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Friday, April 4, 2008

That Vladimir

posted by on April 4 at 10:48 AM

It’s hard to believe that the bespectacled man in this clip…

…is the author of these lines:

My pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward my glimmering darling, stopping or retreating every time I thought she stirred or was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze.

The man on the clip (the one not smoking) is a massive bore. He is bloated, stuffy, awkward, and needs cards to say things he has said in an infinity of other interviews and books. What kind of person uses cards to repeat himself? A bore.

RSS icon Comments

1

No, Charles, YOU'RE a massive bore. He's a massive boor.

Posted by Bwana | April 4, 2008 11:21 AM
2

I can't watch the clip right now, but if it's what I think it is, VN always used cards when he was interviewed. It's frankly a miracle if you found footage of him being interviewed in person; he always insisted on written answers to written questions. "I speak like a child", he said. His product was books, not speech.

Posted by Fnarf | April 4, 2008 11:23 AM
3

Volodya Nabokov was not a bore, and he's charming in this clip. He wasn't great at speaking in English, so he prepared his comments ahead of time, and after this early interview, pretty much always insisted on editing--essentially writing--his responses, which were always great. I think Trilling is more the bore here, though his arrogant claim that you can't trust writers to see what's in their own books fetched a priceless grin from VN.

Posted by Tim Appelo | April 4, 2008 11:37 AM
4

tim, my debt to nabokov is so deep, i need to find a way to overcome him, to hate him, to look down on him. anything! just get him out of my way.

Posted by charles mudede | April 4, 2008 12:07 PM
5

cut him some slack; it's the pre-media age.

and he's more at home with butterflies than people.

Posted by michael strangeways | April 4, 2008 12:22 PM
6

Trilling is just chillin'. Probably remembering from Keats' letters (which he edited, brilliantly) where K says that the poet is 'the least poetical of creatures'.

Bwana, you're a BOER.

Posted by Grant Cogswell | April 4, 2008 1:53 PM

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