Here’s how I came to be reading Vladimir Nabokov’s exhilarating but challenging novel Pale Fire.

I was playing Rock Band with a serious, established, Best American Short Story-garnering writer. His Rock Band avatar looked like an angry, cross-dressing pirate who’d been dipped in purple hair dye. His avatar’s name was “C. Kinbote.”

“Who’s C. Kinbote?” I asked as I rocked out.

“He’s the narrator of Pale Fire. You haven’t read Pale Fire?” he said, rocking out.

So now I’m reading Pale Fire. It’s a tricky artifact book, one that presents itself as an annotated edition of a long poem, “Pale Fire,” by the late poet John Shade.

Of course, this is Nabokov, so it’s hardly that simple. The foreword and rambling annotations are written by Shade’s self-appointed and quite likely insane editor, Charles Kinbote. And (again, of course, this being Nabokov) the foreword and annotations aren’t literary commentary at all, but rather a story of scandal, obsession and death, illuminating not so much Shade’s poem as Kinbote’s devouring preoccupation with trying to convince Shade to pen an epic national poem about Kinbote’s home country Zembla, particularly the episode of his beloved king’s daring escape from an anti-monarchist uprising. Shade’s poem does none of that, but that doesn’t stop the delusional Kinbote from crediting his telling of Zemblan national myth as as the inspiration for Shade’s 999-line work.

One of the pivotal ironies, though, is that Shade’s poem is more or less clattering, overserious guff, while madman Kinbote’s tale of revolutionary adventure in his native Zembla sings with vigor and feeling. And even though I’m certain the better part of Nabokov’s wiles and jibes are flying past my head, the joy — the muscular joy — of his sentences are ample compensation.

Dreams are still free, though.

Cue harp music and arty blur as we travel back to April 2008, when casinos were a growth industry, easy credit was everywhere, mixed-use was all the rage and the Fertitta brothers wore sunglasses to look cool rather than hide their hot, salty tears of grief at having an overleveraged empire on their hands.

It’s hard to believe that once upon a time Stations wanted to out-CityCenter CityCenter. From an R-J piece a year ago:

Station Casinos is designing the most ambitious project in its 32-year history — a multibillion-dollar development that would be bigger than MGM Mirage’s $8 billion CityCenter.

A mixed-use development, tentatively titled Viva, is envisioned for 110 acres on Tropicana Avenue just west of Interstate 15 that’s now the site for the Wild Wild West hotel-casino and some restaurants, retail shops and warehouses, the locals gaming company said.

Building of the project, which could eventually cost as much as $10 billion, is planned in phases. The first phase is expected to have three hotels with 5,200 hotel rooms and a large casino.

Funny how things have changed so quickly. It’s almost as if Southern Nevada’s chronic lack of economic diversity has put it in mortal peril or something …

You, sir, are no John Kenneth Galbraith.

Reader Gabriel Gentile writes in response to Penn Jillette’s recent piece for CNN:

On April 1, noted entertainer and Las Vegas resident Penn Jillete wrote an editorial for CNN.com that cast a critical eye on the President’s plan to evidently “spend our way out of debt”, claiming it was, in his own words, “counterintuitive”.

Penn Jillete is a very intelligent man and has done much to bring information to light for the purpose of helping people make an informed decision. I respect and admire Mr. Jillete a great deal and it is a sincere hope of mine to one day meet the man and, perhaps, even converse with him (about his familiarity with Brother Theodore if nothing else).

But he’ll be the first to tell you he doesn’t know everything, and that he’s been wrong in the past.

For all the talk against it, people don’t realize just how vital a “tax and spend” policy is for maintaining a healthy national economy and infrastructure. Think of it as the heart. The heart’s function is to take in blood, re-oxygenate it, and distribute the blood to the systems where it is most needed. This process is often referred to as the onomatopoeiac “lub-dub”, the “lub” being the intake, the “dub” being the output. Taxing is the “lub”, spending is the “dub”.

What happens when a heart “lubs” more than it “dubs” or vice versa? A natural miracle that even Penn AND Teller couldn’t top!

Here’s an extended Q& A with the League of Conservation Voters’ Tony Massaro and Nevada Conservation League’s Scot Rutledge. A condensed version of this interview can be found in this week’s CityLife.

Q: What are you doing in Nevada?

Tony Massaro: We’re talking about Sen. Harry Reid because there are literally millions of dollars that come to Nevada as a direct result of the work that Sen. Reid has done. One example is transmissions. There was billions in the stimulus package for transmissions, just in the west.

We need to have, if we’re going build wind facilities and solar facilities in the west, those are largely not going to be built next to the large population centers that are going to use the energy. So you have to get the energy there. So in order to have a clean energy economy work, you build these facilities in rural Nevada, and then you send the energy to Las Vegas and Reno and the other urban centers throughout the rest of the west.

Q: Is there a demand for renewable energy to justify the type of investment the federal government is making?

TM: One of the things that was included in the stimulus bill was the extension of the renewable energy tax credits to basically make them permanent. In the past 10 years, they’ve had that tax credit extended more than 10 times, and some of those extensions were only 6 months long. And it’s really hard to have a business plan when you don’t know what price you’re paying.

You do have a renewable energy portfolio standard in Nevada, so you’ve got to move along that path no matter what. So the industry is being created. Part of the issue is where the industry is being created. And part of what the industry did was create a mechanism so that a significant push is created in Nevada. That’s a big part of it. (more…)