Beverly Kenney - Try A Little Tenderness & It's A Most Unusual Day

What a lovely voice. And this Otis Redding cover is my favorite left-field interpretation of a song since Keely Smith's Hard Day's Night.

A+!

From Ian Frazier's Marginal:

Of special interest to readers of this magazine might be Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950. Nabokov’s handwriting (in English) was small and fluid and precise; in books that he took exception to, such as a translation of “Madame Bovary” by Eleanor Marx Aveling, his correcting marginalia climbed all over the paragraphs like the tendrils of a strangler fig. Nabokov was also a professor of literature, and in his copy of the New Yorker anthology he gave every story a letter grade. The way he wrote each grade in the table of contents next to the story’s title carried the authority of one who expects that hearts will soar or plummet at the sight of his boldly printed capital. Many of the stories did not fare too well, and would not have got their authors into a selective university. Top marks went to Jessamyn West’s “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (A-) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (A). Prof. Nabokov awarded only two stories in the anthology an A+: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J. D. Salinger, and “Colette,” by Vladimir Nabokov.

Read the rest at the New Yorker.

Dmitri Nabokov, Car Guy (Take Two)

Vera Nabokov and a Bizzarrini Strada

Photos of Dmitri and his family and his cars!

Accidental Nabopop

So also: some accidental Nabopop! Fujiya and Miyagi's Transparent Things.

More Nabokovilia in Martin Amis

So I knew there was some Nabokovilia in Martin Amis's London Fields and The Information, but it wasn't till I visited the former and revisited the latter that I found even more.

See page 303 of London Fields:
Vladimir Nabokov, encouragingly, was a champion insomniac. He believed that this was the best way to divide people: those who slept and those who didn't. The great line in Transparent Things, on of the saddest novels in English: "Night is always a giant but this one was specially terrible."
Fee fie fo fum, goes the giant. How did VN ever slay the thing? I wander. I write. I wring my hands. Insomnia has something to be said for it, in my case. It beats dreaming.


And see too page 238 of The Information:
To paraphrase a critic who also knew about beetles and what they liked, Kafka's beetle took a beetle pleasure, a beetle solace, in all the darkness and the dust and the discards.


Three observations:

1. Amis, in The War Against Cliche, his collection of book reviews, loves to use the same sort of Transparent-Things-insomniacs-or-not-"There's only two kinds of people in this world" line as an opening hook (not often, but often enough: some examples: "It was in Joysprick (1973), I think, that Anthony Burgess first made his grand-sounding distinction between the 'A' novelist and the 'B' novelist" (113), "There are two kinds of long novel" (121), "Dipsomaniacs are either born that way, or they just end up that way" (207)). 
2. The Information's Richard Tull's beetle thoughts have been only slightly reshuffled in transport. Nabokov's original line, from the Kafka chapter in Lectures on Literature, reads: "...curiously enough, Gregor, though a very sick beetle -- the apple wound is festering, and he is starving -- finds some beetle pleasure in crawling among all that dusty rubbish." (Tull festers a bit himself: bitter, ignored, he is a writer of unreadable fiction condemned to read and review lengthy, unreadable biographies.)
3. There's Nabokov in Kingsley too! I'll be checking out the letters and Stanley and the Women presently.