Nabokovilia: Stephen King's "Fair Extension" (from Full Dark, No Stars)
This bit is actually likely not Nabokovilia, but there given that King has nodded at Nabokov before, there is a slim chance that it might be. Here it is, from "Fair Extension" (in the collection Full Dark, No Stars
):
"No, no, no! This isn't some half-assed morality tale. I'm a business-man, not a character out of 'The Devil and Daniel Webster.' All I'm saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I'm going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you'd better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things
." (269)
More choice bits from Full Dark plus the rest of the Stephen King Nabokovilia below the fold.
Stephen King on outlet malls (see too this bit on outlet malls from Put This On):
And on storytelling:
The Plant, Part 1
From The Regulators
):"No, no, no! This isn't some half-assed morality tale. I'm a business-man, not a character out of 'The Devil and Daniel Webster.' All I'm saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I'm going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you'd better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things
." (269)More choice bits from Full Dark
plus the rest of the Stephen King Nabokovilia below the fold.Stephen King on outlet malls (see too this bit on outlet malls from Put This On):
...and half a dozen other oversized retail operations of the sort that are called "outlets" (as if they were sewer drains rather than shopping locations). (283)
And on storytelling:
Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do -- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street. (366)More Nabokovilia:
The Plant, Part 1
With your concurrence, I'm returning 15 book-length manuscripts which arrived unsolicited (see Returns, next page), 7 'outlines and sample chapters' and 4 unidentifiable blobs that look a bit like typescripts. One of them is a book of something called 'gay event poetry' called Suck My Big Black Cock, and another, called L'il Lolita, is about a man in love with a first grader. I think. It's written in pencil and it's hard to tell for sure.
(...)
P.P.S. L'il Lolita is actually a pretty good title, don't you think? We could commission it. I'm thinking maybe Mort Yeager, he's got a touch for that sort of thing. RememberTeenage Lingerie Show? The girl in L'il Lolita could be eleven, I think -- wasn't the original Lolita twelve?
From Black House
(written with Peter Straub)
(written with Peter Straub)They began with Chester Himes and Charles Willeford, changed gear with a batch of contemporary novels, floated through S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, and ventured emboldened into fictional mansions erected by Ford Madox Ford and Vladimir Nabokov. (Marcel Proust lies somewhere ahead, they understand, but Proust can wait; at present they are to embark upon Bleak House.)
From The Regulators
Good agent that he was, he had managed to maintain a neutral, if slightly glazed, smile on the ride from the airport, but the smile began to slip when they entered the suburb of Wentworth (which a sign proclaimed to be OHIO'S "GOOD CHEER COMMUNITY!), and it gave way entirely when his client, who had once been spoken of int he same breath with John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and (after Delight) Vladimir Nabokov, pulled into the driveway of the small and perfectly anonymous suburban house on the corner of Poplar and Bear.
On Sentiment
:Yeah, well. We are all quite sentimental, a word that Nabokov defended. He wrote of Dickens and the death of Little Jo in Bleak House, I will not allow you to describe this as sentimental: people who use that word have no idea what sentiment is...(The rest at Prospect magazine.)