Nabokov's Signs and symbols

[Smoke Teff]

Great stuff, Mark.

I saw Treisman and Denis Johnson on a panel together a few years ago, each
of them laughing about the difficulty, often to the point of total
futility, DT finds in trying to change even a word of DJ's fiction.

Also if we want to talk about heavy-handed editors in American short
fiction, how could we not...

I just read this interview Lish did with *The Paris Review *a few years
back...

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6423/gordon-lish-the-art-of-editing-no-2-gordon-lish

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 7:56 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here's inside New Yorker shit I learned; Wm Maxwell did not like The
> Lottery, would not have published it.....Ross never committed himself to an
> opinion....young Brendan Gill
> was the first cheerleader....
>
> But evidently Maxwell turned the Salinger story into what was
> published....took a long part of 1947 and it was held to be published in
> January 1948 because Ross wanted the stories
> to be as if HAPPENED WHEN PUBLISHED....see The Lottery....(obvious resort
> for winter vacation for Bananafish)....
>
> And Ross complained to Cheever, "Why are all your stories so fucking
> gloomy, John?..but i must publish them".....half-off remark since Cheever
> was often more 'spiritually" upbeat than many.....certainly that Salinger
> story.......
>
> Nabokov later gave Cheever's *The Country Husband an A+ too...*.only two
> so recorded, he gave one of his own NY stories just an A......lots of lower
> grades, of course.  and that dog in this story.......does he bound into the
> end of Vineland?
>
> I've never read of Murakami translating Cheever either.....
>
> On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 5:37 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Your link to the Cheever had me thinking the same thing. I can't
>> recall if Murakami translated Cheever but his short stories have a
>> similar rhythm. And one of his famous stories is A Good Day for
>> Kangaroos, which goes back to the Salinger.
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 6:21 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > And there is a good Murakami story that I would bet a jar of jelly on
>> this influenced. The existential phone calls one.
>> >
>> > Sent from my iPad
>> >
>> >> On Apr 23, 2017, at 9:00 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Nabokov's first story published in the New Yorker in 1948 is a tiny
>> >> little piece that seems to me very relevant to readers of Pynchon.
>> >> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/05/15/symbols-and-signs
>> >> He told the fiction editor that “a second (main) story is woven into,
>> >> or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one,” although from
>> >> my reading this could be a tease, since there's such a heavy
>> >> metafictional layer exploring our tendencies to "project a world"
>> >> (COL49) when we're reading. Plus it tied in neatly to the discussion
>> >> of weather in books had here recently, and Nabokov might be satirising
>> >> the idea that climate is a conspiracy based on our mood.
>> >> -
>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>
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