Right! Wow, how did I get that mixed up? The Hopalong-Freud author was IRA Wallach. I hadn't read any Nabokov in 1970 (I was 12) so I don't know where I ran into that piece. Well, now it will be in the archives for future forgetters. --Tim

The Three Meetings parody was written by the late, sorely missed (and underappreciated) Stanley Elkin, not the actor Eli Wallach, and appeared in the Nabokov "70th Birthday Tribute" issue of 1970. To paraphrase one of the characters potrayed onscreen by Wallach, "There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend. Those who skillfully parody Vladimir Nabokov, and those who don't."

>>>>>>>>This reminds me -- does anyone remember a Nabokov parody called "Three Meetings" by Eli Wallach? It's long out of print, but the bit I recall is his discovery of the Lightly Salted butterfly, "bug pennants, bucking....choppy flags of the forest". This book I think was named for much funnier parody (wouldn't it be?) of Eliot, a takeoff on "The Cocktail Party" called Hopalong-Freud, which ends with the audience kneeling and singing Adeste, Fideles.
--Tim Henderson



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