Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Back from slightly more than a week in DC, where I ushered in a new birthday with expensive gin and whisky, saw this Sigur Rós show [clickable link to listen/will be podcast soon, I'm told] with Nate, and bummed around figuring out how to walk around NW DC. Played with the birthday iPod, found out its photo capacity is nice but gimmicky (no way to edit, rename, or delete photos once they're on(!), edited apace, and received, among other things...

A subscription to Library Thing from Nick! Online personal library indexing? Mmmmmm...

One odd note: I spent the trip home reading through Nabokov's Pnin (Nate found he had a brace of them) and came upon the following passage:

"He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen--no, twelve days late) and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis."

Now that last bit threw me quite for a loop, but I was eventually, after some scrutiny, fortunate enough to puzzle it out as the oddest day-of-the-week abbreviation I've yet seen. It's trying to find the significance of the word break--my best guess is that Pnin only taught four days a week, so motuweth on, frisas off? Still, hats off to Nabokov--he can't quite sustain the humor of the first chapter, but it's a nice little work, for what my opinion is worth.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Goody, an update!

Tim said...

Hey. I'm the LibraryThing guy, so I came because I saw it on Technorati. But who cares—PNIN IS MY FAVORITE NOVEL! I hope you liked it. It improves with each reading. There's a good literary criticism of it, Phantom of fact : a guide to Nabokov's Pnin by Gennadi Barabtarlo (1989). It is, in a way, as clever as Ada or Lolita.

Andrew said...

Thanks for the comment, and permit me to gush about LibraryThing. And the paid subcription I received as a birthday gift. Wow, that thing is awesome.

And any book I'm re-reading out of order (to see if I can pick up random snippets I may have missed) just after I finished...Pnin was pretty nice, indeed.

Anonymous said...

Also, something completely different

from tomorrow onwards count the days untill your Bday package arrives !

Anonymous said...

Great quote. Anyway, true the book does taper off a bit at the end, but I still think Pnin is his best crafted character.