[NPPF] Childhood Epilepsy

[charles albert]

...and here I was growing increasingly confident that this issue would be
relegated to a matter of PF trivia, as it appears to have been by most
commentators.....

Thanks, Appleshiner.........now I've got some serious typing to do......

With the proto-Klytemnestra safely ensconsed at the Chapel Penal Facility
for the day, I am now free to get back to the office, and do just that....

Be back in about an hour, with the lowdown.......


love,
cfa





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "sZ" <keithsz at concentric.net>
To: "The Neo-Nabokov List" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 5:58 PM
Subject: [NPPF] Childhood Epilepsy


> Vladimir Nabokov. Inspiration:
> (written on November 20, 1972, for Saturday Review)
>
> A special study, which I do not plan to conduct, would reveal, probably,
> that inspiration is seldom dwelt upon nowadays even by the worst reviewers
> of our best prose. I say "our" and I say "prose" because I am thinking of
> American works of fiction, including my own stuff. It would seem that this
> reticence is somehow linked up with a sense of decorum. Conformists
suspect
> that to speak of "inspiration" is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to
stand
> up for the Ivory Tower. Yet inspiration exists as do towers and tusks.
> One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all
> things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding
> gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike
> some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something
the
> artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly
> well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture
of
> a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness
of
> physical discomfort- youth's toothache as well as the neuralgia of old
age.
> The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were
> connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither
> source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its
> secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has
> blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the
> familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but
> the artist knows he is ready.
> http://mochola.narod.ru/nablib.htm
>
>