¤ milky moon ¤

Joanna Newsom is a huge fan of Nabokov's writing. In this 2004 (!) interview with chickfactor.com, she calls him "definitely my favorite author", and in Dusted she says, "I think I was hugely influenced — I don’t know to what extent it comes across — but I love Nabokov, especially his gift for stringing words together, and his sense of how different words impact each other when they bump up at the edges."

Stylistic influence is too elusory to be worth chasing, but there are a few instances at the word- or idea-level where I think the connection between them is clear. Here they are:

• In Emily, her use of the word "dolorous". This is only sure enough to list because she explicitly calls it out in a Guardian interview: "in the song Emily there's a reference to Lolita. Not directly to the character but to the heavy, languorous energy, that listlessness and decadence." The pretty well describes her phrase "dolorous with vines", and Dolores is Lolita's real name in the novel.
  
• In Only Skin, we get "But I can’t with certainty say we survived." In its phrasing and figurative context, I see a connection with Pale Fire's line "I'm reasonably sure that we survive".
  
• Of course, there's "waxwing", in the song Autumn. If you learn one word from reading Nabokov, it will be this one. The waxwing is a bird that appears throughout Pale Fire, including in the first line of the poem, and inhabits its central metaphor.
  
• As a Pitchfork writer points out, the word "etiolated" (used in No Provenance) is a gem likely gleaned from Lolita.
  
• In Baby Birch, the visual wordplay in "Do you remember staring,/up at the stars" reminded me of Pale Fire's "outstare the stars".
  
• This one's from a (we hope!) forthcoming song which the fanbase hive-mind has tentatively titled The Diver's Wife. The line is "tell me why is the pain of birth lighter borne than the pain of death?". If you're obsessed with Nabokov, you've probably tried to get through his autobiography at some point. And even if, like me, you didn't finish it, I bet you at least got through the first two sentences: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."
  
• Honorable mention: Pale Fire's "web of sense" vs Sawdust & Diamond's "system of strings". This one is really tenuous, but I feel it, so I'm listing it anyway.

Do you have any others to add? I think you can love music without caring about lyrics, and you can love reading without loving words, but Nabokov & Newsom are connected by their shared love of the words themselves.

well, i'm not sure, but in sawdust and diamonds, the line "though my wrists and my waste seemed so easy to break, still my dear, i'd have walked you to the edge of the water" always reminded me of the part in "glory" where he's with the girl he loses his virginity to on the beach. he says something about grabbing her and kissing her, but doing it all clumsy and something and she tells him something along the lines of "careful! you'll break me!" or something like that. sorry, it's been ages haha but i feel like i might have read that here in a similar thread once upon a time. all i know, is i definitely connect the two now

Love this post!

I'm not a native english speaker, so a lot of times I don't know if the things I hear are references to a specific writer or just common culture. Anyway, here are some thoughts:

- In Autumn, she also sings "a row of silent dove-gray days". Maybe she borrowed that from Nabokov? I remember seeing that in Lolita and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
- In Sadie, she starts the song calling "Sadie" and ends it saying "my Sadie" - just like Nabokov in Lolita. ("Lolita, light of my fire…"; "And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.")
- In Have One on Me, she sings "like a cornered rat". I saw that in Lolita too.
- In Cosmia, maybe the use of the moth representing or signaling a big change? This is very questionable, so I don't know. Nabokov used that a lot.

There's more, but I don't usually take notes so it's hard to remember.

Huge parenthesis:
As for other writers, I think the sequencing of tracks on Ys was maybe inspired by the sequencing of chapters in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury?

quoth the newsom, in no provenance. the song goes back to hinting at the burning barn in other bits but i'll just use this for now:

we spun gold clear out of straw.
And, when our bales of bullion
were stored,
you burned me like a barn.
I burned safe and warm in your arms.
In your arms, your arms.

i'm reading ada or ardor right now, and there's this particular chapter in part one (chapter 12? something like that) where everyone wakes up in the middle of the night to find that the barn in the estate was burning. i don't feel like spoiling, but everyone in the house leaves, aside from our two protagonists. the two of them watch the scene from a window in the library, and they have sex for the first time.

no provenance deals with a lot of things i'm finding in ada, too? memory, recollection and time in general seem to be a big theme in both.

andrewb wrote:

• Honorable mention: Pale Fire's "web of sense" vs Sawdust & Diamond's "system of strings". This one is really tenuous, but I feel it, so I'm listing it anyway.

Maybe Nabokov got this from Weber? "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun." Of course Weber wrote it in German, so "significance" and "sense" could be two readings of the same word.

Martin Amis has written that Nabokov's overriding concern was with tyranny. In the novels Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading we meet with tyranny head-on of course, Lolita too may be viewed in this light. But I feel the real tyrant in Nabokov is Time itself. Time strips us of everything eventually: all that we own, all that we love. Nabokov was no stranger to the ravages of this tyrant - his father assassinated, the 16 year old 'Prince' having to flee his native land into exile, never to return. What he attempts to do in his novels - through memory, through the recall of exquisite detail - is overthrow, at least momentarily, this tyrant. The famous passage from Speak, Memory wills us to believe that we are with Nabokov as he remembers in 'real time'; as he battles the enemy Time before our very eyes and throws its corpse at our feet:

"Among the trivial souvenirs acquired at Biarritz before leaving, my favorite was. . . a meerschaum penholder with a tiny peephole of crystal in its ornamental part. . . . a miraculous photographic view of the bay and of the line of cliffs ending in a lighthouse could been seen inside. And now a delightful thing happens. The process of re-creating that penholder and the microcosm in its eyelet stimulates my memory to a last effort. I try again to recall the name of Colette's dog-- and , triumphantly, along those remote beaches, over the glossy evening sands of the past, where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water-, here it comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss, Floss!"