<table><tr><th>From:</th><th>Ed &lt;</th></tr><tr><td>Sent:</td><td>Sunday, January 20, 2013 2:43 PM</td></tr><tr><td>To:</td><td>Epstein, Jeff</td></tr><tr><td>Subject:</td><td>Happy Birthday</td></tr></table>

Hi Jeff

Happy Birthday. Also thanks for the coffee (Jennifer is a superb =rewer). In looking back at my class notes, you may be interested in =abokov's first-day of instructions to the students in Lit 311 on =onday, September 14, 1953, the first day of his day of teaching at =ornell. It was also my first lecture course. After telling us to =ake (and stay in) numbered seats in the lecture hall (which had about =00 seats), and introducing Vera Nabokov. Who sat on a chair on stage =acing him. as the course assistant, he said what we, readers, needed =o read novels was 1)a good memory 2)artistic feelings, and 3) a good =ictionary. He then said it was a fatal mistake, though a current =rend in academia, to search for historical or social meaning because a =reat novel is a pure invention by the author, and like nature, a =eception. He also warned against identifying with any of the =haracters/ Instead, he said we should be looking for "a tingling in =he spine." The author were enchanters, and created their effects by =rchestrating details that evoked pictures in our head. PS. I don't think I <u>ever of throw h The Gift thou</u> h, fdollowing his =nstructions, I bathed myself in the details Best regards Ed Epstein ?xml version=.0" encoding=TF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "- //Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version=.0">

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