Word: lessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more tennis lessons), and finally as a professor at Cornell from 1948 to 1958, Nabokov studied America, as a colleague at Cornell puts it, like someone "in Madagascar observing the natives." In 1945 he became an American citizen. They occupied a succession of rented houses?more or less bivouacked in the quarters of a different absentee professor each year ?partly for lack of cash, partly because Nabokov, having lost everything once, has absolutely no interest in acquiring physical possessions...
...Cornell Nabokov's course in Modern Fiction (also known as Dirty Lit) became famous. Nabokov detested "oldfashioned human interest criticism." It consists, he once reprovingly wrote oldfashioned, human-interest Critic Edmund Wilson, "of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the imaginary, but generally far less plausible, world of the critic, who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were 'real people.'" He refused to deal in such "dreadful things as trends," or offer traditional chatter about themes and schools of literature. Instead, he performed brilliant, instant autopsies on each book, taking it apart...
...lost brother, it appeared almost unnoticed. By the time he reached Cornell he had published Bend Sinister (1947), a study of a police state, parts of Speak, Memory, one of the most beautiful autobiographies in English. Yet he was barely known on campus as a man of letters, much less a literary genius...
Today, Nabokov is a distant and revered personage safe in Switzerland; his judgments and comments are no less candid than ever. Along with a great many writers (see box p. 82), the informal list of his jocular pet hates includes such things as: progressive education; "serious" writers; confessions in the Dostoevskian manner; book reviewers, most of whom, Nabokov contends, "move their lips when reading"; people who say "excuse me" when they belch. Clearly, in an age practiced in the smooth piety of mock humility and slackly trained to believe that sincerity is an excuse for nearly everything, the public Nabokov...
...typical American household will earn almost $14,000 - in terms of today's prices - and enjoy a 40% increase in the real standard of living. At the same time, the number of families with incomes above $10,000 will rise from 15 million to 34 million. Those with less than $5,000 will decrease from 13 million to less than 11 million out of a total...