Author: David Gorsline

Powerful Kramler: Nabokov decoded

Kinbote writes of dialling 11111 to summon first responders to the scene of the shooting (“I then dialled 11111 and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage,” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 1000). At the time of these events, various countries were beginning to adopt 3-digit emergency telephone numbers, following the lead of Britain’s 999. New Zealand introduced a 111 emergency number in 1958; the year before, California rolled out a ZEnith 1-2000 (presumably one asked for rather than dialled this number, since Z is not assigned a digit on the telephone dial); Australia adopted 000 in 1961. Use of 11111 for emergency purposes is undocumented, as far as my searches go.

Old World/New World: “…the disguised king’s arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole.” (note to line 691) As is often the case, a New World family of birds (the black and yellow Icteridae, “jaundiced ones”) is not closely related to its Old World namesake, in this case the orioles, family Oriolidae.

Nabokov appears to have introduced two coinages in the book, one by Shade (“And that odd muse of mine,/My versipel, is with me everywhere,/In carrel and in car, and in my chair.” [ll. 946-948]) and one by Kinbote (“The Shades were out, said the cheeky ancillula, an obnoxious little fan who came to cook for them on Sundays and no doubt dreamt of getting the old poet to cuddle her some wifeless day.” [note to line 802]). Versipel is glossed as a back-formation from versipellous, “changeable; protean; having a form, nature or appearance that changes often.” Ancillula is from the Latin, and is a diminutive of ancilla, “handmaid.”

There’s a snag

Saved to my to-read folder: a new special report is available from the American Bird Conservancy: Landowner Stories in Bird Conservation: Managing for Cavity-Nesting Birds in Ponderosa Pine Forests. Birds of particular conservation concern include Flammulated Owl (Otus flammeolus), Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis), and White-headed Woodpecker (Picoides albolarvatus).

The year in review, 2009

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 2 January: WATCH assignments for the calendar year were distributed over the holiday break.
  • 2 February: wood s lot reminds us that it is James Joyce’s birthday.
  • 1 March: Only a light frosting of snow this morning on the still-sleeping woods (the bigger dump is expected this evening).
  • 3 April: “Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens.”
  • 1 May: Via Arts & Letters Daily, Stuart Jeffries explores the recent population explosion of bangs…
  • 2 June: Lawrence M. Hanks et al. have captured on video a Common Raven (Corvus corax) in Death Valley NP that has learned how to turn on a campground water spigot to get a drink.
  • 2 July: The last play in August Wilson’s cycle of Pittsburgh plays, Radio Golf, is set in 1997, at a time when the city’s black upper-middle class is enjoying both economic good fortune and the prospect of genuine political power.
  • 2 August: Michael Weller’s Fifty Words heads up the list of five plays (featuring two pianos!) presented at another fine festival in Shepherdstown.
  • 6 September: Some tidbits from the most recent newsletter from Friends of Huntley Meadows Park…
  • 3 October: “At the heart of the Park idea is this notion…”
  • 1 November: George Plimpton’s hockey book is back in print…
  • 2 December: I came across the following turn of phrase in Chapter 13 of So Big.

The year in review, 2008 and 2007.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2009

Taking a couple of classes, plus a concerted effort to spend more time in the field and documenting it, means I have lots of field trip notes this year.

2008’s list.

McCarthy decoded

In the course of tracking down some of the more obscure vocabulary in Blood Meridian (obscure, unless you’re a Scots-descended horseman living in what is now the American Southwest), I ran across the interesting word scantlin or scantling (“I got busted in the head with a scantlin,” chap. III, p. 32 in the Modern Library edition). It refers to a timber used for framing a house or a ship, like a 2×4, and is often used in the plural. It has several other older senses, reaching back to its derivation from scantillon, jumping from the French échantillon, with senses of “a sample” or “a measuring rod.” But of course the confusion with scant is all too easy, and one proceeds with caution in tracing its etymology.

Slear (“Climbing up through ocotillo and pricklypear where the rocks trembled and sleared in the sun…”, chap. V, p. 62) does not show up in my printed references, but there are online uses of slearing as a industrial process performed on coiled metals. Perhaps a portmanteau of shear and slit? And is this the sense that Cormac McCarthy had in mind?

Old Zemblan

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What is we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 991