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Tag Archives: Vladimir Nabokov
pale fire: aesthetics of contempt
Vladimir Nabokov and Pale Fire. Much less well known than Lolita and certainly his strangest work… Pale Fire is a tease to the reader, a farcical caricature of scholarship… The sensitive reader dislike being teased, unless it is done with … Continue reading
pale fire: the big wordy tease
Vladimir Nabokov and Pale Fire. Not his best work, but clearly one of the stranger literary offerings… Like Lolita, it is a study in obsessional insanity and a satire on the European intellectual in America. It is also the reconstruction … Continue reading
pale fire: study in obsessional insanity
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Not his best, but one of his strangest… The novel is clearly a little masterpiece of ingenuity. Shade’s poem itself is charming. The gradual self-exposure of Kinbote’s insane mind is skillful. There is even some comic … Continue reading
hollow laughter
Most fiction pretends to be “real”: while we read, we believe. And the author himself, while he writes, also frequently believes. But there are certain stories that are contrived, and are meant to seem contrived, acting parts in which the … Continue reading
Chess a genteel game? … full-contact body and mind
Not all chess matches have had a happy, sportsmanlike end.Does chess encourage violence or discourage it? It may not be a leisure activity of refinement and erudition that many outsiders hold the image of it to be. In fact the … Continue reading
Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Miscellaneous, Music/Composition/Performance
Tagged Aleister Crowley, Bobby Fischer, Chess, Chess boxing, Edward Lasker, Fernando Pessoa, Irving Finkel Lewis Chessmen, Judith Polgar, Lewis Chessmen, Ralph Charell, Simon Armitage, Stanley Kubrick, Thomas Rendall, Vladimir Nabokov
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Finding bobby fisher: Back to Iceland?
Maybe the celebrated American chess champion knew something, a secret on the game he never disclosed. On the isle of Lewis on the outer fringe of the Northern Hebrides, the existence of giant chessmen does not go unnoticed. Here, as … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Miscellaneous, Visual Art/Sculpture/etc.
Tagged Bobby Fischer, Danny Yee, David H. Caldwell, Dylan Loeb McClain, Harry Potter, Irving Finkel, Irving Finkel Lewis Chessmen, Jan Newton, Jeremy Silman, Lewis Chessmen, Maev Kennedy, Marcel Duchamp, Reuben Fine, Richard Reti, Rudolf Spielman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Taylor Edgar, Tim Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov
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JANE AUSTEN: ESSENTIAL AMBIGUITIES OF THE HEART
…and iron butterflies in the soul. Which “Belle du Jour” to rattle the ghosts in the cage of moral sentiments. Maybe men should get off the couch and take the trouble to find out instead of making virtue out of … Continue reading
Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Miscellaneous, Modern Arts/Craft
Tagged Billie Piper, Catherine Deneuve, Claudia Johnson, D.W. Harding, David Lodge, Edouard Manet, Elizabeth Jenkins, F.R. Leavis, George Lewes, Horace Walpole, Howard Jacobson, Ian Watt, Inger Signun Brodey, Irene Collins, J.S. Clarke, Jan Fergus, Jane Austen, Jon Spence, Judy Dench, Lionel Trilling, Luis Bunuel, Margaret Drabble, Marilyn Butler, Michael Kellner, Monica Lawlor, Monteiro Belisa, Nancy Butler Jane Austen, Pamela Mooman, Paula Byrne, R.W. Chapman, Robert Morrison, Sir Walter Scott, Sonny Liew, Vladimir Nabokov
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PULLING THE BEARD OF THE KING
“I would say that our patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful. Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Miscellaneous, Modern Arts/Craft, Music/Composition/Performance, Visual Art/Sculpture/etc.
Tagged Albert S. Gerard, Allen Ginsberg, Anton Boisen, Ben Heppner, Charles Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Erich Heller, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Maciunas, Goethe, Hegel, Isaac Luria, Jack Kerouac, Jacob Burckhardt, Jacques Lacan, Jake Heggie, James Gillray, James Joyce, John Lennon, Kafka, Karl Marx, Martin Wasserman, Michael Garfield, Michel Foucault, Peter Orlovsky, Renana Elran, Robbe-Grillet, Rudolf Otto, Sanford L. Drob, Shakespeare, Steve Smith, The Grateful Dead, The Last Poets, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Viktor Frankl, Vladimir Nabokov, Yoko Ono
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LOST BERLIN:BABYLON & BOOGIE AT THE BRANDENBURG GATE
A macabre gaiety pervaded Berlin like an intoxicating smog. There was no shortageof drink, drugs, or beautiful women. “There are two kinds of places,” wrote a contemporary of Bertolt Brecht, ” those one talks about, and those one doesn’t talk … Continue reading
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Tagged Anita Berber, Bertolt Brecht, Dave Riley, Dita Von Teese, Duke Ellington, Erich Maria Remarque, Fassbinder, George Grosz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jason Lutes, Joel Dorn, John Fuegi, Josephine Baker, Katherine Farmar, Kurt Weill, Leni Riefenstahl, Liza Minelli, Luigi Bazini, Marlene Dietrich, Mel Gordon, Nina Hagen, Robert J. Sternberg, Rosa Luxemburg, Sander L. Gilman, Scott J. Thompson, Shinan Govani, Solomon Asch, Stephen Lemons, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Walter Benjamin, Werner Fassbinder, Wolf Von Eckardt
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BLOOD FLOWERS & HEADS ON THE DOOR
A genre of fiction which first gained popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epistolary novel is a form in which most or all of the plot is advanced by the letters or journal entries of one or more … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Miscellaneous
Tagged Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Dickens, Duncan Quinn, E. Derek Taylor, Ellen Moody, George Butte, George Eliot, Hans Baldung, Heather Carroll, Henry Fuseli, James Boswell, Jane Austen, Jane Collier, Jocelyn Harris, John Stevenson, John William Waterhouse, Jolene Zigarovich, Jonathan Swift, kathryn Steele, Leslie Stephen, Lisa Zunshine, Margaret D. Carroll, Mary Davys, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Saskia Wickham, Sean Beam, Sean Bean, Sigmund Freud, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov
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