Subject
"Free-association football with Edsel Ford" from JF
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Matthew Roth wrote:
> 1. Has anyone (here on the list or elsewhere) tracked down the Edsel
> Ford poem excerpted by Kinbote?
I was thinking of requesting /Raspberries Run Deep/ by
interlibrary loan, but that's as far as I've gotten. If I try
this, I'm going to start as close as I can to 1959 and work
backwards. Have you eliminated any books yet?
> 2. In lines 615-616, Shade is describing "the exile, the old man /
Dying
> in
> a motel" and says: "He suffocates and conjures in two tongues / The
> nebulae
> dilating in his lungs." My questions: Does "two tongues" refer to
> languages?
That's how I took it.
> Medically speaking, what are nebulae and how do they dilate in
> the lungs?
I took that to refer to the cloudy appearance on an x ray of
lung lesions. Maybe there's a comparison between how they look
in black-and-white x-ray photographs and how nebulae look in
astronomical photographs. I don't know medicine, but I suspect
the disease is pneumonia, "the old man's friend", and "dilate"
just means "expand", as the portions of the lungs blocked by
fluid and bacteria (or whatever) gain in size.
> What does it mean to "conjure" them?
It seems kind of strange to me. Here are possibly relevant
definitions from Webster's Third (the wrong one):
1. b : to entreat earnestly or solemnly : IMPLORE, BESEECH
2. b (1) : to affect or effect by by or as if by magic : call
forth or /send away/ by magic arts...
For the first I'd expect "conjure them to do something", and
for the second "conjure them away", but those are as close as
I get.
> With gratitude,
> Matthew Roth
>
> --------------------------
>
> It's funny how, once deep in the thickets of PF, everything I
> read seems to relate to it somehow.
Do I hear disembodied chuckling somewhere?
[snip intersting poem]
> [EDNOTE. A few more thoughts on the name "Edsel Ford." Would his
name
> have appeared alphabetically before Frost's in the index to some
> contemporary volume of American poetry? Is the alphabetical sequence
of
> the first name followed by the surname important? SES]
I like the Ford-Frost adjacency--too bad I know so little about
what poets were anthologized then (not even whether there were
any Friedmans in between).
Some free association football with Ford: My first thought was
that it was a coincidence, like crown-crow-cow, that two people
with that very rare name should have gained some prominence.
Another possibility is that Ford was a lesser contemorary of
Shakespeare, as Ford is of Frost (or Shade or Nabokov). Yet
another is that a ford is a place to cross a river--like the
Styx? Then Ford's biography posted here suggests that he might
have been gay, which might have interested Kinbote. (But if
Kinbote had stopped on his way to Cedarn in Fort Smith, Arkansas,
and met Ford , I'd think he would have mentioned it.) Would
you believe Ford's Theater, site of a famous assassination?
No, I have no reason to think Nabokov knew Ford's sexual
orientation or the fact that he wasn't named after the
more famous Edsel Ford.
Jerry Friedman
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
> 1. Has anyone (here on the list or elsewhere) tracked down the Edsel
> Ford poem excerpted by Kinbote?
I was thinking of requesting /Raspberries Run Deep/ by
interlibrary loan, but that's as far as I've gotten. If I try
this, I'm going to start as close as I can to 1959 and work
backwards. Have you eliminated any books yet?
> 2. In lines 615-616, Shade is describing "the exile, the old man /
Dying
> in
> a motel" and says: "He suffocates and conjures in two tongues / The
> nebulae
> dilating in his lungs." My questions: Does "two tongues" refer to
> languages?
That's how I took it.
> Medically speaking, what are nebulae and how do they dilate in
> the lungs?
I took that to refer to the cloudy appearance on an x ray of
lung lesions. Maybe there's a comparison between how they look
in black-and-white x-ray photographs and how nebulae look in
astronomical photographs. I don't know medicine, but I suspect
the disease is pneumonia, "the old man's friend", and "dilate"
just means "expand", as the portions of the lungs blocked by
fluid and bacteria (or whatever) gain in size.
> What does it mean to "conjure" them?
It seems kind of strange to me. Here are possibly relevant
definitions from Webster's Third (the wrong one):
1. b : to entreat earnestly or solemnly : IMPLORE, BESEECH
2. b (1) : to affect or effect by by or as if by magic : call
forth or /send away/ by magic arts...
For the first I'd expect "conjure them to do something", and
for the second "conjure them away", but those are as close as
I get.
> With gratitude,
> Matthew Roth
>
> --------------------------
>
> It's funny how, once deep in the thickets of PF, everything I
> read seems to relate to it somehow.
Do I hear disembodied chuckling somewhere?
[snip intersting poem]
> [EDNOTE. A few more thoughts on the name "Edsel Ford." Would his
name
> have appeared alphabetically before Frost's in the index to some
> contemporary volume of American poetry? Is the alphabetical sequence
of
> the first name followed by the surname important? SES]
I like the Ford-Frost adjacency--too bad I know so little about
what poets were anthologized then (not even whether there were
any Friedmans in between).
Some free association football with Ford: My first thought was
that it was a coincidence, like crown-crow-cow, that two people
with that very rare name should have gained some prominence.
Another possibility is that Ford was a lesser contemorary of
Shakespeare, as Ford is of Frost (or Shade or Nabokov). Yet
another is that a ford is a place to cross a river--like the
Styx? Then Ford's biography posted here suggests that he might
have been gay, which might have interested Kinbote. (But if
Kinbote had stopped on his way to Cedarn in Fort Smith, Arkansas,
and met Ford , I'd think he would have mentioned it.) Would
you believe Ford's Theater, site of a famous assassination?
No, I have no reason to think Nabokov knew Ford's sexual
orientation or the fact that he wasn't named after the
more famous Edsel Ford.
Jerry Friedman
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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