On 7/11/06 18:55, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Dear List, Victor, Carolyn, A.Stadlen:
The question about Shade's shagbark, like many other similar doubts -- such as Kinbote's various misprints, false misprints and misguided cross-references-- reminded me of a particular strategy that entranced the "Viennese quack".
Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, retells the joke about two Jews who meet on a train:
"Where are you going?" one asks. "I'm going to Pinsk," the other replies. To which the first answers, "You say you are going to Pinsk, because you want me to think you are going to Minsk. But I know you are going to Pinsk. So why are you lying to me?"
Someone asked me if Kinbote's "gilt key" would lead me to "guilt key". Like the reference to "primal scene" and "lockless doors" it may indicate an erotic, traumatic subtext lurking in Shade's poem.If we remember that Nabokov not only reviled Freud but insistently so, returning to him over and over, I now ask
Would that old Jew be really travelling to Pinsk?
Jansy
Jansy: I was brought up with a FUNNIER version of Freud’s ancient joke — note the added NOT which makes ALL the difference.
"Where are you going?" one asks. "I'm going to Pinsk," the other replies. To which the first answers, "You say you are going to Pinsk, because you want me to think you are NOT going to Minsk. But I know you are going to Pinsk. So why are you lying to me?"
BUT, like VN’s version of the wonderful Chapman’s Homer joke, you either GET IT and giggle, or you start quibbling about the exact baseball SCORE (which is totally IRRELEVANT) and then hunt the newspaper archives.
There’s another be-whiskered baseball yarn about the NY Phil string section that gets drunk during a peformance of Beethoven’s Choral symphony: “Yankee Ba[s]ses loaded at the bottom of the 9th.” (NO, I don’t know if this REALLY happened.)
Stan Kelly-Bootle