Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Copulation of Clichés. Director John G. Avildsen directs his actors in the same manner that a red light may be said to direct patrons. No matter. Pornography is customarily, in Nabokov's fine phrase, a copulation of clichés. Not here. Garfield takes this insanely, inanely plotted movie and lends each scene a Rabelaisian gusto and surprise. His movements are reminiscent of the hippopotamus in rutting season; his expressions are unique. Who else could register such dismay when he finds that he has been making love to a corpse? Who else could transmit such concern...
...some ways, this is not surprising. Wilson has always been cantankerous, picking fights with his cultural neighbors (Vladimir Nabokov, for example, over obscure points of Russian prosody) and the Government (a $69,000 misunderstanding with the Internal Revenue Service, after his failure to file tax returns for nine years, erupted into a book-length tirade). When he chooses to talk on any subject, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Iroquois ritual, listeners must simply sit patiently until he stops. Gossip delights him. In recent years he seems to have spent much of his time whittling on 19th century regional fiction...
...trio of compulsive polyglots, Samuel Beckett (equally fluent in English and French), Vladimir Nabokov (a writer in Russian, English, French and possibly German) and Jorge Luis Borges (whose first work at seven was an English summary of Greek myths) are the men whom Steiner judges to be "the three figures of probable genius in contemporary fiction." Joyce teaching at his Berlitz school he takes as the prototypical modern artist, master of the "lost center." a practitioner of the "literature of exile...
...Vladimir Nabokov called it "posh-lost," a Russian term he translates as "crude pseudo literature." Thomas Mann called it Death in Venice, perhaps the most celebrated novella of the 20th century...
Mars Bars. The caprifoliaceous translations are better clues to Nabokov's whereabouts. As a poet he is a master, divisively, sometimes awkwardly stretched between two landmass languages. There are times when he appears as a provincial linguistic pedant. At other times he is an overrefined rhymester who thinks it snazzy to pretend that "pre-au-roral" is the best English version of a straightforward Russian word meaning "daybreak." Nabokov seems to know and obstinately use all the English words that ever existed, but does he really not see that "stirless" (as in "Stirless, I stand there at the window...