Banff, Day 7 — Week 1
Look, Mom: I performed with Vijay Iyer! — "What's Vijay Iyer?" Why write difficult music? A similar question came up in the first English class I took in college, which was amusingly titled "How to Scandalize Readers: Vladimir Nabokov's English Novels." In discussing novels like Lolita , Pnin , and Ada, or Ardor , the notion of hidden points of reference came up again and again—what Nabokov described in the afterward to Lolita as the " subliminal coordinates by which the novel is plotted.” For Nabokov, the subtle details that hold his novels together formally aren't necessarily the point of reading his novels, i.e. , our priority in reading his novels isn't to find these details. Instead, these subliminal coordinates provide a framework with which the novelist can operate with broad creative freedom to write works like Lolita —novels that are morally complex and layered with literary and cultural allusions, but read beautifully in them...