Jansy: can’t help immediately with lists of anthologies blessed with VN’s works, but can report that he flourishes in most of the FAMOUS QUOTATIONS collections I’ve come across. At our local library the other week I browsed five or six such compilations. They were tagged in yellow “REFERENCE ONLY. Not to be removed!” so I started scribbling notes, which I placed in some safe place beyond subsequent reach. One of the collections (Oxford Univ. Press, I think) was devoted specifically to Lit & Lang aphorisms (or “pithy sayings,” he lisped!). Dozens of Nabokovian quips, which one has the feeling were deliberately polished with such collections in mind.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 03/02/2009 16:13, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Stan K-B [ to Suellen: "most helpful. Thanks. I’ll re-read Updike’s post-words on VN’s Luzhin’s Defense[...]The general feeling I register about Updike’s [...] “O, what a falling off ...” [...] complaint that he was just “too damned prolific” i.e., lacking self-censoring discernment. Whereas, to my untrained eyes/ears, Nabokov just got better as the years rolled by. TOOL, I’m sure, will verify this in spite of time tragically running out before his final master-building."]
JM: I agree with SKB on "Nabokov just got better...". There is one quality of his that has not evolved because it remained a constant: his being emminently an author one reads, re-reads and starts all over again. There are thousands of fine and stimulating books that I'll never get around to read because time is so short and, at the same time, there are authors and books that one cannot just read once. Updike, for me, belongs to the "one timers", even "sometimers"category. Never Nabokov. While I pondered on "vita brevis" ( preceded by "ars longa", unrelated to the tons of unread books) I noticed that for me it is exactly this feeling of "ars longa" that is so present in Nabokov and thanks to whom I feel a part of this particular "longevity".
The "Nabokov No-Finds" (from SK's previous message) tell a curious story about invisible rivalries and prejudices, but this issue is certainly more complicated. The two (Oxford) Anthologies of "Humour" and of "XXth Century Poets" I consulted carry no Nabokov. Has it anything to do with The New Yorker's ,AM and other magazines policies on copy-rights?
I remember an anthology organized by Joyce Carol Oates that includes SM's first chapter,"Perfect Past."
Where could I find out about which anthologies in English included VN among American, English-speaking, novelists or the Russian poets and authors?
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MR (Zembla-website): "...the author or his wife or son has control of both access and copyright for fifty years, i.e. until June 23, 2009. At that point, the collection will be open and the as yet unpublished Nabokov writings in it will be in the public domain."
Andrea Pitzer: "Talking about the permissions issue...I was told that after June, copies of the materials--but not necessarily the originals--would be available to the public in some form."
Stan K-B: "...the infamously mis-printed “Sinner’s Bible” of 1631[...]garbles the word “greatness”[...] Warning to printers and editors: the Sinner’s Bible crew, some claim, were hung, drawn and quartered."[...].
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"Now here’s an interesting find, or rather NON-FIND: I’ve just read Updike’s long intro to the new Everyman Library composite edition of the Angstrom Quadrilogy[...] JU mentions many influences and counter-influences [...] NO VN, not a murmur but DRUM-ROLL ... Edmund Wilson [...] a quote from Nicholson Baker’s memoir “U and I: A True Story.” (Granta)“ ... In grieving for Updike [...] 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.”
Suellen Stringer-Hye: ...this is from the VNCollation#3 (March 1, 1994) on Zembla: 'And speaking of John Updike[...] he claims in an interview [...]that his new book Brazil "... should appeal most to anyone who used to be pleased by Nabokov's excursions into the semi-real. I'm not Nabokov, and there was much about his fictional worlds that's a little constraining, but I did love the attitude he brought to the art of fiction, a kind of detached, almost scientific wish to do something new with this form[...]" Brazil, according to a Financial Post article dated February 26, is only the second Updike book to be set outside of the U.S. The other was The Coup, "...narrated by a francophone dictator--who sounded like Vladimir Nabokov on Prozac'...."
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