Without Lifting A Finger

Got stuck in the ER last night (luckily, a false alarm for a young relation). Got a lot of reading done. Pnin has so many great "licks," and reads like a walk (a cakewalk)  in the park. * A few fave excerpts: Genius is non-conformity. At two, Victor did not make little spiral scribbles to express buttons or portholes, as a million tots do, why not you? Lovingly he made his circles perfectly round and perfectly closed. A three-year-old child, when asked to copy a square, shapes one recognizable corner and then is content to render the rest of the outline as wavy or circular; but Victor at three not only copied the researcher's (Dr. Liza Wind's) far from ideal square with contemptuous accuracy but added a smaller one beside the copy. There is, for instance, the Kent-Rosanoff Absolutely Free Association Test, in which little Joe or Jane is asked to respond to a Stimulus Word, such as table, duck, music, sickness, thickness, low, deep, long, happiness, fruit, m...

Probably not too far off the mark: Next, they switched to the usual shop talk of European teachers abroad, sighing and shaking heads over the "typical American college student" who does not know geography, is immune to noise, and thinks education is but a means to get eventually a remunerative job.

Pninism: "I search, John, for the viscous and sawdust" = I search, Joan, for the whiskey(s) and soda" * The pencil figures hugely in Invitation to a Beheading and, though foggy from distance, there's a wonderfully magic passage in Transparent Things re this writing implement (I believe, along with the index card, it was Nabokov's weapon of choice). Anyway, here's a third paean to the pencil in Pnin: With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener -- that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticon-deroga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.

          Started re-reading Nabokov's Pnin .     A few early underscores:   languid Eileen Lane, whom somebody had told that by the time one had mastered the Russian alphabet one could practically read "Anna Karamazov" in the original A race was run between the doctor's fat golden watch and Timofey's pulse (an easy winner) his greatest course (with an enrollment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense "I must warn: will have all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation" Pninizing his new quarters It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks