Seeing the consequences of a thought

Two very knowledgeable Michaels (Johnduff and Wood) with some useful and interesting notes on what literary theory does.

Up to something

Good old Michael Wood on Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice in the NYRB (from September 2009; I'm a little behind):

"A new gourmet health-food restaurant opens 'off Melrose.' It is called the Price of Wisdom, and located above a seedy bar called Ruby's Lounge. This allows the owners to put up 'a hand-lettered sign reading, THE PRICE OF WISDOM IS ABOVE RUBY'S, JOB 28:18.' Inherent Vice also has a collision and repair shop called Resurrection of the Body. There is something touching about jokes one has to work so hard for, and Pynchon has a special tenderness for the mode, memorably signified, in Gravity's Rainbow, by the Hobbesian law firm of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

"These gags and allusions are fleeting instances of cultural thought at work, failures of seriousness that are prodigies of connection … No thought is banal if it is up to something, and the novelist's task, and ours, is to watch the thinking as it happens and before it fades, not detach or prejudge the style or the content." (70-71)

Mildly Missionary

My interview with everybody's favorite Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature is now up at Notcoming.com.

I need an angle

So I just read Pale Fire. And it's too much for me, i can't pick an angle on it. I know too much about it, but I don't really KNOW anything about it, ya dig? And I know Benj will ask me about it. But I dont' know what to say. It's impossible to talk about for me, I think its a book that defies any attempt to render it knowable through speech acts (I guess that's an angle??) Is it postmodern or fully represent the crisis of modernity? (is there or a difference?) or does it represent the academic crisis of modernity? I'm gonna read Mikey Wood's book in a bit, so maybe salvation is around the corner.

It's weird cause I'm perfectly okay with Lolita, I can talk about it from different angles, what have you. I'm okay with all the authorial problems and questions there. But Pale Fire makes my brain explode. And once I started reading criticism (serious criticism!) about how a ghost is guiding the book, I lost it. I think I share Michael Wood's avoidance of all the verbal/linguistic stuff in Nabokov in favor of questions of ethics and feeling. And Rorty's introduction to Pale Fire is beautiful...but not quite right all the way, I feel.

Here's Yaron's helpful words to me:
pale fire is hands down my favorite nabokov novel. i think it is so
fantastic. let me see what i remember from when i read it last, whihc
was 4/5 years ago:

-pale fire is in part abt nabokov's obsession w/homosexuality, which is
impt in many of his novels and esp in this one and lolita. nabokov wrote
PF, L, and Pnin at basically the exact same time, and they have a lot in
common, all being abt ex-pats, academia, violence, etc
-in part pale fire is abt graphic fictional violence. kinbote's story is
in a sense a retelling of nabokov's own family fleeing russia (vlad's
older brother and uncle were gay btw) and the assassination of shade is
a retelling of nabokov's father's murder
-the story is also abt authorial control, the author vs. the critic, and
who has the 'final' say on the author's work, and what's at stake in
that say, in keeping with this pale fire is in part abt the power of
naming, lolita is more obviously abt this, but i'd bet pale fire would
be interesting to read w/the part abt naming in butler's excitable speech
-the ghost is spelling out the scientific name of a butterfly, and its a
warning to john shade, a butterfly passes him right before he's killed
-the poem pale fire has a lot of references to previous poetry, esp
pound's cantos i remember
-its also in part an attack on the beats through an attack on Dostoevsky
(also an attack on freud - nabokov would say he put a lot of stuff in
the book to make you think its freudian but it really isn't, but well, i
guess probably also a very psychoanalyticaly interesting book - it is
all abt fantasy space)

that's all i can recall, my favorite line the whole book is "even the
climate seemed to be improving," which is kinbote talking abt the reign
of peace and prosperty in zembla, its right after an emerald tower is
being erected