Bookwarm Games

Pursuing the butterflies and other beasts in Nabokov's late work. Play and games, FF9's dual worlds--a crossover with the Video Game Academy seems imminent. Adding a chapter to the modernism book outline as we speak!

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(Cards, voice, boat...)

Garnet's lost her powers of speech, but we do our best to make up for it.

For more: https://videogameacademia.org/courses/current-semester/final-fantasy-ix/

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Nabokov's Van and Ada, "dangerous cousins" long before Arrested Development and whatever French art films it was directly spoofing, prefigure also Woody Allen's and Wes Anderson's predilections. What are readers supposed to make of the nonagenarian narrator's loving descriptions of acts whose moral impact the precocious youths seem to overlook, whilst making anagrams of insect (scient - incest - nicest) and blushing across the breakfast table?

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From the kerfuffle caused by Eiko's love letter to the Alexander summon sequence, passing over for now much of the Treno card tournament in merciful silence.

For more: https://videogameacademia.org/courses/current-semester/final-fantasy-ix/

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Comparisons to Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust are entertained and mused upon at the narrator's invitation, and we readers and rereaders are entertained and bemused by this puzzling, playful later masterpiece from the author of Lolita, a book that has been back in the news lately due to certain famous people whose lives have been tawdry imitations of its controversial art.

Text and annotations: https://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/

Lolita in the news: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/02/jeffrey-epstein-nabokov-lolita/685320/

Readership and vice: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/reading-crisis-solution-literature-personal-passion/685461/

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The princess and the summoner village brought full circle; we meet our final party member; Kuja vs Brahne; and on to Disc 3.

More at https://videogameacademia.org/courses/current-semester/final-fantasy-ix/

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With guest appearances by Dostoevsky and Ippolit: https://anunexpectedjournal.com/beauty-in-tragedy-the-idiot-dostoevsky-and-eucatastrophe/

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Discussing Alex's forthcoming entry in the Bibliotheca Dantesca. https://penn.manifoldapp.org/journals/bibliotheca-dantesca

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbigmQGjQaA

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Selections from Keats' Letters: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters

Text of Endymion, with Preface and notes: https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_endymion_book_i.html

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We end up talking quite a bit about Hamlet and other plays, less about the poem, but it's the point of departure for what I hope is an interesting conversation nonetheless.

Babcock later turned up this article on the ways in which the fall of Troy appears across WS' work: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/1/38

For my part, I'm more interested in Shakespeare and Ovid. A book James and Caley of Chandler Prep suggest: https://archive.org/details/shakespeareovid0000bate

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