CHW wrote: "Oh dear. I fear that the nuances of conversation do not
travel easily across the ether, nor do attempts at
wit..."
Strangely enough, so it
is!
Actually, I only realized quite
recently that one man's joke is another man's ...whatever. Until
then I tended to view jokes as pertaining to "universals". The
apprehension of nuances depends on shared cultural references or
experiences, but these are not enough. A different syntax,
distinct taboos may nip any budding understanding.
CHW recited
an anticipation of Kinbote and even Conmal's poetic renderings, but these
lines almost foresaw the quote I'd have liked add to
my posting on "otherwordly logic", but the
meaning I searched for was far (or so I hope) from the
hallucinatory tempests one may also read in these
lines:
And, as
imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns
them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a
name.
CHW: Why, in English,
does womb rhyme with tomb? I really don't know if VN read Carlyle or Bartlett
--- probably. He seems to have read everybody.
JM: The succession
of Bartlett's quotes from Carlyle came to my attention because they seemed to
follow a line of Nabokovian themes, but I must have been
wrong.
CHW: [Schopenhauer was
not another Will so... is the name Arthur also used euphemistically?]
Schopenhauer wrote The World as Will and Idea, 1818. See W.Wallace, no
relation, Schopenhauer, 1890.
JM: Ah, that
kind of Will...
CHW: Partridge wrote
Shakespeare's Bawdy. A sudden thought: does that apostrophe s
indicate a genitive or an elision?
JM: Is Eric Naiman
present to comment on that?
CHW: Another
thought: the delightful and affectionate account of the life, career and poetic
offerings of Edsel Ford, The Ozarks Poet, here, as posted
earlier... which I have just
been reading more attentively, persuades me Ford was, indeed, very much in VN's
mind at the time he was bodying forth Pale Fire... I must suppress all these burrs.
Apologies to all those who feel annoyed.
JM: Should we
believe you sound sufficiently contrite? Thank heavens, no
( Imho).
Jansy