24 posts tagged “vox hunt”
Show us a musical genius.
Duh.
What was the last good movie you watched?
In Auburn, before heading home -- It inspired some "festive" black nail polish, which I managed not to spill all over the carpet, not that it would matter now anyway:
And this morning, lounging on the couch drinking egg nog for breakfast:
Oh, Lloyd Dobbler, where are you?
Show us your favorite writer.
Audio: Share a song you can't help but sing along to.
As a sort of all-purpose way of responding to both the Question of the Day and the Vox Hunt, allow me to present to you what may just be my favorite novel of all time. I mean, it's hard to say, really, since I specialize in novels; novels are my livelihood. I am in love with so many and am reluctant to play favorites, but if you put a gun to my head and demanded that I choose, I would utter, without hesitation, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
It's Nabokov's first novel in English, and his insecurities about writing in a new language are clear -- in the plot, not so much in the language itself. The dude is always foremost a technical virtuoso, and he plays with words in a way I have rarely seen others do. Nonetheless, the hapless Russian narrator, V, is uncertain about the English language and writes in the shadow of his brother, an English novelist of some (perhaps dubious) renown.
In one of my favorite passages, V describes the writing style of his brother Sebastian Knight, the purported subject of this sham biography, as being something to which both the narrator and I blindly,desperately, aspire:
[Sebastian Knight] had no use for ready-made phrases because the things he wanted to say were of an exceptional build and he knew moreover that no real idea can be said to exist without the words made to measure. So that (to use a closer simile) the thought which only seemed naked was but pleading for the clothes it wore to become visible, while the words lurking afar were not empty shells as they seemed, but were only waiting for the thought they already concealed to set them aflame and in motion.
Reading this was a defining moment for me -- my thoughts about language and the act of writing, the theory I would later develop for dissertatory purposes, Nabokov's status as Favorite Writer Ever of All Time Really -- everything can be traced back to this. Not to be too dramatic, or anything.
Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler: This book is wonderfully humorous, in that sort of postmodern, Oulipean, gamesman kind of way, and yet it's not just a clever gag. Oh no, so much [sniff], so much more. I highly recommend it.
Book: Show us the latest book you bought, borrowed or received.
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