Matt Roth, adding another item to the
exchanges bt. Friedman and Kunin, wrote:
"I might also remind everyone of the reference to
"Colonel Starbottle" (Starover Blue), which might lead us to Bret Harte's story
"Colonel Starbottle's Client," also concerned with kinbote."
Here is one more (out of the blue) item produced
by a faint verbal ressonance bt starover blue and
starbottle:
Wasn't Vladimir Nabokov's father's favorite flower the
"bluebottle"?
....................................................................
Jansy: I forgot to
emphasize another curious ressonance bt. CK's paragraph and HH's, quoted in
the last posting:
Pale Fire:
we undo the work
of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and
construction, from the treeman to Browning,
from the caveman to Keats...
Lolita: I
am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable
pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.
..............................................................
Gradus movements might have been related to a treeman's or a
swinging ape's ("swinging
down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to
branch"); Kinbote heard himself described as "an
elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of
a genius." and the words "macaco worm, a parasite of a
genius" might serve to place CK on the initial steps of the
evolutionary ladder. Even
Shade, by implication ( parasite of a genius, of extinct
mammoths).
We
read in Pale
Fire's "Index", under Botkin: "king-bot, maggot of
extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to
have hastened their phylogenetic end." Another
information ( a Google dic): macaco: n. species of
lemur and S American monkey; the macaco worm
is the parasitic larva of the South American botfly.
The
passage from mammoths, as represented in
various cave-drawings, into angels, brings up the idea of a
representational hierarchy and not an
archeologic-biological evolution...