Subject
Nabokov on food (my favorite dishes)
From
Date
Body
A Literary Dinner
Come here, said my hostess, her face making room
for one of those pink introductory smiles
that link, like a valley of fruit trees in bloom,
the slopes of two names.
I want you, she murmured, to eat Dr. James.
I was hungry. The Doctor looked good. He had read
the great book of the week and had liked it, he said,
because it was powerful. So I was brought
a generous helping. His mauve-bosomed wife
kept showing me, very politely, I thought,
the tenderest bits with the point of her knife.
I ate--and in Egypt the sunsets were swell;
The Russians were doing remarkably well;
had I met a Prince Poprinsky, whom he had known
in Caparabella, or was it Mentone?
They had traveled extensively, he and his wife;
her hobby was People, his hobby was Life.
All was good and well cooked, but the tastiest part
was his nut-flavored, crisp cerebellum. The heart
resembled a shiny brown date,
and I stowed all the studs on the edge of my plate.
Southey liked a roasted rat for supper - which is especially comic in view
of the rats that devoured his Bishop. (Pale Fire, note to Lines 376-377)
The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing.
'We shall try to eat one later,' she [Ada] observed, 'but it must be gorged
to taste good. Of course, it can't sting your tongue. No animal will touch a
person's tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he
always leaves the man's tongue lying like that in the desert' (making a
negligent gesture). (Ada, 1.12)
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Come here, said my hostess, her face making room
for one of those pink introductory smiles
that link, like a valley of fruit trees in bloom,
the slopes of two names.
I want you, she murmured, to eat Dr. James.
I was hungry. The Doctor looked good. He had read
the great book of the week and had liked it, he said,
because it was powerful. So I was brought
a generous helping. His mauve-bosomed wife
kept showing me, very politely, I thought,
the tenderest bits with the point of her knife.
I ate--and in Egypt the sunsets were swell;
The Russians were doing remarkably well;
had I met a Prince Poprinsky, whom he had known
in Caparabella, or was it Mentone?
They had traveled extensively, he and his wife;
her hobby was People, his hobby was Life.
All was good and well cooked, but the tastiest part
was his nut-flavored, crisp cerebellum. The heart
resembled a shiny brown date,
and I stowed all the studs on the edge of my plate.
Southey liked a roasted rat for supper - which is especially comic in view
of the rats that devoured his Bishop. (Pale Fire, note to Lines 376-377)
The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing.
'We shall try to eat one later,' she [Ada] observed, 'but it must be gorged
to taste good. Of course, it can't sting your tongue. No animal will touch a
person's tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he
always leaves the man's tongue lying like that in the desert' (making a
negligent gesture). (Ada, 1.12)
Alexey Sklyarenko
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
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L