Lola

Lola de Valence

–  Edouard Manet, 1862

Lola de Valence

Entre tant de beautés que partout on peut voir,
Je contemple bien, amis, que le désir balance;
Mais on voit scintiller en Lola de Valence
Le charme inattendu d’un bijou rose et noir.

Among such beauties as one can see everywhere
I understand, my friends, that desire hesitates;
But one sees sparkling in Lola of Valencia
The unexpected charm of a black and rose jewel.

— Charles Baudelaire, 1863, translated by William Aggeler

“The Triumph of Manet”

…Manet, with his fondness for the picturesquely exotic, still paying tribute to the toreador, the guitar, and the mantilla, though already half won over to everyday objects, to models found in the street, must have seemed to Baudelaire like a close reflection of his own problem: the crucial condition, for an artist, of being subject to several opposing temptations and actually capable of expressing himself in a variety of admirable styles.

We need only glance through the slender collection of Les Fleurs du mal, noting the significant and as it were concentrated variety of subjects in the poems, and compare it with the variety of subjects to be remarked in the list of Manet’s works, to decide on a reasonably obvious affinity between the preoccupations of the poet and the painter…

Both were born into the same environment of the old Paris bourgeoisie, and both display the same rare combination of a refined elegance in matters of taste with a singular strength of will in their work.

Furthermore: they were both equally contemptuous of any effects not arrived at by conscious clarity, and the full possession of the resources of their craft; it is this quality, which defines purity, in painting as in poetry. They have no mind to speculate on “sentiment” or introduce “ideas,” until the “sensation” has been skillfully and subtly organized. In fact, what they aimed at and reached was the supreme quality in art — charm, a term which I use here in all its force.

That is what I think of when I recall the delicious line — a line that seemed equivocal to the evil-minded, and a scandal to the Law — the famous bijou rose et noir which was Baudelaire’s tribute to Lola de Valence. A mysterious jewel, it seems to me less appropriate to the strong and stocky danseuse in her rich and heavy Spanish petticoat, standing superbly in wait behind the scenes, ready, with all her supple sureness of muscle, for the signal that will release the vigor, rhythm, and syncopated violence of her dance, than to the cold and naked Olympia, that monster of banal sensuality, ministered to by a negress…

– Paul Valéry, 1932

Lolita

She was Lola in slacks.

– Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

Softball Diaries

On my walk this morning I was thinking about a writing project. Here’s an illustration of how it would work. The indented italicized bit is the first half of the first paragraph of the first novel in the series that I’m coming close to finishing. The non-indented, non-italicized commentary is the imagined writing project.

* * *

The dining room looks inviting, but today it’s the bar that calls to you. Maybe it’s because you don’t want to hear the hostess pose the inevitable question – “Just one?” – in that reflexive tone of pity and scorn. There is no television perched up in the corner replaying football highlights, no stereo system blasting rock oldies on tinny speakers – only the classic silent aesthetic of bottles and glasses and polished granite. A long mirror stretches across the back wall; there’s even a bowlful of clementines on the bar. When the young woman in the black velvet jacket asks what you’d like you don’t have to think twice: a bottle of Bass, please.

I’ve never spent much time in bars. On summer breaks during my college years I played on a softball team sponsored by Boomer’s Tap, a neighborhood bar frequented mostly by middle-aged working class men from the neighborhood.  Once I reached official drinking age I would join my teammates at Boomer’s to drown our sorrows after yet another defeat. I was the team’s pitcher, but I didn’t take my responsibilities very seriously. I wore a 60 on the back of my jersey, the number corresponding to the percent effort I typically put out during the games, as evaluated by my teammates. I thought of myself as an outfielder, the position I’d played since Little League. But this was 16-inch slow-pitch, the game of choice for beer-swilling middle-aged working class men in Chicago. For some reason I had a hell of a time judging flies, even though the ball was so much bigger and moving so much more slowly than a real 9-inch-in-circumference baseball, the flight of which I could track with great accuracy. Because I was a good hitter I was deemed an offensive asset to the softball team, so to minimize my defensive liabilities I became the pitcher.

In 16-inch softball, as in hardball, pitching is a glamor position. It’s understandable in hardball, where speed and spin and location dramatically affect the batter’s ability to make solid contact. But this was a big old softball arcing slowly toward home plate: there’s not much a pitcher can do to fool the batter. Sure, you could try to aim inside or outside, high in the strike zone or low, propelling the ball on a big looping trajectory or a relatively flat one. But with that big fat ball floating up there the batter has plenty of time to adjust, shift stance, step backward or forward in the batter’s box, take a big swing. Backspin, trying to induce a popup rather than a line drive or a deep fly ball? Against the rules. The pitcher is, however, allowed to pretend to pitch: wind up, begin the underhanded throwing delivery, then suddenly stop and hold onto the ball for a moment or two before starting again. Two feints are allowed before actually delivering the ball to the batter. A lot of the beer-belly pitchers in the Chicago softball leagues loved the showmanship, the theatrics of pretending. Between the feints and the pitch they would drag their back leg forward or to the side, glare intently at the base runners, pull their waistbands up over their bellies, and so on. As a batter I would just wait, bat on shoulder, for these guys to finish their contortions, not shifting the bat into actual hitting position until the ball was finally on its way toward the plate. As pitcher for the Boomer’s Tap team I just couldn’t take my  job seriously. No feints: just throw it up there and let the hitter take his best shot. That’s why my teammates gave me a 60% score for effort.

I can with complete honesty and some shame report that I never, not once, picked up a girl at a bar etc. etc. I do like dining alone at a café table though etc. etc.

The mirror, the bowlful of clementines, the barista’s black velvet jacket, the bottle of Bass Ale — reference the painting by Manet:

We bought a print of this painting after seeing the original at the Courtauld in London. For years it hung on one wall or another of one house or another that we lived in. Our daughter’s violin teacher loved this print, so when we got rid of most of our belongings in preparation for moving to France we gave it to her. Etc. etc. about trying to arrange for violin lessons in France, about the violin being lost in transit on our move back to the US, about never having actually visited the Folies Bergère on any of our trips to Paris.

*  *  *

After this little experiment I realize that, if I were going to pursue this project, I’d stick to the more precise ways in which the fictional corresponds to the nonfictional. So I’d skip the softball vignette but include the Manet and maybe also the violin lessons. Then the text is framed not so much as an autobiography but as an illustration of how seemingly random elements in a fiction have parallel manifestations in the writer’s life. It’s not as though every line of fiction I’ve written would have a direct correspondence in my memoirs, but with enough fragments a reader might be able to triangulate on who I am. All the more reason not to do it.

Mali?

Many years ago my traveler’s checks were stolen in Tangier by some English guy who later cashed them in Timbuktu, which happens to be in Mali. Other than that I had paid virtually no attention to the place until the French government’s recent military intervention. Here’s what I’ve pieced together:

Mali has undergone numerous political upheavals since France cut it loose in 1960. From 1992 a publicly elected government held office. Just before the scheduled 2012 elections the military seized power via a coup. The military say they took charge because the elected government was not maintaining a hard enough line against the Tuaregs of the north, who wanted to establish an Islamist state. I infer that the military was concerned about Islamist candidates doing well in the upcoming elections, as well as the possibility that the Tuaregs would be permitted to secede from Mali in order to form their own nation. Not surprisingly, a sizable proportion of the Malian populace is incensed that a stable, popularly-elected government has been deposed by military strongmen. Again not surprisingly, the resistance is being led by the Tuaregs.

So when France unleashes bombing sorties against the so-called Islamist extremist terrorists, it’s siding with the leaders of the military coup that only last year overthrew the democratically elected government. The Malian government has also called on neighboring Algeria to aid in suppressing the resistance. Algeria’s history is similar to Mali’s. In 1991 an Islamist coalition won the popular elections. In response a military coup ensued, deposing the elected government and triggering a civil war in which something like 200 thousand people were killed. A democratic republic has subsequently been installed, but it’s clear that the military still controls the Algerian government.

Again not surprisingly, not a few Algerians take exception to the Algerian military strongmen going to the aid of the Malian military strongmen. And so in protest an armed Islamist faction took control of a natural gas field, holding local and foreign energy workers as hostages. The Algerian military came charging in, guns blazing, mowing down captors and captives alike.

Is this largely an ethnic skirmish, limited to an uprising among the minority Tuaregs who also happen to be supporters of sharia law? Or are the Tuaregs standing on the front lines of a more widespread popular resistance against the military dictators that have seized power in the country? I don’t know. An estimated 90% of Malians are Islamic, but that doesn’t mean most of them support the establishment of an Islamic state. But I’d be surprised if most of them prefer a military dictatorship to the elected government which it overthrew just last year.

Faulkner’s Narrator on the Floating Signifier

“It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood we see ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable — Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and folded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.”

– William Faulkner, Absolom, Absolom!, 1936

Squirrel, Uselessness, Pony Express

1. In my O’Gandhi novel I included an episode about removing a dead raccoon from the main character’s chimney, a fictional event based closely on real life. Again yesterday, several years later, we had to call an animal removalist, though this time it was a live squirrel. I won’t write this one up, but I will note that the tactical equipment included a green cloth grocery sack, two blue rags, and a bottle a chloroform. “Good boy,” the removalist complimented the still-very-alert squirrel while tossing it over the back porch railing.

2. Daughter Kenzie has been rewriting a novel she originally wrote during 2011 NaNoWriMo. Here’s a bit of dialogue from the work in progress, tentatively entitled The Sin Aesthetic:

“What do you mean,” she inquired, “when you say you wonder if art should be useful?”

“Only that some things are more enjoyable if they are of no practical value. The beauty of a portrait is not its ability to make a profit unless it is of very poor quality indeed. Its beauty is much more reliant on its sheer implausibility and impracticality. Few people in reality pose the way they do in paintings of themselves, but the discrepancy often heightens their portrait’s quality. I find that use tends to cheapen art horribly.”

Lucia thought that Mr Fenmore looked rather like some idealized portrait as he lounged upon his sofa, and she found herself hoping that he was a perfectly useless individual.     

“Is this a commonly held opinion in Apollyn, Mr Fenmore?”

He chuckled softly. “I am uncertain that it has occurred to the majority of genteel Apollynians that there is any use beyond beauty. It may not be a subject on which most people have an opinion, since it is assumed that everything should be beautiful, and that only some things need to be useful.”

3. I’ve been looking again at The Courier. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it when I finished editing it a few months ago; now, after letting it breathe, I’m finding it more palatable. Today, for example, I was pleased to come across a sentence that includes four colons. While rereading I’ve also taken the occasion to add passing references to Hermes, Trismegistus, and the Pony Express.

Part of a Winter Solstice Story

Anyway, the Fenimores, Mr and Mrs Fenimore, I say, Mr Fenimore is really pioneering. He’s small and slim, but always looks as if he’s setting out on an adventure with an imaginary hiking stick in his hand.

I know the type, Paula says.

He takes over the after-school chess and judo clubs, I say. He starts up an after-school cookery class and takes a lot of flak for being a man who runs a cookery class. Mrs Fenimore helps. She always helps. She is always there helping, she’s a shy person who smiles a lot, while her husband, whom she looks at with eyes full of a sad, hopeful love, runs the school clubs, and not just those, he forms a neighbourhood wine club where our parents and the other neighbours who don’t have kids go to the Fenimores’ house to taste wine, Mrs Fenimore puts invitations through everybody’s door, smiling shyly if you look out the window and see her on her rounds. JACK AND SHIRLEY FENIMORE INVITE YOU TO A SPECIAL WINE TASTING. Loads of people go, all the neighbours go, my mother and father go, and they never usually go to anything. They’ve never done anything like it before. Then everybody talks about how nice the Fenimores are, how much they like the Fenimores’ house, car, garden, cutlery, design of plates. Then the Fenimores organize a theatre visit. JACK AND SHIRLEY FENIMORE INVITE YOU TO EDUCATING RITA AT THE EMPIRE. Everybody goes. JACK AND SHIRLEY FENIMORE INVITE YOU TO A MULLED WINE EXTRAVAGANZA. JACK AND SHIRLEY FENIMORE INVITE YOU ON A SOLSTICE ASSAULT ON BEN WYVIS.

Assault on Ben who? the man (I’ll call him Tom) says.

No, I say. Ben Wyvis is a mountain. Ben is a Scottish word for mountain.

Yeah, I know, I know that, Tom says.

You don’t know nothing, Paula says. You didn’t know what angora was a minute ago.

Anyway, I say. About twenty of us, who’ve all lived under Ben Wyvis for most of our lives and have never been up it, seven or eight adults and the rest kids my age, some younger, a couple of older ones, get into a minibus the Fenimores hire, because Mr Fenimore’s just got his minibus driving licence, and drive to the foot of Ben Wyvis to see how high up it we can get on the Sunday before Christmas, December 21st, a gloriously sunny Sunday, bright and crisp and blue-skied.

And then what happens?

Oh, okay, I get it, it’s a game, Tom says. Okay. You get to the top and you have the most fantastic party and you kiss your first boy up a romantic mountain on the shortest day of the year.

The minibus breaks down, Paula says. You never even leave the neighborhood.

Halfway up the mountain, I say, the sky changes colour from blue to black, and half an hour later it starts to snow…

– from “Present,” a short story by Ali Smith in her 2008 collection The First Person and Other Stories

The Perfect Christmas Gift?

From the Denver Post:

This weekend set a record for all single-day background check submittals in Colorado for potential gun purchases, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation officials.

The first day after news of one of the worst mass shootings in America, when a gunman killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., requests to buy guns in Colorado surged.

A total of 4,154 background checks were submitted on Saturday, said CBI spokeswoman Susan Medina. Those figures topped the previous greatest number of background checks on Black Friday this year, when 4,028 were processed.

The surge after the massacre surprised CBI officials, who said the office wasn’t adequately staffed to deal with demand. The situation soon created a backlog and increasingly long wait times for potential gun buyers waiting for check results.

So many background checks were submitted the process that normally usually takes minutes turned into wait times of more than 15 hours… By Sunday, the wait for a processed background check grew to 18 hours, Medina said. By Monday afternoon, it took longer than 21 hours for a check to be processed.

Richard Taylor, manager of Firing Line — which bills itself as Colorado’s largest gun shop and has been active since the mid-1980s — said the store had never been as busy as it was over the weekend, and times for a background check to be processed proved it.

“It’s just been crazy,” he said. “I’m surprised the system didn’t crash, it’s been so busy.”

The rush began Friday afternoon after news of the Sandy Hook shootings broke, Taylor said. Customers coming to the store speculated on how laws could change in the aftermath while browsing the store’s selections, he said.

Assault-style rifles were the most popular gun over the weekend, Taylor said.

 

The Bisexual Allure of Objects

To test whether grammatical gender really does focus speakers of different languages on different aspects of objects, we created a list of 24 object names that had opposite grammatical genders in Spanish and German (half were masculine and half feminine in each language), and then asked a group of native Spanish speakers and another group of native German speakers to write down the first three adjectives that came to mind to describe each object on the list. The study was conducted entirely in English, and none of the participants were aware of the purpose of the study. The question was whether the grammatical genders of object names in Spanish and German would be reflected in the kinds of adjectives that Spanish and German speakers generated. All of the participants were native speakers of either Spanish or German, but both groups were highly proficient in English. Since the experiment was conducted in English (a language with no grammatical gender system), this is a particularly conservative test of whether grammatical gender influences the way people think about objects.

After all of the adjectives provided by Spanish and German speakers were collected, a group of English speakers (unaware of the purpose of the study) rated the adjectives as describing masculine or feminine properties of the objects. The adjectives were arranged in alphabetical order and were not identified as having been produced by a Spanish or a German speaker.

As predicted, Spanish and German speakers generated adjectives that were rated more masculine for items whose names were grammatically masculine in their native language than for items whose names were grammatically feminine. Because all object names used in this study had opposite genders in Spanish and German, Spanish and German speakers produced very different adjectives to describe the objects. For items that were grammatically masculine in Spanish but feminine in German, adjectives provided by Spanish speakers were rated more masculine than those provided by German speakers. For items that were grammatically masculine in German but feminine in Spanish, adjectives provided by German speakers were rated more masculine than those provided by Spanish speakers.

There were also observable qualitative differences between the kinds of adjectives Spanish and German speakers produced. For example, the word for “key” is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers said they were golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. The word for “bridge,” on the other hand, is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.

– Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips (2003), “Sex, Syntax, and Semantics.”

Pickpocket by Bresson, 1959

An Overheard Business Conversation

[This is the abridged version.]

“That’s so unfair/unprofessional/unjust/sleazy/mean/backstabbing/reprehensible!”

“It’s just business.”

The Mailmen of Truth

The unitary or dominant way of thinking is that of a generalized hermeneutics, a hermeto-logy… The unitary philosopher (the philosopher of Being, then of Difference) was always a representative, emissary, and civil servant of the Postal and Telecommunication ministry; a transmitter and decoder of hermeto-logical Difference; an agent of postal ingenuity. He exploits confusion, the ambiguity of the secret and of censure. Nearly all philosophers were the mailmen of truth, and they diverted the truth for reasons less to do with the secret than with authoritarian censure. Meaning, always more meaning! Information, always more information! Such is the mantra of hermeto-logical Difference, which mixes together truth and communication, the real and information. The most extreme version of this hermeto-logical ambiguity is the Hegelian and Nietzschean principle: the real is communicational, the communicational is real. it is in the omnipresent effectivity of communication that hermeto-logy itself deteriorates.

– François Laruelle, “The Truth According to Hermes,” 2010

This is important to me, but I can’t tell you why.

Okay fine, I’ll say a little bit about it. I just read The Infinities, a John Banville novel narrated primarily by the Greek god Hermes. He is the divine messenger, interpreting the gods to men and vice versa. But at some point Banville’s Hermeneutical narrator acknowledges that, for the gods, watching mortals engaging in the material world is like looking into a mirror: try to reach in, to make direct contact, and the mirror breaks. Even for this narrational Hermes, then, the world of men is sealed off from the gods. This got me thinking about the other Hermes, Trismegistus, the purported author of the ancient esoteric Hermetic Texts. Was he god or man? I don’t know. He is credited with using his alchemical knowledge to make an airtight seal on a glass tube, hence “hermetically sealed.” Plato alleged that some Egyptian temple contained a secret library of Hermetic texts dating back 9 thousand years. I don’t know much about his writings, but I presume that this other Hermes claimed access to hidden knowledge. Evidently Banville’s hermeneutical narrator didn’t have access to the hermetic keys for unlocking the material world.

It turns out that I recently finished writing a novel called The Courier, about a guy who transmits packages and messages. I didn’t explicitly link the titular character to either Hermes, but he is both. As carrier of messages he is a hermeneutician; as one who does not break the seals on the messages he carries he is hermetic.

Yesterday I happened to come across Laruelle’s essay; I know it was referenced by one of the theory blogs, either Agent Swarm or An Und Fur Sich or Ecology Without Nature or Archive Fire. Laruelle’s idea of the philosopher as general-purpose hermeneutician, as “mailman of truth,” suits my fictional Courier nicely. Earlier Laruelle writes:

Next to the unitary and authoritarian Hermes, there is another Hermes. He defines the essence of truth as a secret, but as a secret that in order to exist and to be made known needs none of the light of logos, none of the tricks of meaning, the strategies of interpretation, the horizons of the World, or the transcendent forms of appearance. Truth as secret exists autonomously prior to the horizontality of appearance. The secret enjoys an absolute precedence over interpretation; it is itself the Uninterpretable from which an interpretation emerges. It is the invisible that has never been visible because it is known from the outset to be invisible. The essence of the secret does not reside in a rupture or redrawing that de-limits presence via some kind of withdrawal or “retrocession.” That the secret has never appeared in the horizon of presence is simply an effect, the effect of its positive essence.

And that works for my Courier too, in his hermetic mode: some parcels can never be opened. Not that I necessarily believe that Laruelle’s discussion of truth is itself true…

Holy Motors by Carax, 2012

Getting my own numerological obsession out of the way… Early in the film Oscar asks Céline, his chauffeuse, if he has a lot of appointments scheduled for the day. Nine, she tells him. But at this point Oscar has already had two appointments. So I counted them myself:

1. Hotel portal into movie theater
2. Exec leaving big white house with children and guards on the roof
3. Beggar woman
4. Point-light CGI dance…

5. Beauty and the beast at photo shoot…

6. Father retrieving daughter from party
7. Entr’acte with accordions…

8. Murder at warehouse
9. Murder at cafe
10. Old man dying in bed
11. Musical interlude with Kylie Minogue…

12. Home with chimps

One could split a couple of these appointments into two separate scenes, but each of the 12 requires Oscar to assume a different persona. Between appointments he is Oscar, riding in the limo getting ready for his next appointment. But is this the “real” Oscar? Or as limo-rider is he again playing a role? Surely he is, since it’s this role — Oscar as performer doing a variety of gigs — that holds the whole movie together. Make it 13 appointments then.

But what about the last scene, the titular scene, when the holy motors, the limos, are all gathered at the garage? Oscar isn’t in this scene, but like the interior of the limo, the garage is a setting that frames the whole movie. The cars are lamenting the lost age of the “visible machines” like themselves, the “holy motors,” replaced now by the unholy and invisible machines of CGI and the backroom banking mechanisms where the movie deals get done and the appointments get put on the books. We infer that Oscar too is a holy motor, a visible machine, a live actor, and that his time too is coming to an end. So this nostalgic garage, populated by no living humans, is a kind of mausoleum. We’ve had scenes shot in graveyards, we’ve seen Oscar killing his own double, twice, we’ve seen Kylie either suicided or playing a suicide, so this comically mournful scene of reminiscing limos is the future unreality toward which the rest of the movie points.

So let’s make it 14 appointments, the last one with Oscar absent except in postmortem spirit. And voilà, we have the fourteen Stations of the Cross, with Oscar playing the role of Jesus and the garage playing the tomb, the Fourteenth Station. And the limos are like the angels in the tomb, ready to bring Oscar back from the dead again tomorrow. I believe it was the Entr’acte that tipped off this idea for me, since it’s played inside a cathedral like a liturgical procession, and all of those old French churches have the Stations lining their walls.

Carrying a Tune?

Yesterday while helping friends move out of their apartment I mentioned that, while going to school, I had worked the night shift at UPS loading parcels into cross-country semitrailers. UPS pushed its people hard: I typically lost five pounds a night. “Just like the opera,” the woman, a cellist, remarked. I’d never thought of loading trucks as operatic before, but I was too busy hauling stuff to ask her what she meant.

 

Spring in Fialta by Nabokov, 1936

…I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer . . . I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it — he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him, and that is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth.

I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream-familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose . . . but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust…

[Nabokov wrote this short story in Russian while living in Berlin; he and Peter Pertzov translated it into English.]