Just a quick note in response to Jansy's last post ("Edsel Ford and conjuring nebulae in two lungs") - the wikipedia information I provided was in acknowledgement of my own ignorance of astronomy. By contrast, the medical information I provided was not "wikipedia-inspired" - I'm in the penultimate year of a graduate medical course, so my knowledge of both tuberculosis and neuroanatomy (where I believe my post gave Crossman & Neary's Neuroanatomy as a reference) is based on that - the most recent X-ray I saw of miliary TB was last week at a hospital in Vellore, India, from where I am currently typing. While I appreciate that a certain academic suspicion is healthy, I'd have found it less abrasive to have had the source of my information checked rather than the assumption made that I was merely typing things into google... !

 

On the question of how far discussions can or should diverge from what VN intended - one could use Barthes' Death of the Author to argue that would Nabokov intended in his work is of *no* importance. While I'm sure many of the discussions on the list, perhaps including the MPD, tuberculosis, and neuroanatomy ones, are minority discussions, I would hate to see them excluded *from* discussion on the basis that Nabokov may not have "intended" them.

 

Best,

Nick.