Open Thread

“Nabokov is amazing”

Bullshit. If he’s so good, why didn’t the Sharks make it past the Black Hawks? Niemi was much better.

Biff, you’re 2 1/2 hours late.

donatella,

Nabokov is amazing,
only he could have pulled off that literary high wire act.
And English wasn’t his first language.

Slopefarm and Jester,

those are super quotes!
****

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”! I once tried to pick up a woman by talking about that.

“Death and the Compass”:

“Scharlach, when in some other incarnation you hunt me, pretend to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B, half-way between the two. Wait for me afterwards at D, two kilometers from A and C, again halfway between both. Kill me at D, as you are now going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy.”

“The next time I kill you,” replied Scharlach, “I promise you that labyrinth, consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing.”

Did someone mention Borges? This one’s fun:

Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.