NPPF On Shade's Maud's Keats' Chapman's Homer

[jbor]

I'm not really sure where we're supposed to be up to with the group read,
and the page numbers in my book don't match up with the page numbers being
given in the list discussion, however, it's noteworthy that Kinbote bungles
both the annotation to Line 98, where he fails to recognise Shade's
memorialisation of Maud's literary wit in clipping and mounting the
newspaper baseball headline which ironically and unintentionally echoes the
title of Keats' famous poem, and the annotation to Lines 120-1, where he
can't understand the simple ratio calculation Shade has made, and where he
admits "perhaps I am only tired." The very next annotation goes on in an
extremely energetic way for 14 pages, though it has nothing whatever to do
with the poem, so it's not that he's "tired" at all, it's the fact that he's
absolutely frustrated that the poem isn't what he wants it to be on the one
hand, and that he's not a particularly astute reader or careful critic on
the other, that Nabokov is foregrounding by having him make errors like
these continuously throughout his commentary.

best