In the last ten hours

I've managed to throw together all of my notes for Pale Fire. It's something. I also found yet another article. I don't know which is worse: the sheer volume of criticism surrounding Pale Fire, or the complete lack of scholarly attention to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Cat's Cradle has a lot of criticism surrounding it as well, of course, but not as much as Nabokov, I think. Maybe I just haven't looked as hard. Anyway, the article I found tonight is from 1985, so I was sort of hoping it would be irrelevant, but it turns out it's all about Hazel, which makes it potentially very relevant. For the section on Pale Fire, I have decided (a bit more than tentatively at this point) to write about the representation of two catastrophes: Hazel's suicide (as narrated by her father, John Shade, in the poem) and John Shade's murder (as narrated by Charles Kinbote in the commentary). These seem to me to be the most traumatic events in the text, but as such they've garnered a considerable amount of attention, though not necessarily (though partially) from the angle I'm taking.

I should probably read Freud...

I'm reading Memoires for Paul de Man by Jacques Derrida at the moment. Bottom line is that I can always concentrate on my close reading for this draft and work in some theory for the next go round, right?

I'm panicking. I'm starting to panic. It's 5:30 in the morning and I'm starting to freak out. I will be fine. I'm going to go attempt to turn my brain off now, and then I will attempt to get up at a reasonable hour. I set my alarm this morning, but it was so darn loud I was more concerned with turning it off than getting out of bed. No wait, that was yesterday. This morning was rather fabulous. It snowed a ton last night, I love it. I'm such a little kid when it comes to snow. I was out in the city with friends and just standing outside, letting the flakes cover my hair and eyelashes and coat.

We had this very strange conversation last night, which I sort of stumbled into the middle of so I don't know what started it, about making a language an official language and dictating language, the legality of one language over another, reclaiming some sort of pre-colonial past, what having a thriving literature means for a language, what colonizers killing off all the intelligentsia does to a language, living vs. may as well be dead languages, that sort of thing. Hegemony. I, of everyone at the table, had very little room to talk. My Spanish sucks, my French sucks, my German sucks, and the only thing I know how to say in Polish is "May I have an ashtray, please?" What can ya do?