Subject
Nabokov in cyberspace (fwd)
Date
Body
From: lav@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
This message was originally submitted by lav@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU to the
NABOKV-L list at UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU. If you simply forward it back to the list,
using a mail command that generates "Resent-" fields (ask your local user
support or consult the documentation of your mail program if in doubt), it will
be distributed and the explanations you are now reading will be removed
automatically. If on the other hand you edit the contributions you receive into
a digest, you will have to remove this paragraph manually. Finally, you should
be able to contact the author of this message by using the normal "reply"
function of your mail program.
----------------- Message requiring your approval (75 lines)
------------------
It occurred to me this evening that, in the absence of Suellen
Stringer-Hye's fine compilations of Nabokov mentions and allusions, it
is still possible to harness modern technology to create a cheap
imitation. I refer, of course, to the simple approach of searching
the World-Wide Web's enormous collection of information,
misinformation, and everything in between. To do this, I used the
Lycos server at Carnegie-Mellon University, which you can reach at
http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/
It found me 48 documents that mention Nabokov, although that includes
a number of repetitions. (I only looked for "Nabokov"; no doubt
"Lolita" and "Nabakov" would have turned up a lot, too.) And here's
what I saw in these documents:
--- There's a lot of academic stuff, of course. I discovered that
entire courses on Nabokov are taught at Wesleyan and at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and that books by Nabokov are used in
courses at Cornell and Harvard. (In most of these cases it's the
course catalog that's online; at Cornell, though, it appears to be
only the bookstore's inventory, and nothing about the content of the
courses in question.) Somewhere in Sweden (well, it looked like
Swedish, anyway), Svetlana Polsky is writing a doctoral dissertation
called *Struktura Nabokovskoj prozy*.
On the fringes of academic life: The Princeton University Press is
ready and willing to sell you Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin.
They've got a book by Alvin Kernan (with a chapter on Nabokov) that
they'll sell you for a discount.
--- There's a lot of computer stuff. K. M. Mennie and Stuart
Moulthrop, in discussions of hypertext, mention Nabokov; no surprise
there, since the idea that Nabokov and hypertext go together dates
back to Ted Nelson's desire in 1969 to create a hypertext version of
*Pale Fire*. A participant in the summer seminar at the Center for
Electronic Texts in the Humanities at Rutgers was also interested in
what the computer could do with or to *Pale Fire*.
We also learn from the web that a computer programmer at Stanford and
a guy who works in the Emory Law School Library are both fans of
Nabokov. There's a guy who works for the Institute for Scientific
Information who has a friend who is a Nabokov scholar. A professor of
computer science at Princeton includes Nabokov in his Gallery of
Heroes (and he's even got a picture of Nabokov in this gallery).
And a computer programmer at Lehman Brothers in New York includes this
cheery quotation in his signature file:
"The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of
excruciating insanity" - V. I. Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins
(I hope the advice he offers on using Sun workstations is not as
inaccurate as this. I especially like the "V. I.")
--- Finally, there are some random mentions. There is one minimally
detailed account of Lolita's censorship; and Nabokov comes up as the
guy who had a certain job at Cornell before Herbert Gold, and as an
example in a review of Catharine Mackinnon's *Only Words*. Apparently
Nabokov was mentioned in a movie review in *Time* last December, but
although Lycos could read this review I couldn't because I hadn't paid
*Time* any money.
And a record review by a certain Jonathan Lethem contains these
sentences:
In a world of hamfisted preaching, his raps and rants are allusive
and evocative in a way that makes me want to soak them in again and
again. He grasps the power of the 20th Century's great contribution to
literature -- the 'unreliable narrator' -- with the proficiency of
Vladimir Nabokov or Charles Willeford.
No, I don't know who Charles Willeford is either, although the
similarity to a well-known comment of Nabokov's about fame is eerie.
John Lavagnino
This message was originally submitted by lav@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU to the
NABOKV-L list at UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU. If you simply forward it back to the list,
using a mail command that generates "Resent-" fields (ask your local user
support or consult the documentation of your mail program if in doubt), it will
be distributed and the explanations you are now reading will be removed
automatically. If on the other hand you edit the contributions you receive into
a digest, you will have to remove this paragraph manually. Finally, you should
be able to contact the author of this message by using the normal "reply"
function of your mail program.
----------------- Message requiring your approval (75 lines)
------------------
It occurred to me this evening that, in the absence of Suellen
Stringer-Hye's fine compilations of Nabokov mentions and allusions, it
is still possible to harness modern technology to create a cheap
imitation. I refer, of course, to the simple approach of searching
the World-Wide Web's enormous collection of information,
misinformation, and everything in between. To do this, I used the
Lycos server at Carnegie-Mellon University, which you can reach at
http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/
It found me 48 documents that mention Nabokov, although that includes
a number of repetitions. (I only looked for "Nabokov"; no doubt
"Lolita" and "Nabakov" would have turned up a lot, too.) And here's
what I saw in these documents:
--- There's a lot of academic stuff, of course. I discovered that
entire courses on Nabokov are taught at Wesleyan and at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and that books by Nabokov are used in
courses at Cornell and Harvard. (In most of these cases it's the
course catalog that's online; at Cornell, though, it appears to be
only the bookstore's inventory, and nothing about the content of the
courses in question.) Somewhere in Sweden (well, it looked like
Swedish, anyway), Svetlana Polsky is writing a doctoral dissertation
called *Struktura Nabokovskoj prozy*.
On the fringes of academic life: The Princeton University Press is
ready and willing to sell you Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin.
They've got a book by Alvin Kernan (with a chapter on Nabokov) that
they'll sell you for a discount.
--- There's a lot of computer stuff. K. M. Mennie and Stuart
Moulthrop, in discussions of hypertext, mention Nabokov; no surprise
there, since the idea that Nabokov and hypertext go together dates
back to Ted Nelson's desire in 1969 to create a hypertext version of
*Pale Fire*. A participant in the summer seminar at the Center for
Electronic Texts in the Humanities at Rutgers was also interested in
what the computer could do with or to *Pale Fire*.
We also learn from the web that a computer programmer at Stanford and
a guy who works in the Emory Law School Library are both fans of
Nabokov. There's a guy who works for the Institute for Scientific
Information who has a friend who is a Nabokov scholar. A professor of
computer science at Princeton includes Nabokov in his Gallery of
Heroes (and he's even got a picture of Nabokov in this gallery).
And a computer programmer at Lehman Brothers in New York includes this
cheery quotation in his signature file:
"The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of
excruciating insanity" - V. I. Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins
(I hope the advice he offers on using Sun workstations is not as
inaccurate as this. I especially like the "V. I.")
--- Finally, there are some random mentions. There is one minimally
detailed account of Lolita's censorship; and Nabokov comes up as the
guy who had a certain job at Cornell before Herbert Gold, and as an
example in a review of Catharine Mackinnon's *Only Words*. Apparently
Nabokov was mentioned in a movie review in *Time* last December, but
although Lycos could read this review I couldn't because I hadn't paid
*Time* any money.
And a record review by a certain Jonathan Lethem contains these
sentences:
In a world of hamfisted preaching, his raps and rants are allusive
and evocative in a way that makes me want to soak them in again and
again. He grasps the power of the 20th Century's great contribution to
literature -- the 'unreliable narrator' -- with the proficiency of
Vladimir Nabokov or Charles Willeford.
No, I don't know who Charles Willeford is either, although the
similarity to a well-known comment of Nabokov's about fame is eerie.
John Lavagnino