Subject
JM to SKB on "plex" and accidents
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Stan K-B: "As a fairly obvious portmanteau, 'plexible' has passed into the tongue-in-cheek Urban Dictionary as:adj. describing the psychosomatic state of a person who is both willing to and physically capable of participating in edgy and/or contorted sexual acts. a compound of '(com)pliant' and 'flexible'."
JM: Plexible and pliant must have been closely associated in VN's mind since he wrote, in KQK, about two of its variations. On CCC's edition, pages 800 and 801, we find "rippliability" and "ripplexibility". In my youth, instead of ending messages with "hugs and kisses", we wrote " osculos e amplexos" ( meaning not-Catullus kisses and ample-plexal embraces)
NB: I spelled "voskin" incorrectly as "vorskin".
S K-B also warns us against over-readin "the shapes of letters, mistaking arbitrary phonetic alphabets for ideograms and hieroglyphics. To Jansy, the letter 'V' gains significance by suggesting 'convergence' -- to others it spells out Churchillian triumphalism. For us logicians the sans-serif 'v' can be read as 'OR' .."
JM: Did I write about "V" as "convergence"? I might have been quoting an article by James Ramey ("Parasitism and Pale Fire's Camouflage", where he writes " If we accept that the V in the Botkin entry...As Eric Naiman suggests, V for Vladimir..." before he develops his own ideas about V ), but then... who knows?
I try to be attentive to color references ( but I never remember if oatmeal stands for N, or V, nor the pale blue as in "some kind of net: a bag of pale-bluish gauze on a ring fixed to a rod of light metal", an obvious reference to Vladimir, and more involutions, in KQK, CCC's page 901) and shapes ( even Joan of Arc's flamule or Lucette's, or Ada's hair and decolete, or... VEL?)
S K-B: "I'm not against the FUN of exploring the infinite 'allusional regress' -- it's embedded in the divine Nabokovian experience just like his oft-cited parallel-mirrored images -- provided we keep a Nabovian sensayuma. We have VN's own warning..."
JM: I don't know what sensayuma means, but I get the general sense. I'd just written about "VN's all-encompassing irradiating words" and your technical addendum on "infinite allusional regress" inspires me more towards running as a rabbit than achieving tortuous-tortoisodal-V, id est: I won't take heed of the warnings...
S K-B: At one point she hints that "the king's escape from the castle is doubtless castling." Well, we chess-savvies note at once that it's illegal for the King to escape a check or checkmate by castling (there are other rules that inhibit castling), but let that pass. Chess problems very rarely involve castling (O-O or O-O-O in symbols) since it's seldom clear if earlier moves leading up to the given problem may have rendered castling impossible.... "a King and two Knights cannot generally FORCE checkmate on a lone King."
JM: I'm blissfully ignorant about Math and Logic, less blissfully in relation to Russian and chess. There is an important paragraph on this subject, again in KQK ( a suggestive title also in relation to chess), but I'll have to look for it later. Whenever I think of chess "Solus Rex", I am superficially reminded of R.Roussel's "Locus Solus", but today I think there might be a reference to this author who I doubt VN had nor read ( impossible to miss Locus Solus and its "ressuscitin"!)
Wikipedia: Raymond Roussel Pari, 1877, Palermo, 1933) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, chess enthusiast, neurasthenic and drug addict. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th Century French literature...Roussel's most famous works are Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus, both written according to formal constraints based on homonymic puns. Roussel kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, where he describes it as follows: "I chose two similar words. For example billiards and pilliards (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus." For example, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard/The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table. must somehow reach the phrase, .les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard/letters [written by] a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer.
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JM: Plexible and pliant must have been closely associated in VN's mind since he wrote, in KQK, about two of its variations. On CCC's edition, pages 800 and 801, we find "rippliability" and "ripplexibility". In my youth, instead of ending messages with "hugs and kisses", we wrote " osculos e amplexos" ( meaning not-Catullus kisses and ample-plexal embraces)
NB: I spelled "voskin" incorrectly as "vorskin".
S K-B also warns us against over-readin "the shapes of letters, mistaking arbitrary phonetic alphabets for ideograms and hieroglyphics. To Jansy, the letter 'V' gains significance by suggesting 'convergence' -- to others it spells out Churchillian triumphalism. For us logicians the sans-serif 'v' can be read as 'OR' .."
JM: Did I write about "V" as "convergence"? I might have been quoting an article by James Ramey ("Parasitism and Pale Fire's Camouflage", where he writes " If we accept that the V in the Botkin entry...As Eric Naiman suggests, V for Vladimir..." before he develops his own ideas about V ), but then... who knows?
I try to be attentive to color references ( but I never remember if oatmeal stands for N, or V, nor the pale blue as in "some kind of net: a bag of pale-bluish gauze on a ring fixed to a rod of light metal", an obvious reference to Vladimir, and more involutions, in KQK, CCC's page 901) and shapes ( even Joan of Arc's flamule or Lucette's, or Ada's hair and decolete, or... VEL?)
S K-B: "I'm not against the FUN of exploring the infinite 'allusional regress' -- it's embedded in the divine Nabokovian experience just like his oft-cited parallel-mirrored images -- provided we keep a Nabovian sensayuma. We have VN's own warning..."
JM: I don't know what sensayuma means, but I get the general sense. I'd just written about "VN's all-encompassing irradiating words" and your technical addendum on "infinite allusional regress" inspires me more towards running as a rabbit than achieving tortuous-tortoisodal-V, id est: I won't take heed of the warnings...
S K-B: At one point she hints that "the king's escape from the castle is doubtless castling." Well, we chess-savvies note at once that it's illegal for the King to escape a check or checkmate by castling (there are other rules that inhibit castling), but let that pass. Chess problems very rarely involve castling (O-O or O-O-O in symbols) since it's seldom clear if earlier moves leading up to the given problem may have rendered castling impossible.... "a King and two Knights cannot generally FORCE checkmate on a lone King."
JM: I'm blissfully ignorant about Math and Logic, less blissfully in relation to Russian and chess. There is an important paragraph on this subject, again in KQK ( a suggestive title also in relation to chess), but I'll have to look for it later. Whenever I think of chess "Solus Rex", I am superficially reminded of R.Roussel's "Locus Solus", but today I think there might be a reference to this author who I doubt VN had nor read ( impossible to miss Locus Solus and its "ressuscitin"!)
Wikipedia: Raymond Roussel Pari, 1877, Palermo, 1933) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, chess enthusiast, neurasthenic and drug addict. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th Century French literature...Roussel's most famous works are Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus, both written according to formal constraints based on homonymic puns. Roussel kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, where he describes it as follows: "I chose two similar words. For example billiards and pilliards (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus." For example, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard/The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table. must somehow reach the phrase, .les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard/letters [written by] a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm