Darryl Schade: I've been hoping
that someday VN would show up on audio like Lolita and Speak, Memory and the
handful of poems and now I see that Enchanter and Mary are scheduled for release
on audio later this
month...I look forward to them and hope they have a good
narrator. This may be heresy to those who think VN or any lit should only be
read...I don't know how Pale Fire will "translate" but it will be
interesting. And I hope they use several different narrators for variety,
but I'm even more excited about it now....
JM: Until quite recently I'd been
mostly a "reading" person until I started to listen to different voices and
interpretations of English poetry and a new world opened up for me.
Thanks to Dmitri for the initiative in relation to Nabokov, and to Darryl Schade
for having brought the news.
Trying to spare my eye-sight I've been busy
watching old movies, most of them silly or very contrived. The opening
scene in one of them, with a movie producer describing his projects, played by
Noel Coward, made me think of Nabokov playing Kinbote ( "Paris when it
sizzles,"1964) and enjoying himself hugely during such a
performance.
G.Lipon (to J.Friedman):... you are conflating the term
insane with delusional and/or dissociated identity. ..Shade, if quoted
accurately by Kinbote, says as much in the commentary to line 629(The fate of
beasts):
"That is the wrong word," he said. "One should not apply it to a
person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a
brilliant invention. That's merely turning a new leaf with the left
hand."
JM: I agree with Gary: one must state
what we consider to be the meaning of "insane," "delusional," "deliberate"
before we decide to argue about these terms ( there are so many different
theories and different conceptions!). From the point of view implicit in
Shade/Kinbote's sentence, which he quoted, we stand outside the realm
of psychopathology, looking at things from the perspective of a
creative artist. Perhaps Nabokov would have liked to believe that a person
can avoid madness by an act of will as when Shade, in the same paragraph,
observes that "loonies" and "poets" are alike. The interesting item, which
I hadn't noticed until now, is the dissimilarity between Kinbote's Zemblan
creation, and Nabokov's novels as a whole because VN's past was never presented
as being drab and unhappy. He was not trying to "turn a new leaf"...
The
more I consider the insertion of Botkin,V. in the Index, the more puzzling it
seems to be (it's not as gratuitous as it had seemed to be at
first!)