Sandy Klein spotted a reference to Nabokov in an AUDI advertisement...:The classic filling station even made an appearance in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Nabokov pointed out its "stationary trivialities — that green garbage can, those very black, very white-walled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks, the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incompleted crossword puzzle of their wooden cells." http://www.insideline.com/audi/audi-e-den-envisions-filling-station-of-the-future.html 

 

JM: I often fear that a Nabokovian ghost impels me to find nabokoviana wherever I go. Since I don't believe in ghosts, I had to start to work on the hypothesis that there's something particular in Nabokov's writings, not necessarily universal or "cosmopolitan"but that is omnipresent in our verbal world. This is why I proposed to the Nab-L a joint work related to extra-textuality and hypertext.

While reading Norbert Elias on "Ueber die Einsamkeit deer Sterbenden" (on the solitude of the moribund) I was often led to think about Nabokov's solitary death (later made shareable by his son's description of his last days in the foreword to "TOoL") and his relatively secluded life in a Swiss hotel with non-sympathetic attendants and porters. 

Elias discussed the fantasy of an "homo clausus," for whom life would have a private, idiosyncratic meaning, often pre-established externally by godlike entities (nature and "determinism" might figure among the latter). In a certain way one may consider Nabokov's entire work as being directed towards finding a private meaning for this kind of an "homo clausus" existence, for coping with his strong fear of dying and his wish for "immortality."

Is there a relation between "Nabokov & Death" (a sort of Erlkonig/Alderking theme), and the multiplicity of references to him that pop up almost everywhere, as if the modern Western world had been  contaminated by a similar (futile) need to collect links and bobo-links, which can be more often found in his art than in any other author's?