Brian Boyd: Pt 1 Ch 35 is the next chapter to go live on AdaOnline. In my annotations, already out in The Nabokovian, I hadn't thought of the visual pun ...

 

Jansy Mello: I checked your annotations in The Nabokovian n.68,Spring 2012.  Concerning the note 221.07 there may be something else to add. 

While searching for references to Ada's hair parted at the neck because I remembered the description of an inverted "V", and of a triangle (a reference to a woman's "delta")*. Then it occurred to me that "crown canopies" might indicate not only "the canopies of crowns of trees," described in your note, but also special arrangement of parted cloth hanging from a bed's canopy**. The images (crown canopy, parted hair) have a sexual connotation (the triangle or the delta) 

However, in the sentence "My magic carpet no longer skims over crown canopies and gaping nestlings, and her rarest orchids." the insertion of a fully decorated bed makes no sense, whereas the crowns of trees are perfect. Anyway, I thought it worth a mention.

 

A second item (from Pt 1 Ch 35) is also interesting and it's an equally problematic image: "One day he brought his shaving kit along and helped her to get rid of all three patches of body hair: ‘Now I’m Scheher,’ he said, ‘and you are his Ada, and that’s your green prayer carpet.’" The reference to Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights is very clear and dominates the scene and further associations to it. Nevertheless, the process of shaving body hairs suggests someone with scissors, so I couldn't help thinking of the German word "Scherer"(a shearer).  The recurrent reference to a "carpet" is also worthy of note if one keeps the sexual imagery in mind. If we add Van Veen's moribund condition while recollecting magic carpets and lost greens, a grass-cutting scythe might come in handy (the grim reaper?).

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* - "Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue. The fillet of black velvet binding her hair that day (the day of the mental picture) brought out its sheen at the silk of the temple and along the chalk of the parting. It hung lank and long over the neck, its flow disjoined by the shoulder; so that the mat white of her neck through the black bronze stream showed in triangular elegancy." (Ch.17). Cf., for example, Anais Nin's "the Delta of Venus"

 

** -  The images from internet ads offering bed canopies show them as clearly "V" shaped...