Dear List,

 

Reading William Gibson's 2007 novel Spook Country on an airplane last week, while returning home from a Nabokov panel at the ASEEES convention in San Antonio, I was delighted to find the following allusion. 

 

Gibson's character, Milgrim, is traveling in a Zodiac, an inflatable motorized boat: "He was bouncing along at some insane speed on something that reminded him of a creepy folding rubber bathtub that he'd once seen Vladimir Nabokov posing with in an old photograph" (p. 344, Berkley Books 2008 paperback ed.).

 

Does anyone recognize this image?

 

:) SES