(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Ugh, please no more snow. Please? On the upside, I finally found some time to bookmark the December posts for 50books_poc(and mood. Mood was more important. I had a number of times in the past month when I could have done it, but I'm just now recovering emotionally from the month I had.) And since I still had time and inclination, I claimed January and did the first half. sanguinity, hope I'm not stepping on anyone's toes.

Also in other news on that subject, I finished the 50th book of my own personal attempt to read 50 books by authors of color, with Michael Guillen's Can Smart People Believe in God. It took me 2 years, which is significantly longer than I thought it would take after I kicked off the first month by reading 11 books. But I stuck with it and I want to report to all of you that it was incredibly worth it. I discovered a number of incredible authors, met some cool people, and had a lot of fun. When I hit 50, there was no question in my mind that I was going to do it again.



I picked up Pale Fire yesterday. I've read the Foreward and the four cantos. Um... It's a pretty flawed poem? And he definitely couldn't figure out how to end it. I think that might be the point. We'll see when I go on to the commentaries.

I had an interesting conversation with 'nix about the right way to read Pale Fire. In the Foreward, Kinbote suggests reading first the commentaries, then reading the poem with the commentaries side by side, and then rereading the commentaries. Recognizing the unreliability of Kinbote, I asked her if this struck her as good advice. And what she told me was, "Either way, he's fucking with you." If I took his advice, I'd be doing it because it was what he suggested, what he felt was in his best interest. And if I didn't take his advice, I wasn't just doing what I wanted, I was consciously doing what he hadn't suggested. Suddenly, either way, a decision a reader isn't usually faced with- whether or not to read a book chronologically from page 1 through the end- had been forced upon me.

With that in mind, I decided to read the poem first, then read the commentaries while referring back to the poem. Part of my decision was to train my brain not to read this the way I read Infinite Jest. By intently choosing a different reading method, I hoped I would avoid locking myself into a track I'd already walked. I also hoped it would give me an opportunity to give the poem a chance to stand on its own without the commentaries.

Alas, this is not the case. The poem itself is of moderate interest. I could certainly have written an academic paper on it when I was in school, if I had had call to. But it is no masterpiece on its own, it lacks an ending, and there are numerous flaws in the verse. I imagine the substance of the work lies in the commentaries, in Kinbote's extractions and musings on the work, on the examination of the way we construct narratives around narratives.

Comments

[schemingreader]

I would love to see your list of 50. I'm assuming it's fewer than 50 authors, and I'd like to add more to my list. (I haven't undertaken the 50 thing as a commitment, I just want to read more good writers and more POC.)

[seekingferret]

The majority of my reviews are here. My most recent ones have not yet been added to delicious, though. They'll be added soon: http://www.delicious.com/50books_poc/by.seekingferret

In general, the delicious page at http://www.delicious.com/50books_poc is a great resource for finding authors of color. Every review posted for the challenge gets logged and tagged there.

[schemingreader]

Thanks! This looks more useful than the LJ comm.

[seekingferret]

There came a point when we overwhelmed the Livejournal tagging system, and the mods said, "Well, if we're going to have to take our tagging off LJ, we might as well do it right." Our delicious is already really, really useful and oyceter is working on upgrades to the data structure that should make it even more valuable as a community resource.

[sanguinity]

Lots of people who hang out at the comm aren't formally doing any challenge: they just want more recs for, and discussion of, POC authors.

[roseandsigil]

I do surprisingly little reading these days, so getting through Pale Fire is taking me a while, even though it is moderately short. However, I would be very curious to hear what you have to think on the commentaries.

Also, apparently there is little real-world critical agreement on the quality of the poem. I agree that it there are places where the verse is clumsy and it is kind of meandering. However, it definitely has a plan, and the first and fourth cantos are heavily intertwined.

There's a couple of possibilities for what is going on:

1. Nabokov is cleverer than you, and he wants it to appear that Shade is cleverer than you.

2. Nabokov is cleverer than you, and he wants it to appear that Shade is not actually very good at poetry. However, note that in-universe, Shade is supposed to be a genius; there's a bit (I think in the poem) which talks about his name appearing next to Frost's. On the gripping hand, Shade may be self-aggrandizing and Kinbote is...unreliable at best.

3. Either of the previous two in-universe explanations, plus Nabokov actually failed to write a good poem. I believe that this is Nabokov's only moderately long poem, and maybe he just wasn't any good. I find this vaguely possible, but I find it deeply improbable that Nabokov couldn't recognize whether or not he wrote a good poem. I find it much more likely that the meanderings and verse infelicities are on purpose by Nabokov.

4. which I just thought of. Nabokov is cleverer than you and the poem isn't done. Recall that Shade died.

[sanguinity]

January: YES, it's okay, and thank you!