NPPF Comm4: Metadiscussion, anybody?

[charles albert]

Your analysis is right on the money, and Terrance deserves much credit for
foresight.....I have been sitting on my hands with some stuff that fits your
description, and can't figure out how to proceed.....I have no particular
suggestions as to how to address the problem and will gladly defer to a
plurality behind any solution.....

But leave us not deprive "Ginger" Badger of his star turn - few will ever
know how hard he worked just to walk across the stage......

love,
cfa

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Don Corathers" <gumbo at fuse.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 10:55 PM
Subject: NPPF Comm4: Metadiscussion, anybody?


> Decided to go ahead and post this now, because it includes (just a little
> way down) a structural question we might want to kick around a little bit.
>
>
> Line 71: parents (p 100)
>
> We learn a little more about Shade's parents: that his father Samuel, vice
> president of a surgical instruments company and ornithologist, died in
1902,
> when Shade was four. That his mother Caroline was a skilled artist who did
> the drawings for Samuel's book about Mexican birds. Kinbote doesn't report
> when Shade's mother died.
>
> " 'a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei' (that should be
> 'shadei,' of course)." Bombycilla is the genus name for the waxwing. The
> common North American waxwing is Bombycilla garrulus. The cedar waxwing,
> Bombycilla cedorum, is a close relative. The one that hit the window was
> Bombycilla shadei.
>
> ".Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It
> represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live
and
> personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes,
around
> the common pebble of a Christian name." As Botkin, cited as an example
> (rather out of context) two sentences later, might become Kinbote.
>
> ".used to call any old tumble-down building 'a hurley-house.'" Nice one,
> Charlie.
>
> And then abruptly we're in Zembla, meeting the king's parents. And here we
> approach a kind of turn in this discussion.
>
> Let me suggest some assumptions. I think we can assume that everybody who
is
> following this discussion seriously has read the book at least once. Thus
we
> 're all aware that Charles Kinbote believes himself to be the deposed King
> of Zembla, and that Kinbote is profoundly delusional. And that while
Zembla
> may or may not really exist in the fictional world of the novel, Kinbote
is
> probably not the king, and may not even be Kinbote. Gradus is probably not
> Gradus, but a local boy named Jack Grey who was trying to shoot the judge
> who committed him to an institution.
>
> Beyond that there are many discoveries yet to be made.
>
> Those of us who have read Boyd's *Nabokov's Pale Fire* know that the
section
> we're talking about now is central to an analysis that opens up the novel
> like a dark Vanessa spreading its wings. This raises a question that goes
> back to the spoilage discussions we had before the reading began, in a
> somewhat different way, and to David Morris's post suggesting that the
> reading is in the doldrums because everybody's sitting around waiting for
> the synthesis to begin. I realize now that this circumstance was what what
> Terrence must have had in mind when he said, early on, that our schedule
was
> fucked.
>
> If the point of this discussion, which is I think essentially
recreational,
> is to share the pleasures of unlocking a difficult work of art together,
it
> seems to me it is much too early in the game to begin posting big slabs of
> received wisdom. But I'm not sure just how we should proceed.
>
> I'd appreciate hearing what the group thinks.
>
> Don
>
>
>
>