“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. The robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblbee has entered the room and bumps into the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”
“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish – but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”
Writer friends, I discovered a fun website today. It’s called “I Write Like” and here’s the description:
Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke | Pablo Neruda (?) | Louise Glück, Vita Nova | Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro | Vladimir Nabokov, Mary | Etel Adnan, Jebu | Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary | Bangtan Sonyeondan (방탄소년단), 봄날 (Spring Day) | Artwork by Claude Monet
Nabokov's Lolita has always been a controversial book. You want to laugh but then stop yourself because you’re also seriously disturbed at the same time. And then there’s the slew of cover designs, none of which seem to accurately reflect the complexities of the novel. The solution? Gather up the best possible designers to interpret Lolita and come up with some spellbinding covers. What started as a cover competition is now a whole book including 60 different versions of the cover of our beloved Lolita. Humbert Humbert, you are one demented fellow.
“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.” — Vladimir Nabokov [Moonlit Night, Isaac Levitan]
• Vladimir Nabokov lives with his wife Véra in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, a resort city on Lake Geneva which was a favorite of Russian aristocrats of the last century. They dwell in a connected series of hotel rooms that, like their houses and apartments in the United States, seem impermanent, places of exile. Their rooms include one used for visits by their son Dmitri, and another, the chambre de debarras, where various items are deposited—Turkish and Japanese editions of Lolita, other books, sporting equipment, an American flag. More: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov
• One thing you will notice about Levitan’s landscape paintings is how diverse they are in terms of style and subject. His academic training allowed him to be such a versatile painter and, like many of the other Russian masters, it appears he was not timid about experimenting with his style and technique. Some paintings are delicately rendered and realistic, whilst others are bold and impressionistic. More: https://drawpaintacademy.com/isaac-levitan/
“I am here through an error — not in this prison, specifically — but in this whole terrible, striped world; this world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error…”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading.
A terrific read if you’re into Kafka, Sartre, Beckett, existentialism, absurdism, and all that jazz.
Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most favonian* week. This time I took up a strategic position, with obese newspaper and new pipe, in the piazza rocker before L. arrived. To my intense disappointment she came with her mother, both in two-piece bathing suits, black, as new as my pipe. My darling, my sweetheart stood for a moment near me - wanted the funnies - and she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one, but more intensely so, with rougher overtones - a torrid odour that at once set my manhood astir - but she had already yanked out of me the coveted section and retreated to her mat near her phocine** mamma. There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates** clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. As I looked on, through prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to a motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with the various girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and revealing a stippled armpit - but fat Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light, and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular fraud.
paradiastolen. (rhetoric) reframing of a vice as a virtue, often with the use of euphemism
From Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov [my italicising]:
The ageing woman who sold barley sugar and Lucky Louse magazines in the corner shop, which by tradition was not strictly out of bounds, happened to hire a young helper, and Cheshire, the son of a thrifty lord, quickly ascertained that this fat little wench could be had for a Russian green dollar. Van was one of the first to avail himself of her favours. These were granted in semi-darkness, among crates and sacks at the back of the shop after hours. The fact of his having told her he was sixteen and a libertine instead of fourteen and a virgin proved a source of embarrassment to our hell-raker when he tried to bluster his inexperience into quick action but only succeeded in spilling on the welcome mat what she would have gladly helped him to take indoors. Things went better six minutes later, after Cheshire and Zographos were through; but only at the next mating party did Van really begin to enjoy her gentleness, her soft sweet grip and hearty joggle.
“I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes — closed — all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels.”
—Vladimir Nabokov in his letter to future wife Véra Yevseyevna Slonim dated 30 December, Letters to Véra
If I were to stream literally every day (stuff as simple as just doing every day activities, cooking, drawing, homework) would anyone watch? I feel like y’all deserve more Evermore content and sometimes it’s hard to get up and take photos
(Just like or leave a comment if you’d be interested)
