Stan Kelly-Bootle: "Before
buying/downloading Brian Boyd’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic
Discovery, ($24.79), on Stan’s 2nd Kindle (swank!), the screen
informed me that “Customers who bought this book also bought
Middlemarch by George Eliot.” My only negative comment on BB’s
analysis after an enjoyable/instructive trip to locations 138-9 (are these
printed-page numbers?) is his taking seriously VN’s mathematical mumbo-jumbo
about spirals and Hegelian dialectics... VN’s provable awkwardness with real
mathematics seems a taboo subject, yet it’s no handicap to an artist of his
stature. 2. Browsing through Literature in the Modern World –
Critical Essays and Documents, Edited by Dennis Walder (OUP, 1991)...No
mention of VN, even in sections on Freud and translation.Stan Kelly-Bootle(Lord
Derby Prize for Mathematics, 1946)"
JM: I checked the pages against the
actual "chose" (the printed BB). The pages correspond to Part Three,
"Synthesis and Re-reading" ( Transformation:corroboration) Index entries on
Hegelian triad indicate p.10-13,89-90,207,233,256. See also spiral
(10-11;233,266n.32. "in the third arc the poem continues from line 999 to
line 1000 by spiraling back to the beginning, in a sustained explosion of
positive ironies that suggests an afterlife might transform even what looks like
maximum meaninglessness into a synsthesis of radiant sense." Nice.
btw: a friend sent me images of spiraling earth and galaxies,
heading towards a crash against Andromeda, to stimulate me to calculate at
what speed we are constantly turning and spinning right now. Fortunately we
cannot all be attuned to what's happening in the universe (a
bit dizzying if you ask me). Perhaps Nabokov inherited his mother's
religious wisdom (quoted somewhere in SO) and let paradise take him in its
stride (although flying off, impelled by a centripetal force, would be some
sparking experience).
Alexey
Sklyarenko: "I belatedly realize that the
cartoonists Emmanuil de Saint Priest and Emmanuel Poiré (Caran d'Ache) are the namesakes of Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804), the German philosopher who is mentioned in Ada (2.5):
"It [the closet] had a keyless
hole as big as Kant's eye. Kant was famous for his cucumicolor iris."
...Chose...Ding...
JM: That's some other kind of awesome
spinning, Alexey. I wonder if experimental psychologist Fechner's angels
had cucumicolored eyes (Fechner saw them like round eyes roaming through the
universe).