Pale Fire

Classics for a reason.

Whenever I go back and read, I read Pale Fire a couple years ago.

And I've been doing a thing where I keep up with what's coming out week to week.

So I'm

always like, okay, I've got to get this done before the next one to just take pride in my top ten list at the end of the year.

But two years ago I read Pale Fire.

by Nabokov, and I was like, nothing I've read since has been as good as that.

But it's like, how do you, it's rare that I'll reread something, but for the book club, my picks, it's something I've read before, once, and loved.

I'm reading poetry at the moment.

I'm reading Vladimir Novikov's Pale Fire and the cantos in that.

It's wonderful.

And I look forward to your tattoo.

And Nabokov himself would probably get a kick out of your idea, Milo.

I just imagine thinking about the guy and what he chose to write, like with Palefire.

I also get the sense that Nabokov is one of these dudes that, like, although they have such a great artistic output, I think his taste is kind of... weird like cormac mccarthy is another example of a dude who i do like the artistic output of in general even though i think he's almost ridiculously flawed but he just has like such terrible opinions on other books like he would hate my list because he hated magical realism he didn't even like proust he thought they couldn't even be considered literature and nabokov similarly for someone who loves writing and was so good at it kind of just hated like everything reading his his index he had of like various authors and his short opinions yeah

Dostoevsky for children Conrad for children yeah just moving on yeah

uh i see uh i like it i can do it yeah and

blattery and nabokov book pale fire did a similar thing but and then however you know it like the book begins with the the intro about the you know the whole background context and then after that it's a 10 like like i think like 99 9 no sorry 9999 lines of poem and then it it has its own footnote and and then and the whole chapter with the with the full footnote that itself is a narrative it's narrative itself it's about how someone I think like his neighbor becoming so obsessed with that poem because it spoke to him in some way it's a very jumbled up puzzle of a book wow yeah so so the animation take on the Blair Witch Project is so yeah it's animators you know trying to solve a puzzle pieces and then the end And their narrative is just discussing how, trying to figure out how it exactly happened.

And it's just more like a creative process, you know, drama, you know, and they use, they use like a, they use like a, that era of animation software.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And since we are in the postmodern section here, number 46 is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.

I have read that.

It was at your recommendation.

He just also happens to be a genius.

But if you read books like Panin, and certainly Lolita, but also Pale Fire and Laughed in the Dark, this is a man who just has so much hatred and condescension in his heart.

And he like...

He's just always making fun and ruthlessly mocking.

but the name Lord Kinbo itself...

It comes from Nabokov's wonderful book, Pale Fire, Kimbo being the mysterious narrator commentator who you're not really sure where he's from because he's from this fictional country that he just constantly talks about seemingly.

I highly recommend that book if anybody hasn't read it.

It is so much fun.

It's like I keep finding all of these little references in the episode to stuff within the UFO community, conspiracy community, whatever.

This

is also exactly what Pale Fire is like.

Yeah, like it is an endless sort of scavenger hunt of references.

Hopefully that won't happen, but it is in there.

When I decided that that's what I was going to be doing, I went away and re-read Pale Fire by Nabokov, which is a book I really like.

Because I just thought, how much poetry will people tolerate in a book? And that's got way more poetry than mine.

It begins with a thousand-line poem.