Tim: my comments to Jansy last night on the Hayes/Haze wordplay were posted before I had seen your email. I hope it clarifies my position which rests on a well-known problem in Logical Implication*, a subject near to Carroll’s heart. Strangely, all his books on Logic were published under his pen-name Lewis Carroll, whereas all his works in other branches of mathematics appeared under his real name, Dodgson.
My comments on Alice in Numberland were based on a review in an MAA journal. I’m awaiting delivery with growing excitement, especially to learn more on Carroll’s 3-valued Logic! Briefly: some statements are neither TRUE nor FALSE; they are tagged MEANINGLESS!
Summary: “Mangling Charlotte Hayes to Charlotte Haze would be childish and cruel wordplay” may well be TRUE (and even typical of VN/HH’s wordplays), but it does NOT prove that VN’s choice of Charlotte Haze had any connection with a London procuress called Charlotte Hayes. SO FAR, all we’ve had are conjectures that VN was “probably” familiar with literature on London prostitution.
SKB
On 06/01/2009 00:40, "Nabokv-L" <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] Two from SKB
From:
"Tim Henderson" <tim.hendo@gmail.com> <mailto:tim.hendo@gmail.com>
Date:
Mon, 5 Jan 2009 12:40:51 -0500
To:
"Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu> <mailto:NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>
This is interesting! But don't you think the 'childish and cruel' wordplay is really part of HH's character, part of his contempt for the Haze character? His own name is a self-constructed pseudonym, isn't it, despite the fact that he puts it into "real" dialogue....? I'm going to look up Lewis Carroll in Numberland, being a big fan of popular mathematics in my journalist role. -- Tim Henderson
On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 7:28 AM, jansymello <jansy@aetern.us> wrote:
SKB: Look for LEWIS CARROLL IN NUMBERLAND, Robin Wilson, W W Norton, 2008. Enough wordplay, perhaps, for non-mathematicians [...}VN was teasing when he said Carroll was an H-H prototype. Carroll certainly loved photographing naked nymphets but NO HANKY-PANKY.
Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] anagrams
From:
"Tim Henderson" <tim.hendo@gmail.com> <mailto:tim.hendo@gmail.com>
Date:
Mon, 5 Jan 2009 15:14:05 -0500
To:
"Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu> <mailto:NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>
This reminds me -- does anyone remember a Nabokov parody called "Three Meetings" by Eli Wallach? It's long out of print, but the bit I recall is his discovery of the Lightly Salted butterfly, "bug pennants, bucking....choppy flags of the forest". This book I think was named for much funnier parody (wouldn't it be?) of Eliot, a takeoff on "The Cocktail Party" called Hopalong-Freud, which ends with the audience kneeling and singing Adeste, Fideles.
--Tim Henderson
On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Alexey Sklyarenko <skylark05@mail.ru> wrote:
Dear all,
Nobody seems to have noticed that Siri Bendtsen, the name of the girl who asked the List about the reason of VN's dislike of Dostoevsky, is a Nabokovian anagram. I wouldn't have noticed it myself, if the inventor of this quite plausible Scandinavian name (to whom I had written by chance) didn't invite me to look closer at Siri. The anagram's solving was then the matter of a second.
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