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Re: QUERY: Down, Fido? PS
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Petter Naess: "I believe I once came across a comparable instance in which VN, in the midst of answering a literary question... interjects "Down,Fido" (or something like that...), but now I'm unable to locate that passage. I think it was in Strong Opinions, but a cursory skim missed it.Anyone know the passage? Perhaps I remember it all wrong..."
JM: In Strong Opinions the first appearance of such a "dog" (cf.Vintage,78) was in 1967, during an interview with Alfred Appel Jr ( who notes that VN doesn't like to talk off the cuff ,ie: "off the Nabocuff"). While googling I discovered that there is, indeed, a"Fido"- theory of meaning, by Gibert Ryle [ Cf. Philosophy and a reference to "Platonic realism or hypostization."*] Perhaps Petter Naess has substituted the Plato-Fido reference by accident, but a Fido-search is worth pursuing further!
Changing the subject:
In Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna Karenina is Doing in Kamera obskura by Thomas Seifrid (Zembla), there is an epigraph extracted from "Dar": "A mysl' liubit zanavesku i kameru obskuru." Dar (383) ..."But thought likes curtains and the camera obscura." The Gift (338).
[QUERY]: When Nabokov chose the title for what later became known as "Laughter in the Dark" ( "Camera Oscura") did he intend it to suggest, literally, a "dark room," or was he indicating the apparatus, used by Duerer, Vermeer and various other painters, that is also designated by "Camera Obscura"? Or, perhaps, both?
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* Extract: Philosophy of language: "My dog Fido is an entity, and is designated by the name "Fido." On analogy, some theories of meaning claim that every meaningful expression refers to or designates an extra-linguistic entity, including abstract entities, and derives its meaning from what it designates. Gibert Ryle applied a derogatory label to this theory of meaning. According to him, this analogy is naive and incorrect. "Fido" stands in the relation of designation to my dog Fido. However, not every meaningful expression is a name that stands for some entity. For all expressions to be meaningful in this way, we would in the first place have to invent whole classes of abstract entities to which expressions that do not function in a designating way could seem to stand in a relation of designation. The expression "red" would, for example, give rise to the expression "redness" to stand for the objective property of redness. But this multiplication of entities would be futile. The central objection here is that having meaning is not identical with standing for. Other philosophers call this theory Platonic realism or hypostatization."I am still not quite sure why it seems so natural to assume that all words are names, and even that every possible grammatical subject of a sentence, one-worded or many-worded, stands to something as the proper name 'Fido' stands for the dog Fido, and what is a further ..."
** Wiki: The camera obscura (Latin for "dark room"; "darkened chamber") is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with colour and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation. Although the pinhole camera and camera obscura are credited to Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, 965-1039), for the first clear description and correct analysis of the device and for first describing how an image is formed in the eye using the camera obscura as an analogy, primitive forms of a camera obscura were known to earlier scholars since the time of Mozi and Aristotle. Euclid's Optics (ca 300 BC), presupposed the camera obscura as a demonstration that light travels in straight lines. When Ibn al-Haytham began experimenting with the camera obscura phenomenon, he stated (in Latin translation), Et nos non inventimus ita, "we did not invent this".
The camera lucida was patented in 1807 by W.Hyde Wollaston.There seems to be evidence that the camera lucida was actually nothing but a reinvention of a device clearly described 200 years earlier by Johannes Kepler in his Dioptrice (1611). By the 19th century, Kepler's description had totally fallen into oblivion, so Wollaston's claim was not challenged. The term "camera lucida" (Latin "Light Room" as opposed to Camera Obscura "Dark Room") is Wollaston's. ...The name "camera lucida" (Latin for "lit room") is obviously intended to recall the much older drawing aid, the camera obscura (Latin for "dark room"). There is no optical similarity between the devices. The camera lucida is a light, portable device that does not require special lighting conditions. No image is projected by the camera lucida.
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JM: In Strong Opinions the first appearance of such a "dog" (cf.Vintage,78) was in 1967, during an interview with Alfred Appel Jr ( who notes that VN doesn't like to talk off the cuff ,ie: "off the Nabocuff"). While googling I discovered that there is, indeed, a"Fido"- theory of meaning, by Gibert Ryle [ Cf. Philosophy and a reference to "Platonic realism or hypostization."*] Perhaps Petter Naess has substituted the Plato-Fido reference by accident, but a Fido-search is worth pursuing further!
Changing the subject:
In Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna Karenina is Doing in Kamera obskura by Thomas Seifrid (Zembla), there is an epigraph extracted from "Dar": "A mysl' liubit zanavesku i kameru obskuru." Dar (383) ..."But thought likes curtains and the camera obscura." The Gift (338).
[QUERY]: When Nabokov chose the title for what later became known as "Laughter in the Dark" ( "Camera Oscura") did he intend it to suggest, literally, a "dark room," or was he indicating the apparatus, used by Duerer, Vermeer and various other painters, that is also designated by "Camera Obscura"? Or, perhaps, both?
.............................................................................................................................
* Extract: Philosophy of language: "My dog Fido is an entity, and is designated by the name "Fido." On analogy, some theories of meaning claim that every meaningful expression refers to or designates an extra-linguistic entity, including abstract entities, and derives its meaning from what it designates. Gibert Ryle applied a derogatory label to this theory of meaning. According to him, this analogy is naive and incorrect. "Fido" stands in the relation of designation to my dog Fido. However, not every meaningful expression is a name that stands for some entity. For all expressions to be meaningful in this way, we would in the first place have to invent whole classes of abstract entities to which expressions that do not function in a designating way could seem to stand in a relation of designation. The expression "red" would, for example, give rise to the expression "redness" to stand for the objective property of redness. But this multiplication of entities would be futile. The central objection here is that having meaning is not identical with standing for. Other philosophers call this theory Platonic realism or hypostatization."I am still not quite sure why it seems so natural to assume that all words are names, and even that every possible grammatical subject of a sentence, one-worded or many-worded, stands to something as the proper name 'Fido' stands for the dog Fido, and what is a further ..."
** Wiki: The camera obscura (Latin for "dark room"; "darkened chamber") is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with colour and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation. Although the pinhole camera and camera obscura are credited to Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, 965-1039), for the first clear description and correct analysis of the device and for first describing how an image is formed in the eye using the camera obscura as an analogy, primitive forms of a camera obscura were known to earlier scholars since the time of Mozi and Aristotle. Euclid's Optics (ca 300 BC), presupposed the camera obscura as a demonstration that light travels in straight lines. When Ibn al-Haytham began experimenting with the camera obscura phenomenon, he stated (in Latin translation), Et nos non inventimus ita, "we did not invent this".
The camera lucida was patented in 1807 by W.Hyde Wollaston.There seems to be evidence that the camera lucida was actually nothing but a reinvention of a device clearly described 200 years earlier by Johannes Kepler in his Dioptrice (1611). By the 19th century, Kepler's description had totally fallen into oblivion, so Wollaston's claim was not challenged. The term "camera lucida" (Latin "Light Room" as opposed to Camera Obscura "Dark Room") is Wollaston's. ...The name "camera lucida" (Latin for "lit room") is obviously intended to recall the much older drawing aid, the camera obscura (Latin for "dark room"). There is no optical similarity between the devices. The camera lucida is a light, portable device that does not require special lighting conditions. No image is projected by the camera lucida.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
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Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
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