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DN on numbers, synaesthesia, and adapting VN's language to cinema
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Comment for Stan et al. from DN
Stan,
You call my attention to something I know well. I cherish the
unbowdlerized audio of Lolita that Jeremy I. gave me. I also thoroughly
enjoyed, on a different plane, an abridged live reading of his in which
he ingeniously made the volume itself bow for the curtain calls. So far,
by the nature of things, the movies have abridged and bowdlerized the
written word. One seemingly insurmountable obstacle, when dealing with
the inimitable beauty of language in a VN novel, was how to transform
it into a thing of equivalent beauty in the visual medium. One is now
pondering the prospect of filming Ada. Having relinquished recourse to a
couple of ready screenplays, one has a largely untried trick up his
sleeve, a kind of cinematic end run that may make it possible to skirt
the obvious hurdles in an unorthodox way. Stay tuned for a new book by
neurologist Richard Cytowic titled Hearing Colors, Tasting Sounds: The
Kaleidoscopic Brain of Synesthesia, for which I have written a few
prefatory pages. They touch very briefly on a new approach to cinema.
Incidentally, current research suggests a possible a link, in the brains
of some synesthetes, with the ability to recall and manage terrifyingly
long strings of numbers.
Regards,
DN
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Stan,
You call my attention to something I know well. I cherish the
unbowdlerized audio of Lolita that Jeremy I. gave me. I also thoroughly
enjoyed, on a different plane, an abridged live reading of his in which
he ingeniously made the volume itself bow for the curtain calls. So far,
by the nature of things, the movies have abridged and bowdlerized the
written word. One seemingly insurmountable obstacle, when dealing with
the inimitable beauty of language in a VN novel, was how to transform
it into a thing of equivalent beauty in the visual medium. One is now
pondering the prospect of filming Ada. Having relinquished recourse to a
couple of ready screenplays, one has a largely untried trick up his
sleeve, a kind of cinematic end run that may make it possible to skirt
the obvious hurdles in an unorthodox way. Stay tuned for a new book by
neurologist Richard Cytowic titled Hearing Colors, Tasting Sounds: The
Kaleidoscopic Brain of Synesthesia, for which I have written a few
prefatory pages. They touch very briefly on a new approach to cinema.
Incidentally, current research suggests a possible a link, in the brains
of some synesthetes, with the ability to recall and manage terrifyingly
long strings of numbers.
Regards,
DN
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm