Yes. Isn't It Nice to Think So?

I'm reading a (ahem) rather scholarly book about Nabokov's fake scholium on a fake poem Pale Fire, which is called Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. It is by the apparently very well regarded (and why shouldn't he be?) Brian Boyd, and apparently it caused something of a scandal when it was unleashed upon the world, as in it, Boyd renounces his position as a leader of the Shadeans (people who think that John Shade, the fake person who in the novel Pale Fire is credited with writing the poem, actually invented Charles Kinbote, the fake person who writes a misguided commentary about the poem) and returns to the position that KInbote and Shade each wrote the sections that the text says they wrote. Everything is what it is and not another thing. However, Boyd goes onto say that both Kinbote and Shade are influenced by the ghost of Hazel Shade, and that, post-his-own-mortem, Shade joins his daughter in suggesting things to Kinbote that make the most compelling parts of his commentary compelling. Boyd does a lot of work to tease out hidden connections: Kinbote's grandfather's mistress, Iris Acht, is one of Hazel's avatars because her name is an eye-part, and because Hazel's name is a color that refers almost exclusively to that eye-part.

Frankly, I don't have any idea what to make of any of this. It is difficult enough to talk about Pale Fire to anyone who hasn't read it (really: try explaining it to your mother and see if you make it past "999 line poem in heroic couplets), and it's difficult enough to talk to anyone who has read it without just enjoying yourself in the comic and tragic luxuriances of its prose. I honestly can't figure out how the idea that dead Hazel has, like Sibyl Vane, started communicating through Nabokov's words unbeknownst to anybody would affect the way I feel about the novel. It's a weird lack of involvement after reading nearly three hundred pages about a novel I love. I've written on here before about the quondam king of Zembla, namely to write about how, while watching Mad Men one night, I realized that I don't know what he looks like. Knowing me, I probably came to the conclusion that it was best to just keep him vague. Is it good to keep oneself in the dark (shaded) about whether or not a prominent character in a book is, as a ghost, dictating the thematic of the book?

Earlier, when I said that everything is what it is and not another thing, I thought I was quoting Bishop Berkeley, the idealist British philosopher. Wrong! It turns out that I was quoting a different bishop, Bishop Joseph Butler. I now know exactly two things about Bishop Butler, which is one, that he said that, and two, that he shares his name with a musician from the Lovin' Spoonful. And while I'm onto them: I was positive that one) there was some kind of major connection (like, shared members) between the Lovin' Spoonful and Herman's Hermits, and two) that at least one, and possibly both, of these bands featured one of the four guys who would go on to be Crosby Stills Nash and Young. I don't have any fucking idea why, as of fifteen minutes ago, I thought all of that. It will be very difficult to get around to not thinking it. But now I know it's wrong.

Do you remember that move Socrates was always doing? Socrates had this move where he'd ask forty questions, and eventually someone would say that a bold man is better than a just man, but that justice was better than boldness, and then Socrates would say, "Oh, no, Hippomarchus or whomever, we've gotten ourselves into a scrape!" and then Hippomarchus or whomever would make hesitant noises, and probably go home. That's Socrates for you: the bulldog of the law of the excluded middle. I always feel bad for all of those Hippomarchus and whomsever. Excluding the middle is alright for gadflies and saints but seems like a terrible place to eat. Tomorrow I am going to consider the evidence about Hazel Shade and not change how I feel about Pale Fire. Also, if I think about the Lovin' Spoonful, I will also think about Herman's Hermits and about at least Graham Nash. I'll believe in anything. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.

What Does Charles Kinbote Look Like?

Yesterday I was watching Mad Men, and because there are damn buses driving past my window all night, and because Mad Men is an Important Drama with Frequent Nearly Inaudible Speeches, I could not figure out what was going on on the show, and my mind wandered. And what it wandered to was that I don't know what Charles Kinbote looks like. I thought about it some more: I don't know what Tyrone Slothrop looks like, I don't know what Don Gately looks like, I don't know what Kilgore Trout looks like. And these are people whom I've spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about, imagining in actual situations and doing actual things. I have thought long and hard about Kinbote puttering up to Shade's house and being told that he's not there by Mrs. Shade; I just kind of imagine the abstract idea of hopefulness, in one old body, puttering up to an abstract idea of disdain. I am having trouble even talking about what it is I can't do, because if you asked me, well, you understand, do you not, that a man is driving over to another man's house and encountering his wife, I would of course say yes. But I keep imagining different Kinbotes -- different old people reconstructing into the deposed old king -- and none of them stick. This is even true of people whom I met first in books whom I later saw in movies; Gilbert Osmond will never ever have quite the same features as John Malkovich, especially not in the way that Osborne Cox will always have exactly the same features as a particular John Malkovich.

When, straining to hear what icy thing Betty Draper was mumbling, I first thought about the fact that I didn't know what Gately or Slothrop looked like -- and moreover, that I had never really thought about the fact that I didn't know what they looked like -- I felt sort of scandalized. It was like realizing that I had never even thought about what Club Member Brian Matthew Blood's middle name is. But now, after thinking about it, I feel less scandalized, and more --not happy, really, but maybe appreciative: I like that I don't know what these people exactly look like, and probably because I can know them better. This is a constant theme among lonely readers, but one of the delights of books, and in particular a delight of books that isn't offered by films or television, is a deep feeling that You Know These People: and who would be easier to feel like you know than a hazy, blurred at the edges version of Charles Kinbote?

The False Azure of the Windowpane

Today I went for a run, and remembered that another reason I, as a literary nerd, like our house here: not our street, or the one next to it, but the one next to that is called Waxwing Lane, which is only a small, pluralizing sibilant away from being waxwing slain, and we all know what poem I have a crush on has that phrase in it's first line. Anyway, that made me think about a book issue that I often try to engage my family on, to their long-suffering: how much do you think about books when you're not reading them? Or actually, I guess the question is more: how much do you use books to think about other things?

Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.

That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.