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Re: "unpublished poem version of Lolita"?
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Re: [NABOKV-L] "unpublished poem version of Lolita"?Dear Stan K-B and List,
After such marvellous answer from S K-B - that has me still in a tremulous grip of laughter - I'll send another line from VN's 1924 short-story "Gods" ( I endorse his heartfelt thanks to Dmitri ), a carpe diem exhultation woven with tears, which I haven't copied down but we all know it is there along with the gladiators:
"I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator...Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.
There's a glorious "Ring" announced at the Met, but I missed it and Brunhilda's shield, to come back to tropical Brazil after a chilly meeting in Chicago for the MLA presentation of papers on Nabokov. ( I hope SES will divulge her find about Disney's enchanted hunter's name?)
Here I need no coats and buttons, perhaps this is why I have no idea if my sentences button to the right..
I have a little story about unchivalrous chirality that is independent of the legend that below the equator unplugged bathtubs spin in the opposite direction as those up North (and yet our new moon indeed smiles like a Cheshire cat's...). My husband once had to call in a safebox expert because he was unable to open it by following the secret instructions he kept.First the guy made a quick anamnesis: Had anyone managed to open the safe before?
When husband said "my wife", the expert said: Then try rotating everything in the opposite direction and we'll see if we have to break the safe open or not. It worked! I don't know who wrote the instructions in the first place but the bulky expert knew about the mysterious workings of chiral gender and the female mind...
Perhaps VN's, one of VN's transformed universes carry Plato's idealistic hermaphrodite unbuckled couples, such as many of us believe about Vaniada? (not Hum and Lo,though).
Welcome Steve!
Best,Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: Stan Kelly-Bootle
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] "unpublished poem version of Lolita"?
On 29/12/07 23:27, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you...aren't you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . .(VN,"Gods")
Happy 2008 to you all...
JM
Jansy & Fellow Nabokovistas: I reciprocate, being too old and ungodlike to rotate. The quotation is new to me and especially exciting with its mathematical implications: the contrasts between reflective and rotational symmetries (which have deep influences in cosmology).
Had I stumbled across this verse unattributed, I think (or dare to think) that I would have identified our master's voice?
My 2008 has been happy SO FAR! Urly daze [early days], as we Scousers say. I received as a prezzie the Pocket Penguin 34, CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE (2005) which offers five of VN's finest short stories at the improbable price of 30 Brit pence per masterpiece! There's no explicit acknowledgement to translators, but since the stories are taken from earlier collections (out of reach as I type), I assume we are enjoying the fruits of Dmitri's labours, many with his father's collaboration.
DN: Lang mae yer lum reek! (Long may your chimney smoke)
There are 70 Pocket Penguins in the series, celebrating Penguin's 70 years. I shudder un peu at some of the non-writers selected, but, what the hell ...
For Jansy and others on dis staff, I offer VN's tease from The Admiralty Spire:
' ... how easy it is to guess that the author's name is a pseudonym, that the author is not a man! Every sentence of yours buttons to the left.'
(Coincidentally, last night I was watching as Siegfried made a similar discovery in Act 3. Bru:nhilde's shield must have buckled to the left! That's no man, he screams ripping off his Auntie's bra. Real naughty, that Ring Cycle.)
This brings us back to VN's Gods:
When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you...aren't you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . .(VN,"Gods")
The poet-god (did the original have God upper-case?) seems to have real blood to sway his senses, the sign of a Greek demi-god or hints of the (related?) Christian Man-God reincarnation. Either way, VN gives us prophetic signs'n'wonders: serious cosmologists do posit multiverses which are forever unexplorable -- beyond direct spatio-temporal relations with our local cosmos. (Eddington in the late 1920s was exploring whether a 3+1-dimensional world could coexist with a 2+2-dimensional world. His answer: yes, but neither could ever know about the other's existence. This was at Cambridge during VN's very residence! Do we have a date for the Gods poem?)
Nearer to earth, in the poposed mirror-image transformation, the loved-one's vestments will button to the right. But, of course, male coats will now button to the left. Note that this chirality is directly related to the two directions of rotational spin (male coats wrap clockise; female counter- or anti-clockwise. These and other spins play a key role in particle physics. Our universe may well FAVOUR male over female spin, or vice versa!) Is this just the chiral reversal of purely arbitrary dress-codes, or will the Viennese Witchdoctors who love to probe VN's ID and ID-EST, seek some fanciful homoerotic deviations.
My spin [sic], which I hope Nabokovians will support at this festive point in space-time, is that we all unbutton in the appropriate direction and cavort naked with Ada and ardour, Hum and Lol, Shades and Grades of Kinny and Pninny and all, in VN's transformed universe.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
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After such marvellous answer from S K-B - that has me still in a tremulous grip of laughter - I'll send another line from VN's 1924 short-story "Gods" ( I endorse his heartfelt thanks to Dmitri ), a carpe diem exhultation woven with tears, which I haven't copied down but we all know it is there along with the gladiators:
"I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator...Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.
There's a glorious "Ring" announced at the Met, but I missed it and Brunhilda's shield, to come back to tropical Brazil after a chilly meeting in Chicago for the MLA presentation of papers on Nabokov. ( I hope SES will divulge her find about Disney's enchanted hunter's name?)
Here I need no coats and buttons, perhaps this is why I have no idea if my sentences button to the right..
I have a little story about unchivalrous chirality that is independent of the legend that below the equator unplugged bathtubs spin in the opposite direction as those up North (and yet our new moon indeed smiles like a Cheshire cat's...). My husband once had to call in a safebox expert because he was unable to open it by following the secret instructions he kept.First the guy made a quick anamnesis: Had anyone managed to open the safe before?
When husband said "my wife", the expert said: Then try rotating everything in the opposite direction and we'll see if we have to break the safe open or not. It worked! I don't know who wrote the instructions in the first place but the bulky expert knew about the mysterious workings of chiral gender and the female mind...
Perhaps VN's, one of VN's transformed universes carry Plato's idealistic hermaphrodite unbuckled couples, such as many of us believe about Vaniada? (not Hum and Lo,though).
Welcome Steve!
Best,Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: Stan Kelly-Bootle
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] "unpublished poem version of Lolita"?
On 29/12/07 23:27, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you...aren't you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . .(VN,"Gods")
Happy 2008 to you all...
JM
Jansy & Fellow Nabokovistas: I reciprocate, being too old and ungodlike to rotate. The quotation is new to me and especially exciting with its mathematical implications: the contrasts between reflective and rotational symmetries (which have deep influences in cosmology).
Had I stumbled across this verse unattributed, I think (or dare to think) that I would have identified our master's voice?
My 2008 has been happy SO FAR! Urly daze [early days], as we Scousers say. I received as a prezzie the Pocket Penguin 34, CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE (2005) which offers five of VN's finest short stories at the improbable price of 30 Brit pence per masterpiece! There's no explicit acknowledgement to translators, but since the stories are taken from earlier collections (out of reach as I type), I assume we are enjoying the fruits of Dmitri's labours, many with his father's collaboration.
DN: Lang mae yer lum reek! (Long may your chimney smoke)
There are 70 Pocket Penguins in the series, celebrating Penguin's 70 years. I shudder un peu at some of the non-writers selected, but, what the hell ...
For Jansy and others on dis staff, I offer VN's tease from The Admiralty Spire:
' ... how easy it is to guess that the author's name is a pseudonym, that the author is not a man! Every sentence of yours buttons to the left.'
(Coincidentally, last night I was watching as Siegfried made a similar discovery in Act 3. Bru:nhilde's shield must have buckled to the left! That's no man, he screams ripping off his Auntie's bra. Real naughty, that Ring Cycle.)
This brings us back to VN's Gods:
When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you...aren't you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . .(VN,"Gods")
The poet-god (did the original have God upper-case?) seems to have real blood to sway his senses, the sign of a Greek demi-god or hints of the (related?) Christian Man-God reincarnation. Either way, VN gives us prophetic signs'n'wonders: serious cosmologists do posit multiverses which are forever unexplorable -- beyond direct spatio-temporal relations with our local cosmos. (Eddington in the late 1920s was exploring whether a 3+1-dimensional world could coexist with a 2+2-dimensional world. His answer: yes, but neither could ever know about the other's existence. This was at Cambridge during VN's very residence! Do we have a date for the Gods poem?)
Nearer to earth, in the poposed mirror-image transformation, the loved-one's vestments will button to the right. But, of course, male coats will now button to the left. Note that this chirality is directly related to the two directions of rotational spin (male coats wrap clockise; female counter- or anti-clockwise. These and other spins play a key role in particle physics. Our universe may well FAVOUR male over female spin, or vice versa!) Is this just the chiral reversal of purely arbitrary dress-codes, or will the Viennese Witchdoctors who love to probe VN's ID and ID-EST, seek some fanciful homoerotic deviations.
My spin [sic], which I hope Nabokovians will support at this festive point in space-time, is that we all unbutton in the appropriate direction and cavort naked with Ada and ardour, Hum and Lol, Shades and Grades of Kinny and Pninny and all, in VN's transformed universe.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Search the Nabokv-L archive with Google
Contact the Editors
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm