Here’s this spectacular essay about Vladimir Nabokov by Martin Amis. Way better than any literary essay I’ve seen in a long time. And now that I’m back from my Saturday walk with Mr UD (Brookside Gardens. They were moody on a mid-November day. Burnished late fall leaves. Decorative lights laced through the trees. The sky was all gray and wavy and if gaunt branches weren’t a cliché I’d report gaunt branches.), maybe we should walk through this wondrous prose. So wondrous that we will forgive its multiple misspellings.

Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (LOOK LEFT), and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), when he reminisced in 1974:

“. . . I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the coloured phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.”

Well, the creative joy is authentic; and yet it isn’t faithful (in common with pretty well the entire cast of Nabokov’s fictional women, creative joy, in the end, is sadistically fickle). Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate”, as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.

What do you see, from the outset?

I see confidence — the strong initial assertion about language, an assertion whose meaning we don’t yet know. Yet precisely the confidence of assertion coupled with the mystery of the assertion’s meaning draws us forward. He’s put it in second person – you – and that makes sense, because he’s a novelist, like Nabokov, and he gets what novelists are about. They spend much of their time in the same utilitarian language world the rest of us inhabit; but they also inhabit a private world rich with the “stuff of patterned artifice.” (Note the poetic phrase here – the repeated sound of the letter T: sTuff / paTTerned / arTifice. The very idea of artful writing – its patterned artifice – is exemplified, brought to linguistic life, in the lilting words Amis has chosen.)

After the lovely praise of writerly inspiration he quotes from Nabokov, Amis begs to differ from it a bit. In fact inspiration isn’t faithful; as a writer ages, he can’t rely on it at all. Talent dies. Think of Philip Larkin, arguably the greatest English-language poet after the modernists, who stopped writing poetry years and years before his death because whatever power had been inspiring him to write poetry withdrew.

Notice how from the start Amis lightly, easily seeds his essay with exactly pertinent quotations from Nabokov, a practice that both deepens our understanding of Nabokov and reassures us that we are in the hands of an essayist who knows his work intimately.

Nabokov composed The Original of Laura, or what we have of it, against the clock of doom (a series of sickening falls, then hospital infections, then bronchial collapse). It is not “A novel in fragments”, as the cover states; it is immediately recognisable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov’s manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling – “bycycle”, “stomack”, “suprize”), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I dare say, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind. “Auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city”: in this we hear an echo of the Nabokovian music. And in the following we glimpse the funny and fearless Nabokovian disdain for our “abject physicality”:

“I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it – the wrong food, heartburn, constipation’s leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet . . .”

Otherwise and in general Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago.

Even as he’s writing in sorrow (he reveres Nabokov, but this last unfinished work is terrible), Amis is linguistically playful, echoing Nabokov’s twisted, antic ways. This is lively, fun prose, with its butterfly homages and alliterations (following, funny, fearless).

Apart from a welcome flurry of interest in the work, the only thing this relic will effect, I fear, is the slight exacerbation of what is already a problem from hell. It is infernal, for me, because I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius. And yet Nabokov, in his decline, imposes on even the keenest reader a horrible brew of piety, literal-mindedness, vulgarity and philistinism. Nothing much, in Laura, qualifies as a theme (ie, as a structural or at least a recurring motif). But we do notice the appearance of a certain Hubert H Hubert (a reeking Englishman who slobbers over a pre-teen’s bed), we do notice the 24-year-old vamp with 12-year-old breasts (“pale squinty nipples and firm form”), and we do notice the fevered dream about a juvenile love (“her little bottom, so smooth, so moonlit”). In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls.

Six fictions: six fictions, two or perhaps three of which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime. The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age.

That should be despoliation, by the way.

But now we have Amis gradually shifting from his general point about the failure of talent as even the greatest writers age (there are exceptions – Bellow wrote Ravelstein in his eighties), to his particular point about the form that failure took in Nabokov. And again, via his subtle, knowing extraction of just the right bits from Nabokov, Amis establishes that writer’s deeply unpleasant obsessive recurrence to the theme of sex with very young girls.

An aesthetic, but not quite a moral, problem, he says. What does that mean? As with his initial provocative assertion, one wants to know more.

The word we want is not the legalistic “paedophilia”, which in any case deceitfully translates as “fondness for children”. The word we want is “nympholepsy”, which doesn’t quite mean what you think it means. It means “frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable”, and is rightly characterised by my COD as literary. As such, nympholepsy is a legitimate, indeed an almost inevitable subject for this very singular talent. “Nabokov’s is really an amorous style,” John Updike lucidly observed: “It yearns to clasp diaphonous exactitude into its hairy arms.” With the later Nabokov, though, nympholepsy crumbles into its etymology – “from Gk numpholeptos ‘caught by nymphs’, on the pattern of EPILEPSY”; “from Gk epilepsia, from epilambanein ‘seize, attack'”.

doesn’t quite mean what you think it means. This is sassy writing, taking liberties with the reader — You think it means this, but it doesn’t. And note how his use of the second person has sort of shifted from being about himself and other writers — as if he were writing this to himself as a sort of exhibitionist meditation — to being a direct address to you out there. You, me, the lot of us reading this essay… The use of the second person is always a touch insolent, with its implicit presumption — you think this, you’re wrong about that — but I think we rather like that insolence. It perks us up, makes us consider whether we want to be defensively at odds with it, or uneasily okay with it, etc.

Amis quotes from another spectacular writer, John Updike, to get at the underlying reason for Nabokov’s nympholepsy; he was a messy, compromised, and corrupted animal searching always for the uncorrupted “diaphonous exactitude” (diaphanous is spelled incorrectly) of youth. But at some point he lost control of the hunt and became the hunted; he fell into a nymphetic frenzy.

More later. Dinner break.

Here’s how the new chair of the board of trustees at one of the major public universities in this country writes.

It’s his letter of application to the university for the position.

I am Chris Kennedy and I am interested in being nominated to the Board of Trustees for one of our nation’s most prestigious universities – The University of Illinois… An institution that embraces innovation, embraces new ideas. An institution that embraces new ideas, embraces its future. The confident attitude that the people from Illinois embrace comes from their comfort with being surrounded by organizations like the University of Illinois that are the best in the world. The University of Illinois has taught us all how to embrace the future. The University of Illinois is an economic incubator. Each year it retains the state’s brightest minds and attracts thousands to our state to live here for four years. Most of them fall in love with the state, with its beautiful lakes and state parks, its vibrant culture, the welcoming nature of its people, and its wonderful communities and neighborhoods in which to raise a family.

Straight from the grave of Leonid Brezhnev. If I were a student — let’s not even talk about a professor — at the University of Illinois, I’d be disgusted. The guy obviously doesn’t give a shit about the place and can’t be bothered to show any respect to the nominating committee.

And they made him chair.

From a letter to the editor of the Dallas Morning News about having real mustangs (the horses) be the new mascots for the Southern Methodist University football team:

… Although I generally love tradition, I have reached the conclusion that it is time to make a new tradition for SMU and its football program, which is itself making huge strides this year to break away from the doldrums that have clouded the program since the 1987 “death penalty” season.

Real Mustangs and the beauty, grace and strength of such magestic steeds enhance, not detract from, the image of the athletic program that the university, Director of Athletics Steve Orsini and Coach June Jones are trying to build…

Let’s mount this magestic steed. Why does it fail to break away from the doldrums?

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First: It’s a short letter, but still manages to feel wordy, cumbersome. Why?

Although I generally love tradition, I have reached the conclusion that it is time…

Redundancy (Two uses of the word I; two uses in this sentence of is; three uses of it.) Just too many words, too many teeny clauses; comes across as pompous somehow. Condense and simplify: I love tradition, but it’s time…

Second: The latter part of the sentence is full of mixed metaphors:

… making huge strides this year to break away from the doldrums that have clouded the program since the 1987 “death penalty” season.

Here the football team walks on water as it strides away from doldrums.

Doldrums are windy, not cloudy.

Third: The writer includes unnecessary quotation marks, which make murkier an already murky sentence. Is he worried that some readers will think the 1987 team was sentenced to death? Does he fret that if he doesn’t put a phrase like sudden death overtime into quotation marks his reader will assume a game’s loser is guillotined?

Write simply, clearly and directly. Anything – verbal or graphic – that complicates things should be tossed.

Fourth:

Real Mustangs and the beauty, grace and strength of such magestic steeds enhance, not detract from…

Nothing brings on sudden prose death like misspelling your most important words. Here, a list of attributes (beauty, grace, strength) functions to lead us to the summarizing high point of majestic… Only everything collapses into laughter when the climactic word turns out to be magestic, like magnesium… And anyway, since majestic steed is a terrible cliche, the writer should have avoided it.

Enhance, not detract from goes back to the wordiness problem. Drop not detract from. It’s pointlessly fussy.

Very pretty example of irony from Tom Powers, a Minnesota Pioneer Press sportswriter.

… [A]thletic departments go about the business of molding young men and women. They teach hard lessons. For example, Brandon Spikes, Florida’s star linebacker, has been suspended for 30 minutes because he attempted to gouge out the eyes of an opponent Saturday.

He must sit out the first half of Saturday’s game against Vanderbilt. Spikes was not successful in removing the eyes of Georgia’s Washaun Ealey, probably because he was wearing a glove and couldn’t get a good grip when he shoved his hand inside the helmet. That’s fortunate for Spikes, who might have been suspended for three full quarters had he succeeded.

[The] University of Minnesota probably appears equally culpable from afar. What is going on over there? The Gophers have had more trouble in one week than some schools have had in a decade.

Well, probably not, actually. Most Division I athletic programs have so many skeletons in their closets that there is little room for shirts and shoes. But the Gophers have had their share of messes to clean up recently.

As Forrest Gump said, “stupid is as stupid does,” which means that the sparkling entrance exam scores of certain Golden Gopher student-athletes may be misleading…

Sure, it’s a little heavy-handed. Whaddyaexpect?

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UD thanks Michael for the link.

… involves Scathing Online Schoolmarm complaining about headlines.

Take this one, from an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about Michael Pollan and others like him with controversial ideas about the food industry, and the way some universities don’t want these people invited to give talks on campus:

FRANK TALK ABOUT FOOD SOMETIMES QUASHED

Point One: Shouldn’t this at least be FRANK TALK ABOUT FOOD SOMETIMES SQUASHED? Then you get frank and squash, two foods.

Point Two: We could be yet more clever and write FRANK SPEAKERS SOMETIMES BEANED.

Point Three: More rad: FRANK… ‘N FRIES.

Sprinkled. Scathing Online Schoolmarm says this is interesting writing. Not sure I would have chosen sprinkled.

Fairy dust is sprinkled. Refreshing spring rains are sprinkled. Little dead squirrel bodies are… what? Lying around campus? Popping up around campus?… Nah…

But anyway. San Jose State University has a problem:

In the past, San Jose State University had a humane way to deal with pesky squirrels—they trapped and released them, according to Pat Lopes Harris, SJSU’s director of media relations. However, budget cuts recently forced the school to turn to more lethal methods when they no longer had the staff to check the traps. The result? Corpses strewn around the campus. [Strewn is just right. Did the writer use sprinkle because she’d already used strewn?] That practice is about to come to an end. After years of routinely poisoning their population of bushy-tailed tree- and burrow-dwellers, the school administration is reportedly “looking into” humane alternatives to industrial strength rat poison as a form of squirrel population control. The campus has had a rampant ground-squirrel infestation for years now, with the little guys chewing away at landscaping and upturning lawns and building foundations. Since the grounds crew began baiting their fluffy nemeses in 2007 [Fluffy nemeses is wild.], it has become a common sight to see little dead squirrel bodies sprinkled around campus in the morning. According to the Spartan Daily, the SJSU student newspaper, the choice method of termination is currently anticoagulants, which “essentially cause the animal victim to bleed to death throughout a period of a few days to a week.” Dead or dying rodents flailing on the ground then become prey for predators like falcons and hawks, which in turn get poisoned.

In the immortal words of UD‘s own fluffy nemesis, La Kid: Yuck.

The University of West Georgia student newspaper did the best it could when a secretary in the music department hanged herself last Wednesday, “during class hours in the Humanities building.”

Since the death occurred in a very public place on campus, it was a news story and had to be reported that way. “The Humanities building was announced as an official crime scene, and everyone was evacuated from the building while classes were in session.” The police needed to make sure she wasn’t murdered.

She was thirty years old. A diabetic, she’d been told by her doctors that parts of her limbs would have to be amputated.

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Her friends speak of her with eloquent simplicity. “[I] spent all day thinking about her as she was when we were younger.”

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It’s a good article, finding a balance between reporting how she died and evoking the person she was. Yet many on the comment thread are upset and offended; for them, the act was private, and reporting on it only increases her family’s anguish.

SOS absolutely knows what they mean; and yet she agrees with the dissenting commenters:

I’m glad the article was written because before the rumored reason for her death was due to a love affair gone bad. This seems much more appropriate.

If she wanted her suicide to remain private, she would have chosen a more secluded location. The West Georgian reports news that relates to the campus, and it is doing its job.

SOS doffs her hat to the editorial staff of the University of Virginia newspaper. Their response to GQ having ranked the school 25th Douchiest is lovely.

And the comments! Even lovelier.

(The school University Diaries has dubbed the worst university in America, the University of Georgia, comes in 13th.)

Scathing Online Schoolmarm will leave to a psychiatrist the close analysis of this language.

Preliminarily, however, what strikes one is the linkage between the moribund verbal formulations throughout, and the inability / unwillingness to grasp reality. Note the final sentence. Note the recommendation of John Calipari as a role model.

SOS attaches to this post a warning: Reading this opinion piece from start to finish is not for everyone. There will be people who cannot continue with it all the way to the end. We recall what Freud told us:

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has wrestled with these demons for years.

She’s not denying that this piece of writing, and writing like it, scathes the scather. But she’s compelled to struggle with it.

What SOS is saying is that if you have no pressing need to go there, you shouldn’t feel bad if you decide to stay away.

… in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune from the president of hopelessly conflicted University of Minnesota. He had to say something; the newspaper’s been all over the many ongoing conflict of interest scandals in the UM medical school.

What he’s produced, though, is too lacking in content for SOS to take hold of anything from it for discussion purposes. The piece makes no reference to particular COI cases — a basic requirement under the circumstances.

If you’re in the mood for meaningless reassurance and groundless self-congratulation, go to it.

University of Manchester professor Annmarie Surprenant, who seems not to read her students’ exams before grading them (background here), has issued a statement in response to press reports about this behavior, now under investigation by her university.

Here tis.

I am quite politically incorrect, outspoken and have never adhered to the oft-repeated and probably excellent advice to ‘watch your back’, because I believe watching one’s back will never move us forward.

This makes me an easy target for a certain type of person. Half-truths, false accusations and malicious gossip readily ruin one’s reputation in the eyes of that certain type of person. But in the end it is your work that stands.

No student has ever been inaccurately or unfairly graded by me, and that stands. [Every exam paper has been double-graded and] diligently and accurately annotated and marked.

While not as bad as Columbia University’s Madonna Constantine, whose corner cutting involved plagiarizing her students’ work, or Bonnie Ashley, Annmarie Surprenant’s statement is quite, quite bad. SOS will now tell you why.

When you’ve been accused of something so bad that it makes the papers, you have a couple of choices. If you’re guilty, and you probably are, you can confess to the behavior, or something short of the behavior but bad nonetheless, and offer a reason or two maybe… The most important thing, though, after acknowledging some fault and expressing willingness to cooperate with investigators, is to shut up.

Bonnie and Madonna, as you see if you’ve clicked on their names, gassed on and on and on. Wrote volumes.

Why shouldn’t you pen your confessions at this point?

Well, because you got into the deep shit you’re in because you’re kind of an idiot, kind of an unpleasant whacked out individual. Specifically, what got you into trouble is a sense of your exemption from the rules other people follow, coupled with a pinch of paranoia. THE MORE YOU WRITE, THE MORE EVERYONE WILL SEE THIS. Your prose will give you away. You’re the sort of person who should never be allowed to testify on your own behalf. The best thing for you to do is shut up.

Annmarie begins her statement with a big fat pat on the back for being so great. She is bold, bold, free as the wind, standing firm at the fierce crosswinds of human progress. And we all know that in repressive countries like England people who go against convention are beaten down. The world is full of evil envious gossipers who will try to destroy your work by destroying you….

Yet Annmarie herself almost destroyed her life’s work a few years ago, by repeatedly lying on grant applications about having earned an MD.

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Surprenant ends with a belligerent insistence on her total innocence.

Like the other two writers I’ve mentioned, Surprenant has broken the cardinal SOS rule to control your emotions. Especially when you’ve been accused of something, you’ve got to stay cool. Why? Because we all learn, from dealing with children, that the guiltier you are of something, the louder your insistence that you’re not guilty is likely to be.

And again – most damning of all – what’s lacking in this statement is any expression of willingness — you could even make it eagerness — to cooperate with investigators.

I’m distressed by the accusation that I’ve been negligent in my grading. I look forward to working with the university investigating committee.

Something like that. Short, calm. Acknowledge you’re upset, by all means. That’s honest. But then stop talking about how you feel and get down to business. Don’t tell me you’re being pilloried for being such a gifted person.

It bothers SOS when writers work hard on their articles or papers and blow off their headline.

Your headline is like a hostess welcoming you into her restaurant. (La Kid’s hostessing this summer at a local ‘thesdan eatery, so SOS has that on her mind.) Does she make you feel welcome? Do you positively want to go in ?

So here’s an Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer’s headline for his Pitino piece:

SEX IN A RESTAURANT, A JOB IN JEOPARDY

Dullsville. Spice it up.

SEX AT A TABLE, FUTURE UNSTABLE

SEX AT A DIVE, WILL HE SURVIVE?

SEX ON A PLATE, PITINOGATE

SEX AND GRUB, THERE’S THE RUB

SEX IN TRATTORIA, SIC TRANSIT GLORIA

… lurks in the unlikeliest places.

Found this toward the end of the comment thread for a New York Times debate on whether direct to consumer television commercials for prescription drugs is a good idea.

(Answer, according to virtually all debaters and commenters:

Are you effing kidding?):

An erection pill called Ta Da? Ta Da! I’m now a vacuous, bourgeois, self-entitled cretin chasing his menopausal, morbidly obese spouse around our stucco McMansion with a raging erection – Ta Da! the American Dream!

There’s more where that came from. The whole thing’s worth reading.

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Results of the debate here.

A fine specimen of writing. A rather long piece, but you keep reading. Not just because the story’s great, but because the mood of the piece feels so real: Stoic, somewhat amused, almost forgiving.

You know how exciting this is for me.

Let me catch my breath.

OK:

So, here’s Use Number One, perfectly fine, correct, as upright and respectable as Ryan O’Neal’s parenting skills:

Is it possible that there is something in the Orthodox community in general and the haredi community in particular that creates fertile ground for this type of fraud? I’ve too often witnessed, here and in Israel, a perverse notion that we few who feel bound by the laws of God are free to flout the laws of man.

Here’s Use Number Two:

There is much to be said about the culture of a haredi community where, as Mark Charendoff, the president of the Jewish Funders Network, points out in a Jewish Week opinion piece , there seems to exist “a perverse notion that we few who feel bound by the laws of God are free to flaunt the laws of man.”

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Mysterious and beautiful are the ways of usage error.

He’s even quoting the first guy!