Readers of the list may (or may not!) be interested in a VN blog I’ve started here: kobaltana.wordpress.com.

 

My first extensive post concerns a cluster of like-sounding words hiving in the background of Pale Fire.

 

Here is a bit of it:

 

In a talk I gave for a panel on the 50th anniversary of Pale Fire, I compared the reader of PF to an explorer who, despite not always finding what he set out to find, nevertheless discovers all sorts of interesting vistas and species that, while not strictly relevant to his goal, may still be enriching. At the panel, I talked about my research into the poet (yes, poet) Edsel Ford, part of whose poem “The Image of Desire” appears in Kinbote’s note to line 603. Here I am going to offer another example of what I call “education-by-Nabokov”–the kind of literary sleuthing that often takes one through the hinterlands of unimagined landscapes.

As any “expert solver” of PF will tell you, one of the frustrations and delights of the novel is that it requires one to pursue vast, wide-ranging sources and allusions that fall well beyond the bounds of common literary knowledge. In this example, then, I want to note a collection of oddities picked up along the way–oddities that together form a strange phonetic web of (non)sense.

 

Read the whole thing here: http://wp.me/p3PUy5-1c

 

Matt Roth