Gary S Lipon: By topsy-turvical coincidence I was
....thumbing through Oliver Sacks' latest book, Musicophilia, and he quotes from
SO, I believe, that VN was pretty amusical... He also quoted Dimitri on the
topic from a forthcoming book. On the other hand I hear the line, the way you
smile at dogs, as an allusion to Gershwin's 1937 song, They Can't Take That
Away From Me.
Stan Kelly-Bootle (to S.Klein) I’m over-the-moon
to see the VN additions on audible.com, to which club I’ve long been a happy
subscriber....With VN also available in audio and film, we can now supplement
our instruction re-listening and re-viewing ...Discuss: which of VN’s
works would survive similar stochastic shufflings, beyond, of course, those
performed by VN on his pack of cards...
JM: Topsy-turvy stochastic shufflings and
coincidence... Suddenly Shade's silent stillicides became as audible as the
lines that made them shine.
Nabokov's non-aleatory music
might admit hopscotch readings, but I'm only certain of
the "survival" of "Ada" and "LATH." Kinbote, in PF, added
such purpose to his saltatory remarks that PF must be the most vulnerable
under arbitrary chronologies. As Shade has acknowledged:
"Time means succession, and succession,
change:/ Hence timelessness is bound to
disarrange/ Schedules of
sentiment."
Contrafacta, in music, is not illegal nor irregular (unlike countefeit
leonardoes and plagiarism) - and this is another element from the
musical world present in Nabokov ( sacred and profane self-references and to
other mysterious authors).
Stan's employ of the word "stochastic" led me to an off-list message I got
from Dave Haan yesterday (his blog is "Stochastic Bookmark" found at
http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/2005/08/high-road.html ) He
sent me one of his poems whose "rhyme-scheme is taken from the road not
taken (inverted within stanza), but meter is more stopping by woods",
associating to my Nab-L posting on Nabokov and Frost. Its closing lines
are:
"
The adage that the poet coined
Struck me as sheer
coincidence
When, further on, I came to sense
That far gone road my path
rejoined
Without one whit of difference."
whereas in Frost we find:
"I shall be telling this with a
sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the
difference."
and both deal with random choice, convergences, differences or disjointed
pecteption As in Shade's lines: "I cannot understand why from the
lake/ I could make out our front porch when I’d take/ Lake Road to
school.../ I look but fail to see/ Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space/Has
caused a fold or furrow to
displace...."