{"id":244,"date":"2005-07-12T06:58:37","date_gmt":"2005-07-12T06:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/2005\/07\/12\/the-pale-fire-deathmarch-week-6-5\/"},"modified":"2005-07-12T06:58:37","modified_gmt":"2005-07-12T06:58:37","slug":"the-pale-fire-deathmarch-week-6-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/2005\/07\/12\/the-pale-fire-deathmarch-week-6-5\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pale Fire Deathmarch, Week 6.5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pale Fire Peoples!
\nAs suggested last week, here’s a bonus round for folks interested in re-reading the first section, talking about the Richard Rorty introduction to the Everyman’s Library, and\/or bringing other external sources to the party.
\nMy 2 cents: I was a bit disappointed with the Rorty intro. Seemed to me he was commiting a Kinbote of sorts — putting himself too much in the center of things. I kept waiting for him to say “When we first encounter so-called ‘Gradus,’ we are wearing those pants we thought we’d given away, but then it turned out they were just buried under some other clothes on our rocking chair in the back room.”
\nSome of what he described as what the reader would go through rang true for me — in particular the section on page x where he talks about the experience of reading the intro and the poem. But after that, I started writing “no” in the margin of my copy every paragraph or two. “The awed sense that royalty has condescended to treat us as a confidant”? no. “the revelation of some new and surprising fact about our remarkable host and commentator”? no again. I just didn’t have that experience — at the start, for me at least, Kinbote was a clown. It was only toward the very end that I was surprised to find myself getting a wee bit of sympathy for the narrator.
\nThose are quibbles, I suppose. My biggest beef is that so much of Rorty’s essay hinges on the idea that Nabokov wanted us to forget about Hazel and then only come back to her in the end. (1) did we really forget about her? didn’t seem that way to me. (2) I don’t recall N. swinging her story back into view in the last few pages.
\nStill, it made for an interesting reading. Your thoughts?
\nNext up:<\/b> starting on August 16th, Deathmarch 3: At Swim-Two-Birds<\/b><\/a>, by Flan O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan), which, according to James Joyce, is “A really funny book.” (I’m not making that up.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pale Fire Peoples! As suggested last week, here’s a bonus round for folks interested in re-reading the first section, talking about the Richard Rorty introduction to the Everyman’s Library, and\/or bringing other external sources to the party. My 2 cents: I was a bit disappointed with the Rorty intro. Seemed to me he was commiting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archiveddms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}