Re: Speaking of Nabokov...

gpaterso@richmond.edu
Tue, 29 Sep 1998 01:50:11 -0400

At 17:39 09/28/98 -0400, I wrote:
>> If it wouldn't be some sort of bizarre copyright violation, would anyone
>> be interested in my posting some of the highlights from my reading?

Well...I just hope I'm not breaking any huge laws or anything.  If I am, 
uh, um, ah, oh well, they're out of business again, it was almost 30 years
ago, and the copyright has probably expired anyway.

The following are all passages quoted from the Winter 1970 issue of "The
Phoenix".  Note: There are two different periodicals called "The Phoenix"
with quarterly distribution.  One is the radical underground literary mag
with two incarnations (each lasting less than five years) containing the
Giles Weaver pieces.  The other is a still-going Canadian journal of
classical literature, and by classical, I mean Greek and Roman stuff from
around the turn of, oh, the Common Era.
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Page 172 - points to a Catcher-like aspiration and reincarnation

"As I was walking back to Hamp last nite through dark Childs Park I had
thoughts of this earth actually being purgatory and that after my death
I wanted to come back here and work to help others get through the mill
and find their true identities.  I had, before those thoughts, some
thoughts on reality that were so wild I began to come unhinged."
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Page 172 - Interesting connection to Catcher and the Nine Stories

"I had some fancy thoughts on this business of committing oneself to
some cause of supposed value worthy of self-sacrifice."
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Page 173 (?) - Very reminiscent of first few pages of Catcher.

"But I am here failing to record my activity fo the past week.  I falied
early in the week because of a hearty sickness of recording my life,
suspecting it very much as a stupid pastime."
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Page 175 - Intriguing, considering recent events.  Sounds like Maynard's
           own account of her break-up with JDS, from his side.

"...her fundamental and basic self-esteem is horribly maimed, her
emotional reaction of pain, anger and depression is the natural
response to any threat of the slightest dilution of whatever sense of
her own value she is able to keep scraped together.  In her frenzied
need to run me down she unavoidably robs authority from my regard for
her great but thwarted capacities.  When I am around her I must stop
living in order to keep her from dying on me.  Nevertheless I lost my
patience this week and wrote her a hurtful letter."
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Page 176-177 - It is pointless even to mention it. (:

"...if I were alone then things are not important enough to worry
about, but if an immanent action God were a reality, then there is
hardly any cause to worry.  Of course if there is a real life
distressing factor then it is too much to expect any person not to
worry some.  But lacking a specific grievance one should live in a
fair degree of psychic peace and not anticipate distress, provided
one is so fortunate as to be free of compulsive morbidity."
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Page 177 - Giles Weaver begins a LONG discussion of psychologists.

"En garde!  You self-proclaimed mind healers who devastate the soul!"
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Page 178 - Continuing with psychologists...

"Last I heard, medicine was an art.  If medicine deals with the
body and psychology deals with the mind, how is it that psychology
fancies itself a SCIENCE?  This frightens me.  It appears to me as
one of the outstanding symptoms of the human race plunging into
madness.  If medicine is respectable as an art, how is it that
psychology is not supremely respectable as an art?  Were psychology
an art, how rich it would be.  It would attract artists instead of
plumbers.  It would draw upon all wisdom without fear or favor.
Science, philosophy, literature, religion, geography, geology, and
Christmas stockings too, all would instruct psychology were it an art."
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Page 180 - Yet more...

"He [some ideal future psychologist] will, at the ripe moment of
fashionable psychology, merely stand up on his hind legs and cry:
'FRAUD'.  Then all hail will break loose.  HAIL!  Hail our savior,
he has struck the chains from our minds."
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Page 182 - Near the end of psychology discussion

"...PERCEPTIVE CAPACITY.  That is, how to have INSIGHT, not how to
SHOW.  So there they are, the sick green psych majors, unlimbering
learned limericks on distressed men and women already victimized
by the everyday insanities of our society."
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Page 184 - This could have been Seymour's epitaph.

"How the world loves to murder the aspirations of its children
for the sake of trivial or even obscene values."
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As I said at the outset, the copyrights on The Phoenix have probably
expired by now anyway, and I haven't heard about any Giles Weaver
renewing them.  At any rate, this isn't even 10% of the Winter 1970
submission, much less the two later submissions in the next two issues
of the Phoenix.  (They serialized the material into three roughly equal
subsets.)  All of this material apparently arrived at the Phoenix's
editor's desk in large envelopes, with a letter explaining a complex
page-numbering system for the log books (from which these quotes were
lifted) and strict instructions that nothing could be altered about the
pieces except the title, because it had no title until the Phoenix
supplied theirs.  Something like "Further Notes from the Underground."
The notes I have supplied next to the page numbers are brief summaries,
sometimes mentioning a possible connection between Giles Weaver and JDS.
As Stephen Foskett's site points out, The Phoenix should be available
in any really really good library.  College libraries, with their huge
periodicals sections, would be the best bet.  Any feedback from these
quotes or from further reading in other parts of the Giles Weaver
pieces would be appreciated.

And if this really is illegal after all, don't cry about it, for God's
sake don't sue me, just delete the silly message and get on with life.


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 G.H.G.A.Paterson  (804)662-3737  gpaterso@richmond.edu
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