:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 01:58 pm (UTC)Goat is firm but fair!
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 02:04 pm (UTC)Now to obtain a child and a goat. And a Grandpa.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 03:20 pm (UTC)Thing is though, all his books are like mega-puzzles. Once you've done one of his Rubik's dodecahedrons it is a bit deflating to go back to the noughts-and-crosses of normal books. That said, the Nabakov I read most recently was Pale Fire and I found it took so much energy that in the end I stopped trying so hard and just let it carry me with it, probably missing a lot of the important stuff, but having more fun.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 04:17 pm (UTC)The next novel I picked up also happened to be quite language-obsessed, funnily enough, and nearly as poetic. But more on that in due course.