Have had scores of emails (well, none, really), wondering how Summer of Nabokov turned out. It went swell! Did not read all the ones I intended...books like The Defense (ooh! chess!...zzz.zz.z) will have to wait.
In unpacking boxes of books (yes, still unpacking!), I picked out a copy of Strong Opinions, the Great Man's collected interviews. Dude drops super-duper one liners and, yes, strong opinions on every page:
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
On Freud (whom he loathes [but, if you had written Lolita, wouldn't you?]):
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be
cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I
really do not care.
ZING!
Or this:
One often hears writers talk of how a character takes hold of them and in a
sense dictates the course of the action. Has this ever been your
experience?
I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience!
Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane.
Or the no-room-for-debate declarations (there are many) such as:
Neither Gogol nor Tolstoy nor Chekhov were distinguished versificators.
Take that!
He also talks about his reading method ("...bedside heap of a dozen volumes" described as "dwind[ling] to two or three...usually in the space of a week") and damn, I do the same thing! Not in a week, though, and half the books are old Sergio Aragones MAD Magazine comps and books about cats. But no matter! Right now, for instance, I'm reading Strong Opinions as a palate cleanser between every 50 pages or so of the The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, who, in my best Nabokovian, I will say, while I'm happy for him to have won the Nobel Prize, writes like a Turkish Richard Russo. Zing!
In fact, yes, I will start making ever more imperious declarations about whatever slides past my glims..."This saag lacks backbone..." etc.
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