Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0013793, Sun, 29 Oct 2006 08:53:37 -0800

Subject
Re: "Free-association football with Edsel Ford" from JF
Date
Body
Replies & Comments to sundry:

1. I read Edsel Ford's collection _Looking for Shiloh_. The PF poem is not
there, nor is it in the online items from the Beloit Poetry Journal
(www.bpj.org/index/F.html),nor the listings of a Library of Congress recording
by Ford. But the guy was quite prolific. His work does have some
resemblance to
Frost in that it is work is quite "folksy" as befits one from Rogers, Arkansas
(pop. circa 5000 in 1950).

2. Like Jerry Friedman, it seems to me that the most likely way that VN would
have run across Ford is in an anthology with an adjacent Frost listing.
NB
................... Her room / We’ve kept intact.
Its trivia create / A still life in her style: the paperweight /
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,/ The verse book open at the Index (Moon,/
Moonrise, Moor, Moral),....


3. Matthew Roth's exegesis on X-rays of lung lesions and nebulae is
outstanding.

Best, Don Johnson
-----------------------------------





Quoting NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU>:

> Matthew Roth wrote:
>
>> 1. Has anyone (here on the list or elsewhere) tracked down the Edsel
>> Ford poem excerpted by Kinbote?
>
> I was thinking of requesting /Raspberries Run Deep/ by
> interlibrary loan, but that's as far as I've gotten. If I try
> this, I'm going to start as close as I can to 1959 and work
> backwards. Have you eliminated any books yet?
>
>
>> 2. In lines 615-616, Shade is describing "the exile, the old man /
> Dying
>> in
>> a motel" and says: "He suffocates and conjures in two tongues / The
>> nebulae
>> dilating in his lungs." My questions: Does "two tongues" refer to
>> languages?
>
> That's how I took it.
>
>> Medically speaking, what are nebulae and how do they dilate in
>> the lungs?
>
> I took that to refer to the cloudy appearance on an x ray of
> lung lesions. Maybe there's a comparison between how they look
> in black-and-white x-ray photographs and how nebulae look in
> astronomical photographs. I don't know medicine, but I suspect
> the disease is pneumonia, "the old man's friend", and "dilate"
> just means "expand", as the portions of the lungs blocked by
> fluid and bacteria (or whatever) gain in size.
>
>> What does it mean to "conjure" them?
>
> It seems kind of strange to me. Here are possibly relevant
> definitions from Webster's Third (the wrong one):
> 1. b : to entreat earnestly or solemnly : IMPLORE, BESEECH
> 2. b (1) : to affect or effect by by or as if by magic : call
> forth or /send away/ by magic arts...
>
> For the first I'd expect "conjure them to do something", and
> for the second "conjure them away", but those are as close as
> I get.
>
>> With gratitude,
>> Matthew Roth
>>
>> --------------------------
>>
>> It's funny how, once deep in the thickets of PF, everything I
>> read seems to relate to it somehow.
>
> Do I hear disembodied chuckling somewhere?
>
> [snip intersting poem]
>
>> [EDNOTE. A few more thoughts on the name "Edsel Ford." Would his
> name
>> have appeared alphabetically before Frost's in the index to some
>> contemporary volume of American poetry? Is the alphabetical sequence
> of
>> the first name followed by the surname important? SES]
>
> I like the Ford-Frost adjacency--too bad I know so little about
> what poets were anthologized then (not even whether there were
> any Friedmans in between).
>
> Some free association football with Ford: My first thought was
> that it was a coincidence, like crown-crow-cow, that two people
> with that very rare name should have gained some prominence.
> Another possibility is that Ford was a lesser contemorary of
> Shakespeare, as Ford is of Frost (or Shade or Nabokov). Yet
> another is that a ford is a place to cross a river--like the
> Styx? Then Ford's biography posted here suggests that he might
> have been gay, which might have interested Kinbote. (But if
> Kinbote had stopped on his way to Cedarn in Fort Smith, Arkansas,
> and met Ford , I'd think he would have mentioned it.) Would
> you believe Ford's Theater, site of a famous assassination?
>
> No, I have no reason to think Nabokov knew Ford's sexual
> orientation or the fact that he wasn't named after the
> more famous Edsel Ford.
>
> Jerry Friedman
>
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