NPPF - Foreword - Notes (1)

[Jasper Fidget]

I've added some terms from Toby G. Levy's post.  All the definitions are
taken from the most recent edition of the OED unless otherwise noted.

Page 13:
"John Francis Shade" has the sound of Francis Scott Key in it.  Key was an
American lawyer who in 1814 wrote the words to the United States of
America's national anthem after a night of British naval bombardment on Fort
McHenry at the Battle of Baltimore, War of 1812.

John Shade was born on July 5, 1898.  Charles Kinbote and Jacob Gradus were
also both born on July 5 (see 161, 275 respectively).  They all die in 1959
(or at least evidence suggests that K has committed suicide).  John Shade
died July 21, 1959.  VN's father died on July 21, 1922 (he was shot while
attempting to prevent the assassination of a politician named Pavel Miliukov
-- see p 298 and others).  Queen Blenda dies on July 21 in the Zembla mirror
world (where women are men?  Then K's father dies on that day).

New Wye -> knew why: who "knew why"?  The town?  John Shade?  Charles
Kinbote?

"wye: 1. The letter Y.  2. Something shaped like a Y."  (Webster's New
Universal)

"wye: 1. The letter Y.  2. A kind of crotch."  (Webster's Revised
Unabridged)

"wye (OED): A support or other structure in a form resembling a Y; spec. (a)
Plumbing a short pipe with a branch joining it at an acute angle; (b)
Electrical Engineering = STAR; (c) an arrangement of three sections of
railway track, used for turning locomotives."

New Wye: New Y: New York.

The Wye, a river in England, noted by Wordsworth in his poem "Lines:
Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye
During a Tour, July 13, 1798" (a.k.a. "Tintern Abbey").  The poem is largely
concerned with memory and the imaginative capacity of the mind to help
create what it perceives.  Note that July 13 is the middle of the date range
of July 5 to July 21, and that John Shade was born 100 years after its
composition.  The text of Tintern Abbey:
http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html	

Perhaps it's worth contrasting Wordsworth's moving summer river of memory
and growth with Shade's frozen winter lake of memory and death.

The ghost of Tintern Abbey: http://www.castlewales.com/tintern1.html

Page 13:
Appalachia, USA.  Appalachia is a region formed by the Appalachian
Mountains, which run from Quebec to Georgia, and are composed of several
individual ranges (the main one in New York being the Adirondacks).  The
Appalachians on the eastern side of North America are -- in a sense --
*mirrored* by the Rocky Mountains in the west (though much smaller than the
Rockies).  It seems a general consensus that the town depicted in Pale Fire
is actually Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University where VN taught
(and Pynchon attended).

Page 13:
The manuscript: "consists of eighty medium-sized index cards".  VN himself
preferred this method of composition.  Pale Fire (poem, commentary, etc) was
literally written on index cards.

Page 13:
A poem in four cantos, a parody of Eliot's Four Quartets.  But Shade is a
Pope scholar, so Pope's Dunciad, a poem in four books with a preface, the
poem, a commentary and notes.

Page 13:
Birds: Shade's parents were ornithologists (ln 72)
waxwing(1), pheasant(24), grouse(25), mockingbird(63), etc

Page 13:
A parhelion is a bright spot on a solar halo (parhelic circle) caused by ice
crystals in the atmosphere.  Parhelia can be colorful (resembling a rainbow,
for which there are other references in PF) and symmetrically spaced.  

For a full explanation: http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/halo/pcpaths.htm  
For photos: http://www.meteoros.de/ee13ee18/ee13_b.htm  
Maybe just because I'm a technology geek, this reminds me of "lens flares":
http://jonathanclark.com/diary/flare/  ("My eyes were such that literally
they / took photographs" (ln 30-31)).

Page 15: 
"I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole
stack of [index cards] in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he
stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black
butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fe." (pg 15).

The words "pale fire" obviously stand out, black butterflies are associated
with death and fire, and finally there is an allusion to Flaubert, the first
many (many) literary plants in PF.  From _Madam Bovary_:

"One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something
pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding-bouquet. The orange
blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver-bordered satin ribbons frayed
at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry
straw. Then it was like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She
watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the
gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black
butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney." (Madam
Bovary, Pt. 1, Ch. 9).

Page 16:
"a fantastic farrago of evil"
"farrago: A confused group; a medley, a mixture, a hotchpotch.
   
A. Burgess Such a repetitive farrago of platitudes.   M. Gee A farrago of
madness and morals and murder of the language."

Page 16-17:
"Golconda": "a mine, a rich source"