Vladimir Nabokov’s map of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus’s routes around Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses
I’m back, by the way, and I’m never not down with Nabokov manuscripts.
The most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again. It's the most extraordinary thing in the world.
Why am I the Arkadelphian? Ask me anything (provided what you're asking isn't lame).
Why am I the Arkadelphian? Ask me anything (provided what you're asking isn't lame).
March 26, 2012
February 10, 2012
Who’s that face? The “Gloomy good looks…Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice…broad shoulder…”
Why it must be Humbert Humbert from Lolita, scanned into composite sketch software used by law enforcement.
The result is the greatest Tumblr EVER: The Composites
December 21, 2011
“Nabokov wrote most his novels on 3” x 5” notecards, keeping blank cards under his pillow for whenever inspiration struck. Seen here: a draft of Lolita.”
I really need to start doing this! I always seem to get my best ideas right before I doze off, and then again right when I first wake up!
This is just remarkable. Lolita breathes with such an easy erudition—and is so dauntingly good—that the thought of Nabokov, writing in the third or fourth language he’d learned, wrote much of it spontaneously makes me feel like a damned fraud.
(via theredshoes)
July 22, 2011
on the docket (the first)
MUSIC
—Album by Girls
- Jan and Dean meets Elliott Smith
- It’s not exactly a unique take to point out the cognitive dissonance between the sunny surf rock layers of Album and its melancholy subject matter, but it’s such a defining aspect of the album that you can’t ignore it. It’s an album of disillusioned late summer, when tans turn leathery, when flings turn into breakups, when warmth becomes suffocating heat. If you can take Christopher Owens’ Elvis-Costello-after-a-night-of-speedballs vocals and you have half the appreciation for surf music that I do, then you’ll find Album as lovely and moving as I have.
—All Mod Cons by The Jam
- Elvis Costello meets The Who
- The Jam is apparently massively successful in its native England, but that fame never translated across the Atlantic. I think this is partly because, unlike the Clash’s genre-hopping or the one-of-a-kind coked-up mania of Elvis Costello’s Attractions, the Jam combined the Angry Young Man discontent of late-70’s England with a distinctly English sound: specifically, the Who in full Mod mode. The sound is less immediately appealing to me—I don’t know if I’ll ever be de-punked enough not to be annoyed by solos again—but the album’s got more than enough critical respect and obvious potential to let it grow on me.
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I Love Winnie Cooper
“Winnie Cooper was, in a sense, the first pretty girl to smile at me—at all of us—and for that reason, because of her...
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- “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain
- “I only...
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“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found…”— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
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“[It could mean something.
It could mean everything.]
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.”— Mary Oliver, from “... -
breakfast just got a whole lot sexier
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“Just a few days after Nabokov’s death, there was an invasion of butterflies out in Springs, Long Island. It probably happens every year. But the...
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Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture, January 1947
