Forum / The Flourish (and Lolita)
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Copper Sloane LevyOct 26, 03:20am"Have you ever had that experience at any point in your life when you've done something — in sports, let's say — when you've done something so many times that you've become an expert at it, and you start to add something to the act that is no longer required of the act; it's inessential, it's a flourish. Something you add on to it.
That experience is the breakthrough that some artists — very few artists — make from discipline and craft into style.
It's the windmill slam in basketball. It's the tennis player who returns the ball between the legs. It's the soccer play who kicks the ball into the net upside down in mid-air, not because he has to, but because he can, because it looks so very good. That's Nabokov's style."
— Nick Mount on Vladimir Nabokov
This is one of the countless university lectures that shaped me as a writer. I thought I'd share it with you all.
Happy Friday,
Copper
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DolemiteOct 26, 03:46pmadobe flash player keeps crashing on me on firefox, and on IE it only comes up with pages of code, but will check this out when system is up.
(and thanks for posting)
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DolemiteOct 26, 03:50pm
(pssst...
you're not going to get much/if any response when posting interesting/useful/amusing things here...)
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Copper Sloane LevyOct 26, 08:17pm
My pleasure.
(And yeah, I've noticed. I had to double-check that this tab was labeled 'Forum' and not 'Self-promotion'.)
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DolemiteOct 26, 09:34pm
"The artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman.
--VNI love this kind of stuff.
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Sally HoutmanOct 27, 01:29amHave only had time to watch the first 15 minutes, but, man it looks great.
Will come back this evening and view the rest.
Thanks for sharing this!
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DolemiteOct 27, 01:40am
The speaker appears to be a nervous lover, but he is a brave lover, and that's what counts when it comes to art.
this is good, too:
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Sally HoutmanOct 27, 02:21am
Great. Gonna Check 'em both out later.
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James Lloyd DavisOct 27, 02:58pmAn interesting man, was Nabokov. Fine writer and one of my favorite novelists. But like everyone who undertakes the inordinate effort to write novels, he has that little bit of self-indulgent madness which tempts vanity.
Too easy to strangle the reputations of dead people with such petulant dismissal. I wonder what Dostoevski would have said in response.
Fascinating interview.
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DolemiteOct 27, 03:42pm
I found a book of his lectures (transcribed from his notes, I believe, he typed out each one as if it were a ms) in my neighbor's trash.
Yeah, lots of writers he didn't like, which surprised (shocked) me.
"little bit of self-indulgent madness"
I'd say it was COMPLETE (though completed by/with his wife's help and utter devotion to/belief in him)--there's a newish book out on her I'd like to read).
Didn't he write his stories/novels one sentence at a time, on 3 x 5 cards?
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James Lloyd DavisOct 27, 04:47pm
I never heard that and it sounds a bit incredible. I have no doubt that, and I've heard this about Dylan Thomas... that he wrote down brilliant sentences and phrases that came to mind in odd moments (Dylan Thomas kept such reveries in notebooks. Perhaps Nabokov might have done the same with 3 x 5 cards), save them aside and inserted novels where they would fit into a WIP.
I like to do something similar with flash fiction, but the pieces that I use in a manuscript are often related only by chance, if indeed chance is the vehicle. When you carve something out of words, say a poem or flash piece, something that reek of jeweled precision, a thing you can never achieve while fleshing out a good size novel, you hesitate to discard it. A possible theory concerning the anecdote and only that.
Thomas Wolfe, a novelist whose prose bordered at times on sheer poetry, may have also practiced this kind of salvage method. I remember some few published poems of his that might have been grafted into his voluminous novels.
But that's only speculation. I wish I had the time to research it. Then again, Thomas Wolfe seems to have vanished from the literary canon. I wonder if people remember his work these days.
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James Lloyd DavisOct 27, 04:48pm
reeks, reeks
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DolemiteOct 27, 06:01pm
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