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Re: SIGHTING: Zemblan pizza
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Andrea Pitzer: In a lightweight counterpoint to the meaty Pale Fire discussion about Hazel Shade's influence on Kinbote and/or Shade, may I introduce... the Zemblan pizza, in (and on) which all is not as it seems. From the "Once I Metablog on Metafiction" site:
http://ronosaurusrex.com/metablog/2010/08/08/zemblan-pizza-rezembles-nabokov/ The "pizza" has been created by Erica Eller and Kayvon Ghashghai in honor of Dr. Charles Kinbote. I kid you not.
JM: Pitzer on Pizza?
The site opened onto "Zemblan Pizza Rezembles Nabokov" from "Once I Metablog on Metafiction."
I selected a few lines from it:
"Who is real and what is fiction? ...Some interpreters of the novel claim that the author of the poem, John Shade is also a figment of Kinbote's deranged imagination. Some say that Kinbote is an invention of John Shade. They may interpret it as they wish and no one can stop them. Kinbote near the end of the book says, "I may assume other disguises, other forms . . . I may turn up yet, on another campus, as on old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile." In other words, the fictional character may become the author, Vladimir Nabokov, who created all of the characters and therefore himself[...] We, the readers, rewrite poem, commentary and Nabokov's novel as we read it. Everything we read, everything we think, everything we experience, everything we eat, must pass through a fantastical mirror of language that reacreates - and distorts [...] "The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves / The moon into salt tears: the earth's thief / That feeds and breeds by composture stolen / From general excrement: each thing's a thief."// You are the thief, you, yes you, the murderer of poets, the killer of authors, and once you have stolen this poem, book and blogpost, you will make of them things that bare a rezemblance, but are wholly new. It may not be a pizza, but it tastes great."
Are we, all of us, "thieves"? ( Leland de la Durantaye, apud Zimmer, believes "Pale Fire" is a book about this thieving theme) I prefer to state the matter in a non excremental or vegetarian way, but also inspired by other people's customs. In Brazil, fresh left-overs, when transformed into dumplings or fried rolls are named "Lavoisier rolls." It comes from a sentence attributed to him (which, as I recently learned, is untrue because of something related to entropy):
"In Nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed." Perhaps references and metamorphosis belong to the creative surge while plagiarism sides with entropy...
However, differently from the two inspired cooks, or the blogger, I think that there are "true distortions" and "concave-convex circus-mirror distortions." There must be a mountain peak where author and reader happily embrace (stealing an image used by Nabkov).
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