R.S. Gwynn on "Pale Fire"

I just got the boxed set of "Pale Fire" with essays by Brian Boyd and R.S. Gwynn. It's a beautifully crafted edition by Berkeley's Gingko Press. Nice surprises once you take off the plastic wrap: blind tooling on an inner cover echos the title on the front, recessed pasted-in artwork, also revealed when you open the box, and the essays have a pasted-on title. The book cloth is sturdy and masculine, not at all "precious"...perfect textures for reading the text as a tactile experience...and most fun of all, Gwynn goes about to show that Stanford's Yvor Winters is the main prototype for John Shade, not Robert Frost....lots to enjoy here. In a dyslexic moment I googled R.S. Gwinn, who has posted a bio under Wikipeetia for people like me who misspell his name....where he's identified as an amirican poet....love it!

I read about this edition recently and the discussion it generated of the poem itself, its beauty and merit, or lack thereof.

Here it is, if you can tolerate that meddler Ron Rosenbaum:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2010/07/freeing_pale_fire_from_...

>1 ElenaDanielson: I'm in! Time to get myself a Christmas present.

>2 DanMat: Thanks for sharing the article; it's what pushed me over the edge.

Thanks for the link!

Just went to a talk by Martin Amis, who said he considers Nabokov the best novelist of the 20th century....(not Dad!) - Elena

Ooh! Tell us more!

Amis has been beating the drum for Nabokov for a long time. And rightly so...

MA was a bit contradictory, not unusual in off the cuff stuff. On the distinction between spontaneous genius and disciplined talent, he said the first contracts with age as the second expands over time. Then Amis said that Nabokov's late work "Ada" (which he dislikes) had genius but not enough talent. I asked about the posthumous "Laura," which I don't think should have been published. Amis agreed it was VN's weakest, but that publishing it served the higher purpose of reviving interest in VN...not sure I agree.