response 88 of 224:

Nov 5 13:52 UTC 2003

The "Insert before a professional" didn't give it away to me, and I'm
still puzzling over what it means.

In the last quote the author refers to his "students", which strongly
suggests that he's an academic.  The guy also seems excessively fond
of alliteration:  "utterly unable", "the web of the world, and the
warp and the weft of that web" (sheesh!), "stranded spirits", etc.

response 90 of 224:

Nov 5 18:28 UTC 2003

One more quote from the same book:

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -- and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky."

response 92 of 224:

Nov 5 20:52 UTC 2003

All I know is that I havent read it. Maybe you could give us some non-
literary clues. *shrug*

response 94 of 224:

Nov 6 06:43 UTC 2003

Anyone mention Kipling yet?

response 96 of 224:

Nov 6 13:14 UTC 2003

In one of the quotes, the author says that he's a lousy poet.
Would Kipling have said that?

response 98 of 224:

Nov 6 17:45 UTC 2003

I had not read this either, so I looked it up.  I only read one of his books,
and I would be surprised if most of us had not read that one at some point
beyond high school.

response 100 of 224:

Nov 6 18:50 UTC 2003

Vladimir Nabokov.

response 102 of 224:

Nov 6 19:38 UTC 2003

Yah, Nabokov's Pale Fire.  The prose is by Charles Kinbote and the 
poetry is by John Shade.  Here's a review I wrote of it recently:

Once upon a time, a judge named Goldsworth who lived in the college 
town of New Wye, Appalachia, sent a homicidal maniac named Jack Grey to 
an Institute for the Criminal Insane. But Grey escaped, and set out to 
find Judge Goldsworth and take revenge on him. 

When Grey arrived in New Wye, Goldsworth was away on sabbatical.  
Unfortunately, Goldsworth's nextdoor neighbor, a famous poet named John 
Shade, resembled Judge Goldsworth a bit. At the very moment Jack Grey 
arrived at the Goldsworth house, Shade was on his way there. Thinking 
Shade was the judge, Grey opened fire on the unfortunate poet, killing 
him instantly with a bullet through the heart.

The reason Shade was at Goldsworth's house was that the man who was 
temporarily renting it while the judge was away, a Russian emigre named 
Vseslav Botkin, had lured him there with promises of liquor. (Shade was 
on the wagon, or at least trying.) 

Now this Vseslav Botkin was insane. After leading a dismal life of 
pederasty and persecution he had retreated into a desperate fantasy in 
which he imagined himself to be Charles the Beloved, last king of the 
kingdom of Zembla. In Botkin's paranoid world, the extremists had taken 
over Zembla and King Charles was forced to flee to America, where he 
changed his name to Charles Kinbote and found a teaching job at 
Wordsmith University, in New Wye. Botkin believed that Grey was 
actually an incompetent assassin sent by the extremists to murder King 
Charles (i.e., him), but who murdered John Shade by accident.

The fantasies of this lunatic might be of little interest to the rest 
of the world, except for one thing. Botkin had been confiding his 
Zembla fantasies to John Shade in the hope that Shade would bring them 
to life in an epic poem. And in fact, Shade had been hinting to Botkin 
that he was writing a long poem, which Botkin crazily assumed would be 
his Zembla poem. On that fateful afternoon, Botkin had induced Shade to 
bring the almost-finished manuscript of the poem to Goldsworth's house, 
where Botkin (as he believed) would finally see his Zembla come to life.

When the police had left and Botkin was alone at last with "his" poem, 
he was horrified to find that it had nothing at all to do with Zembla. 
It was an autobiographical poem addressed to the poet's beloved wife, 
whom Botkin despised, as he despised all women. The poem was very 
personal, containing many intimate details of the poet's marriage. It 
is doubtful, in fact, whether Shade ever meant to publish it.

Undeterred, Botkin absconded with the manuscript to a motel room in a 
mountain town in the far west where he proceeded to write a long series 
of notes to the poem in which, taking off from a phrase here and a word 
there in Shade's poem, he detailed his "Zembla" fantasy. He even 
managed to find an unscrupulous publisher. 

The resulting book -- Shade's poem "Pale Fire" together with Botkin's 
preface, table of contents, notes and index -- comprise the novel _Pale 
Fire_, by Vladimir Nabokov. It is an artifact of the fictional world of 
Nabokov's novel, created by two of Nabokov's characters, that has 
somehow escaped from the fictional world into our "real" world. With 
the possible exception of a copy of _Alice in Wonderland_ autographed 
by Alice Liddell herself that I once held in my hands, it is the 
strangest book I have ever seen in my life. 

It is also filled with puzzles and paradoxes. From something as simple 
as the location of New Wye (somewhere in the hills of western Virgnia, 
judging from the butterflies that fly there), to whether the kingdom of 
Zembla actually exists in the fictional world of the novel (apparently 
not -- only where did that little Zemblan translation of Timon of 
Athens come from?), to the identity and motives of Shade's murderer, 
nothing in _Pale Fire_ is easy or obvious. Things get so complicated, 
in fact, that you start to wonder if maybe Nabokov didn't outsmart 
himself in this one. I still don't know. I do know that _Pale Fire_ is 
a masterpiece that deserves all the praise it gets.

response 104 of 224:

Nov 6 19:42 UTC 2003

(Md's review in #102 slipped in.  Very interesting.  Now I'm motivated
to read the book.  I'll be posting a new quote soon.  Stay tuned.)

response 106 of 224:

Nov 6 20:19 UTC 2003

  re #105:  Quick!  Someone get md some smelling salts..

response 108 of 224:

Nov 6 20:35 UTC 2003

Heh, I was contemplating guessing Nabokov based solely on the fact that
it was md posting.  :)

response 110 of 224:

Nov 6 23:38 UTC 2003

Zembla sounds a lot like the Russian word for land/country (with a b thrown
in to make it easier for Americans to pronounce).

response 112 of 224:

Nov 7 02:16 UTC 2003

"Nova Zembla" is what Botkin/Kinbote imagined the "extremists" called 
Zembla after they took it over.  It is most certainly a version of 
Novaya Zemlya.