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Re: Albion and black albinos
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On 30/01/2009 12:57, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> SK-B [ for the Irish, it¹s always PERFIDIOUS ALBION! The phrase is
> indivisibule! [...] I quickly tired of Updike¹s explicit sex; after 2
> promising rabbits! Did VN¹s admiration last longer than mine?[...] David
> Foster Wallace¹s biting critique quoted in today¹s Times: ³No US novelist has
> mapped the solipsist¹s terrain better than Updike"]
>
> JM: Solipsists, unite? I always thought Updike was the perfect example of
> small communities' Biblical "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself". To
> recover VN's commentaries on Updike would take up some time and I cannot
> recollect any specific reference to "admiration" on his part. I didn't read
> the Rabbits (1-2-3-sorry Dad! -4-5-6) but I did enjoy "Bech at Bay" and the
> first chapters of "Marry Me".
> // reluctant snip
>
> Jansy: want you to know that I love the ³sorry Dad² bunny tale! Perhaps we
> should add ³Thou SHALT commit adultery,² as Exodus 20:14 appears in the
> infamously mis-printed ³Sinner¹s Bible² of 1631! The same Bible garbles the
> word ³greatness² leading to the ³great arse of God² (Deut. 5:24) Warning to
> printers and editors: the Sinner¹s Bible crew, some claim, were hung, drawn
> and quartered. Updike¹s ³Couples² certainly ignored the commandment ³Do not
> covet thy neighbour¹s ASS.² But we digress!
>
> VN¹s ³admiration² for Updike was expressed in an interview [exact ref.? the
> DATE would be significant!] when Nabokov was asked one of those irritating
> questions: what he thought of contemporary American writers. VN usually fenced
> off such questions with generalities (oft negative), so I recall being
> surprised that VN favourably ventured a few real names, inc. Updike¹s. I had
> just read Updike¹s 98%-glowing post-word to the Penguin ³Luzhin¹s Defens[c]e.²
> That and other snippets indicated some measure of mutual Updike/VN respect. I
> was only marginally interested in such opinions. We must read and judge for
> ourselves.
>
> Now here¹s an interesting find, or rather NON-FIND: I¹ve just read Updike¹s
> long intro to the new Everyman Library composite edition of the Angstrom
> Quadrilogy. This intro appeared over 4-pages of small print, ³Updike on
> Updike,² in the Times2, Jan 29, 2009, so I was spared the expense of buying
> all them Rabbits! JU mentions many influences and counter-influences:
> Dostoevsky, Joyce (esp. the female soliloquies!), Roth, Mailer, Miller,
> Caldwell, JM Cain, DH Lawrence, ... NO VN, not a murmur, but DRUM-ROLL ...
> Edmund Wilson (³one of my models in sexual relations,² referring specifically
> to Wilson¹s 1946 prosecution over ³Memoirs of Hecate County.² Updike writes of
> restoring cuts in ³Rabbit, Run² as a result of the ³censorship retreat²
> following the Lady Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer trials. THERE IS STILL NO
> MENTION OF NABOKOV, where, in the context of famous literary censorships, one
> might surely have expected a ref to Lolita. And this silence, recall, from one
> whose prose-style is often said to show Nabokovian influences? Funny, as in
> Peculiar? Nil nisi Bonham Carter, as we say in Liverpool. (We have our own
> malapropisms called ³malapudlianisms.²)
>
> In the Feb 2, 2009 Sunday Times, we find a quote from Nicholson Baker¹s memoir
> ³U and I: A True Story.² (Granta). Baker imagines BEFORE THE EVENT the
> mourners gathered at Updike¹s fun[f]eral (inspired by Henry James¹s account of
> the ³popular manifestation² at Ralph Waldo Emerson¹s funeral):
>
> ³ ... In grieving for Updike, the sombre, predominantly female citizens would
> be grieving for their own youthful sexual pasts, whose hardcore cavortings
> were now insulated by wools and goose downs of period charm, vague remorse,
> fuzzy remembrance, spousal forgiveness and an overall sense of imperfect
> attempts at cutting loose; they would be mourning the man who, by bringing a
> serious Prousto-Nabokovian, morally sensitive, National Book Award-winning
> prose style to bear on the micromechanics of physical lovemaking, first
> licensed their moans.²
>
> Bravo! Baker himself is cunningly Prousto-Nabokovian, n¹est-ce pas? A writer
> to watch out for.
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle
>
> PS: I¹ve worked on several text-search algorithms over the years (see e.g., my
> ³Assembly Language Programming for the MC6800x,² SAMS/MacMillan search
> ³Kelly-Bootle² on amazon). One challenge is handling such Boolean search
> criteria as ³Updike-but-NOT-Nabokov.²
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