It was mentioned that it would good for us to designate a 'commonplace' site on our blogs for favorite lines from N. that we come across, and of which there are certain to be many. I determine here and now to try to put in my 'commonplace selection at the end of every entry. his may be a helpful stratagem pour moi. Being a colossal nerd and having already read Lolita, Speak Memory and Pale Fire I was unsure quite how to precede. Now I think I do.


A place of pleasure(that sounds so wrong I just realized) is necessary to establish, since N. doesn't the pleasures of adjectives and puns, or puzzles. His writings are designed to be like puzzles and games or parody, which to N. is the same thing; parody is not to be confused with satire, which intends to teach a lesson. N. is not didactic author. Yet, strangely, it was mentioned in class that N. and Oscar Wilde(who proclaimed "There are no moral or immoral books only well-written books and badly-written books")may just be the two most moral writers there are. Hmm...

COMMONPLACE

We include today a quote of N.'s mentioned in lecture--"The word "real" is the only word that must be in quotation marks."--and the final sentance of the first paragraph of Lolita: "Look on this tangle of thorns."