speed: This book is pure poetry

[infoterror]

Don't be misinformed

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.

“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

It's more subtle than anything in postmodern lit, but you have to admit, that's excessively poetic. It's not wordplay, but sceneplay. I didn't quote the rest of the first chapter -- obviously, because you're smarter than average, you'll want to go re-read it ASAP -- but the lead up is a description of this man trying to make a life in the city and slowly realizing that he's lonely. He goes to confront the book's most dominant and masculine character, and finds an echo of his loneliness, ending with two of the most insightful and poetic passages in literature. "Full of finely observed life," someone once said about Fitzgerald -- and in this passage, every metaphor speaks of the soul of what it describes.

Don't be a fool. Go re-read this book. Not only is it beautiful, but it explains America in ways that few understand. Every inch of it serves its metaphor, wrapped tighter than "Teh Matix" could ever hope to be.

<3

 

[speed]

Don't be misinformed



It's more subtle than anything in postmodern lit, but you have to admit, that's excessively poetic. It's not wordplay, but sceneplay. I didn't quote the rest of the first chapter -- obviously, because you're smarter than average, you'll want to go re-read it ASAP -- but the lead up is a description of this man trying to make a life in the city and slowly realizing that he's lonely. He goes to confront the book's most dominant and masculine character, and finds an echo of his loneliness, ending with two of the most insightful and poetic passages in literature. "Full of finely observed life," someone once said about Fitzgerald -- and in this passage, every metaphor speaks of the soul of what it describes.

Don't be a fool. Go re-read this book. Not only is it beautiful, but it explains America in ways that few understand. Every inch of it serves its metaphor, wrapped tighter than "Teh Matix" could ever hope to be.

<3

It was harder than I thought to find excerpts from Lolita--its still copyrighted. But I honestly dont think anyone can touch Nabokov when it comes to prose, form, content, hell, even symobolism and metaphor. I mean read the following passages. Who else could write such words? Flaubert maybe. I know of no other.

She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.​

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. [/COLOR][/COLOR]

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorn.



How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until she had done her morning duty. And I was such a thoughtful friend, such a passionate father, such a good pediatrician, attending to all the wants of my little auburn brunette's body! My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys. On especially tropical afternoons, in the sticky closeness of the siesta, I liked the cool feel of armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove[/COLOR]

 

[speed]

And yes, I agree The Great Gatsby is probably the best American novel. I urge you to read Pale Fire or Lolita, and still tell me you prefer Fitzgerald.

 

[Justin S.]

Lolita is a great work, the opening makes quite an impression. The first time I read it, I started on a Friday, and finished it that Sunday I was so engrossed.

There are sections of that book that simply amaze me.

 

[infoterror]

I urge you to read Pale Fire or Lolita, and still tell me you prefer Fitzgerald.

I have read Pale Fire; it was clever, and like most postmodern novels, aped Nietzsche. But did so poorly: it understood deconstruction but not construction.

Fitzgerald captures both at once.

It is in my view higher art.

"He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it's a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm--charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It's not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It's a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes."

- Raymond Chandler on F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

[speed]

I have read Pale Fire; it was clever, and like most postmodern novels, aped Nietzsche. But did so poorly: it understood deconstruction but not construction.

Fitzgerald captures both at once.

It is in my view higher art.

Again we must agree to disagree. I think you need to reread it. I dont think Nabokov gave a damn at all about deconstruction or Nietszche--hell he mocked them at every turn. I dont think any philosophy or politics interest him other than freedom of creation, and freedom from the spooky soviets. So again, I am scratching my head at these comments, because they, well, they make no sense. Where in the world do you get these ideas anyway? I think you need to read Pale Fire again, and read a little about Nabokov. ITs fine if you dont personally like him, but this is beyond opinion, and leading into erroneous facts and propaganda.

Anyway, the book demands more than one reading. Many literary scholars rank it as the top novel of this century. And even you must admit the genius of writing such a book.

And finally, your constant attacks against postmodernism still befuddle me, as you constantly make reference to the artistry of Burroughs (who is terribly terribly postmodern). It's a hypocritical stance. But if one is going to take it, and we should forget about the last 100 years of writing since say Proust, then please explain why Tolstoyevsky, Flaubert, Dickens and so forth, do not equal or greatly surpass the one small book talent of Fitzgerald?

Oh and I have the highest respect for Infoterror. We're just passionate about the subject. We argue like Italians or Greeks.

 

[infoterror]

And finally, your constant attacks against postmodernism still befuddle me, as you constantly make reference to the artistry of Burroughs (who is terribly terribly postmodern). It's a hypocritical stance. But if one is going to take it, and we should forget about the last 100 years of writing since say Proust, then please explain why Tolstoyevsky, Flaubert, Dickens and so forth, do not equal or greatly surpass the one small book talent of Fitzgerald?

First, style is not important; content and inner philosophy are. What Burroughs does is similar to what Fitzgerald does -- he creates a metaphor for our direction as a society, as a collective consciousness, and reveals the inner workings behind the facade. That to my mind is one of the primary goals of literature -- learning, vision, bringing forth beauty by revealing the strong lines of structure.

Why Fitzgerald is great is his insight. In other words, I think the goal of a writer is his or her observations and wisdom, not as much the style. Burroughs is postmodern on the outside, classicist on the inside... Nabokov is postmodern outside and inside. What does Lolita tell us, or even Pale Fire, which I enjoyed, about life and the human spirit and the philosophy of survival? Not much -- they deconstruct, taking us farther from a complete philosophy. While I think Lolita is hilarious, I'm not sure what it contributes, where with the far more profane Naked Lunch, the relationship is clear.

"Tolstoyevsky" is a keeper.

 

[MasterOLightning]

The Brothers Karenina is my favorite Tolstoyevsky book.

 

[speed]

First, style is not important; content and inner philosophy are. What Burroughs does is similar to what Fitzgerald does -- he creates a metaphor for our direction as a society, as a collective consciousness, and reveals the inner workings behind the facade. That to my mind is one of the primary goals of literature -- learning, vision, bringing forth beauty by revealing the strong lines of structure.

Why Fitzgerald is great is his insight. In other words, I think the goal of a writer is his or her observations and wisdom, not as much the style. Burroughs is postmodern on the outside, classicist on the inside... Nabokov is postmodern outside and inside. What does Lolita tell us, or even Pale Fire, which I enjoyed, about life and the human spirit and the philosophy of survival? Not much -- they deconstruct, taking us farther from a complete philosophy. While I think Lolita is hilarious, I'm not sure what it contributes, where with the far more profane Naked Lunch, the relationship is clear.

"Tolstoyevsky" is a keeper.

I laugh. You must have a harder time with postmodernism because it is more complex than the utter simplicity of Fitzgerald and his one thin great book.

For example, Lolita could be interpreted as bing a book about America. Little Lo, is America--shallow, young, yet strangely alluring--and Humbert is old, cultured Europe and all that goes with it, seducing little Lo with his ideas,etc. Or, Lolita has been described as a vision of totalitarianism (Nabokov fled those pinko commies and Stalin), told from the view of a tyrant--humbert humbert.

Dont you see, thats the genius of Nabokov (especially in Pale Fire), and Shakespeare, and even Tolstoyevsky as well. They are about deeper inner things, but there is a myriad of interpretations, that change with each person. For instance, there are multiple philosophies vying for time and space in Dostoevsky's characters, and no one can figure out which one Dostoevsky really believed in. The atheist existential intellectual (Ivan Karamazov, Notes from the Underground), the religious, spiritual, orthodox man (Alexi, Bishop Tikhon) the sensualists, (Dimitry, Stavrogin), the saintly fool (Prince Myshskin).

 

[Cynical]

I hate to intrude on y'all's discussion, particularly given that I've got very little "formal" education in literature, but from my experience, when there are a multitude of interpretations of something, it's generally because the author didn't make a clear statement, and thus thousands of people all read some meaning into it in order to appear intellectual.

 

[speed]

I hate to intrude on y'all's discussion, particularly given that I've got very little "formal" education in literature, but from my experience, when there are a multitude of interpretations of something, it's generally because the author didn't make a clear statement, and thus thousands of people all read some meaning into it in order to appear intellectual.

Ahem...that is the purpose of art. Art without nuance, depth, and a variety of interpretations usually falls by the wayside. Why do we love the Mona Lisa (most obvious example) so? Shakespeare?

And this is a personal argument between infoterror and I, that is largely about personal tastes. I like complexity, nuance, playful form, and partially obscure intention. Infoterror prefers--if I understand him--clarity and higher philosophical intentions, metaphor, and masterfully wrought but simple form.

 

[Cynical]

The purpose of art is to make stuff that has no meaning so that people can try to look cool in coffeehouses by talking about it? Wow, I never knew.

 

[speed]

The purpose of art is to make stuff that has no meaning so that people can try to look cool in coffeehouses by talking about it? Wow, I never knew.

The purpose of art, rests entirely in the artist--in my opinion. Its a personal act of personal creation. It is what an artist makes it. Thus, why most great art takes some time to be appreciated. I dont think these are controversial ideas here cynical. And frankly, if you wish, read Nietzsche, or any memoir or biography of any artist.