Man, poetry is hard.

So I’ve been enjoying myself with this Chinese New Year break thing, and surprisingly I haven’t been spending much of it getting shitfaced (only once! And only moderately so). Been catching up with some reading, right now I’m trying to finish Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and hot damn, it’s SO hilares. Like this (excuse the looooongness):

Now there is nothing a lonesome man relishes more than an impromptu birthday part, and thinking—nay, feeling certain—that my unattended telephone had been ringing all day, I blithely dailed the Shades’ number, and of course it was Sybil who answered.

“Bon soir, Sybil.”

“Oh, hullo, charles. Had a nice trip?”

“Well, to tell you the truth—”

“Look, I know you want John but he is resting right now, and I’m frightfully busy. He’ll call you back later, okay?”

“Later when—tonight?”

“No, tomorrow, I guess. There goes that doorbell. Bye-bye.”

Strange. Why should Sybil have to listen to doorbells when, besides the maid and the cook, two white-coated hired boys were around? False pride prevented me from doing what I should have done—taken my royal gift under my arm and serenely marched over to that inhospitable house. Who knows—I might have been rewarded at the back door with a drop of kitchen sherry. I still hoped there had been a mistake, and Shade would telephone. It was a bitter wait, and the only effect that the bottle of champagne I drank all alone now at this window, now at that, had on me was a bad crapula (hangover).

From behind a drapery, from behind a box tree, through the golden veil of evening and through the black lacery of night, I kept watching that dawn, that drive, that fanlight, those jewel-bright windows. The sun had not yet set when, at a quarter past seven, I heard the first guest’s car. Oh, I saw them all. I saw ancient Dr. Sutton, a snowy-headed, perfectly oval little gentleman arrive in a tottering Ford with his tall daughter, Mrs. Starr, a war widow. I saw a couple, later identified for me as Mr. Colt, a local lawyer, and his wife, whose blundering Cadillac half entered my driveway before retreating in a flurry of luminous nictitation. I saw a world-famous old writer, bent under the incubus of literary honors and his own prolific mediocrity, arrive in a taxi out of a dim times of yore when Shade and he had been joint editors of a little review. I saw Frank, the Shades’ handyman, depart in the station wagon. I saw a retired professor of ornithology walk up from the highway where he had illegally parked his car. I saw, ensconced in their tiny Pulex, manned by her boy-handsome tousled-haired girl friend, the patroness of the arts who had sponsored Aunt Maud’s last exhibition. I saw Frank return with the New Wye antiquarian, purblind Mr. Kaplun, and his wife, a dilapidated eagle. I saw a Korean graduate student in dinner jacket come on a bicycle, and the college president in baggy suit come on foot. I saw, in the performance of their ceremonial duties, in light and shadow, and from window to window, where like Martians the martinis and highballs cruised, the two white-coated youths from the hotel school, and realized that I knew well, quite well, the slighter of the two. And finally, at half past eight (when, I imagine, the lady of the house had begun to crack her finger joints as was her impatient wont) a long black limousine, officially glossy and rather funereal, glided into the aura of the drive, and while the fat Negro chauffeur hastened to open the car door, I saw, with pity, my poet emerge from his house, a white flower in his buttonhole and a grin of welcome on his liquor-flushed face.

Next morning, as soon as I saw Sybil drive away to fetch Ruby the maid who did not sleep in the house, I crossed over with the prettily and reproachfully wrapped up carton. In front of their garage, on the ground, I noticed a buchmann, a little pillar of library books which Sybil had obviously forgotten there. I bent towards them under the incubus of curiosity: they were mostly by Mr. Faulkner; and the next moment Sybil was back, her tires scrunching on the gravel right behind me. I added the books to my gift and placed the whole pile in her lap. That was nice of me—but what was that carton? Just a present for John. A present? Well, was it not his birthday yesterday? Yes, it was, but after all are not birthdays conventions? Conventions or not, but it was my birthday too—small difference of sixteen years, that’s all. Oh my! Congratulations. And how did the party go? Well, you know what such parties are (here I reached in my pocket for another book—a book she did not expect). Yes, what are they? Oh, people whom you’ve known all your life and simply must invite once a year, men like Ben Kaplun and Dick Colt with whom we went to school, and that Washington cousin, and the fellow whose novels you and John think so phony. We did not ask you because we knew how tedious you find such affairs. This was my cue.

“Speaking of novels,” I said, “you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an insufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described—by Cocteou, I think— as ‘a mirage of suspended gardens,’ and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski’s (and Lyovin’s) thick neck, and a cupid’s buttocks for cheeks; but—and now let me finish sweetly—we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau tenebreux the capacity of evoking ‘human interest”: it is there, it is there—maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeen-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it I bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing.”

That passage was even more hilares the 2nd time around having the time to type it out slowly and picking up on all the under-the-breath parlance.

I’ve also tried to write, and motherfucker it’s so hard to pick it up again after that part of the brain has been dormant for so long. All I have to show for is a goddamn quatrain:

The green trees from childhood cannot be
the same as yours. As with the temperament
of the darkened room we so casually imagine
along my mention of city traffic sounds.

I kinda like it, but what the hell am I supposed to do with it? I hate writing prompts so how can I jumpstart the writing brain without suffering some SUPREME TRAGEDY? That should be a name for a pizza.

I really don’t got much to say, I just wanted to type out the Nabokov massage. But my friend will be arriving in 14 hours! So much for not drinking during the break. Well I best be going then & finish up Pale Fire lest I wanna pick it up again after my friend’s departure with the (likely) mental capacity of a retardog.