Well Tended

"Well Tended," a story I wrote about talking plants and vanishing women, is in the current issue of Glimmer Train! (It's the Spring 2010 issue! #74). You can find it in all sorts of bookstores, or online. Buy five copies!

Loves That Bind

Julian Rios's Loves That Bind seems a likely candidate into Nabokovilia:

In true Rios manner, the list follows alphabetically and contains only women who bear a striking resemblance to literary heartbreakers, beginning with Proust's Albertine, Fitzgerald's Daisy, and on to Nabokov's Lolita.

Ada as a Difficult Book

Lawrence Weschler has observed, astutely, that writers tend to move from Romanesque to Gothic. The early work will be thick, solid, even heavy; only with decades of experience does the writer learn to chisel away excess, as the builders of Notre Dame did: to let in the light. In the case ofVladimir Nabokov, however, the converse seems to obtain. Of the major edifices he erected in English, his last, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle(1969), is his most excessive, both in its difficulty and in the pleasures it affords the (re)reader.

The rest at The Millions. (Reminds me of the line in Wonder Boys: "It's that kind of a book. Like Ada, you know, or Gravity's Rainbow. It teaches you how to read it as you go along")

Shrovis-Bishopthorpe Soap

I love Geo F. Trumper's sandalwood soap, and ditto for the packaging, but even so the slogan in the back ("Trumper's shaving requisites for the discerning") and some of the copy reminds me of Achewood's Mr.Teal Computer.

(And of course I realize that one's parodying the other, so it's a little like being all, Hey, R. Kelly's totally doing Aziz Ansari doing R. Kelly! But awesomeness sometimes requires that parody take precedence over what is being parodied.) 

Michael Maar interview

The BBC interviews Michael Maar in anticipation of the author's Speak, Nabokov (Maar's previous Nabokov outing, The Two Lolitas, was thorough and balanced (and introduced the concept of cryptomnesia into the mainstream), so looking forward to this thing too):

The author of a new study of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction, Michael Maar, explains how the often tumultuous events of the writer’s life, including the death of his younger brother in a concentration camp, imprinted themselves on his work in surprising ways.

(Description & link via Verso.)

Fulmerford Site Updates! (But Not on the Fulmerford Site)

Hi there! I'm neck-deep in the dissertation, so I'm using this blog as a quick, temporary repository for all sorts of Nabokov material (the stuff that would normally go into the site). The hope is that, since it's all small bites, I'll be less lazy about posting stuff.

So yes: less lazy, more frequent.

On Looking Up Nabokov

Yes:

To search online after every unfamiliar word in Speak, Memory would be to invite a distracting systole of attention, drawing me away from the slightly faded pages and directing me to the screen’s eclat, then pulling back again, only to rush in towards the broken sentence abandoned for semiotic insight, my eyes searching for the syntagma where I left off.

The rest at Cagle's.

Laughter in the Dark cover

I'm thrilled to bits with the specimen-case Vintage reissues: they're elegant, they're lovely, and they're lepidopterally-minded without hitting your head over with it with a whole bunch of butterflies. I don't think there's getting away from the motif, at any rate, and besides John Gall did a terrific job of using it to generate a coherent, immediately identifiable set. (I'm way indebted to Gerard Genette in my dissertation, so the moment I hear "covers" I immediately think of his Paratexts.)

I'll be reposting a couple of less coherent, less immediately identifiable covers from a section of the site that was shunted over into Tripod ages ago. Since then, there's been a bunch of folk who've done a far more impressive job of collecting Nabokov covers. My own little collection, Postcards, is still around, but it's way smaller and way less comprehensive than A Nabokov Coverage and Zimmer's Covering Lolita: both are impressive, the former particularly for its extensive dedication to international editions.

• Addenda: More cover discussions today -- not on Nabokov but on the A-Frame. Click here for an explanation and an analysis and here for an extensive gallery.
• Even more addenda! (Via the VN Wikipedia entry.) More Nabokov covers! Robert Nelson's Vladimir Nabokov Writings - First Appearance Database (First Book/Pamphlet Appearances of Nabokov Writings)

Ada Online updated

Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer, has updated his terrific Ada Online with fresh and corrected annotations (see the ongoing discussion at the Nabokv-L listserv).

The Uncommon Reader

From Alan Bennet's The Uncommon Reader:

Less to her credit, before Norman's mysterious departure the Queen had begun to wonder if she was outgrowing him... or rather, out-reading him.Once upon a time he had been a humble and straightforward guide to the world of books. He had advised her as to what to read and had not hesitated to say when he thought she was not ready for a book yet. Beckett, for instance, he had kept from her for a long while and Nabokov and it was only gradually he had introduced her to Philip Roth (with Portnoy's Complaint quite late in the sequence).

I Love You, Man

Nabokov's Ada appears, for no discernible reason, in I Love You, Man.

Nabokov stuff!

Hi there! I'm neck-deep in dissertation stuff, so I'm using this blog as a quick, temporary repository for all sorts of Nabokov stuff (the stuff that would normally go into the site). The hope is that, since it's all small bites, I'll be less lazy about posting stuff.

So yes: less lazy, more frequent.