Welcome Pale Fire Peoples! Today is the first day of the rest of your Deathmarch. By my (very rough) count, we have around 20-30 folks on board — this should be fun.
For them what’re new to Deathmarching, here’s how it works: we’ll tackle the book in 40-50 pages/week chunks. Don’t sweat it too much if you fall a little behind — most folks do at some point. Try to resist racing ahead so as to exentuate the commonality of referential data.
Every Tuesday, I’ll post a thread right chere on cecilvortex.com. Use that thread for comments, which can be as low-key as “Hello Pale Fire Peoples!” or as erudite as [very erudite example here]. One request: If you’re re-reading the book, do yer best to avoid spoilers.
And that’s it. The entire sheebang.
Thanks much for making the ‘march. The book’s entirely new to me and I’m really looking forward to tackling page 1. The first two words appear to be “Pale” and “Fire,” which are words I already know, so I’m feeling pretty good.
Let’s hit the Foreword and the poem this week. Depending on the edition, that appears to add up to around 40-50 pages of actual text.
Next week: See ya at the start of the Commentary (page 57 in the el [everyman’s library], 73 in vi [vintage international]).
is this thing on?
First question: Is it “Kin-boat” or “Kin-bo-tay”?
I was just assuming the “e” on the end of “Kinbote” was Frenchified, so we knew to pronounce the final consonant. What is it, ya frogtalkers out there— “Kahn-bohdt”?
Just bought the book… i’m off.
Cherished its originality 20 years ago. Gonna have another go.
Hello Pale Fire Peoples!
So-called Bill asked: “First question: Is it ‘Kin-boat’ or ‘Kin-bo-tay’? My brain went for Kin-bo-tay but I have nothing to back that up with. Nothing. It’s just what my brain did.
Also: Welcome Wese and electrix!
And further: Just read the first 7 or so pages and enjoyed the hell outta them….. now, off to work on my Zemblan. As it were.
Oh hello!
I’ll be thinking kin-body or maybe kin-booty. I’ll also be contemplating on the prisoner of Zenda and on whether some one once told me that Zemla and Zembla was a mythical name for or mythical country in the lore of Russia or whether I just imagined that or dreamed it.
Nabokov taught at Cornell, right? Does the setting fit? Or are we in the midwest? Remind me, someone. Remind me, o book.
Anyone ever read Pnin? Doesn’t the guy basically just fall asleep on a train? How about Invitation to a Beheading? Postmodern and spiritual as all get-out.
There, I’ve depleted my stock of haven’t- started- reading- it- yet cocktail party chat.
What’s up the introduction? I wasn’t reading it–really. But I was glancing at it, at a stop light, because I was bored. It said the introduction contains SPOILERS? That you shouldn’t read the introduction until after you’ve read the book? Really, what’s up with that?
Wait… is that a whiff of pomo I smell?
So as I was saying – reading Nabakov isn’t the best thing to do when you’re trying to write. Am feeling a little mentally retarded. Aside from having to check my dictionary about three times a page (pulpous and parhelia were in there; berimed seems to be Nabokovean), I can do nothing but whimper at his syntax and wonder what vegetable I should’ve eaten more of when I was three. He writes: “the heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund’s last breath.” I drool. Oh you mean it was cold inside, Vladimir? Freakin’ show off. For lunch, I’m going to make myself feel better and build a little castle out of my left over mashed potatoes.
cec, reconsider your strategy. you have to read poem concurrently with commentary, the latter disaggregated by poem lines(s). i would suggest poem line assignments. if you disagree, i’ll tear apart your house-of-cards blog like W at a greenpeace rally.
really, even since i saw W hold prince abdullah’s hand, i’m an incensed loose cannon. or, covetous. difficult to distinguish when it comes to our lordship.
I’ve started a wiki page to keep track of words in Pale Fire that are new to me. It’s open to all for reference and editing:
http://palefire.swiki.net
If anyone wants to extend it for keeping other types of notes, perhaps by adding a new page, improve the formatting, whatever, feel free…
@D
DavidG: excellent idear!
Itto: That’s what I thought too (read poem and commentary side by side) but a few folks I know who’ve read the book assured me that the way to go is to tackle the poem first, then read the commentary, jumping back to the poem as needed. Plus, it just feels right to not do what Kinbote sez.
Just got done with canto two… I’m glad i’m not depressed, this might send me over a cliff.
I just bought the book, and look foward to being a part of the deathmarch.
Re:
“The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund’s last breath.” That’s my favorite sentence in the Foreword, too. (Had to quote it in full just to read it again.) Nabokov’s omnivorous vocabulary and syntactic complexity remind me of Conrad, & in both cases it has something to do with writing in a third or fourth language. Maybe the ability to be fluent in three or four languages entails thinking in syntax like the above.
My other favorite sentence so far: “the lost glove is happy.”
I find my self strangely enjoying lines like “They close like giant wings, and you are dead” (124) & “And all tomorrows in my funnybone” (156) because they are so cloutishly funny and take such nice aim at the homespun homiletics of Robert Frost (I think for the ultra-urbane M. Nabokov America must have seemed quite a provincial place).
I read this book a long long time ago, and I remember not really liking the poem. But now I’m licking my lips at the pre-postmodern perfection of what it seems to be setting in motion, the places where the commentator seems to be actually writing himself into the poem, and where a layer or two underneath Nabokov seems to be doing the same thing–hurricane lolita & all.
I googled and found: he archipelago of Novaya Zemlya (Russian: Но́вая Земля́, “New Land”; formerly known as Nova Zembla) consists of two major islands in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia, separated by the narrow Matochkin Strait, and a number of smaller ones. The two main islands are Severny (northern) and Yuzhny (southern). Novaya Zemlya separates the Barents Sea from the Kara Sea. The total area is about 90,650 km².
The area is very mountainous, as geologically Novaya Zemlya is the continuation of the Ural Mountains. It is separated from the mainland by the Kara Strait. The mountains reach a height of 1070 meters. The northern island contains many glaciers, while the southern one has a tundra climate. Natural resources include copper, lead and zinc. The islands have a small population, which subsists mainly on fishing, trapping and seal hunting.
The islands’ indigenous population of about 100 persons is Nenet, while the Russians knew of Novaya Zemlya from the 11th or 12th century, when traders from Novgorod visited the area. For western Europeans, the search for the Northeast passage in the 16th century led to its exploration. The first visit was by Hugh Willoughby in 1553. Willem Barentsz in 1596 rounded the north point of Novaya Zemlya, and wintered on the east coast near the northern tip. During this voyage the west coast was mapped.
Actually, in terms of the best way to read the book, I understand that there’s another author who has written commentary on the commentary to the poem, and you really need to read THAT first, then the Pale Fire commentary, and THEN the poem. Wait, wait — but I already read the Foreword! Now what?
Another mountain to be climbed, and I’m hopelessly berimed.
Bluebeard inspires me; when we’re done with this march–having read Nabakov’s biography of Kinbote’s biography of Shade’s autobiography–I shall have to find and read Brian Boyd’s biography of Nabakov. Then I’ll wait breathlessly for someone to write a biography of Boyd. At which point, like Clarke’s programmers, I’ll watch the stars one by one go out.
My impression as I read the Foreword was that my life is a Corrected Draft, teeming with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions. And I hold in my mind a warehouse of phrases and lines, desperate to find a mechanism for returning to the proper canto and expanding or revising or even replacing what I scribed at first.
I plan to read the Deathmarch threads first and then the commentaries on the commentaries on the commentaries.
When reading the paragraph about the drama student skit, etc. in flight from NY to SF, I actually snorted (or guffawed or something) loud enough to wake the person next to me. I tried to explain, but he really wasn’t amused.
> I plan to read the Deathmarch threads first and then the
> commentaries on the commentaries on the
> commentaries.
And last, but not least, the Introduction.
Late to toe the mark
I didn’t make it to the summit, let alone the base camp, during the Gravity’s Rainbow deathmarch over at Cecil Vortex’s blog, but this time around we’re reading Pale Fire, which I think was my first choice during the voting,…