Word Play

Still getting no where in terms of a plot. Or even of a location. Or of any sense of what is going on.

But I'm fairly dazzled by the word play. Here's a good passage:

His howd feeled heavy, his hoddit did shake. (There was a wall of course in erection) Dimb! He stottered from the latter. Damb! he was dud. Dumb! Mastabatoom, mastabadtoom, when a moon merries his lute is all long. For whole the world to see.

The other writer this is now reminding me of (perhaps my favorite novelist) is Vladimir Nabokov. While the fascination and expertise with wordplay are similar, the use and function of them are opposite. When you read a novel by Nabokov, you get totally gripped in the story, and it's only afterward (or when you are reading his introductions) that you start to see the playful language. Sometimes it's more obvious (like in Pnin), but it's always there. Here, however, the wordplay is completely obscuring the sense of the piece.

Foreground and background again. Somehow I've got to find a way to distinguish what's important. It's like people who have that brain defect where they cannot distinguish different sound levels, and so every sound - air conditioners, light breezes, screaming football fans - all carry equal weight. I guess this is also like those Magic Eye Stereograms from the 90's that I could never do. I don't need a plot, but somehow I do have to find some sort of pattern.