Travel
From Glory.
Exile and pleats
From Glory.
Pretty Proustian
Involuntary memory and shifting mountains.
An improved tube
A toothpaste slogan.
Zembla casts a spell
Spelling out Zembla in the NYT Spelling Bee.
Mailing a letter
Nabokov’s narrator mails a letter.
Chock!
Chock — O! — late.
"Orlovius was displeased”
A narrator thinks about how to begin a new chapter.
Healing up
was surprised to see “heal up” in the novel Despair.
“Yeats is always sincere”
John Shade opines. Like James Boswell before him, Charles Kinbote records.
“What emperor?”
Alfin the Vague (1873-1918), king of Zembla, Charles Kinbote’s father, “a kind, gentle, absent-minded monarch.”
“Insert before a professional”
Charles Kinbote, editor and commentator, thanks his publisher, “good old Frank.”
NYT Letter Boxed fail
GRIMPEN.
Parisian hand-bills
Nabokov and Bove: strange to move from one novel to another and find a similar moment, also on a Paris street.
“Deeper matters”
A passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
Mr. Goodman
A passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
“Everything”
A sentence from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
Mr. H
A passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
“Nine eight eleven alarm clocks”
A passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
“An old picture postcard”
A passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
Word of the day: brevier
Because it’s National Dictionary Day.
M’sieur Pierre’s cell
It’s decorated.
Sharpening
Nabokov on pencil sharpening.
"An enlightened descendant"
Nabokov on the pencil.
Hot-dog stands and poetry
A Proustian passage from Nabokov.
Beginning King Lear
I was about to teach the first class after a long break. I’d given the students no assignment. So we were going to begin King Lear by reading the play aloud in class. Did the students know that was coming? I don’t think so.
Nabokov, dreaming
There is no getting away from grading, not even in dreams, or especially not in dreams.
From an old notebook
Vladimir Nabokov on students’ notetaking.
William Weld’s reading
Borges and Nabokov.
Nabokov: “Dixon Pink Anadel!”
Has any writer had more to say about pencils than Nabokov?