1. Before buying/downloading Brian Boyd’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, ($24.79), on Stan’s 2nd Kindle (swank!), the screen informed me that “Customers who bought this book also bought Middlemarch by George Eliot.”
Does this ubiquitous amazonian marketing ploy pose any CrittyLitter problems worthy of Nabokovian solutions? Some disambiguation is required. It clearly means that at least two buyers of BB’s Pale Fire also bought Middlemarch from amazon. We don’t know which purchase came first, or if any causal connection is implied either way. If you click further, you see a list of a dozen other books that BB’s PF customers have “also bought.” This includes familiar classics from Ivanhoe to Crime and Punishment, but NO mention of the essential supplement to BB’s exegesis, namely Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov! The latter, as you might guess, is not (as yet) in the Kindle Catalogue.
Just to probe the system, I then ran a test purchase of Middlemarch, hoping to see that “Customers who bought this book also bought
Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd.” Nonesuch came the reply.
My only negative comment on BB’s analysis after an enjoyable/instructive trip to locations 138-9 (are these printed-page numbers?) is his taking seriously VN’s mathematical mumbo-jumbo about spirals and Hegelian dialectics. Such hypotheses violate the Popperian axiom of falsifiability ;=) The family of Archimedean curves r = a(t^[1/n]) [polar coordinates (r, t)] do indeed have beautiful properties (with consequences in Natural forms) but talk of “unvicious circles” and relating parts of spirals to Hegel’s triad (thetic/antithetic/synthetic) does a disservice to the those beauties. I fear – I fight a lost cause ... VN’s provable awkwardness with real mathematics seems a taboo subject, yet it’s no handicap to an artist of his stature.
2. Browsing through Literature in the Modern World – Critical Essays and Documents, Edited by Dennis Walder (OUP, 1991), I was shocked/annoyed/horrified/miffed ... No mention of VN, even in sections on Freud and translation.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
(Lord Derby Prize for Mathematics, 1946)