Nabokov's Cornell Lectures & Pat Boone on WAVY Radio (Canned or plugged-in music)

[Mark Kohut]

I don't think I merit the name-check but just want to add that
even Nabokov, yes a perfectionist snob, liked the popular
when feelingful..........

I heard A. Appel tell of his affection for Tennessee Waltz, the song....
a real song and not Pat [Boonish]. 

In his book on Gogol Nabokov taught me--us--the Russian word 'poshlust'
which, he said was kitsch (and much worse, kinda morally defective) in things,
feelings, false emotion, etc......




----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, February 24, 2011 10:43:15 AM
Subject: Nabokov's Cornell Lectures & Pat Boone on WAVY Radio (Canned or 
plugged-in music)

As discussed several times, these lectures are useful when reading
Pynchon or any other difficult work. In his essay on Kafka's
"Metamorphosis," Nabokov first reminds his students that it is
critical to understand that life in Prauge in 1919 was different from
life in Ithaca in 1954. That setting and the historical threads of a
story would be ignored by students, as Mark indicated, was something
Nabokov knew was happening, as his students were jumping on the
bandwagons of this-or-that school of criticism or theory or starting
with a bias or idea  or connection to something else before they had
actually read what the author had written. Nabokov saw that the study
of art would ignore the art itself and spin out readings and readings
that moved further and further from the spider's own web. Of course,
as beautul as so many of these butterfly are, it is sad to see them
fanned into the web of the spider. A Hunger Artist dreams of such
fannings.

He discusses music, painting, and literature, contrasting the latter
two with the first and foremost. His famous contrast of viewing a
painting and reading a work of literature is extended here; he also
reminds students that canned and pluged-in music, the stiff they
listen to on radio, is dulling to the mind. Of course, Nabokov is a
great snob; he also has a wonderful sense of self-deprecating humor
that, if missed, will offend the thin skinned leveler, but that aside,
he writes with such clarity, that we can join him with Frederic
Jameson (not Benjamin or those French scribblers who entertain
themselves at the expense of their graduate student disciples) and
trace Pynchon's early concerns with modern mechanical reproduction and
capitalism.