Subject
Pale Fire & hypertext
Date
Body
From: alexander young <ayoung@email.gc.cuny.edu>
I have actually traced, tracked, and graphed a number of possible reading
paths in _Pale Fire_. In writing an undergraduate thesis on _PF_, I
decided that a good analogy (nevermind the judgment of that younger,
slightly more naive self) for _PF_ would be a vinyl record (versus a
compact disk), especially considering what are called "lock-grooves,"
grooves cut in a record that arrest the lateral travel of the stylus,
i.e., you hear the same revolution ad infinitum. At any rate, many of the
possible reading paths in _PF_ are circles (or lemniscates) much like the
paper chases in the index; some, on the other hand, are dead-ends; often
the difference between dead-end and circle comes down to the reader's
strategy, e.g., check for "newly" introduced characters in the index, etc.
At any rate, for anyone who is interested, Kinbote's advice is probably
the best in this respect: acquire two copies of _PF_... as for me: I had
two copies open for chasing references and a large photocopy of the poem
on the wall behind the desk...(but now I may be betraying my own Kinbotian
impulses).
-Seth Young
I have actually traced, tracked, and graphed a number of possible reading
paths in _Pale Fire_. In writing an undergraduate thesis on _PF_, I
decided that a good analogy (nevermind the judgment of that younger,
slightly more naive self) for _PF_ would be a vinyl record (versus a
compact disk), especially considering what are called "lock-grooves,"
grooves cut in a record that arrest the lateral travel of the stylus,
i.e., you hear the same revolution ad infinitum. At any rate, many of the
possible reading paths in _PF_ are circles (or lemniscates) much like the
paper chases in the index; some, on the other hand, are dead-ends; often
the difference between dead-end and circle comes down to the reader's
strategy, e.g., check for "newly" introduced characters in the index, etc.
At any rate, for anyone who is interested, Kinbote's advice is probably
the best in this respect: acquire two copies of _PF_... as for me: I had
two copies open for chasing references and a large photocopy of the poem
on the wall behind the desk...(but now I may be betraying my own Kinbotian
impulses).
-Seth Young