About Last Night

Sid Caesar defines jazz:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

A collection of first sentences from Nabokov’s short stories. Selection cribbed from Anthony Lane’s terrific New Yorker essay about the collected stories, with a couple additions:

“The Wood-Sprite” (Nabokov’s first published story, written while he was a student at Cambridge): “I was pensively penning the outline of the inkstand’s circular, quivering shadow.”
“Wingstroke”: “When the curved tip of one ski crosses the other, you tumble forward.”
“Gods”: “Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance.”
“Details of a Sunset”: “The last streetcar was disappearing in the mirrorlike murk of the street and, along the wire above it, a spark of Bengal light, crackling and quivering, sped into the distance like a blue star.”
“La Veneziana”: “In front of the red-hued castle, amid luxuriant elms, there was a vividly green grass court.”
“A Letter That Never Reached Russia”: “My charming, dear distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray-haired, azure liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvurov museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox.
“The Potato Elf”: “Actually his name was Frederick Dobson.”
“The Circle”: “In the second place, because he was possessed by a sudden mad hankering after Russia.”
“Tyrants Destroyed”: “The growth of his power and fame was matched, in my imagination, by the degree of the punishment I would have liked to inflict on him.”
“Ultima Thule”: “Do you remember the day you and I were lunching (partaking of nourishment) a couple of years before your death?”
“That In Aleppo Once”: “Dear V.–Among other things, this is to tell you that at last I am here, in the country whither so many sunsets have led.”
“Signs and Symbols”: “For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.”

Through this “scattering of nutshells” (Lane’s phrase) you get a portrait of Nabokov as a writer. I was reminded of it by Maud’s similar collage of first sentences from nine Muriel Spark novels. Interesting to compare the two. For example, Nabokov’s color field: azure shading into quivering blue, vivid greens and a spot of red. The only colors in the Spark selection: “almost white” and the “clear crystal” you come to after the “murk & smog” — a fittingly chilly palette for a writer who writes as cleanly and sparely as Spark does.
Lane notes another quality of the Nabokov first sentences is their lack of preamble or introduction. The reader is almost always set down at some mid point of the narrative. Writes Lane: “Again and again, with polite indifference, the stories drop us in media res, and leave us to work out what on earth the res might be.”
Lane’s Nabokov essay can be read online (sub. required) or in his essay collection, Nobody’s Perfect.

“Once in a while I drop into a church again to kneel at the altar for a word of prayer, though this is often a single supplicatory gasp as much accusation as anything else, such as ‘Give us a break, will Ya!'”
Peter De Vries, The Vale of Laughter

One of the sharpest parts of last night’s Oscars was a nice bit by Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. about writers versus actors. The transcript, courtesy of Salon:

Fey: Great movies begin with great writing.
Downey:What does an actor look for in a script? Specificity. Emotional honesty. Catharsis.
Fey: And what does a writer look for in an actor? Memorizing. Not paraphrasing. Fear of ad-libbing.
Downey: Actors want scripts with social relevance, warm weather locations, phone call scenes that can be shot separately from that insane actress that I hate, and long dense columns of uninterrupted monologue, turning the page, and for instance seeing the phrase, “Tony Stark, continued.”
Fey: And we writers dream of a future where actors are mostly computer-generated and their performances can be adjusted by us, on a laptop, alone.
Downey: It’s a collaboration, a collaboration between handsome, gifted people and sickly little mole people.

The two were presenting the award for best original screenplay, which went to Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker. Watch the exchange here.

I finished my stint of jury duty on Friday afternoon, took the next bus to Connecticut, and went into hiding with Mrs. T, whom I hadn’t seen for three whole weeks, our longest separation since we were married two and a half years ago. Except for reading a couple of books that I’m planning to review, I did no work of any kind–a near-unprecedented occurrence.
Today I’m returning to New York, where I’ll be speaking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Jazz Museum in Harlem tonight at seven p.m. (If you’re interested, go here for details.) Between now and Friday I’ll be seeing three plays and writing a piece or two, or maybe three.
Not surprisingly, I’m a bit careworn from the events of last week–it isn’t easy to sit on a jury while simultaneously holding down what amounts to a full-time job–so I’m planning to keep my blogging to a minimum for the next few days. OGIC and CAAF will take up the slack.
Till soonish.

“As long as something is unfinished, there’s always that little feeling of insecurity. And a feeling of insecurity is absolutely necessary unless you’re so rich that it doesn’t matter.”
Duke Ellington (quoted in Don George, Sweet Man)