Stan Kelly-Bootle:Two fatidic deaths on August 17, 2010 with interesting VN connections. Eugene MacDonnell (1926 – 2010), American computer-science Pioneer… the Moon is Free, no longer a slavish Pale Fire. Also note that Frost out-Shades JS’s rumbling aabbccdd Heroics and, some say, simplistic circularity (line 1,000 -> line 1?) with an advanced two-fold symmetry: reflective poetry with reflective prosody. Better known to VN-listers, perhaps, is Sir Frank Kermode (1919-2010) prolific, free-thinking English Literary Critic… He once declared “There aren’t any Kermodians in the World!” But, like Nabokov and Nabokovian, FK would be deep-down peeved if the adjective had never cropped up!
PS: more fatidics! My first great-grand-child, a daughter, Elise Rose Coxon, was born August 12th, 2010. Same virgulean date as my mother ADA! My prezzie was CD of Brendel playing Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A minor. Puzzle-lovers will know WHY!

 

JM:  Congratulations great-grandpapa Stan, in the first place! (my grand-daughter Elena’s birthday is the same as my mother’s and one day after a different Elena’s son, Vladimir (April 24). Also, thank you for allowing me to handle a devilish dic!
Fatefully or not, it was one of the two books that surprised me yesterday: "The Devil's DP Dictionary" by Stan Kelly-Bootle. The other, edited by Everyman's Library, is "Comic Poems.”

 

Stan's entry for "Ack" ( A signal indicating that the error-detection circuits have failed), sent me to "Nack" and then I couldn't avoid remembering Kinbote's offer to Shade (Everyman’s PF, p.289) of a “knackel of walnuts” and a glass of Tokay.  Following Stan,  nack ( A signal indicating that all is lost) is a corruption of vulg. knackerel "castrated, rendered knackerless, impotentated".  Kinbote’s nutty enticement is redundant, I now see.

 

The pocket poets in Everyman's anthology was the first in which I found a poem by Nabokov (couldn't find more information in the list of acknowledgements to offer date or place of its original publication).
It's his anthropophagic*  "A Literary Dinner" starting with:

“Come here, said my hostess, her face making room
for one of those pink introductory smiles
that link, like a valley of fruit trees in bloom,
the slopes of two names.
I want you, she murmured, to eat Dr. James."(Cf. op.cit. p. 135) 

 

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1.    *  Its canibalistic ritual is distinct from the Brazilian Modern Art movement (1922) …Cf. Utopia and Anthropophagy : Despite the fact that the anthropophagic movement still finds followers, even among serious Brazilian and Latin American critics, its role has ... www.informaworld.com/index/782947106.pdf