NPPF Comm 3: C.90-121 notes (1)

[Jasper Fidget]

p. 114
"A Luna" ... "a large, tailed, pale green moth, the caterpillar of which
feeds on the hickory."

The Luna moth: "a light-green moth that has long, curving tails on its
hindwings and distinctive eyespots on all four wings.  This nocturnal insect
is found in deciduous hardwood forests in North America."

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/butterfly/activities/printouts/Lun
amothprintout.shtml

We're not supposed to interpret colors as symbols (especially not green!),
but we can trace connections between passages featuring them.  "Pale" - Pale
Fire etc, "green" - the green door and room in C.130 etc, "moth" - mirrors,
Gradus ("batlike moth" on 123), butterflies (everywhere) etc, so this is an
image that collects several motifs (a nexus of patterns?) nominally linked
to the moon (which has served that same purpose for a multitude of artists).

p. 114
"Aunt Maud had been pasting clippings of an involuntarily ludicrous or
grotesque nature"

Assuming I've read it correctly, the implication is that Aunt Maud's act of
cutting and pasting the clippings has transformed them into the ludicrous or
grotesque (Aunt Maud again as despoiler or corrupter?) -- although it is
Kinbote who describes them this way.  That her clippings should be
"involuntarily ludicrous and grotesque" is an interesting judgment coming
from Kinbote -- Aunt Maud has clipped these ads for a purpose other than
what their publisher had foreseen, and so she's Kinboted Life Magazine
(Kinboted Life?).
 
We are told the first and the last of these clippings "intercommunicate most
pleasingly."  Alpha and Omega joined again.

p. 114
"pudibundity": 

An odd word that OED doesn't know.  A search turns up some peculiar results
-- see for yourself:

http://www.google.com/search?q=pudibundity

The context here is of Aunt Maud's clippings from Life Magazine, "so justly
famed for its pudibundity in regard to the mysteries of the male sex" (114).
The two example clippings each contain images of females admiring males --
was she interested in the males, in the admiring females, or both?  Was she
operating from some sense of irony?  Desire?  Were these clippings
pornographic for her?  

Maud has also clipped out the "On Chapman's Homer" newspaper article
(thumbtacked to the door, not pasted to the scrapbook), again stripping
content from context.

p. 115
"a modern Eve worshipfully peeping from behind a potted tree of knowledge"

Much as American life is coerced into the frames of Life Magazine's pages,
all of knowledge is potted for the modern Eve.

p. 115
"Nothing beats a fig leaf"

See p. 86 for Kinbote's other problems with optics and uncooperative
vegetation.

p. 115
"the paperweight" -- see ln 61 for paperclip

Shade's poem "Mountain View" (presumably it's Shade's) continues this theme
of abstracting ideas and images into reductive forms, this time the image
and memory of a mountain view encapsulated into a paperweight.  "The
mountain is too weak to wait" is reminiscent of Shade's mountain/fountain
concerns in Canto Three.

Jasper Fidget