Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Click for a larger view. Nabokov wrote out his lectures: “meticulously chosen words” indeed.
Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)
Other bits from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : Halloween observations : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel : Square dancing, poetry, criticism, slang
Friday, December 23, 2016
From an old notebook
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comments: 2
And that was at Cornell, when American schools were still supposedly "great," hah.
When I look at my college notebooks, they are nowhere near that bad but I agree that I -- with all the intervening years -- can't make a coherent narrative out of them, either.
I know I was sometimes a less than diligent notetaker: I sat in on one course to get all the notes I missed the first time around. But I just looked at a random page of my intro-poetry notes from freshman year, and I’m amazed:
“1066: William of Normandy (Norse in France) invaded and conquered England. The Battle of Hastings. French customs introduced and enforced. French language introduced, language became richer.
room-chamber cow-beef pig-pork calf-veal sheep-mutton”
That’s four lines (tiny printing) from a page-and-a-half for one class meeting. I wrote all that down?
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