That's lovely.

Isn't it? While I'm at it, I'll include these fun snippets from Time's review of Nabokov's lectures (which Pynchon attended, incidentally):

... from the podium he projected another character of his own creation, the cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings."

No collection of Nabokov's lectures and notes could fully recapture the flavor of his professorial persona, but "Lectures on Literature" comes as close as one could hope for. Elegantly edited by Fredson Bowers, handsomely printed in an oversized format, it includes discussions of seven classic European and English novels and is extensively illustrated with Nabokov's drawings, diagrams, maps, floor plans and marginal annotations ("Idiot!" he scrawled typically next to one of the many mistranslations that outraged him).

Heh. "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives."

Is anybody going to read Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke?

"This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives."

I had a professor just like this. Adored him.

Also, now I want to change my name to "Quiddity."

Also, now I want to change my name to "Quiddity."

Right?

Hec and others will enjoy this article about William Gibson.

Nice piece, P-Cow. This quote was a little distressing:

"If I had gone to Ace Books in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the world -- particularly badly in Africa -- they might have said, 'Not bad. A little toasty. That's kind of interesting.'

"But I'd say -- ' But wait! Also, the internal combustion engine and everything else we've been doing that forces carbon into the atmosphere has thrown the climate out of whack with possibly terminal and catastrophic results.' And they'd say, 'You've already got this thing you call AIDS. Let's not --'

"And I'd say, ' But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.' Not only would they not go for it, they probably would have called security."

Publisher's Weekly is reporting that Madeline L'Engle has died.

[link]

t sniffle

Oh no!

Oddly, Wikipedia has her death date listed as 8/31/07, with no citation, and AP/NYT doesn't list anything.

I loved many of her books. If you haven't read the 2004 New Yorker profile of her and you love her books, don't ever read it. Unless you can successfully detach knowing about the writer from enjoying the writing (I can't.)

Okay, now I need to know, flea. Dish. Whitefont if necessary.