On 28/12/06 14:17, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
I suggest we include the glass house as part of our collection of images ( do you also have a proverb in English about "people who inhabit glass houses should never throw stones at their neighbors" ? ), an extensive metaphorical "solarium".
Indeed, JM: a local nudge-nudge-wink-wink version of the proverb simply says “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t!” -- leaving open the various activities that might prove embarrassing.
Are we in danger of ‘over-reading’ the opening images of Pale Fire, the POEM, when we seek the precise sizes, shapes, and dispositions of the house’s reflective and refractive surfaces? Some listers seem to want the poem to ‘make sense’ as if it were a real-estate brochure or architect’s plan. One is reminded of Hamlet critics wondering how-on-earth you can ‘take arms against a sea of troubles?’
Somewhere in my scattered ratbag pretending to be a library there’s an anthology of scientifically-dubious lines compiled by Martin Gardner* including “Under stars chilled by the winter; under an August moon burning above; you’ld be so nice, you’ld be paradise, to come home to and love!’ (Cole Porter scores zero in Astrophysics?) YES, VN loves obsessively accurate detail (see his sketch of Master Bovary’s cap and maps of Bloom’s itineraries) yet I’m sure he would giggle over attempts to pinpoint the exact solar angles at the time of the waxwing’s demise “somewhere on the border of Upstate New York and Montario**”
- Dmitri: you may be pleased to hear that an unscientific poll reveals Pale Fire as the favourite VN novel among my fellow mathematicians. Sadly, Ada comes last but I’m evangelizing. Await news of Ada, the MOVIE!! I’m in the throes of obtaining the Tony Richardson film of Laughter In the Dark, in a UK DVD-format. I’m keeping an open mind but gather that Edward Bond’s transfer of VN’s sombre masterpiece in black’n’white cinematic 1930s Berlin to a technicolour 1960s London is far from convincing! My tag for similarly re-located genres is “Carmen On Ice.”
** Letter to Jason Epstein March 24, 1957 outlining VN’s early ideas on Pale Fire plotting. Later letter from Vera to the Bishops (Nov 4, 1961) indicates that PF is almost completed and “is not like anything either he or anyone else has ever written before.”
Stan Kelly-Bootle