-------- Original Message --------
Sandy Klein sends
http://wunderkammermag.com/book-reviews/review-original-laura-vladimir-nabokov by Luke Hodina | 09 Mar 2010 / Thin
Air: Piecing together Nabokov’s 138 handwritten index cards. "As Nabokov faced his own effacement...to
elevate life’s trivialities with his art...it was the infinite minutiae
of the universe that intrigued him...The trifle is the point of
irreducible complexity in human experience... Nabokov died in the
process of examining the relationship between artistic creation and
death, and through this incomplete assembly of notes, we have a more
complete image of his method to ordering the chaos of life’s trifles."
JM: Trifles? To
pay attention to minutiae and detail, to exert discernment
and discrimination is this...trivial "trifling"?
To describe Nabokov's method as "ordering chaos of life's trifles" deserves
a literary Raspberry Trifletart prize ( if my understanding of the
English language is not totally at fault* - and I did enjoy Hodina's sonorous approximation of "face and
effacement"/"life and trifle").
The VN 1960 repartee to Wilson [ "( Isn't all art
whimsical, from Shakespeare to Joyce?)" ] capriciously brings in the word "whimsical" (with
its trail of trifles), but I see in it the enchanter, the great
conjurer, juggling with human illusion and truth.
Gary Lipon: "the
capture is not made into the square that the captured pawn is occupying
but rather into the square behind it. How this can be applied as the
basic rhythm of a piece of writing is not at all clear to
me.Perhaps that things, words, phrases, move obliquely pass one another
as opposed to responding directly to each other. Perhaps a larger
portion of the context would clarify things."
JM: You are right,
placing the sentence in its context would help to clarify the relation
bt. "en passant" in chess and Nabokov's meaning, but I this analogy (if
I may consider it so) derives from a long series of exchanges which I
found impossible to shorten and reproduce here, mainly because I read
them some time ago. I tried to find a short-cut to recover it and your verbal rendering helped me to understand
a bit about how the new set of rules disrupted the balance bt. two
players, and how its correction relies on a "phantom", but
effectual, capture in space. However, I still have no idea how it applies to VN's writing
of "Gogol." It's still itching and twitching, a good stimulus to
proceed. Thank you!
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* This afternoon one
of my grandkids ordered a poisonous-looking electric-blue ice-cream and
asked me to describe 'that" kind of blue. He even offered me to taste
it, while he mocked my inability to describe color without resorting to
the universe of sensations, and their "incommunicability". He enjoyed my
incompetence enormously, the little one - who's never yet been in love,
nor has tried to discern trifles from megrims.