Good afternoon, folks! This is my first post—glad to be joining you all, and please forgive me if this already well-trodden ground. I was messing around with an anagram decoder earlier today, and realized I had never tried rearranging "Humbert" before now. Turns out I could have seen "thumber" hidden in there pretty easily if I just took out the space and wrote Humberthumbert, but hey, no use crying over spilled milk.

Below is a "word cloud" of the Foreword in Pale Fire, where the relative size of each term indicates the relative number of times it shows up in the text, with articles (and any other terms indicated by the user) not counted. I made it using an app from wordle.net, with text pasted in via the following sequence: a screenshot of each spread in the Vintage e-book, then Adobe Acrobat file assembly and Character Recognition. I then deleted the pdf.

I just took a little trip in the Wayback machine,* set for “Cedarn,” and arrived in 1998 to discover (from Tom Bolt) that:

> “Cedarn” occurs in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: “But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted/Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover” (Lines 12-13)

Not sure how a note would be added to Ada Online, but I think this one should be fairly uncontroversial.

On Van's first day back at Ardis in 1888, the details of his arrival morph, starting with:

"My horse caught a hoof in a hole in the rotting planks of Ladore Bridge and had to be shot. I have walked eight miles." (P.189)

Then a few lines later, the narrator reports that "[h]is train had broken down in the fields between Ladoga and Ladore, he had walked twenty miles[...]"

I have posted previously some ideas I have about Pale Fire being a parodic response to Northup Frye’s Archetypal Literary Criticism. Frye was influenced by the work of C. G. Jung, whose work I have also been suggesting is at the parodic core of PF.

Virtually every personage mentioned or alluded to in Pale Fire was associated with mysticism and/or the occult. I have compiled a list below. Note how many were members of the SPR, the esoteric/scientific society that is the template for Shade’s IPH. This is particularly important for my focus: Pale Fire’s hidden structure of Jungian alchemy and archetype.

In PF I think “Hodinski,”queen Yaruga’s lover, goliart and poet likely refers to Houdini, and further, to Nabokov himself.

I don't think this has been mentioned before.

In PF Kinbote jocularly calls Shade "you bad gray poet" and they both giggle like boys. 

"The Good Gray Poet" was the title of an 1866 biography of Walt Whitman by his friend William D. O'Connor. The nickname stuck.

Hello all,

I have recently taken on the position of Associate Editor for Reviews at the Nabokov Online Journal, and I am trying to get together a list of potential books and reviewers. If you have book on Nabokov that you would like reviewed, or if you are interested in writing a review for the NOJ (whether or not you have a particular book in mind), please reach out to me.  My email is mroth@messiah.edu.

Many thanks in advance,

Matt Roth

I believe I have a PF ‘find’ here:

Kinbote in his commentary to 922 quotes one of Shade’s discards:

England where poets flew the highest, now

Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough;