JM: Lorgnons and Lorgnettes, are these (bi)(mon)ocles different for male or female birdwatchers leavesdroppings? Confusing...

D.B.JOHNSON : Lorgnettes (or lorgnon) are eye glasses... Binoculars are what bird watchers use, although my reference to female birdwatchers was a joke.

JM: I was also joking while playing with the suggestive masculinity of "lorgnon" and the more feminine "lorgnette". Neither are very practical for birdwatchers...

Additional quotes in relation to "an explanation about the meaning of the word "carousel" in Russian...[Wikipedia: a carousel (or carrousel) is an amusement ride consisting of a rotating platform with seats for passengers."... and three short texts written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1923 for "Karussel" and published in 1987.]

Spinning through Ada (chapter 3,III), I only checked the word carousel ( with one "s), here a the rotating book-stand :

Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks ...

And yet, Van will then describe Lucette as in a picture, drawn by Toulouse Lautrec ( Cf. B.Boyd's Ada annotations & book-cover), sitting inside a "cabaret" ( not named as such) ..."that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent ...as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then...like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time."

PALE FIRE

Foreword: 1. There is a very loud amusement park in fron of my present lodgings (page 13); 2. twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music (15); 3. friendships develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time, independent of rotating, malicious music. (19);4.wretched motor lodge, with the carrousel inside and outisde my head. (28)

Poem: (pag.55, lines 610/616) Dying in a motel, with the loud fan / Revolving.../And, from the outside, bits of colored light/ Reaching his bed like dark hands from the past/ ...conjures in two tongues/ The nebulae dilating in his lungs.

Other "rotating" images (page 47,line 413-14): A nymph came pirouetting, under white/Rotating petals, in a vernal rite/...

Commentary: 1.(page 93,lines 47-48): the poplar-curtained Roman-tiered football field.[ this image will reappear in Bend Sinister, circus and stage].. youngster flying - on a long control line in a droning circle - a motor-powered model plane.

2.( page 261, line 810): The Daedalian plan simplified by a look from above - smeared out as it were by the splotch of some master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful straight line."(eve of death: Franklin Lane)

The "fan" (object,verb and various meanings) comes close to peacock, iridule, alder/decoy, nacreous, blurred vision, kaleidoscope, glasses, fisherman and even in relation to death in order to convey something "ghostly" that has " no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real play." ( a disputable abstract, indeed, but those who'll take the trouble to accompany the slow building up of Prospero-like images might come to agree with me...)

Bend Sinister: 1..I must put on my spectacles,' said Krug...He held them before his face and looked through them at a distant window. The left glass showed a dim spiral nebula in the middle not unlike the imprint of a ghostly thumb... 3. Speaking of Roman venationes (shows with wild beasts) of the same epoch, we note that the stage...our solar system emerged from a spiral nebula. 3..We shall imagine then a prism or prison where rainbows are but octaves of ethereal vibrations and where cosmogonists with transparent heads keep walking into each other and passing through each other's vibrating voids, while, all around, various frames of reference pulsate with Fitz-Gerald contractions. Then we give a good shake to the telescopoid kaleidoscope (for what is your cosmos but an instrument containing small bits of coloured glass which, by an arrangement of mirrors, appear in a variety of symmetrical forms when rotated — mark: when rotated) and throw the damned thing away.