“Oh, Ashley, what are you afraid of?”
“Oh, nameless things, things which sound very silly when they are put into words. Mostly of having life suddenly become too real, of being brought into personal, too personal, contact with some of the simple facts of life. Now I know that in the old days it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. I resented their intrusion. I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams.”
They were always like two people talking to each other in different languages. But she loved him so much that, when he withdrew as he had now done, it was like the warm sun going down and leaving her in chilly twilight dews. She wanted to catch him by the shoulders and hug him to her, make him realize that she was flesh and blood and not something he had read or dreamed.
Margaret Mitchell
On Pnin, & Nabokov &c.
I love telling people about Pnin, trying each time to better encapsulate Nabokov’s strange little nugget of a book, a puzzle like one of those compact spheres that pulls out wide between the hands. So yes, the short answer is: campus novel about the archetype of the absent-minded professor. Also notable is the fact that Pnin was written as respite during that final relentless stretch of Lolita. I think about Clare Quilty’s death scene that stretched on and on and came to a messy, embarassing end and think: yeah, I might have turned to something a little lighter.
Timofey Pnin is totally Humbert Humbert’s comic foil. He is a bumbling, doddering, awkward dude, but he’s honorable and hopeful and grateful and he’s basically one of my favorite characters from literature. Hands down the end. Because I am still young and don’t have the breadth of vision to spot and dismiss unseen forces (in life OR in literature, natch) the final chapter unraveled with extreme rapidity and kind of randomly. I reread it and thought for awhile, and then I realized all in one great dawning — less like a lightbulb and more like a force of nature — and the book expanded and became a kind of powerhouse and I decided this summer I am going to read Nabokov’s complete works.
Starting with a re-read of Pale Fire. But not before I read The Cloud Sketcher by David Mitchell, because I am almost always guided, in my reading, by intuition, and this is the next book I picked up.
Incidentally, I finally had time to upload photos from the past several months to my Flickr account — starting from scarred plums on the tree in Peter’s front yard, through my move to Dallas, making Hungarian Mushroom Soup and Mama Cass’ new sweater this winter, our brief foray to San Francisco and the re-opening of Dallas’ oldest and gayest girlbar Sue Ellen’s. Enjoy.
I really like Deadliest Catch right now. And also I am reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin and I like that.
Yesterday J and I stopped at a yard sale on our way to sell books (always a good idea, before moving,) and I bought a beautiful fur coat from a pair of sweet Mennonites. “This coat belonged to my mother-in-law,” the yard sale-proprietress said with feeling, seizing my shoulders while I surreptitiously slipped an aged kleenex out of the coat’s pocket and onto a $.25 tshirt table, “who was an amazing woman and a mother to everyone she knew. Wear it with love.”
This morning Anna Katrina called at 11am. “Are you still sleeping?”
“Yurflmurgur.”
“I thought we’d come to Dallas to get tapas and see the Turner show for my birthday weekend. Will you be moved into your new apartment by then?”
Oh Anna, come to Dallas! Avery Johnson and Tom Colicchio have missed you!
“If we enquire of those who have gone before us, we receive small satisfaction; some have travelled life without observation, and some willingly mislead us. The only thought, therefore, on which we can repose with comfort, is that which presents to us the care of Providence, whose eye takes in the whole of things, and under whose direction all involuntary errors will terminate in happiness.”
Samuel Johnson, November 1753
Right now Mackerel is wearing a cotton onesie and his tankhead is poking out of the small zippered opening of his carrier. His eyes are half-open and his pupils are huge. This morning Dr. S took a huge swath of flesh all the way around his (returned, again) fibrosarcoma and left him a seven-inch suture line. It’s a good thing he’s so fat because otherwise he might have missed all that skin.
It’s taking about 4 times longer than usual to type this because without my hands smoothing out the fur on his head and my face up close to his, Mack begins to growl and flail. It’s his third anesthesia in about two months; he looks miserable. I am praying very fervently to the random chaotic sometimes-cruel, sometimes-generous universal forces that those angry little knots of hand-shaped cells won’t come back anymore.
Because I haven’t been reading anything but aging– timeless!– issues of Real Simple Magazine (.60 apiece at Half Price books) and watching Top Chef for the past few days, I steal a quote shamelessly from the Un:
The good-enough mother…starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure. (DW Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 1951)
My mother has more or less disowned me after this sudden abrupt turn my life has taken. She doesn’t want any part of my “drama”. I can’t even tell you how it undermines one’s confidence to have been disowned by one’s family. Dana virtually claps me on the back, announces that I am having the life of any self-respecting young artist. And so I gird my loins and try not to think about it.
J and I are moving in together, into a large airy 2-bedroom apartment in a historic district. The building is corrugated metal, excessively modern, and right next door to an elementary school-turned book depository, so Mama Cass and I can spend hours on the swingset alone. The entire building is green — low wattage lighting, passive gain temperature control, and it full of art freaks — graphic designers, opera singers, french horn players, writers.
So here comes the next incarnation.
Life Before Death
In “Life Before Death”, German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta took interviews and portraits of hospice patients just before death, then portraits just after. The prose the accompanies each photo is almost more jarring than the portraits themselves:
Barbara Gröne, 51
All her life, Barbara had been plagued by the idea that she has no right to be alive. She had been an unwanted baby: soon after her birth, her mother had put her into a home. But she had a strong survival instinct, and became very focused, she said, very disciplined in the way she lived. After much hard work, it seemed that life was at last delivering her a better hand.
But then the cancer struck: an ovarian tumour, which had already spread to her back and pelvis. Nothing could be done. Abruptly her old fears returned: the familiar sense of worthlessness and sadness. At the end of her life, Barbara told me that she was overwhelmed by these feelings. “All my efforts were in vain”, she said. “It is as though I am being rejected by life itself.”
