A Fine, Fine Fall Day for Grafitti Removal

The fine art of grafitti removal

A Fine, Fine Fall Day for Grafftti Removal

A day for Craig Baldwin's Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal.

Kermit & Kinbote

It's always delightful to see Nabokov referenced. It is particularly delightful to see him referenced in a review of the new Muppets movie:

When Gary brings his ultra-perky girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams), on a trip to Los Angeles, Walter tags along too, in great anticipation of visiting the Muppets' studio and meeting, in Vladimir Nabokov's phrase, "beings akin to him."

Limits are Possibilities

I'm a huge fan of formal constraints, and years ago was pleased by finding this bit in Chip Kidd's graphic-design bildungsroman The Cheese Monkeys:

Always remember: Limits are possibilities. That sounds like Orwell, I know. It’s not – it’s Patton. Formal restrictions, contrary to what you might think, free you up by allowing you to concentrate on purer ideas. As graphic designers you want the world as your palette. But beware: You can be crippled by too many choices, especially if you don’t know what your goals are.

So it's a thing I do for myself: set arbitrary rules, some rational, some less so, in whatever I write. It helps beyond the telling.

And so then it's no surprise that it's also a thing I love doing to my students: giving them assignment sheets with insane strictures, which they at first blanch at and then wholly embrace when they find themselves so pleased with the end results. This is the sheet I assigned near the beginning of the semester. And this is the one they just got for their final story. I am very much looking forward to the results.

Also! It's nice to see one's hunches and personal experience confirmed by science. And by Russell Smith, who also, I'm pleased to note, also asks that students produce more material than is seemingly reasonable to ask. But again: it's worth doing because it works.

Nabokovilia: Martin Amis (The Information and London Fields)

Little by little, bit by bit, I'll be reintroducing bits of Nabokovilia from the old site. Here is the first (additional bits of Martin Amis Nabokovilia available here.)

From The Information:

Even when he was in familiar company (his immediate family, for instance) it sometimes seemed to Richard that those gathered in the room were not quite authentic selves -- that they had gone away and then come back not quite right, half remade or reborn by some blasphemous, backhanded, and above all inexpensive process. In a circus, in a funhouse. All flaky and carny. Not quite themselves. Himself very much included.

He said, 'Is this without interest? Nabokov said he was frankly homosexual in his literary tastes. I don't think men and women write and read in exactly the same way. They go at it differently.'

'And I suppose,' she said, 'that there are racial differences too?'

He didn't answer. For a moment Richard looked worryingly short-necked. He was in fact coping with a digestive matter, or at least he was sitting tight until the digestive matter resolved itself one way or the other.

*

'But that was... Wasn't that just a maneuver? To avoid a homosexuality scandal," said Richard carefully. 'Advice from Gide. Before Proust went to Gallimard.'

'Nabokov,' suggested Balfour.

'Yeah but that was just a book of love poems. When he was a schoolboy.'

'Nevertheless. Philip Larkin. And of course James Joyce.'

*

Richard had hated all the poets and novelists too, but the playwrights, the playwrights... With Nabokov, and others, Richard regarded the drama as a primitive and long-exhausted form. The drama boasted Shakespeare (which was an excellent cosmic joke), and Chekhov, and a couple of sepulchral Scandinavians. Then where were you?

From London Fields:

When she arranged this meeting with Guy, over the telephone, Nicola stressed the need for commando or bank-caper synchrony ('Unpunctuality throws me utterly. It's tiresome, I know. The orphanage, perhaps...'); but this didn't stop her keeping him waiting for a good fifteen minutes ('Please, sit down!' she called from the bedroom. 'I do apologize'). She needed fifteen minutes. One to envelope her bikini in a plain white cotton dress. Another to give the bedclothes a fantastic worrying. What was the delightful phrase in Lolita: the guilty dissaray of hotel linen suggesting and ex-convicts saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores? The rest of the time Nicola needed for make-up...

• Thanks to M.R. Miller for providing both the London Fields source and the quote itself. 
• Martin Amis in Wikipedia

The Cat's in the Bag

Was about to pack for gym & found this thing in the bag. If I had a moment and was the sort of person who makes Sweet Smell of Success references to my cat I would have said, "The cat's in the bag and the bag's going to the gym." But I am not.

Sighting: Nicholson Baker on Steve Jobs

Nicholson Baker nods at Nabokov in his Steve Jobs eulogy for the New Yorker:

We’ve lost our techno-impresario and digital dream granter. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, in a letter, that when he’d finished a novel he felt like a house after the movers had carried out the grand piano. That’s what it feels like to lose this world-historical personage. The grand piano is gone.

Read the rest of the piece at http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/10/17/111017ta_talk_baker#ixzz1bF6x4se6

Nabokov in Glenn Kenny's Review of The Big Year

...Which is, as one of its characters takes pains to tell another, more ignorant character, quite a bit of a different thing than "bird-watching." (One is reminded of the American editor who thought the last line of Vladimir Nabokov's "Bend Sinister" was "A good night for nothing," rather than the author's extremely correct "A good night for mothing.")

(The rest of the review over is here.)


(Not, incidentally, Mr. Kenny's first or last Nabokov reference. He penned a very Kinbotian preface to Tom Bissell's Speak, Commentary.)

Semi-Transparent Semi-Alive Sighting! Nabokov in Dawn of the Dead

Awesome sighting! Nabokov in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead -- via the Nabokv-ListServ. More details at the new and really cool-looking Nabokov-minded blog A Distant Northern Land.

Hand Puppet!

The Pio, Whitman College's student newspaper, did a super nice write-up of the reading. I talk about how I think Wal-Mart is awesome for longer than maybe I should. The photo is lifted straight off the newspaper. I look as though I am holding a little hand puppet up to the mike, but actually I am gesturing for dramatic emphasis.

Also: Selected Shorts aired Corddry's reading of "Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote" this weekend. You can listen to the MP3 here.

On October 12 (this Wednesday) is the other Selected Shorts performance! If you are in New York please go and let me know how it went!

Yay!

‎Selected Shorts is totally broadcasting "Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote" this weekend! (http://www.selectedshorts.org/fall-2011-selected-shorts-radio-schedule/). Yay!

The view from the couch.

Reading Tomorrow! (Thursday 9.29)

I read things tomorrow! (Thursday, 9/29/2011, at 7 pm)! Come hear me read things to you if you are in the Walla Walla area and want to hear creepy/funny things that I read to you! Details at http://www.whitman.edu/whitman/index.cfm?objectid=8C3CA455-AF90-2940-8392F3EC3A46B2AE

Boutique + Discoteca + Servicios Legales

Sadly out of business

!!!

"This season, all of our stage performances at Symphony Space will feature a commissioned short story. For BASS 2011, we commissioned a story from Juan Martinez and it will be performed by Cristin Milioti. You may remember Cristin from last season on 30 Rock where she played comedian Abby Flynn, Liz Lemon’s foil."

I'm psyched beyond the telling! (Also, and by the way, the short thing that I wrote is titled "Best Worst American.") Read the rest of the Selected Shorts news piece here.

Nabokovilia: Sam Savage's Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

From the opening to Sam Savage's Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife:

I had always imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line: something lyric like Nabokov's "Lolita, light of my fire, fire of my loins"; or if I could not do lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." People remember those words even when they have forgotten everything else about the books.

• Sam Savage Wikipedia entry 

Walla Walla back alley!

Boyd on Nabokov the Psychologist

From the 2011 Autumn issue of the American Scholar -- Boyd on Nabokov as a psychologist:

Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed as “preposterous” the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s assertions that his novels eliminated psychology: “The shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology,” Nabokov said, “—psychology at its best.” Later asked, “Are you a psychological novelist?” Nabokov replied: “All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists.” 

(The rest here.)

Fall 2011 Courses at Whitman

I'll be teaching three courses at Whitman College this semester. Here are the syllabi!

• ENG 178A: Introduction to Fiction
• ENG 150: Introduction to Creative Writing
• ENG 250: Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction

I'm also creating a page of supplementary reading material for all three courses, which will be accessible here.

ENG178A: Introduction to Fiction

• Syllabus
• Calendar
• Wiki assignment sheet
• Research paper assignment sheet

ENG 150: Introduction to Creative Writing

• Syllabus
• Calendar
• Workshop Guidelines
• First full story assignment sheet
• Second set of story constraints
• Exercises!

ENG 250: Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction

• Syllabus
• Calendar
• Workshop Guidelines
• First full story assignment sheet
• Second set of story constraints
• Exercises!

Supplementary Stories, Essays, and Poems Worth Your While

ENG 232 Stuff

Dear ENG 232 Summer 2011 students,

You will find links to material here. Be sure to e-mail me at marti575@unlv.nevada.edu if you have any questions.

• Nabokov on Kafka
• Group presentation requirements
• The paper requirements
• The syllabus

Best,

Juan

ENC 101 1008 & 1010 Essay Four

Hi! You'll find the assignment sheet at this address. Remember that the David Foster Wallace link is not working: you'll find a shorter version of the same piece here.

You can always reach me at marti575@unlv.nevada.edu -- I'm looking forward to your essays.

Best,

Juan

The Vegas Walk, Part 2

The second half of the walk across Vegas is up at City Life! Photos are here. I'll be updating the map soon.

Getty Event Write-Ups

Two nice write-ups of the Getty event: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/selected-shorts-celebrates-the-written-and-spoken-word/ and http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/03/selected-shorts-at-the-getty-starring-tim-curry.html


Nate Corddry did an awesome job reading the piece, which was written years ago as a lark in the dead hours when I managed a computer lab. Had I known, back then, that someone was going to have to perform the thing, I may have removed the bit about singing portions of Don Quixote in Spanish or maybe even the thing about talking in a fake foreign accent, which is pretty much the whole piece. Corddry totally sang, though! And he did so beautifully. And he was way funny. So maybe it's just as well I didn't know.

I Tell Your Feet What to Live In

In this month's Desert Companion, I tell you what sneakers to wear. Please note: This is a hiking issue! Do not miss the hikes, but wear hiking shoes. Do not wear the things I'm telling you to wear if you are planning on actually going around the Nevada wilderness (particularly the Nike Woodside, which though beautiful is from all accounts almost comically nonfunctional). The story is here and also embedded below and in the actual print issue found in all sorts of places. Read! Hike! Wear good-looking shoes! But don't do all three at the same time!

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Walking Vegas, Part 2

Headin off soon to Hualapai & Charleston for the second leg of walking through Vegas! I'll be posting photos on Facebook and on Flickr. I'll be Tweeing, too! 

(See the article for the first leg here. See also map embedded below: I'll be updating it soon.)

View The Vegas Pedestrian in a larger map

Our Engagement Photos

Sarah and I got our engagement photos done via the kind work of three Canadians: our friend Leah Bailly and the two Vancouver-based photographers who flew to Vegas for a wedding-photography convention and wanted to do an editorial shoot in the desert and were looking for people about to get married.

Here are the photos! And here are more photos!

Thank you so much, Tegan and Bethany and Leah.

Friendly Ghosts: Walking Las Vegas

Julio, one of the nice folk I met along the way.

I'll be leaving Vegas soon, and will be walking it from west to east by way of farewell. The first leg of the journey is up at Vegas CityLife. Here's a sample:

Desert Foothills Road teemed with folk, however, to a point where it felt like a parody of active pedestrian life. I walked in the company of dog-walkers and children and joggers. If you were filming a commercial for your new sub-development, you would have asked for fewer extras because it would not have seemed all that believable. So many people! And so photogenic! But there you were, surrounded by joggers of all ages, everyone in terrific shape, and by a froth of fully kitted-out bikers in expensive gear and the bright primary colors of spandex outfits you'd normally see in serious Tour de France stages, or on tropical parrots.

Photos of the walk are here. And I've gone ahead and embedded the map of the trajectory below:


View The Vegas Pedestrian in a larger map

Sighting: The Onion (COMMENTARY: Hey, Man, I Totally Get It; I'd Watch A 2-Hour 'Biggest Loser' Special, Too (BY A COLLECTION OF NABOKOV'S SHORT STORIES))

COMMENTARY: Hey, Man, I Totally Get It; I'd Watch A 2-Hour 'Biggest Loser' Special, Too (BY A COLLECTION OF NABOKOV'S SHORT STORIES).

Excerpt: "Do you think you're the first educated person to choose reality TV over a series of long, exhaustive nights desperately trying to grasp whatever it is Nabokov was going for in "The Wood-Sprite"?"

The rest at http://www.theonion.com/articles/hey-man-i-totally-get-it-id-watch-a-2hour-biggest,19444/#

Thank you, Gene!

Nabokovilia: Stephen King's "Fair Extension" (from Full Dark, No Stars)

This bit is actually likely not Nabokovilia, but there given that King has nodded at Nabokov before, there is a slim chance that it  might be. Here it is, from "Fair Extension" (in the collection Full Dark, No Stars):

"No, no, no! This isn't some half-assed morality tale. I'm a business-man, not a character out of 'The Devil and Daniel Webster.' All I'm saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I'm going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you'd better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things." (269)

More choice bits from Full Dark plus the rest of the Stephen King Nabokovilia below the fold.

News: Pleiade Editions of Nabokov's Complete Works

The great Maurice Couturier on the difficult translation and nontranslation decisions made for the upcoming third volume of Nabokov's collected works in France for Gallimard (via the Nabokv-L forum):

A great pity, of course. The translations were revised, sometimes in depth, but that was not enough. For volume III, I will personally revise all the translations. "Ada" raises a different problem: Nabokov worked hard on the French translation; I can hardly revise his revisions. I will write variants instead in the annotations.

I take this opportunity to mention that many books were published in France on Nabokov in the last twelve months (partly as a result of "Lolita" being on the syllabus of the national CAPES and Agrégation). I attach the bibliography of my new book, "Nabokov, ou la tentation française", which ought to come out later this year; it lists all those books.

 The rest at the Nabokv-L forum here.

Sighting: Some of Nabokov's Favorite Movies

Collated from the Strong Opinions interviews and the Boyd biographies, and available here: http://mubi.com/lists/7666# (via Maud Newton).

I Tell Las Vegas to Cheer Up

Over at the Desert Companion, I tell Las Vegas to cheer up, though possibly in a way that may make the city more depressed than it was originally. Which is how it goes for pep talks sometimes.

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Also! I tell you what to wear (along with the ever fabulous duo of Christie Moeller and Sara Nunn). Wear it! Or else! Bonus we-tell-you-what-to-wear at the site, where I quote Balzac on style! Balzac!

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Nabokovilia: Cleaning Nabokov's House

From the New York Post's Required Reading (via the Nabokv-L forum):

Cleaning Nabokov’s House
by Leslie Daniels (Touchstone)
If you’ve ever moved into a place before evidence of the previous residents has been expunged, maybe you can identify with what happens to Barb Barrett in Daniels’ debut novel. After leaving a lousy marriage and losing custody of her kids, Barb rents an upstate house where author Vladimir Nabokov once lived. There, she discovers what she thinks (and hopes) is a lost Nabokov manuscript — about Babe Ruth. The author actually does live in a house where the author of “Lolita” once lived, but, in real life, she says, “Nabokov exists only in the copies of his books on my shelves.”

I Keep Telling You What to Wear and Where to Get It Altered!

Go to this month's Desert Companion for the magazine's terrific Best-of-Las-Vegas feature, stay for me telling you what to wear on Valentine's Day and me telling you who's the best tailor in the city. (The latter has a totally unnecessary "Wire" reference, the former a totally necessary sexytime reference.)

Open publication - Free publishing - More arts

Bridges to Antiterra

Anyone interested in Ada is urged to visit Ada Online: it includes the text of the novel and professor Boyd's annotations. The site is accurate, beautifully organized, rich with insight and information, and is in every regard everything this particular page is not--which is to say that Ada Online is not


A monstrous, incomplete, and (most likely) inaccurate log of the literature found in Nabokov’s glorious Ada. For the serious footwork you have Professor Brian Boyd to thank -- I’ve used his endnotes from the Library of America edition of Ada (as well as Nabokov’s Vivian Darkbloom’s Notes to Ada). All mistakes are, of course, mine. Corrections and comments and clues are welcome.

NEWS: Stanford Magazine's "Did Vladimir Nabokov's Sojourn on the Farm Inspire His Famous Novel?"

Lots of interesting, substantive, historically relevant and contextually appropriate stuff in this article. Here is a snippet that is none of those things but is jaw-dropping nonetheless:

Over the chessboard, Lanz confided a dark secret that Nabokov told biographer Field: the memorably dapper professor led a double life. On weekends, he drove to the country to participate in orgies with “nymphets.” He forced his wife to dress as a child. Another prominent Nabokov scholar and biographer, Brian Boyd, also concluded that Lanz was a “nympholept” after reviewing Nabokov’s extensive correspondence in the New York Public Library.

Lanz was best known for his 1941 book, In Quest of Morals.

Via Aimee's Twitter Feed. (Read the rest of the article at http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/mayjun/features/lolita.html)

Sighting: The Prismatic Bezel in the Believer

From Theo Schell-Lambert's "The Depthless Bookshelf" in the 11 January 2011 issue of The Believer:

Interestingly, the Kindle itself pops repeatedly in the ads, even after it has done its work launching the flights of novelish fancy. And we start to get the sense that the device isn't just the departure point but perhaps a feature in these increasingly tangled scenes. And we start to wonder, then, if this interior Kindle contains other false books within (false) books: perhaps The Prismatic Bezel, by Nabokov's dead author Sebastian Knight. (13)

An excerpt of the article is available online.

Boyd on Nabokov's Blues Discovery and the New York Times Article

My favorite commentary so far on the now much-e-mailed-around, much-commented-upon NY Times Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution is Vindicated comes from the formidable Brian Boyd -- Nabokov biographer, editor of Nabokov's Butterflies, and most recently writer of the awesome On The Origin of Stories:

All the more kudos to Nabokov, then, for having developed a hypothesis over sixty years ago, in such a complex group, that proved fertile in driving a ground-breaking research project that uses methods (DNA sampling, computer-assisted cladistics) neither he nor anyone else could have imagined in 1945.

Read Boyd's entire comment over at the Nabokv-L Listserv.

• 2/1/2011 Update (Also via the Nabokv-L Listserv): Read/hear this terrific NPR story from 30 January 2011: Lolita Author Nabokov Was Right About Butterflies.

YesBut

Sociologist Gwen Sharp's Are You Better Of Buying $200 Shoes? makes a couple of really good points on the implicit class and economic assumptions of my H&M piece.

The short answer is, Yes, you are better off buying $200-plus shoes. The slightly long answer is that the cultural capital embedded in the suggestion that someone invest in quality footwear does not translate neatly into a disregard for those who cannot afford to do so. The very long answer is here, in my response, from whence the slightly long answer is excerpted.

Cheer Up, Las Vegas

Go to the Desert Companion to read me telling Las Vegas to cheer up. Read!

Our Save-the-Date Card (in color)

Here's the final color version of our save-the-date card.

"Writers Need Readers" ads

I did these ads a few years back for UCF's writing center. Their motto was "Because writers need readers," so the goal was to find unexpected pairings that needed each other (just like writers need readers).

Our Save-the-Date Card!

We've designed our Save-the-Date card, Sarah and me! For our very small Kentucky wedding! We're super proud of it, and we wanted to share the results. We used MS Word, for to we have no fancy Adobe products on our computer, and we were too bathroby for the graduate-lounge computer lab.

Our Save-the-Date Wedding Card