Friday, December 23, 2016

From an old notebook


Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Click for a larger view. Nabokov wrote out his lectures: “meticulously chosen words” indeed.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Other bits from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : Halloween observations : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel : Square dancing, poetry, criticism, slang

comments: 2

Daughter Number Three said...

And that was at Cornell, when American schools were still supposedly "great," hah.

When I look at my college notebooks, they are nowhere near that bad but I agree that I -- with all the intervening years -- can't make a coherent narrative out of them, either.

Michael Leddy said...

I know I was sometimes a less than diligent notetaker: I sat in on one course to get all the notes I missed the first time around. But I just looked at a random page of my intro-poetry notes from freshman year, and I’m amazed:

“1066: William of Normandy (Norse in France) invaded and conquered England. The Battle of Hastings. French customs introduced and enforced. French language introduced, language became richer.

room-chamber  cow-beef  pig-pork  calf-veal  sheep-mutton”

That’s four lines (tiny printing) from a page-and-a-half for one class meeting. I wrote all that down?