I’m just getting my footing as to what it is that I intend to say about the book in the Nabokov MFA series. The process, to rehash, is that I first read a classic book, in this case "Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen, and then the auxiliary text from Nabokov’s "Lectures on Literature," to get his perspective on the novel.

For some reason, there was a sense of dread in starting this book, or perhaps the weight of the whole proposed Nabokov MFA was in play, because I know Mansfield Park has traveled with me extensively, with the goal of being read. It was with me at least once in Pennsylvania, maybe twice now, and also sat untouched in Texas for two weeks. There was always "one more book" that demanded my attention before it.

Part of it was the weight of it being serious literature, from the early 19th century, and one of the links I found online beforehand calling it Austen’s "most difficult and least accessible work," or words to that effect.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to begin the book and find it very readable and delightful. If I had to guess, I probably read 80 percent of the book aloud in my living room. I much preferred this to reading silently in public, as did occur less often, because the silent read never seemed to have the same rhythm and cadence. Plus, there is nothing like reading aloud to crystallize the focus.

My first impression upon reading it was the delightful voice of the book. The book is narrated in the third party, but the narrator is not omniscient as it shows us the inner life of the protagonist (and the protagonist only, if I am not mistaken), so we are clearly rooting for Fanny Price from the beginning.

This is not a book report, so this won’t really be a plot summary, aside from the broadest of strokes. Fanny is taken in to live with her aunt in the delightful manor that serves as the title of the book. At home, Fanny was one of ten children, in a poorer family, and this move propels her into high society.

So, with Fanny at the center of the novel, all of the other characters go about their class issues, and romantic interests, and everything else and we see most of it from Fanny’s perspective.

The narrative was just so delightful. And any latent fears the thought of curling up with serious literature had evoked in me prior were no longer present once the book was in full swing. I am delaying writing that I, in fact, understood everything about the book at all times, which was probably just Cliff Notes flashbacks of old haunting me.

Austen’s delicate weaving and storytelling really paint a picture of this time and its people, but also tells a simple human story. I’m not a follower of the 19th century, British class system or anything else, but that was never oft putting in reading it.

I don’t really think my intention is a plot synopsis, though. So, we will move on to the Nabokov portion of the program, which was always going to be the spookier half of each lesson in my mind. There is something about wanting to glimpse what he finds beautiful and important about the work on my own, without having to read it in his words and then say, "Oh, but of course, how could I have been so stupid."

His introduction alone frightens, when he talks of the level of detail he finds important: "The color of Fanny Price’s eyes… and the furnishing of her cold little room are important." My mind races to remember this detail and, aside from her room being cold, I’ve got nothing. But I am bewildered as to the importance of her eye color to the book. This is foreshadowing for what would come later.

Nabokov has very clear guidelines even as to how a work of literature should be read. In fact, he insists that you cannot read a book, you must reread it. He likens the physical aspect of reading a book the holding, the eye movement, everything really as preventing artistic appreciation, because the work never gets to live as a painting does, which is to say it is experienced on the viewer’s terms, without the constriction of starting at point A and moving toward point B. When you reread, you get to stand back and admire the work.

Nabokov also advises a detachment from reading. He eschews the notion of empathizing with the protagonist, but rather floating on top of the text so that you can admire it from more than one perspective. He writes:

"It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass."

I point this out and go through the trouble of excerpting his reading methodology in part to understand it better.

The Nabokov book actually has some of his drawings and notes written directly over the Austen text included. It really shows the importance he placed on detail.

Mansfield Park begins "About thirty years ago," and his notes start figuring out in which precise year the novel would take place, based on the year of its authorship. His answer comes later in the text, as Fanny is received at a formal ball, which takes place at a specific age, month, and day of the week. Armed with this information, Nabokov checks against calendars in the late 1700s to determine in what year the ball would have taken place, thus establishing when all other events are occurring.

He also draws maps of how he imagines the grounds of Mansfield Park and other locations in the novel. I must admit that at the present date, I see no larger purpose here as to how the ball taking place in 1795 or 1793 affect the story in any manner. I bring it up because of my curiosity as to why Nabokov found it so important. If I recall properly from other Nabokov writings, when I read the Kafka, he finds it of the utmost relevance that after reading the book, you should be able to sketch the layout of the apartment. You should also understand that the lead character turns into a dung beetle, based on his corroboration of the details in the book with an insect guide presumably (although Nabokov was a noted fan of lepidoptera, that is to say, butterflies, so this may have been easy for him).

He points out that in his college classes (and these were undergraduate classes, by the way, despite my calling this my personal MFA program), that in having his students read Mansfield Park, they also had to read a bunch of additional texts. One character makes reference that he could recite the speeches from Henry the Eighth, so Henry the Eighth must be read. The characters intend to stage a play in the book’s second volume, so the text of the play is added to the curriculum. Fanny references a poem; so two cantos of that larger work are required. But, as much as it seemed to show his amazing resolve to details, the conclusions were not elusive without them.

The play let the characters in the book experiment with interpersonal relationships that tended to not exist in their normal interactions, which stirred up some of the romantic feelings between people where it would not have been proper otherwise. But, since they are acting, they are allowed to put themselves in those situations. Reading the Austen, all of that is clear, though.

The first half of Nabokov’s lecture, though, preserved beautifully because he was more of a reciter at the podium than an engaged speaker in class, shows the importance he puts on words. It tells the story of the novel using Austen’s words as often as possible, with him merely paraphrasing to link her quotations together artfully. There is such a respect for her language shown by this methodology that indicates the importance he gives the craft.

While reading the book, I was actually struck that although the language was beautiful, there were no monologues or quotable passages that linger, and while that is true, Nabokov goes out of his way to find some of the best phrases in the book to let Austen nearly tell the story to his class herself.

To that end, it is rather easy for people to only read the Nabokov book, just to get insight into his mind and a sense of the novels. Although, I am sticking with the program as originally intended, which means nearly a thousand pages of Dickens next.

He highlights words Austen uses repeatedly to steer the reader’s perception of the characters, and details how Austen delivers characterization within the voice of the novel.

At one point, he notes that "Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author’s personality."

When Austen ties everything up at a much quicker pace than the rest of the novel, though a disdained method of information arriving in letters, Nabokov notes that the proper choice might have been another volume of 500 pages, but that Austen chose a "shortcut of no great artistic merit."

That said, he closes out the essay with a backhanded compliment:

"I do not believe anybody can be taught to write fiction unless he already possesses literary talent. Only in the latter case can a young author be helped to find himself, to free his language from clichés, to eliminate clumsiness, to form a habit of searching with unflinching patient for the right word, the only right word which will convey with the utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought. In such matters there are worse teachers than Jane Austen."

So, that is it for Mansfield Park. While Nabokov was a fan of rereading, it will not be reread again so soon. Although, to be clear, none of the Nabokov MFA books will be traded after finished. They all get to stay on the bookshelves here, so that someday, they can teach me more when I have hit a place where they will contain entirely new lessons.

The biggest takeaway from Nabokov going into the Dickens is just trying to appreciate his propensity for detail, and hoping to better read the book in a manner that he would consider instructional.

OK, just about to post the first Nabokov MFA essay on Mansfield Park, but figured that (on the odd chance anyone else takes up this literary challenge), a warning is required.

When reading "classic" books, it is very important to NEVER read the introduction before reading the text itself. I learned this in Thailand when I was reading a lot of classics and started the introduction to The Great Gatsby. I don’t have the exact sentence, but basically it comes right out and says "With the death of Gatsby, the novel spirals into…"

And, I’m there like, Dude! Why tell me a character in the book is going to die like that?!

A faulty argument could be made that I just gave you, unsuspecting potential Gatsby reader, the same information just as brazenly. But I would have to disagree. That book has been around for decades, so Gatsby’s death is not really a secret. It is not like a hot new movie that you have to make sure not to hear about until you see it. Like referencing Samuel L. Jackson’s character dying in the new Star Wars movie coming out in May. THAT would be wrong to post randomly beforehand.

However, that Gatsby information had somehow eluded me or I had forgotten it, and there I was ready to read it for the first time in Thailand. So, to have the "spoiler," using today’s terminology, actually printed as an introduction to the book you are about to read just baffles me.

It is like a title card appearing before The Crying Game saying, "It is really a dude," and then it fades out, and the movie begins.

So, as soon as I hit a lenghty introduction to Mansfield Park, I immediately jumped past it and started with Jane Austen’s text. And, having read the introduction that appears before the novel, and a former introduction that now appears after the novel, it was the right decision. There is WAY too much information in these things.

They are actually not introduction at all, but literary and historical interpretation of the novel. Which is an amazing resource to provide, and one that I rather enjoyed reading after finishing the book. Beforehand, though, it would have been a massive waste of time that robbed me of the intricacies of the novel that was about to unfold.

So, should anyone decide to take on the Nabokov MFA, or if one of the books tickles your fancy, just remember: Skip the introductions.

One of the possibilities on the horizon, although always considered remote, was that I applied for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, which is basically two years of getting paid to work on your writing while meeting for two workshops a week.

When I got my mail on Saturday, one envelope looked strange, since it was my own name in my own writing, and before there was even a chance to open it, the contents were clear: no Stegner fellowship, as I assume the five people who were accepted got bigger, thicker packages.

The letter says they received more than 1,400 applicants for the ten openings (five in fiction, five in poetry), so as lotteries go, worth the $50 entry fee.

I do like the certainty of knowing, though. It is much better than it being yet another question mark on my horizon. The fewer, the better, as far as I’m concerned.

OK, not even 9 a.m. and the writing is done for today, guess that hiccup of yesterday just needs to be accepted and I need to move on and stop wndering what made me question everything.

The most surprising thing is that it is a huge time killer to stop and read the draft anymore. Of course, every read I do is read aloud, and things get corrected, awkward phrases reworked, so it’s not quite just reading. But still, it is a lot of text.

I think there is no option anymore but pushing through to the end. By this time next month, it might well be finished. Or not.

In any event, it is now time for me to hit the gym, and to make up with Jane Austen upon my return, as she also got neglected yesterday.

And tonight, culinary delights await! Mmmmm…

I am severely underestimating the amount of time "giving the draft another read" takes anymore.

The upside, despite all the anxiety of my last post, is that I just had a great experience. It seems, upon reading all 161 pages of the draft, I rather enjoyed it.

In fact, I’m not quite sure where the disconnect is. There is a minor tone shift in the last two chapters, but it seems more due to the fact that they are a bit tense-shifted, because they are told montage-style, with a lot of compressed time. Most things before that had a different pace, and were told in strict present tense. Reading it didn’t seem jarring, though.

I actually had to figure out what the issue was after finishing. So, I think it just seemed awkward from that perspective.

So, the only thing lost is a day of writing, because despite a nap today, it is 12:30 a.m., and I am beat, and unable to write, err, yesterday’s 2,000 words.

It will just have to be sleep, and starting over with a renewed sense of accomplishment instead. Which, admittedly, is fine.

This thing keeps happening, and I don’t know that I ever wrote about it because, unlike you, I don’t read my weblog. I just write it. The catharsis comes before I hit "SAVE." It isn’t really meant for later observation.

So, anyway, this thing keeps happening whereby the book is going well, and then… it seems adrift. There’s a fork in the narrative road, and a few steps down the path, it is a question of whether the path is the right one. Typically, my instinct on this book is to trust my subconscious.

This morning, when I went to write, it wasn’t there. I just knew that every word I would write, and I could have easily banged out my 2K and called it, would be erased later. I know I’m only a few steps down the wrong path, so it’s just a matter of retracing my steps.

The solution is always obvious, but there is always anxiety in these moments. Like when I knew I had to write this draft from scratch, and not do such a massive edit that it would really just be writing anyway, with a lot more difficulty attached.

But these choices always lead to me not doing as much work as I should. But not today. Right now, the plan is to go to the gym, bang out the workout, and then settle in for as long as I need to get things where they should be. And, once that happens, I still owe the novel 2,000 words for today.

I mean, this stuff doesn’t matter to anyone else in the world right now. No one sees the book but me. No one honestly even knows the book but me. Just need to get past all the craziness of it going full-stop when something goes wrong.

OK, what I’m about to write, it does feel as though I’ve written here before. But, anyway, it seems like sometimes when I write, I get hung up on the process. Not the process of the writing, but the processes that are occurring inside the book. Like, in Fight Club, other clubs just start popping up and that information is given to the reader as it is given to the narrator. My narrator is involved in setting up a huge thing from the ground up, but the point is… who cares what steps are involved?

It is a constant battle to realize what is important for me to know as compared to what readers will give a shit about. And, where things are now? Yawn. And the strange part is, when I am writing it, it is essential and interesting. When I give it an edit later that day, boring.

The book is supposed to be lean. But not lean based on me being a former journalist who is used to sucking all detail out of a piece because of space constraints and deadlines. It needs to give you everything you need to know, and leave no questions.

Kind of like when Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz starts down the yellow brick road, and you know that Judy Garland is running on a real set toward a painted backdrop. Is she runs a few more feet, she will crash into a wall. My job is getting the right balance of road to pull you in and make it real, but also knowing when things are suitable as backdrop. And sometimes, the lines are blurry; my sets are too big to be cost-effective.

If anything, the more I write, the sooner I can recognize when things go off-track. I mean, I could only be five pages off at this point. I know that all will be fixed before I go to bed today, so it can’t be massive.

The big question is why these moments make me freeze up. Why anything that is not writing another 2,000 words for the pile is somehow wrong.

Part of it is questioning whether I am doing something positive, or preventing myself from finishing. Now, there is no evidence that I am even doing any of this, but both writing the book and changing my body have been such huge goals forever, there is a natural fear that subconsciously, I will be afraid to finish them.

By conservative estimates, the book should be done by May, and the body June or July (accounting for naturally losing less weight as I get closer to my goal), so there is a ton of second-guessing going on at all times. If I eat a vegan chocolate chip cookie (as I did at yesterday’s Bruce Willis movie, Hostage), it is an internal dialogue as to whether I deserved a cookie, craved a cookie, or am just subconsciously undermining myself.

Using the same logic, lack thereof, or overthinking, the question is, would the book remain off-track if I continue. If it is only a 10-page tangent that would regain the proper story, then it can be edited out later, just continue. Then again, is it a new path that would get us away from the story that should be told, leaving us with something that arrives at the same place, only with far less impact? if so, stop and kill this tangent immediately.

I tell everyone finishing the book is my goal, not publishing the book. That is true, although as soon as I finish it, the intention is to try and sell it. But the point isn’t merely finishing. It is writing something important, heartfelt, funny, and thought-provoking.

Something that, once I finish, makes me wonder how the hell I could ever accomplish something this massive ever again.

And then trying to.

I’m alluded to this many times before, but it has FINALLY begun. I have been diligent about reading the whole time I have been working on my book, and now I will be folding some higher end stuff into the fold.

The premise, based on my love of Nabokov, and his inability to speak in public, is that I have three books, which are lectures he delivered while teaching college. They include Lectures on Western Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature, and Lectures on Don Quixote.

Each lecture is on a specific novel, and I will be reading them all, in order, beginning with Mansfield Park by jane Austen.

The complete listing is:

Lectures on Western Literature

• Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen
• Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
• Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Walk By Swann’s Place, by Marcel Proust
• The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
• Ulysses, by James Joyce

Lectures on Russian Literature (includes novels and short stories)

• Dead Souls, by Nikolay Gogol
• "The Overcoat", by Nikolay Gogol
• Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
• Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevski
• Memoirs from a Mousehole, by Fyodor Dostoevski
• The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevski
• The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevski
• Anna Karenin, by Leo Tolstoy
• The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy
• "The Lady with the Little Dog", by Anton Chekhov
• "In The Gully", by Anton Chekhov
• "The Seagull", by Anton Chekhov
• "On The Rafts," by Maxim Gorki

So, the plan is to read these in this order, followed by Don Quixote, which has its own book.

Each bulleted item will get its own blog entry, less about the book than what Nabokov discussed and I learned.

There is also a Nabokov MFA category on this blog now, so at a future date and starting with this entry, you will be able to find all of these entries easily.

I will be reading some other recent works between these as palate-cleansers, too. Need to read from this century too once in a while.

I recall reading something about being overweight and having more estrogen or somesuch. I never paid it much attention, but recently as am thisclose from hitting 80 pounds lost, there are some obvious changes going on.

The main manifestation is that I am shaving my face far more often than ever before. That’s definitely not a welcome change, but I guess that’s part of the deal.

It reminds me of a weblog post I never wrote, because it felt incomplete, but a few months ago, I sort of felt like I was acting more like a pregnant woman than a man.

Concerned about skin elasticity, I was hanging out on message boards for pregnant women, checking what products they were using, although there was no way to know if a product that helped people who stretched out their skin for a few months would have any effect on someone whose skin was stretched out for years. So far, so good, in that department. Although there’s little I can do to make the skin keep pulling in. Just hoping it keeps doing it.

At the same time, I was also going through a weird time at the gym, because I sweat a lot when I’m there. I actually go out of my way to sweat a lot there. I’m the guy who will leave my machine and turn off the fan if one of the princesses needs to get that icky sweat off of her after doing five minutes of cardio.

Anyway, my level of sweat was creating a lot of heavy, wet shirts dragging across my nipples, and they were becoming sore. So, back to the pregnancy boards, and debating whether to lube up the nipples before going to the gym, or whether my workouts would actually be toughening them up, as many women found after breastfeeding for a while after first getting sore.

So, I have finally crossed over, I am more of a man today than a pregnant woman.

That’s progress, I guess?

Figured I’d check in after such a big decision, and mention that is going well. It has a more surreal quality to it, since I am not keeping anything from the previous draft. I just start blank page each day. If I remember some lines from the past draft, I put them in, and at some point, there will be a comparison between the two to keep anything worth keeping.

But, the stuff seems a lot more alive than the earlier version. Of course, I am probably the worst person to accurately judge the two, being the writer of both, writing one version at present, and not looked at the prior draft for a few months. Anyway, it is going very well…

Sticking with the 2K word limit per day, although the first day I cleared 3,000. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Tomorrow, I will begin writing the novel from scratch. I have weighed all of the options, and this seems to be the best path.

A lot of my hesitation about working on the draft is that it would mainly be chopping it up. The non-fiction book removes a lot of the exposition that was previously saddled with the characters, and a lot of stuff in the latter two-thirds of the book was planned to be removed. It was always going to be a massive edit.

And, long story short, I think I can create the draft I want sooner than I can turn the draft I have into the same thing. The existing draft is somewhere around 50,000 words, so writing 2,000 a day, it means that in under a month I am not only further than where I am now, but I am removing a separate step of folding the non-fiction book into the fictional one. I already know how the two work together with the draft of the book I want to exist. It just so happens that draft does not yet exist.

Also, I think I am much more steeped in this world now than when I wrote it last time. I want to spend more time on it and shine light into the corners more than I did before.

My main hesitation here was to ensure I wasn’t just doing some kind of subconscious procrastination as a means of not finishing the book. Having observed this from every angle, I can’t see that being the case. Let’s hope I’m right.

Aren’t writers supposed to hate the blank, white page? Not sure why, but I became energized when I made this decision. Can’t wait until I get going on this tomorrow… weird.