Subject
Re: connotations of "dobro"]
From
Date
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On 10/08/2008 20:30, "Nabokv-L" <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
> EDNote: My previous effort to forward this post, last Wednesday, apparently
> failed. Here it is at last. ~SB
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: connotations of "dobro"
> Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:34:47 +0200 (CEST)
> From: soloviev@irit.fr
> To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> <mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> References: <C4BCFCD2.AEAE%skb@bootle.biz>
> <mailto:C4BCFCD2.AEAE%skb@bootle.biz>
>
> Dear gospodin Stan,
>
>>> >> Such generalized connotations are NOT our personal CHOICE,
>>> >> citoyen-comrade!
>>> >>
>>> >> How LANGUAGE really works (trust me and the Gnoams!): X uses a word W
>>> >> with an
>>> >> intended semantic-range S(X,W) = [XWs1 ... XWsn]; Y reads/hears W with a
>>> >> transformed semantic-range S(Y,W) = [YWs1 ... YWsm]. After
>>> >> inner-diambiguations and decontextualizations (left as a Chomskian
>>> >> exorcize
>
> You will not frighten me with mathematical notation, even with
> sexual connotation, you know.
>
> I agree that they (connotaions)
> are not always our personal choice, but it depends
> on us - overemphasize them or not. I can invent a context to give
> ANY word sexual connotations. A question is - who invented the context,
> an author or a commentator. To some it may be an exercice, to others -
> exorcism (maybe Chomskian...). When I hear modern discussions, in
> particlar discussions about "sexism", I think often that the real
> sexism is to obsessively sexualise everything, and preferences for male or
> female are secondary even if many militants may disagree.
>
> There
> are also the contexts that desexualize even the words with direct
> sexual meaning. A story I've heard from some old person who was
> prisoner in a soviet camp and worked felling the trees was that
> they used the word for male organ instead of "right" and for
> female for "left" to alert other people when the tall tree
> was falling left or right. It was not an amusement park and
> they were mortally exhausted, and the sexual meaning was downplayed
> if remembered at all in this situation.
>
> I think it all is related to how we comment on VN.
>
> S kommunisticheskim privetom
>
> Sergei Soloviev
> --------
> Ochen chudnoi, Tovarich Sergei! But I'll thank you to leave my COMMUNAL
> PRIVATES out of this debate.
>
> Explicit in my equations is the very point you make about authorial
> _intentions_ and personal reader-interpretations. The reader/re-reader must
> try to discern from _all_ the contextual clues what is being conveyed,
> allowing for the known tricks of the author: irony, satire, sarcasm, humour,
> litotes, deliberate decepion ...
>
> Re-irony: I recall in early schooldays our teacher asked us to provide a
> sentence illustrating the word "marvellous." One kid offered: "Me sister came
> home in tears last night and told me dad she was pregnant and me dad said,
> 'Marvellous, bleedin' marvellous.'"
>
> Re-"Whaddya mean by that?": Although we can't ask Pushkin: "List _all_ the
> connotations you had in mind when using 'dobro' in EO line whatever ... ," we
> can explore Pushkin's "propensities" and learn from those like VN who devoted
> much effort thereto. From AdaOnLine (renewed thanks!):
>
> Pushkin was very fond of him and vied with him in scatological metaphors (see
> their letters). He was Karamzin's ward, Reason's godchild, Romanticism's
> champion, and an Irishman on his mother's side (O'Reilly)" (EO II, 27). [My
> interjection: O Really? Say no more!-- skb]
>
> My pleasure in reading VN (over most rivals for my space-time attention) is
> this semantic challenge. There is VN's special wordscape (have I just coined
> this? If so, I rely on you getting my gist without rushing for a dictionary)
> that, for me, avoids the extremes of boring/obvious and impenetrable
> obscurity. I grew up, like VN, surrounded by word-play and in-family private
> jokes. Every drunk sounded like Joyce or Behan in full tall-tale flight. I
> share VN's fascination-cum-addiction with "rare" words, where "rare" is not
> that easy to define. One example springs to mind: meeting in Ada "the cockloft
> of Ardis Hall" always brings a smile. Every house in my childhood Liverpool
> had a cockloft: an attic-type (Attican!) storage place under the roof with a
> water-tank and maybe room for old papers and magazines (as is the case in
> Ardis Hall). Ours was actually extended and served as a small bedroom! Of
> course, I can imagine many readers smiling over cockloft for a different
> reason, viz., images of a rampant-penis. If you spend your half your life
> sleeping in a cockloft, such allusions are greatly diluted although never
> entirely absent. One might say that allusions like jokes "wear thin" or "wear
> off"
>
> I appreciate Sergei's Gulag (Proshchalny potselui, Solzhenistyn [do I need a
> vocative or what?]) example of what you might called "reverse
> scatologicization," where "naughty" words replace "clean" ones. It happens
> almost without reflection. "Beethoven? I dig that shit, man."
>
> CTaH
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> EDNote: My previous effort to forward this post, last Wednesday, apparently
> failed. Here it is at last. ~SB
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: connotations of "dobro"
> Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:34:47 +0200 (CEST)
> From: soloviev@irit.fr
> To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> <mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> References: <C4BCFCD2.AEAE%skb@bootle.biz>
> <mailto:C4BCFCD2.AEAE%skb@bootle.biz>
>
> Dear gospodin Stan,
>
>>> >> Such generalized connotations are NOT our personal CHOICE,
>>> >> citoyen-comrade!
>>> >>
>>> >> How LANGUAGE really works (trust me and the Gnoams!): X uses a word W
>>> >> with an
>>> >> intended semantic-range S(X,W) = [XWs1 ... XWsn]; Y reads/hears W with a
>>> >> transformed semantic-range S(Y,W) = [YWs1 ... YWsm]. After
>>> >> inner-diambiguations and decontextualizations (left as a Chomskian
>>> >> exorcize
>
> You will not frighten me with mathematical notation, even with
> sexual connotation, you know.
>
> I agree that they (connotaions)
> are not always our personal choice, but it depends
> on us - overemphasize them or not. I can invent a context to give
> ANY word sexual connotations. A question is - who invented the context,
> an author or a commentator. To some it may be an exercice, to others -
> exorcism (maybe Chomskian...). When I hear modern discussions, in
> particlar discussions about "sexism", I think often that the real
> sexism is to obsessively sexualise everything, and preferences for male or
> female are secondary even if many militants may disagree.
>
> There
> are also the contexts that desexualize even the words with direct
> sexual meaning. A story I've heard from some old person who was
> prisoner in a soviet camp and worked felling the trees was that
> they used the word for male organ instead of "right" and for
> female for "left" to alert other people when the tall tree
> was falling left or right. It was not an amusement park and
> they were mortally exhausted, and the sexual meaning was downplayed
> if remembered at all in this situation.
>
> I think it all is related to how we comment on VN.
>
> S kommunisticheskim privetom
>
> Sergei Soloviev
> --------
> Ochen chudnoi, Tovarich Sergei! But I'll thank you to leave my COMMUNAL
> PRIVATES out of this debate.
>
> Explicit in my equations is the very point you make about authorial
> _intentions_ and personal reader-interpretations. The reader/re-reader must
> try to discern from _all_ the contextual clues what is being conveyed,
> allowing for the known tricks of the author: irony, satire, sarcasm, humour,
> litotes, deliberate decepion ...
>
> Re-irony: I recall in early schooldays our teacher asked us to provide a
> sentence illustrating the word "marvellous." One kid offered: "Me sister came
> home in tears last night and told me dad she was pregnant and me dad said,
> 'Marvellous, bleedin' marvellous.'"
>
> Re-"Whaddya mean by that?": Although we can't ask Pushkin: "List _all_ the
> connotations you had in mind when using 'dobro' in EO line whatever ... ," we
> can explore Pushkin's "propensities" and learn from those like VN who devoted
> much effort thereto. From AdaOnLine (renewed thanks!):
>
> Pushkin was very fond of him and vied with him in scatological metaphors (see
> their letters). He was Karamzin's ward, Reason's godchild, Romanticism's
> champion, and an Irishman on his mother's side (O'Reilly)" (EO II, 27). [My
> interjection: O Really? Say no more!-- skb]
>
> My pleasure in reading VN (over most rivals for my space-time attention) is
> this semantic challenge. There is VN's special wordscape (have I just coined
> this? If so, I rely on you getting my gist without rushing for a dictionary)
> that, for me, avoids the extremes of boring/obvious and impenetrable
> obscurity. I grew up, like VN, surrounded by word-play and in-family private
> jokes. Every drunk sounded like Joyce or Behan in full tall-tale flight. I
> share VN's fascination-cum-addiction with "rare" words, where "rare" is not
> that easy to define. One example springs to mind: meeting in Ada "the cockloft
> of Ardis Hall" always brings a smile. Every house in my childhood Liverpool
> had a cockloft: an attic-type (Attican!) storage place under the roof with a
> water-tank and maybe room for old papers and magazines (as is the case in
> Ardis Hall). Ours was actually extended and served as a small bedroom! Of
> course, I can imagine many readers smiling over cockloft for a different
> reason, viz., images of a rampant-penis. If you spend your half your life
> sleeping in a cockloft, such allusions are greatly diluted although never
> entirely absent. One might say that allusions like jokes "wear thin" or "wear
> off"
>
> I appreciate Sergei's Gulag (Proshchalny potselui, Solzhenistyn [do I need a
> vocative or what?]) example of what you might called "reverse
> scatologicization," where "naughty" words replace "clean" ones. It happens
> almost without reflection. "Beethoven? I dig that shit, man."
>
> CTaH
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/