I have no idea if reading Nabokov opens or shuts my mind off things, but his books keep me busy. I'm still plodding away and if our Eds won't mind and the List-members don't complain, I still have several questions I'd like to bring up, concerning Kinbote's (and Van's) obsessive references to dates and "trivia".

1. Pale Fire, note 98: Here Kinbote mentions "other vivid misprints" and refers the reader to note to line 802.
- NB:In the present note what he takes as a misprint ( taking it be a reference to Keats' "Champman's Homer") is a correct newspaper clipping.

When we check his note to line 802 we realize that here K only deals with Coates' own words about a misprint -"not that it matters much".
Only in K's note to line 803 that carries the heading "a misprint" we find the "mountain/fountain" majestic error being directly mentioned.

In note to line 803 Kinbote describes "world games" and discusses the difficulty future translators of Shade's poem will meet to transform "mountain" and "fountain". He notes that this cannot be rendered neither in French, or German, or Russian, or Zemblan... I'm glad to inform that this transformation is possible in Portuguese with a slight alteration: from "Monte" to "Fonte" ie. from "Mount" to "Fount".

2. There is another mistake Kinbote makes in one of his notes and he considers it " a slip" and thus allows it to remain unaltered. In note to line 167 we find:
"The poet began Canto Two (on his fourteenth card) on July 5, his sixtieth birthday ( see note to line 181, "today"). My slip - change to sixty-first."

I bring this matter up after a little arithmetic ( please correct me if I miscalculated). If Shade were sixty in 1959, then he would have been born in 1899 - the same year Nabokov was born. His birthday is April 23 and this date coincides with Ada's husband Vinelander's death in Arizona.

3. John Shade and Charles Kinbote both celebrate their birthdays in July 5 ( Kinbote's birth took place in July 5, 1914) .
4. John Shade's death coincides with the day Queen Blenda died, in July 21,1936 (note 71). Also with Ada's birthday. Adelaida was born in July 21, 1872 ( Ardis, Antiterra) and also little "Adora" ( Van's Mediterranean dream?)

4. Van Veen writes about his mid-July ( 1870) recollections when he was in his seventh month of life. He considers this event as his true birthday since it was when his consciousness was born ( against the "silent thunder of the infinite unconsciousness proper to my birth fifty-two years and 195 days ago"). It is when ( July 14) he definitely decides to return to Ada. This event coincides with the writing of Canto Three and Shade's "half a shade" experience of death.
Summer vacations are important in "Lolita", "Ada" and in "Pale Fire".

5. 1959, when Shade wrote his last poem, was the year when Nabokov ( then 60) left America to settle in Switzerland.

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.