Church went fine yesterday. My plan of spending more time reading and playing music at home seems to be working out okay.  It still needs some tweaking.

I am struggling with Bryan Boyd’s Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I am almost fifty pages from the end and have learned a lot from this book. But I find myself disagreeing with some of his conclusion even while trying to keep an open mind.

One of the characters in the book is named Gradus. Boyd mentions the concept of Gradus ad Parnassum. The phrase means “steps to Parnassus” and is used in various ways historically. It caught my attention because of Debussy’s piano piece, “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum.’ Boyd doesn’t make the connection but some others do.

Using the interwebs I discovered that Nabokov had a Golliwog doll when he was a kid. You know. Golliwog of “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” which is in the same collection as “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum,” The Children’s Corner.

I think this is significant for Pale Fire because the novel revolves around a father/daughter relationship and Debussy wrote The Children’s Corner for his daughter. This cannot have been entirely lost on Nabokov. I’m still poking around to find the connection.

I did find a very interesting take on using Golliwog’s Cakewalk when teaching piano these days. Ionarts: Golliwog’s Cakewalk Essentially the dude approaches a bit like Mark Twain’s n-word books. Teach it and grab the moment to learn stuff from students as well as being as honest as possible about it. I like that.

I listened to James Carville’s June 17th Oxford Union talk. Here’s a link but I’m not necessarily recommending it since he does his usual stream of consciousness rambling. I like Carville. I was happy to hear he thinks that the Democrats will win the presidency bakc in 2020. I wonder what he thinks now that we are in the throes of impeachment.

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I was surprised that my newest edition of Finnegans Wake has an extensive intro, synopsis, biblio, and list of online links. This is one. I have already found it but this inspired me to go back and check it out again. I am working hard on slowly rereading  Finnegans Wake. I’m having lots of fun with it.

And then there’s this.

Don’t Panic: It’s only Finnegans Wake. Great little video on how to pronounce the first thunderword. I didn’t know that the thunder words in the book are made up of words for thunder in languages. Very very cool.