Sighting: The Week,  September 3-10, "What the great ate, " devoted to foods of the famous, e. g., Kafka, Capote, Eisenhower, Nietzsche, Sartre, Warhol, Confucius, Christ, Ronald Reagan (went 70 years without eating a tomato), Thomas Edison, Hemingway, and Nabokov!

 

   Herewith the Nabokov entry on page 53. :

 

  "Novelist Vladimir Nabokov had passions for writing and butterflies.  But his interest went beyond collecting them.  The author of Lolita confided to a Sports Illustrated reporter that he had once eaten butterflies in Vermont.  `I didn't see any difference between the monarch butterfly and the viceroy,' he said. `The taste of both was vile...They tasted like almonds and perhaps a green cheese combination.' "

 

    Entry accompanied by an illustration of a blue butterfly, but NOT N's Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis)!!!.  Instead gross error, it is the humongous Blue Mountain Swallowtail (Papillo ulysses) from Indonesia where N never netted. 

 

     Academic Nabokovians, arise!   With classes about to begin, warm up for the year!  Get out your red pen, your scalpel, machete, or best of all unsheathe your kris from Indonesia!   What grade would you give a student who turned in a paper with this howler?  What would the ultra fastidious N have done? 

 

     RHB/aka/the Sports Illustrated reporter