hayleyterris: Nabokov vs Anderson + Chabon = exquisite  Vladimir Nabokov, his life cleaved by exile, created a miniature version of the homeland he would never see again and tucked it, with a jeweler’s precision, into the housing of John Shade’s miniature epic of family sorrow. Anderson—who has suggested that the breakup of his parents’ marriage was a defining experience of his life—adopts a Nabokovian procedure with the families or quasi families at the heart of all his films, from Rushmore forward, creating a series of scale-model households that, like the Zemblas and Estotilands and other lost “kingdoms by the sea” in Nabokov, intensify our experience of brokenness and loss by compressing them. That is the paradoxical power of the scale model; a child holding a globe has a more direct, more intuitive grasp of the earth’s scope and variety, of its local vastness and its cosmic tininess, than a man who spends a year in circumnavigation.
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hayleyterris:

Nabokov vs Anderson + Chabon = exquisite 

Vladimir Nabokov, his life cleaved by exile, created a miniature version of the homeland he would never see again and tucked it, with a jeweler’s precision, into the housing of John Shade’s miniature epic of family sorrow. Anderson—who has suggested that the breakup of his parents’ marriage was a defining experience of his life—adopts a Nabokovian procedure with the families or quasi families at the heart of all his films, from Rushmore forward, creating a series of scale-model households that, like the Zemblas and Estotilands and other lost “kingdoms by the sea” in Nabokov, intensify our experience of brokenness and loss by compressing them. That is the paradoxical power of the scale model; a child holding a globe has a more direct, more intuitive grasp of the earth’s scope and variety, of its local vastness and its cosmic tininess, than a man who spends a year in circumnavigation.

(via curly-hairednobody)

Source: hayleyterris

The Paris Review interviews Vladimir Nabokov

I would have really enjoyed sitting down and having a conversation with this man, because he seems like such an asshole, but an incredibly witty and intelligent asshole. He’s the kind of person that you would want to beat at chess but never could. His desire to be contrarian gets kind of old, though.

zemblacascadia: Simon Rowberry, a research student at Britain’s University of Winchester, is exploring Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire as a forerunner of hypertext. (Hypertext is a digital story in which parts of the text link explicitly to other sections, allowing readers to navigate within the story to create various versions of the text.) Pale Fire is presented by demented narrator Charles Kinbote as a 999-line poem which he is annotating in the commentary that forms the bulk of the book. The novel has a storyline that progresses during sections of the foreword and commentary, but the reader is often directed back to lines from the poem or sent to other annotations (“see also note to line 894”). Subtler elements of the story emerge only through cross-references. In this extraordinary graphic from a poster presentation given two years ago at the ACM Hypertext Conference in the Netherlands, we can see how Rowberry has begun to chart Pale Fire’s internal links and loops.The novel’s principal characters—John Shade, Kinbote, and Jakob Gradus—sit in a horizontal row of blue boxes in the top third of the graphic. The word hypertext dates back to 1963, just a year after Pale Fire’s publication—and the two were linked early on. IT trailblazer Ted Nelson, who coined the term, reportedly got permission to use Pale Fire in a 1969 hypertext demo at a conference hosted by Brown University. Rowberry is working on his dissertation, “The Literary Web,” which will include a chapter on Pale Fire and hypertext. This week he suggested that examining Pale Fire as hypertext is more than an exercise in revisiting history: I think the importance of Pale Fire as hypertext is not just because Nabokov created a novel that contained links, but also because he included aspects of creative searching within the text that contemporary writers of digital fiction have only recently begun to re-explore.
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zemblacascadia:

Simon Rowberry, a research student at Britain’s University of Winchester, is exploring Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire as a forerunner of hypertext. (Hypertext is a digital story in which parts of the text link explicitly to other sections, allowing readers to navigate within the story to create various versions of the text.)

Pale Fire is presented by demented narrator Charles Kinbote as a 999-line poem which he is annotating in the commentary that forms the bulk of the book. The novel has a storyline that progresses during sections of the foreword and commentary, but the reader is often directed back to lines from the poem or sent to other annotations (“see also note to line 894”). Subtler elements of the story emerge only through cross-references.

In this extraordinary graphic from a poster presentation given two years ago at the ACM Hypertext Conference in the Netherlands, we can see how Rowberry has begun to chart Pale Fire’s internal links and loops.The novel’s principal characters—John Shade, Kinbote, and Jakob Gradus—sit in a horizontal row of blue boxes in the top third of the graphic.

The word hypertext dates back to 1963, just a year after Pale Fire’s publication—and the two were linked early on. IT trailblazer Ted Nelson, who coined the term, reportedly got permission to use Pale Fire in a 1969 hypertext demo at a conference hosted by Brown University.

Rowberry is working on his dissertation, “The Literary Web,” which will include a chapter on Pale Fire and hypertext. This week he suggested that examining Pale Fire as hypertext is more than an exercise in revisiting history:

I think the importance of Pale Fire as hypertext is not just because Nabokov created a novel that contained links, but also because he included aspects of creative searching within the text that contemporary writers of digital fiction have only recently begun to re-explore.

(via slothnorentropy)

Source: zemblacascadia

The State of Things

So I’ve been working on a few different stories to get out to everyone as soon as possible. One is the infamous tale of Jack Wimberly which I am currently plodding through the first chapter of. The prologue, what I’ve been trying to get out for days now, is just about finished. It’s actually rather short and the whole point of my procrastination is that I’ve been waiting a few days to really edit it, mostly for the sake of perspective and distance. In the meantime I’ve been working forward, having finished about half of chapter one, which brings the grand total to just under 12 pages of Times New Roman or a couple thousand words. How exciting. My biggest concern with the development so far is the dialogue. It’s probably because of all of the modernist authors I’ve been reading, but I don’t want the dialogue to read like contrived advancement of the plot, so I’ve been tweaking and altering and ultimately finding myself unsatisfied with the end result. This will undoubtedly end up with me working even farther ahead.

By the way, if you’re reading this for all the tags, I’m going to throw in a shameless plug: check out my short stories. You might like them.

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