Subject: Pale Fire in the Inverted Forest
From: citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Date: Fri Feb 25 2000 - 12:22:18 EST
Louise,
Many thanks for taking the trouble to reply. I confess I have never read
_Pale Fire_; I confess I have read very little in the past two decades.
Nonetheless, I dutifully have placed the title on my endless "To Read" list,
which easily surpasses Seymour's in _Hapworth_.
In rereading some of your enjoyable posts, I stopped at an insight in Re:
Too Stern Eliot. There you write, "... the fact that his [Eliot's] approach
to literature and life parallels Salinger's in more ways than I can list."
As you know from _The Inverted Forest_, Ray Ford (though he usually listened
to Corinne talk her life away), on a couple of rare evenings, talked entire
essays: one on Rilke, one on Eliot. My question is, Do you think it would
be fair to substitute Rilke for Eliot in your quote above? And if the
answer is Yes, would you care to amplify?
Thanks for giving this your consideration.
--Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Louise Z. Brooks <invertedforest@angelfire.com>
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org <bananafish@roughdraft.org>
Date: Thursday, February 24, 2000 4:34 PM
Subject: Re: " and debate 'Louise' "
>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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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