Quote:
Originally Posted by pynch
I wasn’t familiar with this, thanks, Prestidigitweeze. Is it possible that he was a little bored by the interviewer’s questions and wanted to spice things up?
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While I happen to worship his writing with steepled digits (which seems to upset my pastor), it was this interview (and a subsequent leer at the two
Lectures on Literature volumes to which he alludes in my sedate little excerpt) that first apprised me of the two-by-four lodged permanently in Nabokov's colon. Even the conditions he imposed on that interview illustrate what looks like pathological misanthropy: In keeping with his famous mosaic method of writing
Lolita, he insisted on answering the interviewer silently, in painstaking cursive, on a series of index cards, which he then arranged in concordance with some ultimate structure in his head.
Doubleshuffle and Pynch:
The Paris Review site is indeed an addictive resource (the interviews are even tabbed conveniently by decade), but so are the
Review of Contemporary Literature interviews available on the
Dalkey Archive site. Another fascinating site for interviews is
BOMB Magazine, the physical version of which Betsy Sussler has been pumping out since the early '80s. BOMB interviews include not only writers but artists, architects, musicians and actors. The hook is that the interviewer is always a known practitioner of the same art as the interviewee, which gives the reader two chances per piece to ponder the words of someone they might admire.
You might also be interested in this archive of current experimental literature and art, which poet and critic Charles Bernstein made me aware of recently:
Gammm. Charles's own riff on Duchamp is available
here.
If I were not fully aware of having dragged everyone hopelessly OT, I'd complete the digression by linking to a story of mine that was just published in a magazine created and edited (until recently) by Beckett's editor and Joyce's publisher and legal defender. However, shame -- as opposed to the modesty I might have to visit Oz to acquire -- prevents me for the mome (wither, shudder, point).
Now, about that poll (and the hordes of fanboys it will lure away from Joyce Con 2013, with its Stephen Dedalus/Molly Bloom cosplay (if I see one more pimpled ectomorph squinting behind pince-nez))—