"All the Hues
That Fit, We Tint"

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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

 

Breaking the Frame

"[Stephen Dedalus] is physically repulsive but intellectually exquisite. ... [with] his lofty soaring mind, his enchanting creative imagination, fantastically rich and subtle frame of reference, freedom of spirit ..."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

"There's nothing 'cute about narrowness,"
Said the redoubtable Baroness,
"In spite of the Duchess of Win-
dsor's remark on 'too rich or too thin.'
I refer, natch, to thinness of frame
Of reference, in the lit'rary game,
A game in which I, myself, dabble;
And, of course, I'm a dab hand at Scrabble,
Which my husband, the late Baron S---,
While steeped in an Eliotness
Of depression, defamed with a cross
Word: 'That bore's game is poss-
ibly the worst of the wasters of time,
Even worse than your scrabbling for rhyme,
Your petulant foments of vers-
ification, by Jove! Even worse!'
Poor man! Understandably jealous
Of the grandes-gloires of Roma and Hellas,
La Reine Demi-Vièrge and her poets
And playwrights, Romantic inchoates
And Edwardians with lines finely lapid-
ary, he dismissed them as 'vapid,'
And my taste for same as 'a wallow,'
And my little hommages as 'shallow'!
Poor soul! He's expanded in Heaven
(One assumes), where, injected with leaven-
ing transcendent, that gouty old lump, S---,
An infinite sphere may encompass."

posted at 5:00 PM
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