Subject: Re: " and debate 'Louise' "
From: Louise Z. Brooks (invertedforest@angelfire.com)
Date: Thu Feb 24 2000 - 19:33:28 EST
The quote is from the poem `Pale Fire' within the book of the same name. If you haven't read it, the book is a pastiche of a scholarly text, in which the poem `Pale Fire' - the last work of the recently deceased poet John Shade - is accompanied with a lengthy gloss by a scholar and friend, who gradually reveals his true nature throughout the footnotes. (a note: I recommend reading the poem and then the gloss. The narrator recommends quite the opposite, which says it all really). The first two lines are the ones I quoted, of the first stanza:
`I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the windowpane.
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -- and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.'
The poem is 999 lines long, with the final line intended (according to the editor)to be the first line over again, bringing the poem up to 1000 words and linking it in a chain.
For anyone interested in literary criticism it's a fascinating book in its own right, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase `unreliable narrator'.
--- Louise Z. Brooks "Invention my dear friends is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation and 2% butterscotch ripple." - Willy Wonka >Until then, I think I'll try to track down that Nabokov quote Louise used in >her 2/17/00 post Re: Consummations (something tells me I should start with >that old favorite of Camille's, _Pale Fire_): > >"Like Nabokov's `waxwing slain through the false azure of the window pane' - >slamming into the window in our world but passing imperceptibly into the >next in spirit - Buddy is the one who hit the window, while Seymour is the >one who kept going." > >--Bruce > > > > > > > >- >* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message >* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH >Angelfire for your free web-based e-mail. http://www.angelfire.com - * Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message * UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
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