Beheaded

Quite under the weather, I did finish the Nabokov this evening. Contrary to Brian Boyd, I don't see it as a masterpiece as such. The idea of a fabricated reality, not quite the Matrix - mind you - but of charlatans and play-acting, of public relations and self-help. The text is quite prescient but I wasn't moved.

I then read "the Ghosts of Magnetism," a lengthy story (57 pages) by Vollmann in his Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs. This weighty blow left me gasping. I had started it a year ago and sadly abandoned such prematurely.