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VN and occult societies

Submitted by MARYROSS on Fri, 04/02/2021 - 18:31
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Does anyone have information on what VN refers to in Speak Memory when he writes:

 

'Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa.'

 

Notes to Ada, Part 1 john_cho Sun, 03/28/2021 - 13:46
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The following are notes that I took while recently re-reading Part 1 of Ada. Brian Boyd was kind enough to include some of them in his online annotations. Apologies if there are any redundant remarks vis-à-vis previous posts by others.

John Nagamichi Cho

 

Chapter 1

New books on Nabokov matthew_roth Fri, 03/26/2021 - 10:42
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Friends,

March continues to be an especially exciting month for Nabokov studies. In addition to the release of the latest Nabokov Online Journal, we also have the publication of two new collections of topical essays and one new monograph:

1. Teaching Nabokov's Lolita in the #MeToo Era, Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, Ed. (See news page for full description)

Nabokov in the news William Dane Wed, 03/03/2021 - 23:05
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I personally find the idea of "cancel culture" pretty regressive (adults swept into peer trends) but anyway beyond the headline this does get into some depth:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/review/lolita-obscenity-cancel-culture-emily-mortimer.html

Chart of PF and Finnegans Wake comparison MARYROSS Tue, 03/02/2021 - 17:16
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I want to add to my previous post (http://thenabokovian.org/node/52191) a brief chart I made demonstrating many of the similarities between Pale Fire and Finnegans Wake (attached). My suggestion, as above, is that it seems possible that VN was influenced by Northrup Frye’s acclaims of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and purposely plagiarized the themes and motifs, possibly as parody or as a demonstration of how the same could be employed in a novel that is actually readable on a number of literary levels.

 

"Timon's Villa" and Pope

Submitted by William Dane on Tue, 03/02/2021 - 01:28
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From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannons_(house): "...Alexander Pope was unjustly accused of having represented the house as 'Timon's Villa' in his Epistle of Taste (1731).[5]"

 

[the note 5] Pope confided to Lord Burlington "that character of Timon is collected from twenty different absurditys and improprieties: and never was the picture of any one human creature"; quoted in James Lees-Milne, The Earls of Creation, :148...

 

Nabokov and Propp susan_wood Tue, 02/16/2021 - 10:40
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Hi, all! Has there ever been any indication that Nabokov read or at even heard of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928)?

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