gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith) (03/16/86)
Now I shall speak ... Better than any soap
Is the sensation for which poets hope
When inspiration and its icy blaze,
The sudden image, the immediate phrase
Over the skin a triple ripple send
Making the little hairs all stand on end
As in the enlarged animated scheme
Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.
John Francis Shade, poet and scholar, 1898-1959.
ucbvax!brahms!gsmith Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
Fifty flippant frogs / Walked by on flippered feet
And with their slime they made the time / Unnaturally fleet.mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks) (03/20/86)
Okay, Darkbloom fans: What do you think, after all, of the *poem*
"Pale Fire" (included in the *novel* _Pale Fire_). Originally the general
reaction was that it was pretty weak, which raised some tasty ironies about
why Kinbote thinks it's good, and how Shade got to be so famous -- just
one oozy step behind Frost. Sometime in the seventies this trend in criticism
turned around, and those commenting on the novel started to treat the poem
as really pretty good in itself -- understood as a comic/ironic epic after
Pope, say.
I think it's fun but still too much doggerel. What say you?
--
-- Mitch Marks @ UChicago
...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmarnobi@mtuxo.UUCP (m.juliar) (03/21/86)
Re: Pale Fire poem and critics reactions to it I wasn't aware that some critics were looking at the poem, Pale Fire, with lighter blue pencils. Who are they? I am curious. What does Vivian Bloodmark think of it? Me? What do I think of it? It's been too long since I've read it. But I wouldn't judge it too harshly after only one or two or three readings. I wouldn't judge ANYTHING of Nabokov's too harshly after only a few cursory examinations. There are always traps, snares, delusions, illusions, allusions, bombs, smirks, and a total underlying solidity and wholeness to everything he writes. That's the problem with the public perception (for those who perceive at all) of Nabokov. He's considered too hard, or obscure, or cold. Hard he often is (he says to the effect that art isn't simple, it's complex and hard); obscure he never is (he's very specific, very controlled, crystal clear); and, to call him cold is to throw a very old, emaciated, and inaccurate tomato. For instance, look at his handling of Humbert Humbert standing on the hill, looking down at a valley from which the sounds of children playing gently float up to remind him of the worst crime he committed: removing Lolita from that galaxy of childhood. Nabokov is an original and has to be read again and again to appreciate what he was trying to do in his books, what he was trying to make his reads SEE and HEAR and PERCEIVE. He sometimes "made strange" so that we, one of the true antagonists in his books, could stop seeing the world through the prism of old habits and get a glimpse of it through another, fresher, clearer window. I think it's time to reread Pnin.
gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith) (03/23/86)
In article <1814@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> mmar@sphinx.UUCP (Mitchell Marks) writes: >Okay, Darkbloom fans: What do you think, after all, of the *poem* >"Pale Fire" (included in the *novel* _Pale Fire_). Originally the general >reaction was that it was pretty weak, which raised some tasty ironies about >why Kinbote thinks it's good, and how Shade got to be so famous -- just >one oozy step behind Frost. Sometime in the seventies this trend in criticism >turned around, and those commenting on the novel started to treat the poem >as really pretty good in itself -- understood as a comic/ironic epic after >Pope, say. > I think it's fun but still too much doggerel. What say you? I think one of the marvelously clever things about "Pale Fire" is that Shade's poem *is* much more than mere doggerel. It is resolutely anti-modern, of course -- anything written in rhymed couplets would have to be. But it isn't doggerel. It is a poem with touches of Frost, touches of Browning, touches of Pushkin and probably Pope too, I guess. It is conversational and self-revelatory, but the "self" which is revealed is an invention of Nabokov, though at times he serves as a mouthpiece for V.N.'s thoughts. Kinbote's comments are consistently funny, of course. One of the few pieces of actual criticism on the poem is this: How to locate in the blackness, with a gasp, Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp. which he calls "The loveliest couplet in this canto." In fact, this would be close to doggerel except that it is ironic. The whole book is full of wonderful multi-leveled irony; very Swiftian. Shade is in earnest about things we laugh over, but is himself ironic. Kinbote's commentary carries this process several steps farther. ucbvax!brahms!gsmith Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720 "There are no differences but differences of degree between degrees of difference and no difference"