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.”