EDNote: I've decided to re-send Jansy Mello's post, in case its old
time-stamp has buried it in the archaic depths of your in-boxes. Sorry
about the duplication. ~SB
-------- Original Message --------
Hi, Alexey.
Thank you for your message
about coincidental dates.
I heard that Dr. Pekka Tammi wrote about these - but his text is in
Russian, so it's of no avail to me now.
Actually I was only trying to get all the numbers off my chest while
reading Kinbote to mark the orthography for his "cancellations" and
searching for more apparitions of Pnin ( I don't have a digital copy of
PF).
I did find another "cancel" with only
one "L", in notes to lines 433-434 (page 211):
"She would be canceling an
illumination or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse"
Also a new reference to Pnin ( note to
line 579, page 229):
"Upon referring to my little diary...I
dined at their house with the following people: Nattochdag (...);
Professor Gordon of the Music Department ( who completely dominated the
conversation); the Head of the Russian Department ( a farcical pedant
of whom the less said the better); and three or four interchangeable
women..."
I wondered if "fustian jokes" ( note
to line 286) had any link with a strange quotation I could not place
that ends with "fusts in us unused" since it sound so Kinbotean, and I
cannot remember his writing it ...
But here is something that I can still
ask you concerning PF and ADA:
Following note 334 ( page 193 EL)
where Kinbote discusses the Hunted Barn - later dismantled "to avoid
its catching fire", we find that " Science tells us, by the way, that
the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if
Electricity were suddenly removed from the world".
Although I agree with John Shade that "one can harness words like
performing fleas and make them drive other fleas" ( page 214), I could
not keep from wondering if Kinbote was not announcing that, besides
Gradus ( a creature living by words and trains of thought), the
misterious "Lettrocalamity" which made Terra and Antiterra emerge,
would indicate that the entire edifice of ADA is the "fiction of a
fiction inside a fiction" ( following Appel's description
of "involution" in Lolita).
In this case then there will be no
"real" rose among the artificial ones to surprise one's touch, neither
any brass or wood accretions to a painting to hide a
"concrete" walnut...
If for our author, "relationships" dominate over "facts" and
"notation" then it also makes sense to find it is Kinbote who is
arguing in favor of St.Augustine, the Zemblan High Church and promising
"to divulge...an ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret..." to John
Shade.
Jansy
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