Gertrude's blue and Nabokov's blues: preludes to "difficult" reading

Happened to read on the same day a TLS review (February 4)by Thomas Karshan of three new books on Nabokov and find a two-week old article in the New York Times (February 1) reporting that N's theory of butterfly evolution has now been proven correct.

It wasn't N's morphological studies (and I have yet to read all of my hc copy of Nabokov's Blues, lepidoptery taking second place to other "fixed" objects (e.g. words pinned down)that captured me, but N's tetchiness about claims that his writing was difficult to read. Karshan writes:

Like many of the Modernists, Nabokov was of two minds as to whether reading should be easy or difficult. "I work hard, I work long on a body of words", he wrote, "until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn -- so much the better. Art is difficult....

Without pursuing the clear physical element of "pleasure" and "possession" of a "body" of words, and my wondering at N. being called an upper case Modernist, I found myself thinking more about the notion of "difficult reading."

I chanced on a book on my shelves, lying almost hidden on other vertically arranged books because of its format: Jennifer Scappettone's From Dame Quickly, a collection of poetexts, a nonword attempt to approach the innovative way that her poems and word-collages explore text. Truly a modernist qua exploratory departure from received forms. First section of poems with an epigraph from Gertrude's Lucy Church Aimiably, reading in part: "see in the distance that there is elegantly speaking what there is to detach."

Scappettone's texts present a challenge to reading, but to label them difficult is to miss the headiness of what words can do. Her book is not a body and defies possession, or: the pleasure is not in the possession but in navigating the layers and shifts and sometimes fluent sometimes jammed constructions in which each phrase is loaded with import and sheer lyricism that always keeps moving and slipping into new meaning:

lean a sculpture of swan flank forever covered for now
on every imperfect death takes you to task afresh yet
it being swapped all over the place again as decadence
embracing on the night train after a scare and a deal with the conductor you were
never to agree upon the narrative again [34]

("never to agree upon the narrative again" sends me, scatters me off to Stefania Pandolfo's Impasse of the Angel, open nearby, but no . . .later)

There is Gertrude, waiting opposite, her turn to tell the story of blue, "associated with Picasso's return to Spain in 1902. For Stein, blue also means Toklas, whose blue eyes speak of tenderness and sexuality, as she wrote many times."
This, in Dydo and Rice's The Language that Rises.

More on all the blues at a later time when the sky returns to morning blue.