“I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies—every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.”
ICICLES BY CYNTHIA. METER FROM ME, SYBIL.
“I also tried something, with two or three retakes, that I’d like to try and do more of – it’s what I call ‘getting back into the cabbage-patch’ with the actors, not just acting over top of the depth-of-field, with the camera wisely planted in front of the scene – but advancing forward INSIDE OF THE SCENE…”
–Maurice Pialat, 1985, in interview with Alain Bergala and Serge Toubiana.
craig.
Indeed—the quoted text is the final paragraph of “The Vane SIsters,” the last short story Vladimir Nabokov published in his lifetime, and it is an acrostic that confirms the psychic connection/manipulation that its narrator insists on denying. VN never commented on the fact that one of the titular Vane sisters is named Sybil…a name shared by the character whose heart is broken by one Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel, and of course in the very handsome and in some ways exceptionally effective 1946 Alfred Lewin film adaptation, in which Miss Vane is played by a very young and very comely Angela Lansbury. The Lewin “Gray” has just been given a very handsome DVD release on Warner, and the Technicolor inserts of the increasingly horrible titular picture will delight those who have heretofore only seen it reproduced on the back cover of “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” The web of connections here is, for me, as heady as any opiate…
“a very young and very comely Angela Lansbury”
yes.
also – story sounds killer, _comme toujours_. as i’ve said elsewhere, it’s hard to think how i missed the VN train earlier… i have no answer. and yet: here it is, now, and here it is, beautiful, and here it is, fun.
just read _pale fire_ for the first time, then immediately re-read it twice. that book is ridiculous.
“The word acrostic was first applied to the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves always formed a word.”