On Apr 25, 2010, at 9:26 PM, NABOKV-L wrote:

[Jim Twiggs' post was apparently misplaced during the birthday celebrations on Friday.  Here it is now!  -- SES]

 ... I've always thought there's a corresponding point near the end of Shade's poem. It comes here, in lines 923-930:

Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

Everything after "I loathe" is not Shade but rather pure Nabokov... as if Shade had stopped writing and a pre-cut set of pet peeves had been pasted in--that I assume it's VN's way of winking at us from behind the character he's created and is now making fun of. 

Bull-fighting, Picasso's art (abstractist bric-a-brac; / Primitivist folk-masks),

and probably progressive schools; / Music in supermarkets– are particular to VN.

swimming pools is an outlier that bears further consideration.

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, are things everyone dislikes.

Freud is disliked by both VN and Shade, if Kinbote can be believed. 

Marx of course is particularly disliked by VN.

Fake thinkers may be taken as referring to, and generalizing upon, the just mentioned Freud & Marx.

puffed-up poets, if taken to include, especially, T. S. Eliot, is shared by Shade & VN.

Who likes frauds and sharks? (not investors or swimmers).

Overall, there doesn't appear to be much order to the list, and this is worth noting. 

Swimming pools may remind Shade of Hazel's death. Far-fetched?

You might like to go back and read the entire canto with this question in mind:

For each metaphor how decipherable is it?

I'm not going to go into that kind of detail here but simply point to the passage closely following the above one and ask how it gets decoded:

And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla’s fields where my gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose.

The disjointed thoughts, which begin right from the start of the canto, the looseness of metaphor throughout, the obsession with the act of shaving, and the litany of hates, some of which seem odd, all point to the notion that Shade is truly loosing his grip on reality; and perhaps his sense of identity!

The unprepared inclusion of VN's pet peeves in Shade's litany of hates, along with the remote swimming pools, is intended to confuse, and secondarily amuse, the reader and make him ask if Shade isn't losing his mind.

On the question of the goodness of Pale Fire as poem, and this is a standing, strong, opinion of mine: one should evaluate any poem based mainly upon one's own experience of it and without much recourse to extra-libra opinions, be it the author's or some augustly received critic's. This is, I think, the way this act has traditionally been performed. (The missionary position?) One might ask the dinner partner how he or she likes a particular dish but one shouldn't be dependent upon outside opinion as to whether or not it tastes good.

as per usual,

–GSL