Subject
Amber preterists and Lettrocalamities
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After watching Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" with its instances of doubles ( I won't say more to avoid inadvertently spoiling it to anyone who still hasn't seen it) and hearing comments that compared the story to E.A.Poe's "William Wilson", I thought that a Nabokovian magician's spirit was also detectable.
Initially, I accepted this as arising from a common reading from E.A.Poe: coded messages, mirrors, illusions, twins...
But there was another thread running through "electricity" and this set me on to the "Lettrocalamity" issue in "Ada" ( annotated as "amber", as an organic substance itself where other animal bodies can be entrapped, a kind of "preterist's nest").
David Bowie, at its most encased cereous, plays Nikola Tesla, a "world-renowned Serb-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer." Mr. Tesla actually did have an enmity with Thomas Edison over the primacy of AC versus DC ...(wikipedia.com).
Tesla might have had an appeal to omnivorous VN.
The entire issue about AC versus DC could have been variously alluded in VN's works [ not only with the Lettrocalamity reference but...a "preterist", doesn't this word also carry a link with Before Christ, or BC ( it became AC in some romance languages) and After Christ, or AC ( DC in the same other languages?)]
I know absolutely nothing ( and I do mean that, almost shamefacedly) about AC/DC electrical currents.
Once I kept an electric-fish that operated with two different kinds of charges, the strongest was repelling instead of attracting by the effect of a continuous current -so that the prey didn't get stuck to their bodies, as it happens when we get stuck in a live wire - and that's all I know about alternate and continuous flows.
But I gather the entire conflict bt. AC and DC, and electrification and transmission, is something of an overwhelming significance. Would VN have missed that?
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Initially, I accepted this as arising from a common reading from E.A.Poe: coded messages, mirrors, illusions, twins...
But there was another thread running through "electricity" and this set me on to the "Lettrocalamity" issue in "Ada" ( annotated as "amber", as an organic substance itself where other animal bodies can be entrapped, a kind of "preterist's nest").
David Bowie, at its most encased cereous, plays Nikola Tesla, a "world-renowned Serb-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer." Mr. Tesla actually did have an enmity with Thomas Edison over the primacy of AC versus DC ...(wikipedia.com).
Tesla might have had an appeal to omnivorous VN.
The entire issue about AC versus DC could have been variously alluded in VN's works [ not only with the Lettrocalamity reference but...a "preterist", doesn't this word also carry a link with Before Christ, or BC ( it became AC in some romance languages) and After Christ, or AC ( DC in the same other languages?)]
I know absolutely nothing ( and I do mean that, almost shamefacedly) about AC/DC electrical currents.
Once I kept an electric-fish that operated with two different kinds of charges, the strongest was repelling instead of attracting by the effect of a continuous current -so that the prey didn't get stuck to their bodies, as it happens when we get stuck in a live wire - and that's all I know about alternate and continuous flows.
But I gather the entire conflict bt. AC and DC, and electrification and transmission, is something of an overwhelming significance. Would VN have missed that?
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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