Mosquitoes avoid the sunlight.
Likewise, vampires avoid the sunlight.
Think about that.
It would be eerie almost
except for the fact that
vampires aren’t real.
And I’m not 100% certain that
mosquitoes avoid the sunlight.
Blog
-
Likewise eerie, almost real
-
frwiped
fried.
wiped.
but.
saw.
pelican. -
The Pale Fire Deathmarch, Week 5
Pale Fire Peoples!
Welcome to Week 5 and the final push. It’s been an action-packed week filled with revelations and disertations. Suicide? Prejudice? The Legend of Curdy Buff? It’s all in there. I enjoyed this week’s read and was surprised at points to find myself starting to become just a wee bit sympathetic with our narrator. Still, I will confess: Tout en ayant connaissance des traductions françaises de “John Donne” et d’”Andrew Marvell,” j’ai mis ma tête vers le bas, et ai pris un petit somme court. (What oh what did we ever do before we had the Babel Fish?)
Next week: We wrap! Let’s meet up on the far side of the index to compare closing thoughts. Speaking of which, a word to the wise — this last patch includes a few revelations. Folks are doing what they can to avoid full-on spoilers, but if you’re a bit behind this week’s target, you might want to skim these comments with caution.
Thanks all,
-CV -
A little more wahoo
Alameda’s own Red Hills Review was nice enough to recently publish a few of my poems in their issue #2. But wait: the editor of this journal has seemingly inexhaustible lit-related energy and will be putting on a few RHR-related readings over the summer. The first of these is coming up — this Thursday, June 30th, at 7:00 pm, at a stylin’ indepedent Alameda bookstore called Spell-Binding Tales.
I’ll be one of the folks reading that night (under my real name, no less). If you’re in the area, it would be swell to see ya there. In case we haven’t met afore, I’ll be the one who looks like the animation in the corner of the screen, only without the facial hair that magically grows before your very eyes. Which I’m sure comes as a relief to many if not all… -
Two hours
Pouring all these
good things inside me.
Tea. Poetry. Pear tart. Lemonade.
Tea. Poetry. Lemonade. Lemonade.
Pear tart.
Lemonade.
Tea.
Pale Fire.
Pear tart.
Lemonade.
Hoping some of it sticks. -
The Pale Fire Deathmarch, Week 4
Pale Fire Peoples!
Welcome to Week 4! A nice long flight yesterday and some quality Father’s Day reading time has me nearly caught up. It seems like once I hit the King’s escape, things really started to move.
I was struck this week by two stylistic features this book has in common with Gravity’s Rainbow (perhaps they define the Cornell School): a predeliction for silly names (Gahr?!) and a love for the tangential detail, though where N. spins them out like playful fractals that go on a sentence or three or four, Pynchon was laying down dense-packed multi-paged tangents designed to re-, de-, and cross- wire our brains. (I ‘spose ya could argue that the whole commentary is like a 200+-page tangential detail, so mebbe Nabokov wins that battle after all.)
In related news, I’ve begun to read certain Kinbote passages with the voice of Dr. Evil. (“Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland.”)
Next week: We’ve got just two weeks to go (can ya believe that?). To keep them roughly even, this week will be a little on the short side. Let’s meet back up round about the “anonymous bard of the twelfth century,” which is to say, right after the commentary on Lines 681, also known as page 188 in the Everyman’s Library. -
I Love Lucy
Here’s another track on the Virtual LP. If you’ve played a few of these before, you might recall that I have a bit of a thing for piano/vocal standards like (to name two…) The Best Things in Life Are Free and For Every Man There’s a Woman.
This time out, it’s an update of a classic you all know and some percentage of you love. Feel free to sing along at home with I Love Lucy, written in 1953 — lyrics by Harold “I wrote the lyrics to ‘I Love Lucy’” Adamson and music by Eliot “Yes you did, my old friend, but leave us not forget that I am the one who wrote the music to ‘I Love Lucy’” Daniel.
Thanks for listening and dropping by, -CV
time: 1:08 seconds; specs: 1 MB
Press Play to play. -
Perhaps
Perhaps it’s just a dream
but I do like the idea
of some days having
that boot on my desk.
Some days not. -
The Pale Fire Deathmarch, Week 3
Pale Fire Peoples!
Welcome to Week 3. It’s very special week for me, because this is the first week when I’m officially a little bit behind, which means we’re really rollin’ now. I’ve been savouring it a bit too much methinks.
But enough about me — how are you doing out there? And more to the point, have you checked out the Palefire Deathmarch Wiki yet, for the demystification of tricky vocab? (Created some say by “Cort,” others say by “DavidG.” But in such murky matters can the truth ere truly be known?)
Speaking of “Cort,” don’t miss his exhortation to write frothy heroic bather-verse (wiki-style, no less) at the tail end of the thread for Week 2. I could be wrong here, but I think he’s talking to you.
Next week: Let’s meet back up just past “the adjacent position of these rhymes,” which is to say, right after the commentary on Lines 367-370, also known as page 149 in the Everyman’s Library.