EDITOR'S NOTE. Kurt Johnson, co-author of NABOKOV's BLUES--a study of VN's
impact on lepidoptery, offers a plausibe solution to the recent flurry of
messages on the use of VN texts for Nicodemusian flights of fancy.
-------- Original Message --------
Actually, a few weeks back there was a formula going around the email haunts
of America that allowed you to pick up the "numerology" from Sept. 11, including
stuff from Nostradamus, plug anything into it you wanted, and come up with
some "amazing" stuff about your family, the world series, or whatever etc.
etc. and then pass it on to your friends to "impress/scare" them. I just
tried to go back and find those in my email bin but I had erased them (just
checked with a couple of my colleagues and so had they). I wonder if somewhere
along the line someone didn't do a "Nabokovian" version and this that got
seized upon (not to denigrate the original intent of the listserve contributors
here). I suppose I can still try to find someone around who has that original
email that showed you how to do it (I belong to several "trivia" email trees;
they do produce some great stuff from time to time [for example, re science,
one recently with a fascinating [and authentic] explication of the SS-sponsored
Nazi anthropology of the 1940's, an area of scholarship that seems to be
growing from various recent doctoral dissertation studies]).
Kurt Johnson
EDITOR's NOTE. I suspect T.AA. Colquhoun misses the point of the original
Andersonnote and S. Aksenov's comment--ir maybe I do. I took both to be
spoofs on some VN scholarship that relies (overly much) on numerology and
such like. On the other hand, VN did engage in oneirological number mongering.
-------- Original Message --------
This message was originally submitted by TAColquhoun@COMPUSERVE.COM to the
NABOKV-L list at LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU.
----------------- Message requiring your approval (24 lines) ------------------
Message text written by Vladimir Nabokov Forum
>I just received a copy of Priscilla Meyer's "Find What the Sailor Has
Hidden" and I noticed on p. 185 that she connects King Alfin crashing
his plane (called a "bird of doom" in the notes to line 71) into a
building (reminiscent of certain recent events) with the waxwing flying
into the window. She mentions that the Swiss call the waxwing
Sterbevogel ("death-bird") and consider it an omen of war, pestilence
and famine, which reappears every 7 years (though it was actually 8
years since the last attack on the World Trade Center). She also
mentions that Shade died 16 days after his 61st birthday. 16+61=77, the
number of one of the plane
s involved in the terrorist attack of
September 11th. Don't read too much into this, it's just a wild
coincidence that I thought you guys might find interesting.
Sincerely,
Steve Anderson<
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What utter piffle. It's on a par with all those silly urban legends about
11 Sept - like the face of the devil in the flames of the WTC and all the
Nostradamus rubbish. Pleeeease. Let's keep Nab's beautiful world out of the
fray. The only 'birds of doom' are the cretins that give credence to this
sort of thing.
Alexandra Colquhoun