JF wrote: "Off-topic, but I can't resist
saying..." in relation to his quote from Dante.
It's not really "off-topic", though. Kinbote,
while spying on Shade in his upstairs study ( and
including certain intimate, a bit sordid, details) has Shade's liquor
goblet "hide if need be behind Dante's bust" (
Commentary, page 89, to lines 47-48)
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 1:28
PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Department of Interesting Facts
Unrelated to VN (Dante, gravity, elephants, and pubs)
g that the force that animates
the Dance of the Planets is
gravitational attraction--
"L'amor che move il sol e' l'altre
stelle."
Jerry Friedman
JF: interesting that Dante’s
astronomical knowledge was rather post-medieval — classifying our Sun as a
‘star’ is quite modern! And I can’t resist the crude physicists
joke:
“There’s no gravity — the Earth SUCKS!”
Stan
Kelly-Bootle
-----------------------------
Dear Jansy,
Um, I don't
know where elephants enter the picture, though they seem to be a requisite for
anybody writing for the TLS these days (the Wittgensteinian metaphor of
'elephants in the room'). I simply glossed D.Barton Johnson's remarks on
"Tselovalnikov" with a note that the double meaning is covered by
'publican' (publicanus: Latin for tax-farmer, the word is in Jerome's vulgate )
at least in English English. I hail from a family of publicans, though they
tended to drink all the profits, on the 'one for the customer, and one for the
barman' principle of Irish taverners, and paying taxes was always a scramble at
the end of the financial year.
Regards, Peter N.Dale
> Peter Dale,
did you mention the word "publican", as in British usage applicable to "licensee
of a pub", as some kind of elephantine pun?
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