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JF said: "On a different subject, what are those errors of
natural history that Kinbote makes? Only three come to
my mind: he doesn't recognize the Toothwort White, the
diana, and the atlantis as butterflies. I wonder whether
the goldenrod, blooming at the wrong time of year in the
note to line 347, is another. Maybe Kinbote just
misidentified something. (Yellow sweet clover?)"
MR: DBJ makes a like observation in his Field Guide to PF, which causes
him
to question whether or not Botkin could really be an immigrant as
recent as
Charles Kinbote claims to be.
Re: Eliot and Bukowski, I might suggest (rashly) that we can tell so
much
about Bukowski from his work because he is such a terrible poet. I
believe
Eliot, were he so inclined, could easily have produced Bukowski's poems.
Bukowski could not have produced Eliot's. Something similar has been
said
about Shade and Kinbote--that Shade could have written like Kinbote, but
Kinbote could not have written like Shade. (I am not convinced by this
argument, actually.) Nabokov, of course, contains all (even Eliot)
within
PF.
Matt Roth