Carolyn Kunin [to Jansy's links
related to "Nabokov and Taxonomy"] Your post prompted me
to look up this date, July 5, 1915, to see if anything exciting happened. Not
really - but two days later the Lusitania The ship's name was taken from Lusitania, an
ancient Roman province on the west of Iberian
Peninsula the region that now is Portugal.was sunk, so that's
something. Jean Cocteau was born July 5, 1899. I doubt Nabokov knew or
cared...
Jansy Mello: Oh! Actually Kinbote
mentioned Cocteau exactly on July 5! He must have been aware, then,
that it was his birthday ( it'd be too much of a coincidence).
I actually lookd up the words about Proust
that CK attributed to Cocteau (they might have been from Beckett's essay but I'd
have to read it again to be sure), but got nowhere.
Line 181 ("Today"): "Speaking of novels," I said, "you remember we
decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a
huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream......no, do not interrupt me,
light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of
metaphors, described — by Cocteau, I think — as ‘a mirage of suspended gardens,’
and, I have not yet finished..."
(I enjoyed yout pastiche about R.
Jakobson...)