VN-L /Nan Prener: Sighting and a review: “He always read with a dictionary at hand, and advised us all to do so. He would have embraced an e-reader that would allow a word to reveal its meaning at the touch of a finger./Surely, the “sight, smell and touch” of paper is not central to the flow of ideas and images from book to brain. From his grave, V.N. must be shouting: “Up with e-readers and word processors. Down with biases based only upon previously programmed behavior.” What, he might have asked, would those who denigrate electronic devices have said when the world went from stone tablets to scrolls?” NAN PRENER SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW Letters: ‘Inside a Pearl,’ and More. “To the Editor ‘What would Nabokov Do’?

AN old review (1999): "But I would like to add one detail he may already have adduced although he didn’t mention it in our conversation, one detail I can’t believe someone else hasn’t noticed, but one I’d be delighted to get credit for noticing first: The ghost within the name “Hazel,” the ghost of Lolita. //It occurred to me as I was staring at the Hazel passages in Pale Fire (which also makes sly reference to a fictive “Hurricane Lolita”) that one could repunctuate the name Hazel, as Haze, L . And if one did, then one would find oneself staring at Lolita’s name: Lolita Haze, daughter of Charlotte Haze … Coincidence? I don’t think so…Brian Boyd has once again made himself an ornament of the accidents and possibilities of Nabokov scholarship and although I may continue to disagree with him (and still believe V. Botkin deserves resurrection) I salute him for it.” Nabokov’s Pale Ghost: A Scholar Retracts by Ron Rosenbaum 4/26/99

Jansy Mello: We know that V.Nabokov didn’t care to type his manuscripts or to drive a car. This doesn’t categorize him as a “luddite” but it suggests that he wasn’t fond of mechanical or, perhaps even of electronic devices (what model of the microscope did he prefer among those available to him at Harvard?). He was also of an independent nature: how would he react if deprived of books and dictionaries because of a future Lettrocalamity?

[I have in mind, right now, the project of publishing the forthcoming issues of “The Nabokovian” exclusively online.

The smell of the ink, the sight and touch of paper make a difference to me, but running the risk of becoming totally dependent of electronic resources is worse and taunting.

To avoid posting two messages, I added here an old review by Ron Rosenbaum in which he not only argues about Brian Boyd’s theory of writerly “ghosts” in PF (recently mentioned in a posting related to “consciousness after death”), or his retraction concerning the debates about the “Shadean theory”, but he also brings up a find (Hazel and L.Haze) that I’ve encountered (or noticed) yesterday for the first time (this is why I decided to share it with newcomers to the VN-L)