Log24

See as well Pale Fire in this journal and . . .

A Harvard student* attempts to summarize Nabokov’s aesthetics —

“Take ‘Pale Fire,’ his 1962 poem-as-novel
bursting with butterfly as theme:

‘I can do what only a true artist can do —
pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation …
see the web of the world,
and the warp and the weft of that web.’ “

“True artist” here refers to Kinbote, not Nabokov.

* Tessa K.J. Haining, Harvard Crimson  Contributing Opinion Writer.
Tessa K.J. Haining ’23 lives in Adams House. Her column appears on
alternate Fridays. December 11, 2020.

The Rowberry date appears to be, specifically, 8  June 2011:

A Kinbote note — See also this  journal on 8 June 2011.

Update of 3:03 PM ET the same day —

In keeping with Kinbote’s character as an unreliable narrator . . .
Rowberry’s Eindhoven slides  indicate he spoke on 9  June 2011.

See as well the Log24 post  “Historical Fiction” from 9  June 2011.

Literary Meditation for the Feast of  SS Peter and Paul

Background:  McLuhan on analogy.

See a publication offering facsimiles of the original 4×6 cards
of John Shade's "Pale Fire," as Nabokov described them.

Regarding these card proportions, note that 4/6 = 333/500, approximately —
the proportions of the text box in a post from yesterday.

"Continue a search for thirty-three and three" — Katherine Neville.

These rather pointless, but vaguely poetic, analogies were suggested by …

• Yesterday morning's "The Corrections," a post
  featuring spider ballooning and a dead poet, and
   
• "Blue Dream," a post of Feb. 11, 2006.

For the late Vladimir Nabokov, author of Pale Fire :

He took his article from a steel file:
"It's accurate. I have not changed her style.
There's one misprint–not that it matters much:
Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch."

Click for a related Hollywood Reporter  story.

Review of a 1968 novel by Wilfrid Sheed, who died today—

Sheed on his boyhood in My Life as a Fan: A Memoir —

"So it was back to… tinkering with my batting stance and praying that some one of my aged neighbors would miraculously rear back and give birth, like Sarah in the Bible, to a boy who would even more miraculously emerge at about my own age and not turn out to be a butterfly collector or other form of creep." (Simon & Schuster, 1993; in 2001 edition, page 84)

See also Shadow (September 23rd) —

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" — John Shade in Pale Fire , a novel by butterfly collector Vladimir Nabokov

—as well as Intermediate Cubism and Ironic Butterfly.

"This is called the transformation of things."

Santa’s Wit

Edmund Gwenn, actor, died on September 6, 1959.

When asked if he thought dying was tough, Gwenn reportedly said,

“Yes, it’s tough, but not as tough as doing comedy.”

This may or may not be true; if it is, Gwenn may be the true source of a quotation variously attributed to Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth, David Garrick, Donald Wolfit, William Holden, and Groucho Marx, Marcel Marceau, Noel Coward, and Oscar Wilde:  

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

A very dubious version of the Gwenn story attributes the “comedy is hard” part to Jack Lemmon:

The lesson is best illustrated in a story involving Jack Lemmon, whose best work was in comedy. He visited the British actor Edmund Gwenn, suffering in a hospital. Gwenn is said to have lifted the flap on the oxygen tent and said, ”It’s really tough to die.” And Lemmon responded, ”It’s not as tough as doing comedy.”
— Elvis Mitchell in The New York Times Week in Review, Sunday, August 25, 2002

David Bruce, an English instructor at Ohio University, supplies another version of the Gwenn story, from Movie Anecdotes, by Peter Hay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990:

Edmund Gwenn won an Oscar playing Santa Claus in the movie Miracle on 34 Street. As he lay dying, Jack Lemmon visited him and asked if dying was dead. [sic]  Gwenn replied, “Oh, it’s hard, very hard indeed. But not as hard as doing comedy.”

Santa might appreciate the above misprint, as would Vladimir Nabokov…

“Life Everlasting–based on a misprint!”
— Pale Fire 

and John Donne…

“And death shall be no more, Death, thou shalt die.”
— Holy Sonnets