Barrie Karp: "...one
does well not to go by titles for paintings, and especially in this case to see
not only their contingent connection, but their divergence. And to
consider that his idea [ Matisse] of paradise may have changed as his
painting progressed..."
Jerry Friedman [ to
JM's "...dracunculus, dranculus "small dragon", then Old French drancle,
then Anglo-Norman rauncle "festering sore" and rauncler "to fester"...the
earliest meaning of rankle in English.] "...you pointed out that /Ada/
is an orchid genus named after the sister of the mythical Artemisia. That
makes me wonder whether the dracunculus could be Lucette...The first thing that
"heraldic dracunculus" suggests to me is a wyvern or wivern ...the
cockatrice...the phallic suggestion of "cock", and "trice" fits well with
"trilingual" and "triplet" at least in spelling (the way "haze" fits with
"Hase") [...]
A. Stadlen: "there can be
humour in bad taste... and in general I love Nabokov's humour. But I don't
think this comes off, let alone constitutes poetry superior to 'Four
Quartets'."
J. Friedman: "If he's
[Shade] speaking of evil as no one has, his originality might be in adding
things that disgust him to the list, not in giving unprecedentedly harsh
condemnations of the worst evils.Nabokov made more shocking but more obviously
anticlimactic comments elsewhere...."My loathings are simple: stupidity,
oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
JM: I was touched by Barrie's
generosity and the garland of
feminine repose blending in voluptuously with the external
turmoil in oils and coils (I couldn't resist this...).
I tried to extend Baudelaire/Matisse's "volupty"
to ADA, but the word Van used for Villa Venus was "mollitude"
- whereas Eric Veen's perverse dream, turned into a
frightful reality by a crazy parent (an allusion to Marx/Stalin?), is
an added example to those Jerry Friedman quoted to exemplify
Nabokov's "shocking, anticlimatic comments," - when paradises materialize
as cruel distopias - and a collection of intratextual lines are
an echo of extratextual, supposedly serious,
incongruous observations.
What I thought deserved a note in ADA (to be
added to B.Boyd's short "little dragon"), was the connection proffered
in LATH for "rankling & dracunculi," to indicate the propagation
of the festering sores of resentment to be found already in ADA. The
resounding "draoncle", doubled inside an heraldic frame in ADA, led me to an
extratextual incestuous, pedophile and nymphobottomical "oncle" (Rukka),
offering his real-estate of contaminated paradises.
.....................................................................
btw: anyone who bothers to check some of
the internet images about the theme of "the three hares" (for
Nabokov family's trilingualism or lunar mythologies, but a false lead)
shall be in for a visual treat, anyway, by this ancient kind
of trompe-l'oeil completude that only suggests three
actual pairs of ears.