that one made me laugh so much. also the whole Eystein thing was genius. here, mad, hilarious nonsensical Kimbote lampoons replacing a "painting of an object" with the "real object" itself:
Eystein had resorted to a weird form of trickery: he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device had disclosed the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.
A portrait representing a former Keeper of the Treasure, decrepit Count Kernel, who was painted with fingers resting lightly on an embossed and emblazoned box whose side facing the spectator consisted of an inset oblong made of real bronze, while upon the shaded top of the box, drawn in perspective, the artist had pictured a plate with the beautifully executed, twin-lobed, brainlike, halved kernel of a walnut. The receptacle, an oblong hole in the wall, was there all right; it contained nothing, however, except the broken bits of a nutshell.
The shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.
Bonus (Golf):
Lass, see Mass.
Mass, Mars, Mare, see Male.
Male, see Word golf.
Word golf, S 's predilection for it, 819; see Lass.
i have more to write on this, but it is also auto-biographical.
the fact is it was thanks to sleuthing over the Sonny Boy settei materials (https://github.com/sonnyboysettei/official), ultimately making the connection to Pale Fire, which led me to look for the Japanese version of Pale Fire, which explains so much about Sonny Boy. especially the concept of "rendaku" (muddied voice, or mediated "rendered (renda) reality") where, interestingly, waxwing is "renjaku", which led me to the solipsist Jungian interpretation of Mizuho's Grandma Nozomi with dementia (see the Go-Old glasses image of Nozomi) cradling her most treasured images of herself, as Aunt Maud
it has to do with Thrice of Evangelion, of Hideaki Anno and staff saying "Goodbye, All of Evangelion", and Shingo Natsume directing the music video for the song that says "DON'T SAY GOODBYE" Thrice, except at the end where the line was repeated another time. this is rather mindblowing to me personally. and i also found freaky references to my published works, even my "name" on the Sonny Boy credits, that while i rationally establish as pure "Stand Alone Complex" coincidence (unrelated individuals that never interacted with each other ending up the same due to syncing with the "Culture Industry"/consuming the same media)
i'll notify you if you're interested/also a fan of Sonny Boy/Pale Fire.
it makes sense, because Sonny Boy is also the "masc" version of Revolutionary Girl Utena, who borrowed many images from Pale Fire, especially of a bird crashing into the reflected sky of a windowpane, and you can see this as a main motif in Sonny Boy of birds. i'm not sure if i'm the first to make the connection with Pale Fire, but it is something that i arrived on my own, as someone who has a personal history with Pale Fire (quoting "smudge of ashen fluff" in my ... juvenile last words some time ago) and as someone who was influenced by Evangelion to the same apocalyptic degree as Shingo Natsume. one can say it was Sonny Boy is an arrant thief whose Pale Fire he stole from the sun of Utena, who stole from Pale Fire. but Sonny Boy has 4-fold (well imagine a a picture folded in half, twice, which divides the picture into quadrants) the cinematic grammar complexity of Kubrick's 2001, which i held viewings and discussions with students and faculty who wrote a book about it.
a pleasure! like i said, my first reading echoes yours and most others. my second reading echoes Nabokov's derisive snort towards the first. all the same, both deal with the dual-ity of objective/subjective, both within the poem (real/reflection) and without (canonical/interpretation). here abridged, Nabokov reveals the temporal dysphoria embodied by King Kinbote and his wife Queen Disa, as well as the self-hatred of gender dysphoria culminating into self-realization and the most delicate expression of self-compassion:
There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes.
I am thinking of lines in which Shade describes his wife. Sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Disa at thirty bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
The heart of his dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends. Worries assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, took into account changes of fashion; but the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her.
The dream was a constant refutation of his not loving her.
this is the greatest verse in the history of literature. the greatest of sensibilities expressed in any form. it presents Kinbote as self-evident reality (simulacrum), not Professor V. Botkin's nor Nabokov's delusion, that allows Shade to paint Disa from Sybil. the same Kinbotes serenading Disas by a hospice bedside, by a photograph, by a mirror, by a grave. i switched the order for effect, as the last bit about self-compassion is a genius dual negative sleight of hand. the bit about writing poems echoes an interview with Robert Frost (whose symbolist poetry Shade reflects and Kinbote subverts): "If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything." here is some mad, hilarious nonsense from Kimbote lampooning Eystein's trompe l'oeil replacing a painting with what was painted:
Eystein had resorted to a weird form of trickery: he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device had something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein's talent, but the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.
the notes are far more beautiful than the poem for the fact that replacing Disa with Sybil is replacing a painting with what was painted, where Disa is the "plain unretouched likeness" of Shades' painting, and without Kinbote's mad, hilarious nonsense the poem is a mere "idealized and stylized picture." without Kinbote, Shade merely licks the symbols of Frost on the windowpane. because Kinbote is the Shadow of the symbol slain, uniting the viewer and the view.
imagine subverting the greatest symbolist poet with the invention of postmodern simulacrum before it was cool.
Bonus:
The shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.
i had a second reading, and i am convinced it is the greatest work of Art. a lot of people, myself included, bit the ruse that Kinbote was some parody of a mad man and ignored everything but the poem. but the notes have the most beautiful verses in the history of literature, even more beautiful, far more beautiful than the poem.
spoiler: it is just one mind (solipsism). it deals with all kinds of dysphoria, especially gender and temporal (age). Nabokov misdirects away from psychoanalysis with the Freudian hate, but the Jung anima/animus and shadow are obvious. for historiographical background, Nabokov's brother died in the Holocaust where he was taken for being homosexual, and dealt at the time with both the Red and Lavender Scare of McCarthyism. there is a full stanza in the poem about Shade shaving his/her leg. and the, depending on context, hilarious or melancholic references to the loss of "crown jewels". references to "complications of an operation" as well. it is plausible that all of this is a product of Aunt Maud's dementia, where we see Maud's "handsome" lover (older woman) and patron welcomed by Shade in his birthday.
the "dual" in dual blue is in the context of chess puzzles where there are two solutions when one is ideal. indeed the novel was set up to show a most brilliant set up of stealing the "Pale Fire" of the poem into the "Pale Fire" of the novel with notes, and this still holds regardless whether it is all Professor Botkin and Kinbote his mind's reflection in the "mirrorland" of Zembla (which is the pre-Soviet Russia in Nabokov's head that no longer exist).
to me, of all Pale Fire derivatives such as Infinite Jest (a nod to lifting a title from Shakespeare) by Wallace, Gravity's Rainbow by Nabokov's student at Cornell who in a previous work "borrowed" Nabokov's Sebastian Knight, and Danielewski's House of Leaves, Danielewski succeeds in emulating Nabokov's most delicate romanticism above a semiotician's sensibilities, especially in exploring the archetypal in the architectural through Bachelard and Derrida.
but after my second reading, none of its echoes could compare to the original arrant thief.
if you are open to other forms, as someone who is a disciple of Godard and Kubrick, who organized viewing and discussion of 2001 with students and faculty, i can say that the animated work Sonny Boy is a direct adaptation of Pale Fire (i.e. a solipsist dysphoria) and surpasses the masters of cinema and animation (Shingo Natsume's mentor is the peerless genius Masaaki Yuasa) with his cinematic "grammar". i am on my phone and will update this with references from the book once i get my laptop (i only use hn with my phone).
i wish i could quote Kinbote's diss on those who read the poem and stopped at that. after my second read i felt completely bamboozled and could hear Nabokov's prerecorded snorts echoing through time just to ridicule my myopic mind.
if it helps, i did keto fasting for weight loss monitored using a blood ketone meter, ate close to zero calories of korean konjac jelly and zero sugar drinks. and the drastic mental health benefit was a welcome surprise for me. even my physical energy felt infinite. but i experienced exactly what you described after hitting my target weight, very roughly at 15% body fat. at that point the fat burning noticeably slows down and my blood ketone levels drop. important to note that this is at a miraculously stable nondiabetic 70mg/dL glucose level, and zero intake of anything that may induce insulin production. a bite of chicken breast made me lose ketosis and felt the energy loss after a bit so there is that, the biggest confounding var will always be anything you eat that triggers insulin release that instantly halts ketosis, that can only be reactivated hours later. some other "paradoxical" benefit is control of appetite/absence of hunger pangs: https://brainresilience.stanford.edu/news/unlocking-secrets-...
wait, you just gave me an extreme epiphany about my significantly worse right eye myopia. the divergence definitely snowballed from the "use it or lose it" thing and me not wearing my glasses as much as possible
i like Infinite Jest, but among the "derivatives" of Nabokov's Pale Fire (the "original" postmodern novel + parody of academic hogwash with protos in Nabokov's earlier works; possible earlier proto in Poe's aesthetic defense of his poem The Raven), including Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Danielewski's House of Leaves, nothing touches Danielewski's semiotic sensibilities in deconstruction and architecture and his ultimate subversion of this "derivative" form of the postmodern novel (nonspoiler hint: having to "physically" llight the previous leaf/page to see the next). Still, I just reread Pale Fire recently, and missed the "Jung" context obscured by Kinbote's erotomania. I used to think that the Pale Fire poem was an absolute masterpiece. But after rereading Kinbote's notes there is no greater truth of the beauty of Art in the history of literature than how Kinbote elevated this masterpiece especially with his note comparing Disa and Shade. If you are interested in other media forms of Pale Fire, see Revolutionary Girl Utena or Sonny Boy.
I technically have both in one laptop with an AMD iGPU and an RTX GPU. Most of my problems with archlinux is running a 240Hz HDR monitor on dGPU, where the NVIDIA firmware glitches into buffer out of memory errors not reading the CDID properly, and this was solved only less than a month ago with latest beta driver. Lingering problem is waking from memory with crashed plasmashell but this one is KDE Plasma specific, while the monitor one is Linux wide.
plus 1 for Minix. that's how Linus learned OS, from Tanenbaum, and how their public monolithic vs microkernel rift began. iirc xv6 while monolithic also allows for a microkernel implementation (maybe not the ideal way to learn about microkernels) and also has a POSIX layer which fits your "resembles the POSIX world" req. unsure if one still requires learning compiling for strong type checking for IPC with microkernels (if learning for a diy build)
Two example scenarios described by Kurzweil in Singularity is Near: super intelligence augmenting human intelligence via direct brain interface (humans vs AI goes back to intelligence vs intelligence as usual), or, we get to live like very very pampered and worshiped cats.
The description of the (aftermath of the) picnic in the novel was absolutely beautifully haunting and that verse alone to me made the movie feel like superfluous variations of the theme.
This is Homer's "You are here forever" where Homer covers some letters with Maggie's pictures to spell "Do it for her". Except this dystopia uses the family pictures to spell "You are here forever"
Extremely insightful re: capacity to care for others.. though the trend of "NIMBY" and "petite-bougie" ideology (a more modern term being "temporarily embarrassed billionaires") and pretty much the guiltless profit maximization of the oligarchy point to that hypothesis being another form of trickle down economics (only the "prosperous" part. the educating women part should be a given, but if you read the comments in a recent frontpage post about humanitarian aide, the findings of those with decades in direct involvement pointing to "gender empowerment" and road infrastructure as most impactful long-term were met with the same "pronoun" schtick.
I am simply so happy for them. I used to have insomnia and in a music filesharing hub mostly Euros are awake around midnight Singapore time, so had so many online Euro friends mostly from Poland, Finland, Sweden, and especially Romania. It is from my Polish friends that I learned of so many great artists and authors, Beksinski and the nobel laureate Wislawa among many others. I memorized the Polish anthem once but I just know the first line now, Marsz, Marsz, Dabrowski! Polish diaspora especially Polish Americans are just too cool too, Mark Z Danielewski is a favorite.
awesome to see a VS Ramachandran rec on HN. normally it's the rare secondary rec after someone mentions Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
that one made me laugh so much. also the whole Eystein thing was genius. here, mad, hilarious nonsensical Kimbote lampoons replacing a "painting of an object" with the "real object" itself:
Eystein had resorted to a weird form of trickery: he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device had disclosed the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.
A portrait representing a former Keeper of the Treasure, decrepit Count Kernel, who was painted with fingers resting lightly on an embossed and emblazoned box whose side facing the spectator consisted of an inset oblong made of real bronze, while upon the shaded top of the box, drawn in perspective, the artist had pictured a plate with the beautifully executed, twin-lobed, brainlike, halved kernel of a walnut. The receptacle, an oblong hole in the wall, was there all right; it contained nothing, however, except the broken bits of a nutshell.
The shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.
Bonus (Golf): Lass, see Mass. Mass, Mars, Mare, see Male. Male, see Word golf. Word golf, S 's predilection for it, 819; see Lass.