M.Roth: [...] This is Eliot's "The Dry Salvages," from the Four Quartets (the poem Hazel was reading in Canto 2) and it's clear that Eliot is using rote here to evoke the sound of the sea.

JM: A good find ( Eliot-Rote-Sea) and a good question ( where is Shade supposed to be getting the word from?).

Eliot in "The Dry Salvages" was referring to "a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,Massachusetts", therefore the link bt. old England and New England was brought back by the term "rote".

A.Stadlen, in a mood similar to Kinbote's, asked if Shade feigned "distance from...a poem from which he has actually stolen...a word for a title?"
Rote, by itself, must be suggestive of many different themes independent of Eliot's reminiscent reference to it?
The present issue reminded me, once again, of the location of New Wye.

My present reading of VN's "The Defense" brought Palermo, Italy to the fore. There are two curious mentions to this city.

(1) Then she returned with her progressively more detestable burden, and here and there in the mist of Luzhin's youth were islands: his going abroad to play chess, his buying picture postcards in Palermo, his holding a visiting card with a mysterious name on it.... She was forced to go back home with the puffing, triumphant Valentinov and return him to the firm of 'Veritas,' ...

(2) Tomorrow. Most lawful matrimony.' 'Yes, soon, soon,' she replied. 'But it can't be done in a single day. There's still one more establishment. There you and I will hang on the wall for two weeks, and in the meantime your wife will come from Palermo, take a look at the names and say: 'Impossible — Luzhin's mine.'

In "The Defense" the writer Luzhin Senior considers his son a child-prodigy and imagines him as a violinist or pianist ( a plan that apparently a rejected publisher also entertained as Luzhin's carreer). A picture is mentioned twice and I have the impression I once saw it in a book about the composer Haendel.

(1) more than once, in a pleasant dream resembling a lithograph, descended with a candle at night to the drawing room where a Wunderkind, dressed in a white nightshirt that came down to his heels, would be playing on an enormous, black piano;

(2) In Luzhin's new apartment we find the curtains over the windows were yellow, promising a deceptive sunlight in the mornings — and a woodcut in the wall space between the windows showed a child prodigy in a nightgown that reached to his heels playing on an enormous piano, while his father, wearing a gray dressing gown and carrying a candle, stood stock-still, with the door ajar.Something had to be added and something taken away..."

Has anyone followed this particular illustration VN mentions? Music and chess are often brought together in "The Defense", the electricity and musicality of chess moves.

( Coincidentally, a little before I came across the second reference to the child-prodigy ( which I imagine as being Haendel), a long forgotten poem rung in my ears while I followed VN's description of what was going on in Luzhin's mind, during his first fatidic encounter with Turati. There was a rote, an insistent rythm ( "the trumpet's loud clangor excites us to arms...") that spurred me to a Google-search to remember John Dryden's Ode to St.Cecillia, famously set in music by Haendel... )

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