Oh mio caro Vladimir la luce del tuo fuoco pallido non è pallida neanche un po'...

in mano a nabokov le parole danzano, sono belle, sono piacevoli


fate un regalo a voi e alla vostra intelligenza... fuggite la lordura odierna e fiondatevi a leggere questo capolavoro

fatti non foste a viver come bruti ma per seguir virtude e canoscenza

Šitą knygą skaičiau ilgai, vis svarsčiau mesti ar suteikti šansą. Bet staiga prasilaužiau ir netgi pasilinksminau.

Reikia susitaikyti, kad Nabokovas yra įmantrus intrigantas. „Blyški ugnis“ pateikia genijaus Šeido poemą ir literatūrologo Kinboto komentarus. Juose plėtojasi istorijos – istorijoje: pinasi metaforiškas poemos turinys, rašytojo biografija ir asmeniniai kaimyno santykiai, jo įtaka ir požiūris į „tikrąsias“ kūrinio intencijas. Toks romano sumanymas akivaizdžiai išryškina, kad turim reikalų su simuliacija.

„Blyškios ugnies“ komentatorius – nepatikimo pasakotojo etalonas. Jis pasipūtęs, maniakiškai persekioja ir užknisa dar gyvą poetą, po kurio mirties bet kokiomis priemonėmis siekia būti svarbiausiu jo šedevro komentatoriumi. Kinbotas ir pats yra asmenybė su neeiline biografija (drąsiai galima svarstyti, ar „didžioji“). Komentuodamas leidžiasi į subjektyvius viražus, ką komentuoti, atsirenka pagal save. Tampa svarbu ne suteikti poetui laurus, bet įtvirtinti savo pasakojimą. Taigi tiesa yra sutartinė.

„Blyškioje ugnyje“ viskam yra pagrindas. Romano sumanymas yra gilesnis, šakotesnis, nei čia norisi pastebėti. Apsiribosiu tiek: man patiko, jog Nabokovas primena, kad pasakodamas apie kitą neišvengiamai pasakoji ir apie save. Tai būdinga tiek autoriui, tiek suvokėjui. Su tuo tikrai sutinku. O Nabokovas šita ypatybe kūrybingai naudojasi.

Labiausiai įsimena, kad romane snobizmas liejasi per kraštus. Intelektualų, genijų aplinka – puiki terpė tai vystyti. Mėgaujamasi privalumais žaisti, gracingai juokauti, koketiškai žavėti ir varginti įžvalgomis bei aprašymais, tačiau ir stipriai parodijuojama, autoironiška. „Jo protas – biblioteka, o ne diskusijų salė“ (p. 224). Snobai – formos karaliai: viskas čia sujungta ir valdoma, primityvūs dalykai gali būti aiškinami sudėtingai, bet jie ir pletką gali paversti kūrybos esme (smulkutis įvykėlis genijaus kasdienybėje gali būti pristatomas kaip lemtingas kūrybai). Tačiau net užknisantį Nabokovą mylėti galima – jis nenuslysta į būties ezoteriką, o stiliaus klausimu turi sveiko proto ir įžūlumo.

Be galo sodrus romanas. Perskaičius norisi dar kartą patirti jo visumą. Todėl prasilaužus nesigailiu. Ar rekomenduoju? Nežinau. Čia kaip saldymedis, kurį privačiai vadinu „priešų saldainiais“. Pavaišinus kitus, kas nors neabejotinai spjaus prie akių, manys, kad čia kenki bendram skoniui, siūlydama šitą bjaurybę. Įtiksi nedaug kam, bet jei taip bus, tyliai pasimėgausit. Kai žinai, ką dozuoji, tai – gėris.

I have a weird relationship with Nabokov. He's a brilliant prose stylist, and an innovative metafictionist, but I have too many quibbles about his books to induct him into my inner circle. Part of the problem is that, for all his metafictional innovations, his work in that realm is cheap as often as it's genius - the endings to Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading both struck me as major cop-outs. If that was the only problem I had with him, then that would be one thing, but his elitism shines through on pretty much every page, his humor is grating as often as it is successful, and his characters are inconsistent - some, like Pnin and Humbert Humbert come alive, others, like Cinncinatus C, don't seem to exist as anything more than illustrations of a point. Bend Sinister's Krug sort of straddles that line.

None of that matters here, though. Pale Fire is a work of undiluted genius that I can recommend without reservation, and unless Ada proves to be the same way, it is the only work of undiluted genius that I can recommend without reservation in Nabokov's catalogue. Let us, however, set aside how much more edifying and innovative and aesthetically beautiful and closer to perfection I find this novel than anything else by the man I've read, because dammit, Nabokov wrote this fucking novel, which deserves to be held up with the Recognitions and Catch-22 and the Crying of Lot 49 and the Sot-Weed Factor and anything of Borges' as one of the most astonishing texts of early postmodernism. I'm sure Nabokov himself would detest the classification, but it can't be denied that he fits it well, at least here.

The premise is one of the most glorious premises for a novel ever conceived. John Shade writes a poem. Charles Kinbote, possibly but probably not A.K.A. Charles Xavier (no, not that Charles Xavier), possibly and more likely A.K.A. Vseslav Botkin, comments on the poem, but his commentary is less about the poem and more about the fictional northern European land of Zembla, which he may or may not be from, and may or may not be the deposed ruler of - he could also, of course, be a deluded and pathetic old man convinced he was the king of Zembla, and his delusion is so astonishing that Zembla could entirely be his invention - I prefer this interpretation, but the "deposed king" nuttiness certainly has its merits. Which means that Kinbote's "reflections" on Shade's poem are actually reflections on himself, and he in fact insists multiple times that Shade was deliberately writing about him, which introduces the possibility that Shade and Kinbote are the same person, or that Shade is Kinbote's invention, although I prefer to think that Kinbote and Shade are separate and Kinbote is just the sort of egotistical nutjob who would turn someone else's poem into a paean to himself. Kinbote meets Shade in the States and insists he's the poet's best friend, although it's clear that Shade dislikes him to some degree and only tolerates him out of politeness and potential pity. All while Kinbote or maybe Shade or maybe neither of them is pursued by a comically bungling assassin who may or may not be Zemblan, or even real. All told in the most beautiful language imaginable, with an outrageous sense of humor and a terrific eye for the absurd.

It's fucking glorious. The most pure fun you'll have with the canon.

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...

"Seguramente no sería fácil encontrar en la historia de la poesía un caso similar: el de dos hombres, diferentes por su origen, su educación, sus asociaciones de ideas, su tono espiritual y su modalidad intelectual, uno, erudito cosmopolita, el otro, poeta sedentario, unidos por un pacto secreto de este tipo."

Qué difícil es reseñar esta novela de Nabokov, entre otras cosas porque no estoy muy familiarizada con este escritor, a excepción por algunos cuentos, y la verdad es que me ha pillado por sorpresa esta novela que no sé hasta qué punto he podido llegar a todas sus capas… yo diría que no, que necesitaría más lecturas pero así y todo, es una obra mayúscula que no ha dejado de sorprenderme a medida que avanzaba. En un principio parece una sátira construida por Nabokov para cuestionar la estrechez de miras o pedantería de ciertos criticos literarios, la hipocresía de ciertas editoriales, o para carcajearse del sectarismo de ciertos círculos académicos literarios, una hipocresía que de alguna forma está representada en Kinbote, pero no se trata solo de una sátira lo que aquí construye Nabokov, sino una obra de metaficción que reflexiona continuamente en torno a la creación artística y los límites entre ficción y realidad, ese puente que a veces parece tan difícil de cruzar o de delimitar, y sin embargo, en Pálido Fuego se hace patente que para un autor como Nabokov lo convierte en un juego entre él y el lector.

"El manuscrito ha caído en manos de una persona que no solo no está calificada para la tarea de editarlo, puesto que pertenece a otra sección, que se le considera un desequilibrado..."

Nabokov construye su novela sobre la base de una obra póstuma del prestigioso poeta John Shade, un poema, Pálido Fuego, en 99 líneas a su vez divididos en cuatro cantos. Antes del poema tenemos una introducción del crítico y editor Kinbote y posteriormente al poema, los comentarios explicativos de este critico desglosando los versos de este poema. Así que tenemos un poema, el centro de la novela, que ocupa una mínima parte de ella porque la mayor parte de sus páginas están construidas sobre la premisa del punto de vista de Kinbote, el crítico y editor, autonombrado íntimo amigo de John Shade que se convierte en el auténtico protagonista de la novela. Tenemos dos autores, por tanto en Pálido Fuego: por una parte, John Shade, el poeta, y por otra parte Charles Kinbote, el critico/editor, ya que construye una novela paralela en sus comentarios explicativos...solo conocemos su punto de vista sobre su amistad con el poeta, y poco a poco el lector irá percibiendo que Kinbote es un narrador manipulador que querrá llevar al lector por su propia senda.

“Jamás comentamos, John Shade y yo, ninguna de mis desventuras personales. Nuestra estrecha amistad se situaba en ese nivel superior, exclusivamente intelectual, en que uno puede descansar de las penas del corazón, no compartirlas. Mi admiración por él era una especie de cura de altura. Yo experimentaba una gran impresión de maravilla cada vez que lo miraba, sobre todo en presencia de otra gente, gente inferior."

La manipulación de Charles Kinbote comienza ya en la introducción cuando literalmente le dice al lector que no es necesario leer la siguiente parte de esta novela, osea el poema, y que pase directamente a los comentarios explicativos. Es una manipulación en toda regla porque de esta forma en los comentarios explicativos solo conoceremos el punto de vista de Kinbote en torno a un poema que de alguna forma ningunea porque en sus anotaciones apenas se refiere al poema sino directamente y siempre, a él mismo y sus historias sobre El rey Carlos de Zembla, un país ficticio. Admito que en un principio me dejé llevar por Kinbote y comencé la tercera parte sin haber leído el poema, hasta que en una especie de flash se me ocurrió de que era imposible obviar el poema; una vez que comencé con el poema, me di cuenta de que no tenía nada que ver ese poema con los comentarios explicativos de Kinbote... pero dejarse engañar por Kinbote era una fase necesaria ideada por Nabokov para participar en una trama que era como un juego: el lector tenía que conectar e involucrarse y la única forma era siendo consciente de que estaba siendo manipulado por Charles Kinbote. Imposible desvelar más sobre el argumento porque realmente la gracia está en la forma en que Nabokov construye las capas de esta novela bajo la premisa de que lo que se irá revelando en torno a Charles Kinbote y la obsesión por John Shade y su poema.

“Los siete pecados capitales son pecadillos, pero sin tres de ellos: el Orgullo, la Lujuria y la Pereza, quizá nunca hubiese nacido la poesía.”

Aunque las notas explicativas no añadan nada al poema, son esenciales para conocer a Charles Kinbote, el albacea literario del poeta John Shade. Esa obsesión que siente Kinbote por Shade y su poema sirven de excusa a Nabokov para reflexionar sobre la naturaleza humana, la creación artística y la identidad y hasta qué punto necesitamos extenderla más allá de nosotros mismos buscando reconocimientos del exterior. Ya digo que es una novela que me parece esencial sobre todo por la forma que tiene jugar con el poder del lenguaje, y en esto Nabokov era un maestro. En Pálido Fuego nada es lo que parece y ahí está la gracia.

"En lugar de la historia gloriosa y salvaje, ¿qué había? Un relato autobiográfico, eminentemente appalachiano, más bien pasado de moda, en un estilo prosódico neo-Pope, muy bien escrito naturalmente, Shade no podía escribir sino my bien, pero desprovisto de mi magia, de esa especial y rica corriente de locura mágica que, yo estaba seguro, la recorreria y le haría trascender su época."

To explain this gem of a novel in anything less than five or six pages, single-spaced, is to wildly underestimate what is going on here.

This author, best known for Lolita, goes well beyond the scope of that novel while displaying his ever precise and gloriously beautiful mastery of the language. Is he one of the best novelists ever? The brightest? The most cunning and crafty and poetical of the lot?

Perhaps. Indeed, likely. Proof, exhibit A: Pale Fire is based on a mostly autobiographical epic poem that he wrote as a character named Shade who died under mysterious circumstances. The man annotating the poem knew him and did, at first, an admirable job of breaking down and scholarly interpreting the work.

Let me say this. The poem is quite funny and evocative and smart as hell. It's also good. Very.

When this editor, this annotator starts on it, he sometimes makes an inappropriate comment or two and I tended to let it slide, thinking it funny and annoying and went back to enjoying the poem. Unfortunately, as the work progresses, this man keeps interrupting the poem in more serious ways, getting nitpicky, more personal, and even vindictive. This aspect of the novel pretty much takes over completely and we learn some VERY interesting aspects of both their lives.

The time is 1959 but the novel was published in '62. For fans of LGBTQ literature, both good and historical, I totally recommend this novel. The way it is handled is both tragic, unique, heartbreaking, and horrible to experience. The times were rather rough on artists and people with non-culturally standard desires. The things the poet did... well... just thrown in there between the lines... *shiver*

As I said, heartbreaking.

The end is like a hat-trick. We are forced to get used to the annotator going whole-hog on the nitpick and the scholarly schtik, so just when I'm almost fed-up, even the annotator breaks down...

And this is the most brilliant aspect of the novel. :)

I'm still reeling. What a glorious thing.

“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.”

I read Nabokov books at a remove – they are magnificently constructed, but don’t lend themselves to an absorbed and maniacal flipping through. Imagine jogging freely. Now imagine jogging with 10-pound weights on each ankle. Nabokov is the second. Despite that all, his works are pleasant. I am genuinely curious about the plot, and I find myself in debate with him (or his protagonists) on every page. I thought Lolita was fantastic, and I enjoyed Pnin, though not as much as the former. Pale Fire is my favourite so far.

The feeling of moving through molasses may come because Nabokov doesn’t care whether you understand him or not. I am humbled over and over again, as I’m unable to read two paragraphs smoothly, without referring to the OED. You cannot even blame him for employing too many neologisms. He just knows what he’s doing and respects the reader enough to just plop it all down and make it his/her duty to figure it out. Does this make it slightly more difficult? For sure it does. But it’s also immensely rewarding, finding out definitions for such words as “svelte” and “preterist”.

The structure of the book itself is a breath of fresh air. I have come to admit that I am a fan of experimental fiction, so I’ll try anything. When it’s so masterfully constructed, I can only stand back in awe. A poem in four cantos, dissected with overzealous detail by Kinbote, along with a foreword and index readymade. You flip back and forth between Pale Fire and its not-always-scholarly commentary, marvelling in the image that is forming. Confusing at first, made whole at the end. The poem itself is “meh” at best. The commentary is something else.

Some of the lines of Pale Fire (the poem, not the book) made me exhale air out of my nostrils at a slightly more forceful pace than usual. I can’t say with any real zest that I had favourites. I did have some favourites from the commentary. Kinbote’s annotations for line 149 made me laugh when he was 5 pages in. I saw a familiar friend in line 172 and questioned the structure of life in line 230 (“how curious that our rationality feels satisfied when we plumb for the first explanation, though, actually, the scientific and the supernatural, the miracle of the muscle and the miracle of the mind, are both inexplicable”). I wasn’t even surprised by the audacity of notes on lines 680 and 929.

A true work of art. Bravo.

Late night at the university library reference desk. The librarian on duty rubs tired eyes and lifts the receiver, silencing the desk phone's trilling ring. "Hello?"

Heavy breathing, long and unwholesome, then a choked whisper: "Nabokov."

"Yes? Did you need something by him?"

No reply but hot moist mouthbreathing. The librarian hangs up, disgusted.

Another ring. "Hello?" The breathing again, even more intense now.

"Puh... purple prose..."

Click!

Ring. Ring. Ring.

"Hello?"

Outright panting now, lewd and unsettling. "Unreliable narrators and mm-mmm-mmmmetafictional forms!" The last husky syllable swallowed in a deep groaning sigh.

"Quit calling here, you creep!" Click!

The phone again, loud as a gunshot in the middling twilight gloom. "Now listen here, you-"

"Get out of there!" The urgent voice is the local constable's. "We traced the calls - they're coming from inside the library!"

5 stars out of 5. For a guy with such a dour reputation, Nabokov makes murder mysteries a lot of fun. Laboriously crafted, deliciously discursive, dazzlingly unconventional, Nabokov weaves a literary parlor trick that's astounding.

There's a really endearing, clumsily cumbersome episode where a cloddish assassin bungles through a covert meeting but is exposed as an outsider because he just can't get the secret hand signals right. It made me laugh the stuffy chortle of an academic egghead. I guess that's how I'd sum this whole book up: very snooty humor for the ivory tower crowd. Academes will delight to see their own brow-furrowing methods put to shamelessly improper use serving a shaggy dog mystery.

I debated for a long time (a long time for me; it was about two hours) whether to give this book four or five stars. Tedious and downright boring at times, it is an otherwise incredibly intricate and enjoyable account of the death of a famous poet, John Shade, and the publishing of his final poem, Pale Fire, by his close friend and neighbour Dr. Charles Kinbote. The novel is broken down rather uniquely, and the order in which you read the book matters, and is not obvious unless you've done independent research into the opinions of others who have read the book (or have already read it once yourself). Here is a numbered breakdown of the elements in the order they appear in the book, and notes on what parts to read in what order:

1. Foreword (appears in the book first and should be read first)
2. Pale Fire poem (see note to 3)
3. Commentary on the poem Pale Fire (read this at the same time as the poem in 2, flipping back and forth to the Commentary notes for the lines in the poem as you are reading them)

It is critical to read the book in this order, as the Commentary section contains information that supplements and explains parts of the poem (and thus the story as a whole), and also as you may forget what the Commentary corresponds to later if you read the book in its written order, as the poem is rather long (39 pages in my edition and 999 lines long in any edition).

Getting back to the book itself, I found it to be an unnerving trek down a winding path of madness. This book is alternately high fantasy, fictional autobiography, mystery, descent into madness, and much more. Its unreliable narrator and the tale he weaves makes you question the reality of everything you read in this novel. In Pale Fire things may be crystal clear to you, or you may find more questions than you do answers. I felt both ways throughout this book, and that's the beauty of it.

Overall, though tedious and a slog at times, the rewards far outweigh the sometimes difficult journey, and I highly recommend Pale Fire.

After reading 'John Shade' for a time, I
Can not help but think in rhyme. Gray
Cat sits on a sunken chair; Full of
Spite and covr'd with mangy hair.

Was that the phone? I listen at the door.
Pause. Nothing. I resume vaccuming
Once more. And there's the wall of
Sound, that nightly wall. Frogs
Croak, the 'Yotes howl and frighten all.

What torture and yet splendid pain, Nabokov
Has inflicted on my brain! Ludricous,
I say; that I am pleased. When he's
left me feeling used and thor'ghly teased.

What a beautiful work of art, Nabokov was such a master at both prose and poetry. This unique blend of prose and poetry offers a delightful sojourn to cherish !!

Nabokov's Pale Fire is "what a composer of chess problems might term a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex type."

n  n

Perhaps even moreso than Luzhin Defense, Pale Fire seems to me Nabokov's ultimate ode to the king's game. A kind of post-modern salad of quirks and quizzes, the structure of the "novel" is a 999-line poem of heroic couplets by the late John Shade, a preface, an index, and most importantly explanatory commentary in the form of end-notes by Charles Kinbote (friend? neighbor? deposed king? psychopath?).

Nabokov was a lover of chess, but more particularly chess problems, which in themselves are remote artifices, much like Nabokov's post-modern artifacts-as-novels. He championed the chess problem as a battle, not between black and white, but between problem and solver, and that is how his novels should be read as well: the tension is not between characters but between novel and reader. Pale Fire is he ostensible struggle between Shade's poem and Kinbote's commentary, but is actually a problem (or host of questions, problems) for the reader to solve. The character-king of Charles Kinbote (Zembla's Charles X), is the great false move of the game: posing as the innocuous professor and neighbor of John Shade, we are tempted to believe what he tells us in his commentary, though as the narrative continues his harmless mask slips and slips, revealing the madman beneath. Nabokov, in an interview, on deception in chess and in art:n  

The fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjuror's magic: all art is deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation ...I am fond of chess but deception in chess, as in art, is only part of the game; it's part of the combination, part of the delightful possibilities, illusions, vistas of thought, which can be false vistas, perhaps.

nThe whole of Pale Fire can be read as a false vista, and the potential truths behind the mask are manifold, though none is certain. Is Kinbote really Charles the Beloved of Zembla (is there a Zembla at all?)? Is he the mad professor V. Botkin? Is the world actually a shared work between Shade and Kinbote, or is Kinbote/Botkin the sole author? The novel abounds in questions, each solution seductive but all mutually exclusive.

For the sake of simplicity, and to keep from caging myself too much in the Kinbote-is-Botkin camp, I will focus this review largely on the other treasures of Pale Fire, and take Kinbote's character as real and not simply a creation, though with a dash or two of salt. The novel's title suggests lines from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens:

TIMON
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sunn

Timon goes on to name the sea, the earth, and all else as thieves, but they are natural thieves: the moon can't help but to hold the light of the sun, the sea can;t help but to reflect the light of the moon, etc. Artistic theft is a recurrent theme in this Boswellian game of chess, and the potential malignancy of borrowing of inventive "light" from other artists. Kinbote "steals" the narrative from Shade, in fact the poem is quite overshadowed by the narrative, both in relative length and in artistic power, it is not the friendly borrowing of allusion, but the maliciously referential one-up-manship which Kinbote employs on the work of the late Shade. Kinbote is the Nabokovian trope of false-artist: a man who appears to share his views on art, but deploys them to malicious ends. Like Hermann in Despair, like Humbert in Lolita, Kinbote is an aesthetically inclined man, but one who uses art as a way to seduce, to take advantage: not art for art's sake, but art as Machiavellian deception. n  

I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.

nThe novel is a web, it literally refers to itself, and defies tradition methods of narrative reading. The trick is to pounce upon the butterflies of revelation when the appear in small flashes (they are never caught fully in the web) to avoid the sinister spider of deception. Even from the start, how does one read Pale Fire? Poem first, then commentary? Or Kinbote's self-important suggestion to read the commentary before-during-after? There is no right way. The novel is a chess match of 999 lines, first Shade's poesy, then Kinbote's prose, Shade, Kinbote, Shade, Kinbote, etc. But it is an idle kind of match (stalemate.), the quality of Shade's poem is a vastly inferior to Kinbote's commentary, though there is no real conclusion, the poem is left undone, or at Kinbote's suggestion it is left recursive: ending the same way it began. Like a king-in-the-corner, there is a stunted kind of play between Shade and Kinbote, but the play between book and reader is quite active, quite evocative.

The false vistas of Pale Fire are manifestly forewarned of in the opening of Shade's poem: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane" The reader can easily be seduced by the seeming vistas of Kinbote's stories, but by doing so they are reduced to the shadows of their own naivete. While there are a number of potentially "true" vistas, Nabokov never gives us one that is certain, keeping us constantly cognizant of the potential pitfalls of our assumptions: we are never safe when we read Pale Fire.

Whoop-dee-doo, five stars to Mr. Nabokov. Do you also feel silly clicking on the ratings? You throw gold stars into Pale Fire and the vanity of star-ratings is exposed.

We here are a community trying to reclaim our authority over writers who for pages have manipulated our thoughts and beings. Generals get stars, good students too, and my 2-year-old every time she uses the potty. Only the higher-ups get to hand them out, but c'mmon, is there a higher-up for Nabokov? Whoever can, hand him a real star from the sky.

There's a profound difference between clever writing and brilliant writing, and I don't know how it happens that in Pale Fire there's no shame or hiding from clever devices, and yet the outcome is brilliant. It could so easily, it seems, have been awful or unreadable. You don't expect a farce, a contrived "set-up" (the writing of the reader of the writing, and god knows which is the narrator) to be dizzy with beauty. It's alarming to pass cantos and watch what starts out as a prank turn into the masterpiece of the century.