#might be different in america or other countries but for here there is not much diversity

[br1ghtestlight]

whenever I consider seriously trying to take care of my curly hair so that it's less of a flat mess I realize that I'll need to use the Special Curly Hair Shampoo And Conditioner that they only sell at one specific store in the middle of nowhere that costs like 30 dollars a bottle and im like nvm my hair is just gonna have to be ugly. im not doing that

[voyagerprobe]

Buckle up, European and Foreigner Tumblypoos, because I'm about to learn you a thing about AMERICA.

You see these delectable motherflippers? These are called STATES. You stupid foreigners might not be able to wrap your head around this, but basically they're administrative subdivisions of the country.

And here's the thing: They are totally heckin' different from each other! For instance, New York:

Looks TOTALLY DIFFERENT from Kansas:

And they both look TOTALLY different from California!

So before you make fun of an American for not knowing where tiny third-world countries like "Check Republic" or "South Korea" are, maybe think about how much we have to learn about the unique regional differences in our OWN country. Maybe you should think about AMERICA more.

[astonmartinii]

pick of the crop | logan sargeant social media au

pairing: logan sargeant x fem farmer!reader

sometimes opposites attract so much that a city boy is willing to get mud on his trainers

based on this request: Logan sargeant x reader smau, where she’s like a farmer in the country, and people are surprised that they’re so different? - @indesicivelyconfuzzled

MASTERLIST | BUY ME A KO-FI?

logansargeant

liked by alexalbon, yourusername and 611,209 others

tagged: yourusername

logansargeant: never been so thankful for a two week break in the race calendar, farm time has been overdue.

view all comments

user1: did we just unlock the farmer version of logan

user2: real ones have known farmer logan since his f2 days

oscarpiastri: ugh... couple goals i guess

yourusername: you guess?

logansargeant: you wish you were us

yourusername: let's not pit two powerful women against each other

oscarpiastri: thank you y/n

yourusername: i was talking about me and lily, y'all can fight amongst yourselves

user3: you guys are fake as fuck cause why didn't you tell me logan has a gf

user4: a farmer gf ?!?!?!?

alexalbon: so i got heat from you for @albon_pets (follow me) but your gf has a whole ass farm?

logansargeant: and what? dodger would defo take otter in a fight

yourusername: stop the violence

alexalbon: see, this is why people are confused on how you guys got together

logansargeant: i'm just standing up for my dog child ?

yourusername: leave the children out of it

user5: idk how or when this happened but i am enjoying seeing another side of logan

user6: for real haven't seen his feral side since prema

user7: two weeks on a farm will do that to you

yourusername

liked by danielricciardo, logansargeant and 3,199 others

tagged: logansargeant

yourusername: the y/ln farm takes the cota paddock, thanks @alexalbon for recommending fifi for the job of paddock drama queen

view all comments

user9: she brought a horse for her paddock debut ???

user10: idk about you guys but i am thoroughly enjoying whatever the fuck is going on right now

logansargeant: i think fifi did great (i think dan might be friends with us now)

yourusername: she's a gentle queen (omg we've made friends?)

danielricciardo: damn right you have a new friend what a STALLION

yourusername: you can ride her if you want :)

alexalbon: WE CAN?

landonorris: WE CAN?

maxverstappen1: i would like to ride the horsey

yukitsunoda0511: dan woke me up with his scream of joy so you're morally obligated to let me have a ride on fifi as well

logansargeant: well if i knew all i needed to do was bring y/n and fifi to the paddock to make friends they would've been at miami :(

user11: crying so the reports that logan was feeling really lonely were real?

user12: at least he has y/n?

oscarpiastri: cool kids have already ridden with fifi :)

logansargeant: you screamed the whole time?

oscarpiastri: semantics

danielricciardo: i'm outside williams hospitality let me in

yourusername: that was fast?

charles_leclerc: it's kinda in the job description (we're all here please let us in)

user13: the way all the teams are gonna be like where are all of our drivers and why are they all running away?

williamsf1

liked by yourusername, logansargeant and 610,994 others

tagged: logansargeant, alexalbon

williamsf1: austin you delivered !! logan and alex pick up three and four points each in logan's first points and our first double points finish of the season !!

view all comments

user14: someone tell y/n she's not allowed to go home, she's a williams employee now

liked by logansargeant

alexalbon: WHAT THE FUCK IS A KILOMETRE I LOVE YOU AMERICA

logansargeant: 🤨🤨🤨🤨

alexalbon: don't lie you love the bit

logansargeant: no i think YOU love the bit

alexalbon: today i love YOU 😘

yourusername: 🤨🤨🤨🤨

alexalbon: i guess i love you too

yourusername: i would like to think so. don't think i didn't see you swipe a jar of marmalade

alexalbon: GUILTY

user15: williams points, maybe america isn't all bad ...

yourusername: home race did pretty boy so good :))))

logansargeant: idk i think you might just be my lucky charm and can never leave my side again

yourusername: what about the children logan :(

logansargeant: fuck dem kids

logansargeant: JOKES

oscarpiastri: 📸 📸 📸 got ur ass

logansargeant: why are you here?

oscarpiastri: i want naming rights of the next babies 😬

yourusername: logan :((((((( they have feelings :(((((

logansargeant: i'm sorry :( i just love you :(

yourusername: awwwwww i love you too

oscarpiastri: so can i name the next babies PLEASE

yourusername: you wanna give logan a tow next race?

oscarpiastri: fuck no

yourusername: then there's your answer

user16: what the fuck is going on here?

yourusername

liked by oscarpiastri, logansargeant and 7,103 others

tagged: logansargeant

yourusername: there's no such thing as a snooze button here

view all comments

user17: FARM LOGAN FARM LOGAN FARM LOGAN

user18: farm logan makes me weak in the knees

oscarpiastri: why are there two pictures of logan?

logansargeant: choke.

oscarpiastri: woah i didn't know comedy was illegal in texas

yourusername: to perform comedy you kinda need to be funny oscar

oscarpiastri: i am funny?

yourusername: sure ...

oscarpiastri: stop trying to look like a nice gf on the internet you make fun of him just as much as i do

logansargeant: she did say that she prefers dermot over 'my ass'

yourusername: LOL sorry logan....

landonorris: am i dumb?

oscarpiastri: yes :)

yourusername: ass is another way to refer to a donkey lando

landonorris: ohhhh. in that case i am a massive donkey

yourusername: oh that's not...

user19: y/n having to deal with more than logan and oscar will kill her i fear

alexalbon: SHEEP PLEASE BRING SHEEP NEXT RACE PLEASE I LOVE SHEEP

yourusername: you good?

alexalbon: i love sheep. sue me

yourusername: we actually host sheep cuddle session at the farm lol

logansargeant: can confirm they are very cuddly (not as much as you)

alexalbon: 1. why thank you logan 2. LILY CANCEL THE FLIGHTS

logansargeant: i was talking about y/n... but i knew you remembered our snuggle on the plane

alexalbon: i'm like an octopus in my sleep, just ask lily or george

user20: please santa bring me a cuddle session with the sheep at y/n's farm 🤞

logansargeant

liked by alexalbon, yourusername and 503,776 others

tagged: yourusername

logansargeant: 2024 williams? no. y/n's tractor? YES

view all comments

user21: country boy i love youuuuuuuuuuuu eh

user22: third pic is doing something to me that is irreversible

yourusername: lovely lovely cowboy, i might have to ban you from working on the farm cause you're too distracting

logansargeant: saying that as if you don't make collecting eggs look like the hottest thing in the world

yourusername: you looking mighty fine wrangling the cows

logansargeant: you riding a horse makes me go feral

alexalbon: OKAY WE'LL BE ENDING THAT THERE BEFORE IT LEAVES THE PG RATING

yourusername: boooooo you're no fun 🍅 🍅🍅

logansargeant: as if you aren't posting up your feet all over the timeline 🤨

alexalbon: ffs it's just double trouble with you people

user23: only time that driving a tractor is attractive for f1 drivers

oscarpiastri: you guys look like you've jumped out of a trashy romance novel

yourusername: you read them enough to know that

oscarpiastri: what is on my kindle is between me and god

logansargeant: oscar jack piastri leave us out of your smut

oscarpiastri: oh stop being so dramatic, i don't want to know what you freaks do on that farm

logansargeant: and you'll never know. don't think of my girlfriend like that

yourusername: and don't think about my boyfriend like that

oscarpiastri: you people are infuriating

yourusername: we irritating 👯‍♀️

logansargeant: they hate to see bad bitches winning 💅

user24: this relationship is so precious to me

yourusername

liked by oscarpiastri, logansargeant and 31,503 others

tagged: logansargeant

yourusername: farm update: meet the formooooola one grid!!

yuki has eaten all of my shoes :(

alex has taken station in the chicken coup

charles thinks he's a dog?

max and daniel just snooze everyday under the orange trees

george is always right at the door every morning

oscar and logan are just obsessed with each other and the goats

yes i did name the one with the prettiest coat after lewis

fernando is always sat on some poor soul (usually one of the cats)

carlos and lando chase each other constantly

lance and esteban are chill and just like cuddles

valterri drags zhou to do dumb stuff (they got stuck in a window? don't ask)

pierre demands to be brushed everyday

checo, nico and kevin are the mother hens

view all commments

user27: stop the count!!! this IS the cutest moment of the year

yukitsunoda0511: i'm sure cow yuki has a very good excuse

yourusername: i don't have any leather shoes so at least he's not a cannibal?

logansargeant: he did eat my limited edition converse though 🤨

lewishamilton: i simply HAVE to meet cow lewis he sounds like a great dude

yourusername: he's very calm and does love affection

logansargeant: he let me give him belly rubs !!

lewishamilton: that is cute (do not try to touch my stomach)

logansargeant: ... noted

user28: i will never recover from this and need constant updates please

logansargeant: cow me might be obsessed with oscar but real me is still obsessed with you

yourusername: don't tell the others but both you and cow logan are my faves - i love you

logansargeant: awwww i love you too

alexalbon: OUTRAGE

oscarpiastri: ROBBERY

yourusername: oh please ....

logansargeant: you snooze you lose

danielricciardo: awww they can't even separate us as cows @maxverstappen1

maxverstappen1: we're bffs in every universe daniel

yourusername: this is very heartwarming

logansargeant: we're still better though, right?

yourusername: oh of course

danielricciardo: ???

maxverstappen1: ???

fin.

note: two in one day? i am on a roll - i hope you all enjoy with me finally writing for logan !! i for one am glad he's getting a second season!

[tsatsked]

Lore details I've noticed: Farewell Rayashki event

As always that's mostly Russian/USSR/Slavic stuff and some translations, feel free to add anything. I've also made a post about Silver Knot lore details

Obviosly, spoiler warning

Alenka - a USSR chocolate type produced since 1965, they are quite soft and sweet and still popular among kids and adults

The playground is quite typical for the time period. The drawings and sunflowers might be Vila’s and kids’ work. It’s not very clear if the graffiti is made by someone inspired by hip-hop culture or is August’s failed attempt at scribbling out his name, judging by “А” and “Г” as 1st and 3rd letters. The only thing I’d add here is more scraped parts recycled into playground constructions

Ijirak, Kikituk, Qiqirn - creatures from Inuit folklore (as far as I know they are not known in native Siberian folklore). I haven’t found information about Hoituk

The Russian word for “most” means “best” in the phrase “the most “most”” (“самый-самый”)

“It was only by luck that we found the runium. For over 60 years, people here have worked together to make it what it is now” - Vila. If the events happen in 60s-80s (judging by the overall vibe), than the last time reverse was at 1977 and Rayashki started to grow from a village to a town at 1917 or later. It means the town exported runium for all the Soviet years.

⬆️ EDIT: Silver Knot (Windsong's story) confirms it actually happens in 80s-90s

Most of the sighs say “For Better Future”, “Welcome to Rayashki” and “Welcome Zeno’s Military Institute”

The room in which Windsong stays is Soviet af. There are an old TV with a lens, cool bookshelf and tiles that surprised me. They’re common for public and liminal spaces but not so much for the living ones. Maybe they’re chosen because they endure harsh Artic climate better that wood or linoleum

EDIT: the TV looks like KVN-49 model, produced in 1949—1962

“It must be Kikituk! But their closest habitat should be Kong Kalrs Land, hundreds of kilometres away”. Kong Karls Land - a group of island of Svalbard archipelago, Norway. As @vingler-mirror point out in their post, Rayashki is likely based on Pyramiden town owned by USSR on the same archipelago

Природа это числа и черты - “Nature is numbers and lines” Природа это мозаика цветов - “Nature is a mosaic of colours”

“Mutant Kikituk from Olga area! You should be at the Olga Strait, hunting for migrating salmon and whales, not here!” - excuse me OLGA STRAIT!? THE ONE NEAR JAPAN!?

Poneva/ponyova - an element of Russian (Eastern Slavic?) female clothing worn on top of the main skirt of the dress. I believe there was either a mistranslation in Needles and Loaves message where Raisa said “poneva dress”, either she meant the whole outfit

Samodiva - Their name is feminine and can be roughly translated as “self-wonder”, but that’s another word for vila the creature from Western and Southern Slavic mythology similar to Eastern Slavic rusalka/mavka

Other stuff I’ve noticed:

The town seems to have a big arcanist population, if not most of them are arcanists. An arcanist right is applicable to them and all Vila’s known students are arcanists (if the kids are arcanists, their parents and grandparents are arcanists too)

The people of Rayashki seem to come from different places, and it makes sense with Pyramiden's history (EDIT: the workers were mostly from a western region of Ukraine). Pasono’s first name seems to be obscure and I’ve found only a surname mostly known in America. Patrik’s name is more popular name in other countries, and it make me to believe his ancestors might be foreigners. Bogina’s name comes from Southern Slavic languages

Rayashki is very communistic compared to the rest of USSR. Maybe it’s the town’s history, citizens’ temperament, small town’s size, seclusion and big self sufficiency combined. EDIT: the town's athmosphere conctasts with the period of USSR where people start feel more positive about the world around and capitalism with it

[niuniente]

Dear people over America. I woke up to this current political news which is devastating to say the least to minorities, women and the trans community on the other side of the globe. I wanted to do what little I can to help and ease your minds.

I'm a psychic. I have been doing divination (oracle readings) for 25 years. I've got a high success rate and my reviews on my store are 5/5 (you can see this for yourself). I asked the cards for clarification for all this; why is HE the president now, and how does the nearby future look for women and trans communities.

Please note that these are collective readings of the topic and might not correlate with your own personal experiences or how things are in your home state! So take only what resonates with you and ignore the rest. (If you wish to have a personal reading, that is possible; in that case, click here)

Why Trump is the president?

This result didn't surprise me because for the past 3 years I have heard many American people, who have had a near-death experience (NDE) to say that if they have gotten a view of America's future, Trump has always appeared as being elected for the 2nd time - but only for the 2nd time.

The Spirit tells me that Trump's personal lesson is to learn to see other people's points of views. That's why he chose such a position in society, where he would need to consider many different people from different backgrounds and life situations. He needs to understand how his actions affect others.

However, he is miserably failing with this personal lesson (unless something happens and he somehow completes it now in the next 4 years). Instead of going for harmony and seeing everyone's point of view, his priority is Power. With a capital P. That's what he desires, that's what he wants (MAGA movement is based on this; power back to America, America needs to be a powerful, unyielding boxer in the global ring - only a win matters).

I asked why he wishes for this Power and it's simply because of the power's sake. He loves to be in control. He loves to feel powerful. You all are asked, as much as possible, to detach from this drama he is causing because it indeed seems like he is close to a cult leader and loves to bask in this power. He loves the idea that he can command nukes and one of the most powerful countries in the world. To get this, he is ready to cause any kind of a shitstorm - after all, he has not learned to consider others, except maybe only his own family members.

This correlates with his views of an autonomic power, where he gets all the power and can be a dictator. There's no one more powerful person alive in the world than a dictator. Anyone following him is likely learning this same lesson of empathy and understanding, and failing in it. They all want to be the King of the Hill and by following someone who already is, makes them feel like they are, too. This is all drama for dramas sake because it makes them feel more powerful.

TL;DR: Trump's life lesson is to learn to respect and honor everyone despite their backgrounds and views. What a better way to do that as a president of a nation with so many nationalities and stories of people in it. But so far he has failed miserably in this lesson and has chosen blind worship of power instead. Stirring drama is his tactic to gain more power and followers. Detach from his and his followers' drama as much as you can; block, ignore, move on. His reign will eventually come to an end.

Future for Women in The US?

A toxic masculine energy wishes to control women of America and this is not related to any single individual. The rise of misogyny is real and tangible, and women are part of this "other party" the power hungry men do not want to contemplate. It's His way or No Way at all.

This will make women turn more and more away from men, which HOPEFULLY make these men see that in order to actually have a woman and a family they so much yearn to have is to love women. Not to hate them as they now do. Not to see them as assets or items or rewards of a job well done of being a man. More and more women will choose not to have kids, choose not to date or get married, and they will choose even more carefully men who are on their side, walking next to them as a unit.

In a way or another, women WILL fight and take their power back. Peace will not be an option. If this fighting can't be done visibly, it will be done in secrecy; helping other women out, warning them of bad men and risks, aiding others to better safety and to a better life. Mind you that this also covers trans women; there are trans women and trans allies in cis women who will be willing to help. Women will turn towards one another. Men who follow this old paradigm of controlling women will be met with women's bare teeth but other women will be met with peace. I don't see anything particularly related to women who follow misogyny but I imagine with this much mental energy here, women will not abandon them but educate them. It is possible some of these women, who support this kind of regime, will later change their minds when they see how it negatively affects them, their parents, sisters, aunts, friends, cousins, coworkers etc. Some women will die in order to wake others up.

Women will turn their nurturing energies - the one this regime wants to turn towards men and babies - towards themselves. Artistic expression and expressing their feelings through any form of art will be significant. Pay attention to what kind of art women do now - it's going to be directly reflected in what's going on now. Women seem to also be looking more after their bodies, keeping themselves safe. This low level energy of control and forcing women is echoes of the past and women of America, collectively and mainly, wish not to partake in it any longer.

When it comes to men, these men who have thought that Trump will deliver them a woman to look after them and have their babies will see that it's not the case. And, if it is, the marriage is not happy and many women will fight like a trapped wild cat, scratching the eyes out of any of the people who want to trap them. This will be genuinely boggling to them and might make them angrier but their lessons are to understand what human rights are and what it means to respect others as your equal.

TL;DR: Women will turn away from misogyny and forced motherhood more and more, turning their attention and care towards themselves and other women (trans included) and leaving misogyny men angry because they have not learned to love women (not your job to teach them this, sisters!). Artistic expressions in all forms among women will be very high as it will be a way to express and deal with these current energies. Women will be even more pickier with the men they date and get married with, or even interact overall with - as they should. Anyone who wants to rip you off from your human rights is not your ally or a good partner. This will not be a shocker to anyone else but the men who believe in misogyny, as they will not get wives or girlfriends any easier - it only gets harder.

Future for Trans People in the US?

Trans people in the USA (not every state, mind you) need to "erase" their existence. Like I saw someone saying here; if you know a trans person in the USA now, no, you don't. True identities will be hidden for the safety's sake and people will flock more into underground, smaller communities. Those communities will continue to exist and support one another. This is not a total erasure but it's erasure in a way that it is better to choose carefully who really knows your true identity and who are the people to whom you are performing the identity of your physical body. So trans men will pretend to continue to be women on the outside, trans women will pretend to continue to be men on the outside but in their own safe spaces and supportive communities, they can be who they truly are.

Now, trans communities and rights will not be erased. There can be a momentary setback and time when trans people have to carefully hide their identities for their own sake but it will not be permanent. Trans people, like women's collective, WILL FIGHT. Trans people will NOT allow themselves and their fellow trans people to be erased. The time when "transpeople didn't exist because this is woke idealism", as red-wing misogyny says, WILL NOT return. People who wish for these times to come back have fallen from the evolution of humanity. Trans people will not stop existing. They will fight for their rights till the end of the world. Liberation seems to be near and this looks, in America, to be the final dark hour before the new dawn. Hang in there!

The Spirit and the cards promise that trans people will get their freedom. There's no returning back to the time when their existence was forbidden. There's a flow of prosperity and lots of freedom in the future cards so any trans person there reading this - DO NOT GIVE UP. This is temporary. This will pass. You need to play with these nasty rules for a little while but it will pass.

There's a promise of balance in work and home life, so acceptance of trans people both in private areas of their life (home, friends, communities, online blogs etc.) as well as in public (school, work, society, hospitals, other people). That kind of a future is coming, also as we move more into the Era of Aquarius, which supports human rights, different gender and sexual identities without judgment, liberation of gender and sexuality and thus the human expression itself.

TL;DR: Trans people need to lay low for now and hide their true identities for their own safety. If you know a trans person, no, you do not. They will find the support they need in their own communities but trans people will not be erased. Trans people WILL fight and there is going to be a time in the future when they can openly (once again) be who they truly are, both at home and outside home. Flow of prosperity and freedom is in the cards as a promise of the future and these energies are massive. This is only the old paradigm's final efforts to stay alive as it croaks and is forgotten. American humanity will evolve to respect trans people's human rights, too.

EVERYONE SCARED IN THE USA, KEEP GOING! This is only a temporary moment of night.

[python333]

what's a noise to an eardrum? — python³

― ― ― ―

synopsis you've been on a mission for a while, and instead of going back to your quarters after coming back, you head to ghost's.

relationships platonic!ghost & gn!reader.

characters simon "ghost" riley.

word count 2.2k

warnings ghost's pov, 2nd person pov [you/your/yourself], sleep deprivation, bad cliches, bad writing, might be ooc

note hey gang!!! i think i got all the warnings since this is pretty lighthearted considering what i usually post, so enjoy :) lmk your thoughts!

Ghost was sitting at his desk―in his own sleeping quarters, since it’s technically past curfew and he doesn’t need any trouble from recruits about him being in his office after hours, the annoying little shits―typing away at his computer, trying to get a report on his latest assignment done before going to bed.

He’s had a little bit of trouble sleeping lately. Not to say that it’s your fault, but it’s definitely your fault. He doesn’t necessarily need you around to go to sleep, but since you volunteered for a mission a week ago, he’s been a little on edge. Originally, it would’ve been Soap and a few other sergeants heading out to a small town in some country down in Central America, but you took the place of Soap after Price had explained the mission. 

It could technically be done by one person, he’d said in short, but it’s quicker to send out a squadron than a single soldier.

You weren’t the best sniper they had, but you had enough experience with it for Price to approve of you going with one other person to keep watch of you. The long duration of the mission was really to be blamed on how often your target had been moving, leaving you with little room to take any shots. It wasn’t too important of a mission, however―as long as you didn’t miss your target in the end―so Ghost is sure Price is glad that he only had to send out one soldier instead of around six or seven.

Still, despite how there was little to no chance of you coming out of this mission in multiple pieces, Ghost found himself worried; something he, admittedly, feels for a lot of the soldiers here. His worry for you is different, though. Maybe it’s an age thing. Maybe it has something to do with how he’s seen you grow over the years that you’ve been here, and how close you’ve gotten to going from a Private to a Lance Corporal. It’s a relatively low rank for someone in the 141, which only makes him―dare he admit it―prouder. A weird feeling lingers in his mind when the word proud comes to mind as he thinks of you, but he ignores that feeling, instead opting to focus on the report he so desperately wanted to finish.

Despite his usual sleep aversion, he finds himself wanting to sleep for once.

Just as he gets to the middle of his report, he hears a knock at the door. Before Ghost can even say anything, he hears the door open, and his head whips around to see who would decide that it’s a good idea to enter his room without his permission. Though, all of his confusion and building anger dissipates the moment he sees that it’s you. Fresh from medical, he can safely assume, seeing the various bandages and bruises on you, and that odd too-clean smell that’s sticking to you. You look so exhausted, it’s almost funny. Almost. 

You close the door behind you and Ghost turns his head back to his laptop. It’s not that he doesn’t want to look at you, but it’s a little harder to when you look so disheveled. He hears a few footsteps, then the squeaking of bed springs, and a sigh before the rustling of bed sheets. In the faint reflection of his computer screen, Ghost can just barely see you getting comfortable under the covers of his bed, seeming to fully disregard his presence. He doesn’t mind, though. He gets it; that feeling after being on guard for so long, not sure how much of it you can let down even though you’re back on base, and that strange structureless feeling where you wish you had bones but only feel like flesh. 

It’s odd, put simply. When Ghost thinks of the feeling, he thinks of the age-old question, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The feeling is like a constant questioning of what you’re experiencing, the wonderance of whether or not you can feel safe if the safest you’ve ever felt is a feeling lost somewhere beyond you. If you lose a feeling, was it ever felt? If you lost safety, were you ever safe, or, as Maslow would put it, were you always missing that basic need? Ghost knows plenty about missing safety. He knows that his mind blanks when he tries to think about the last time he felt safe before the 141. 

He knows that you know plenty about missing safety, too. Not a lot, because you never say enough to clue him in on just how much you’re missing, but he has his suspicions. Some are confirmed, others mere theories, but still―he knows you well enough. That’s why you’re in his room, not saying a word, just breathing heavily into his pillow and trying to garner warmth from his blanket. He can see you staring at him from the bed. He’s sure you want him to say something, and because it’s you that’s looking at him, he does.

“Back already?” Ghost asks dryly, drawing a small huff out of you. 

“Soap said y’missed me,” you reply, making Ghost scoff, “when he visited me in the infirmary.” 

“Too big of a mouth on ‘im,” Ghost saves the draft of his report, deciding to just save writing it for another time, instead closing out of the program and hovering his finger over the power button on his keyboard, “don’t know how y’managed to understand him.” 

You hum and sit up in Ghost’s bed, the blankets rustling again, and as Ghost’s screen goes black, he turns around to see you sitting up with the blankets wrapped around you like a jacket. He blinks at you, before raising an eyebrow at your position.

“Ruinin’ my blankets?” he asks, though sounding barely offended, “After walking in unannounced besides that little knock?”

“Ruin’s a pretty strong word,” you argue, “and it wasn’t a little knock. It was loud. Practically echoed off the walls.”

Ghost can sense your sarcasm from a mile away, but continues to play along, leaning back in his chair. You look a little more tired covered in blankets, he thinks, those dark circles under your eyes are a little more pronounced. He sees them a lot. Those darkened semi-circles that he used to think were just a part of you, some kind of skin condition, but later realized they were a product of your sleep deprivation. It would’ve been his first thought had he not always seen you with the bags under your eyes, but after going on leave with you―a few months ago, back to his small house, after you had admitted that you preferred staying with him to going back to your dingy apartment―and witnessing you getting proper rest, seeing those circles get a little lighter, he knew that it was more of a sleep issue. 

He’s gone through his fair share of sleeping problems. He still goes through them; everyone in the military does, he’s sure. Ghost used to think that he took the brunt of it, compared to the rest of the task force, not because of the missions but because of what came before the missions. He’s changed his way of thinking since then, has opened up his mind a little more beyond the idea of suffering more than someone else in a specific sense, but he still had that feeling that he took on the majority of nightmares. The word “nightmare” feels a little juvenile for him, but until someone creates a better word for the repulsive things he sees after closing his eyes and just barely drifting asleep, that’s what he’s stuck with. 

“You better hope y’didn’t wake anyone up with it, then,” Ghost hums, “I doubt anyone wants to be awake right now.” 

He sees a small smile grow on your face and small spots of blood arise from beneath the cracked skin of your lips. 

“Everyone here sleeps like a rock as far as I know,” you reply, before pausing, considering, “maybe except for the guys who came in a few weeks ago.”

“I’m sure they’ll be gone by next month,” Ghost tells you, his tone almost reassuring, “I don’t think they can handle any of… this.” 

“You don’t think they can handle your bullying?” you scoff, making Ghost huff out a small laugh, “Weak.” 

“Not everyone’s as strong as you, unfortunately,” Ghost hums sarcastically, getting up from his chair and walking the short distance over to his bed where you’re sitting. Automatically, you move so that Ghost can sit down next to you.

You’re both silent for a little bit. Ghost can see the few healing bruises on your face a little clearer here. Small dark yellows and reds on the sharper points of your face, the parts where the bone is a little closer to the skin, particularly your cheeks and a few over your jawline and near your chin. They’re a bad look on you, not because Ghost doesn’t think you can handle yourself, but because he knows that you can handle yourself, so the only way you could’ve gotten those bruises is if you were forced into a corner. He would consider that they were an accident, somehow self-inflicted, but he knows better than that. 

“Are you tired?” Ghost asks, even though he knows the answer.

“I haven’t slept in a few days.” There it is.

“And for the few days that you did sleep?” He thinks he knows the answer to this too.

“I don’t know if you can really call it that.” Bingo.

It’s not surprising to him. Not only has he been on enough missions with you to know how hard it is for you to sleep outside of the base, but he’s managed to get you to actually tell him about your sleeping struggles. He knows. He watches you subtly kick off your boots, letting them fall over onto their sides, as if you could read his mind and know what he’s going to request next.

“Lay down,” Ghost puts a bare hand on your clothed shoulder and lightly pushes at it, prompting you to lean back onto your side, settling into the bed with the blankets still wrapped around you.

Ghost doesn’t mind the lack of blankets he’s getting. As long as you’re the one hogging them, he finds it easier to go without them, strangely enough. He lays down onto the bed next to you, his head naturally above yours, and neither of you bother to change positions. He doesn’t attempt to pull the blankets from you, and you don’t try to move away from him, the both of you simply existing together in one small space with nothing interrupting you two. A thin layer of air, similar to the blanket covering you, seems to cover the both of you, not trapping you together but instead comforting the both of you. The air feels woven from Ghost’s thoughts, yarn strewn from his cerebral cortex, emotions run through an invisible loom to create the beautiful quilt that covers the both of you. 

Ghost’s hand comes up to thumb at the edge of his balaclava, and he pulls it up the tiniest bit, but then pauses to think.

He knows that if you just turn your head up the tiniest bit, you’ll see his face. The blonde stubble peeking out from under his skin, the small dent forming in the middle of his nose from the constant wearing of his balaclava, and possibly the most embarrassing of all, that small smile he wears that pulls at his already cracking lips that draws blood on occasion. Despite all of this, he pulls his face covering all the way off, and tosses it onto his desk. Your face doesn’t move an inch despite how obvious it is that some kind of fabric has hit the desk. 

He considers saying thank you, but Ghost doesn’t deem it necessary. You’re so close to sleeping that he doesn’t want to risk ruining your chances by talking to you. So, instead, he just brings his arm over your side and lets his hand reach up into the nape of your neck to toy with the small hairs tapering off there. They’re short enough that he’s essentially just brushing his fingers against the skin of your neck, but he assumes you don’t mind, considering how you continue to not move. You stay still peacefully, soft breaths leaving you as your body starts to actually relax.

So you weren’t lying about your lack of sleep, he thinks, his own eyes slowly closing, not that I thought you were, anyway.

Your breathing creates the perfect white noise to him. The vibrations emitting from your larynx that escape your mouth reach his ear canals, where they bounce off of his eardrums, and move down from his middle ears to his inner ears where the nerve endings that live there turn the vibrations into electrical impulses and are translated by his brain into actual sound. The translation sounds like more than just a simple sound, though; it’s like your breathing is translated into actual words rather than breathing, words like safe and guarded. Those small vibrations bounce around in his ears and turn into syllables, then eventually whispers, then firm speech. 

Those words are like music to his ears, as cliché as it is, and he cherishes every word he hears―more than he’ll ever let you know.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

https://x.com/CorenLaVolpe/status/1787971755027612092

As much as a Greek enjoyed the Hades game having people literally taking for granted the designs of the gods as legit is problematic.

No Hermes isn't Asian coded. He's Greek like every God. Literally what does the word Greek next to Greek gods mean to them? An accessory? Give me a break

I got a few asks like this, so I will try to answer them here. This is the post the asks are referring to, and this is the post that started the whole discussion afaik:

This is a whole phenomenon that has lasted for decades in the US, first with USians presenting the gods as North Europeans and now as "everything but" North Europeans to combat the previous racist trend. However, they are still completely tone-deaf, self-absorbed, and privileged because while they do this "correction" they're ignoring actual Greeks, and Greek depictions (and depictions of Greek gods in various areas in the past). Westerners might not be aware of this, because they don't know how badly the Greeks have been treated by powerful countries in the past (including their US, thank you for the Junta and our recent fighters' deaths, honey) but the protests about the gods' design are anti-colonialist.

I want you to imagine this trend with whatever pantheon you want from Africa, Asia, South America etc. Imagine that for centuries they are presented as super White North Europeans by certain powerful nations. Now the same nation who did this racist shit in the past comes around and does more racist shit, by NOT presenting these ancient gods as their people view/viewed them but they present them as everything BUT the appearance they had in all their depictions by the locals. All the while NEVER listening to what the people of this culture tell them, all the while comparing the locals to these gods and finding them uglier and savage. Why would this be acceptable? And why are people so comfortable to forget their cultural sensitivities when it comes to Greece?

(I am aware the US racism also expanded to other pantheons but it didn't happen in this exact way so all I'm asking is to walk in our shoes for a bit, to experience a different flavour of colonialism)

This blog stands for absolute equality and it's heavily anti-racist and anti-fascist, with various resources and support links for minorities in Greece. Everyone is welcome here. This blog believes that if you are of Chinese, Pakistani, Nigerian, Roma descent in Greece you must have the same rights as everybody else and the way you look is not "lesser" than anybody else. I just ask people to consider - especially if you are an immigrant - how you, your parents, your grandparents would feel when seeing your important cultural figures treated like this by the US.

As you have understood by now, changing the depiction is not suddenly okay when the Greek gods now have the palest skin with blue eyes and blond hair. No, that's still racist, and Greeks have been repeatedly told that they are lesser for not looking like the beauty ideals these northern countries projected onto our gods.

Asking for accurate god depictions is a matter of wanting your culture to be treated like.... not a prop, for once. Everyone is free to interact and relate with the Greek culture but when you take the Greek culture and its depictions out of the equation, then the whole thing becomes "playing with dolls", and a fandom (as is the case already for the US).

The Greek gods have been used by Westerners in the past to promote White supremacy, and today they are used by Westerners to combat it; but it still happens in the most divorced sense from the Greek culture. USians are still sooo hesitant to REALLY look at another culture that they'd rather lose common sense (aka, depict gods as the locals see them for millennia) than not white-knight for their fellow Westerners. It's actually infuriating that progressives in the US still miss the mark when it comes to combating US neo-colonialism, and whatever elements left in their culture from colonizing European countries.

And how can we tell the Greek gods are used as props in this US political climate? Simple. They themselves will tell you "It's okay to depict those gods however you like because 1. They can transform 2. They have been worshipped by people of different appearances 3. Greeks can have more than one appearance 4. They are not real. " Then, you tell them "Then why don't you depict Chinese, Indian, Nigerian pantheons whoever you like today? These pantheons all have the above four conditions apply. (No. 4 depending on your beliefs)" And when you strip those first layers, they tell you the actual root cause: "But Chinese, Indian and Nigerian people are still oppressed. Plus, non-white people need to see themselves in media, so here is the chance!"

So, they admit that their only guide for how disrespectful they will be to one's heritage figures is actually the oppression status of that minority (just!) in the US. (Which shows they still don't give a shit about Greeks, cause otherwise they'd still know that Greeks still face bigotry in the US for how they look, how their names are, their customs) . To POC in the US: The moment your oppressors believe your oppression is gone, expect your pop culture to forget (again) all respect for your ancient gods and treat them like cool "new" products for their capitalist game.

And the above discussion paints the Greek culture and Greek figures as a culture-less empty slate, that can be made to represent every person in the whole world. It's US culture, even! But Greek culture is hideous actually, and the Greeks are racist brutes who get in our hair the whole time. Fuck the Greek people and their ancestors' depictions. Greek mythology is a product of no culture, actually, and we can treat the gods like self-inserts in our favorite fanfic. And this is totally not a colonialist mindset! Greeks are not robbed and genocided anymore, and we gave them "white" status in our country a few decades ago (but these ethnic hairy people are still not the same as us, obviously!), and the strings we pull to control Greece are not visible anymore to our own people, so we're good 😊

And, just to be clear: Greek gods are ethnically Greek, as every other [insert cultural descriptor] gods are from that certain culture. The Greek people consider themselves literal progeny of those gods. The first Greeks were born of the gods. Even today we call ourselves Hellenes because one of the first Greeks, the man Hellen, who was born of the gods. If the Greek gods don't express Greek cultural norms, and POVs, and ways of thinking about the world, and are not part of Greek history, what the hell are part of?? Cantonese culture? Do they represent Scandinavian ancient values perhaps....? Do they follow the philosophy of a First Nations tribe?? (This is more a matter of culture, not appearance since various people can be part of a culture. However, it needs to be said, because Westerners are willfully blind to common sense at this point.)

See this video from a Greek Canadian on Greek gods being ethnically Greek

To address one last thing: One person said "why didn't you say anything about how the gods were designed in the first game?" Well, I had made a post about it but some told me "noo they didn't change their race, they just have different colors like green, blue, pink, dark brown, and grey for an artistic touch". I was like "whatever, nobody knows, I have a life to live" so I deleted that post and didn't dwell too much on it. But the anti-colonialist message was the same as in this post, so that's another chance to highlight it.

[rambleonwaywardson]

Clegan Olympics AU - Gold Over America

Masterpost

Read on AO3 (this is a new installment in the Clegan Olympics AU series on AO3)

Author's note: This is NOT the official epilogue. However, I went to see the Gold Over America Tour recently, and I couldn't not write this. Takes place about 5 months after Sous le Ciel de Paris

---

“You holdin’ up okay?”

Curt asks Bucky some form of this question every single night. Are you okay? How you holdin’ up? How’s the leg feel? You sure you’re good for the next number? We can fill in for you if you need a night off.

Sometimes it bugs him – usually when he is, in fact, in more discomfort than he cares to admit – but more often he’s coming to recognize it for the friendly concern that it is. He’s slowly starting to accept the fact that he isn’t a teenager anymore. He isn’t indestructible, and there are people here who care about him and actively want to help him stay healthy.

That’s what we call growth.

Bucky blinks, frozen in the middle of wrapping his knee with tape. Tonight is only his second time since Paris tumbling without a brace and he’s probably overcompensating with how much he’s wrapping the joint. He might as well just wear the damn brace. “Huh? Yeah, yeah I’m fine. Thanks.” He tilts his head and squints, taking a second to actually think about how his leg feels, before concluding that physically, yes, he is fine, if a little sore. 

He nods again. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

Curt smacks his hand and makes a quit it motion. He grabs the tape out of Bucky’s hand and starts unwrapping it from around his leg as Bucky sputters in protest. Then Curt hands him his brace instead. Bucky glares at him, but he takes the thing and goes about strapping it around his knee.

“No reason not to wear it if you’re this jittery,” Curt says.

It’s early January, a brand new year, and they’re at Capital One arena in Washington, D.C. It’s their third week of the Gold Over America Tour, a fun sort of victory lap for USA’s Olympic gymnasts as well as some of the other gymnasts from the U.S. and from around the world. It’s performative instead of competitive, promoting camaraderie, strength, and resilience through a mixture of gymnastics and fun dance numbers.

In short, it’s a two month long cross-country excursion where the gymnasts basically just get to have fun and interact with fans.

Since they’re in D.C., they’re close to home, and Bucky’s been distracted like this all day. He hasn’t been able to think straight from the moment he woke up on the tour bus, all jumpy and worried about seeing his boyfriend and if he would actually show up or if he’d decided in the month since they last saw each other that Bucky wasn’t worth it after all. Then when Gale actually did meet them in the stadium for rehearsal, Bucky was so excited that he kept getting distracted and tripping over his own feet. Not to mention the amount of time he spent just staring at Gale in complete awe when they all went out to lunch earlier, or the fact that he was nearly late for the show because he was doing god-knows-what backstage.

And now they’re here, in the middle of act one, and Bucky is thrown all out of whack again. Curt tells him to get his head on straight, and Bucky flips him off.

Beside them, Croz is changing into a different competition shirt and pants. He glances up at Bucky, a teasing smile on his face. “You see him out there?”

Bucky nods as he gets to his feet and starts tugging his own pants on. “Just for a second.”

One, perfect second during the opening number where the noise of the stadium faded to quiet and it felt like everything around him was moving in slow motion. It’s hard to see into the crowd through the lights shining on them, but Gale is in the front row, right by the spring floor. And Bucky was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

Curt rolls his eyes. “Not like you didn’t know he’d be here. You’ve been with him all day.”

“It’s just… different.” Bucky shrugs, shifting his weight from leg to leg to test out how the brace feels. “It’s the first time he’s getting to actually see me do this since…” Well, since the Paris Olympics five months ago. Since that last fateful day in Bercy Arena that nearly destroyed John’s career (again) and tore them apart.

It’s the first time since then that Gale gets to watch Bucky be a gymnast. The first time since then that he gets to watch Bucky do what he loves to do. 

Originally, before tickets went on sale, before Bucky fucked his leg all over again, they’d hoped to do this tour from September until early November, giving them enough time to recover from the Games and choreograph the show on the front end, and enough time to get back to work for the 2025 competition season on the back end. And then John Egan, one of the stars of this show about strength and resilience, got hurt, went AWOL, spiraled into oblivion, what have you, and it looked like they’d be doing the tour without him.

Once he came to his senses and started at least attempting to crawl his way out of the hole he tried to bury himself in, though, he insisted he wanted to do it. 

The doctor, of course, said he was risking his career doing any form of gymnastics so soon, so they came to a compromise.The tour was postponed until mid-December to give his knee time to heal, and he, for the most part, keeps his skills fairly low impact. There’s one part of the show where each member of the Olympic team performs part of one of their routines, but other than that, most of the skills they’re doing here are easy by their standards in order to preserve their bodies, whether that means doing one less twist or flip or letting themselves fall onto the mats during their landings. John isn’t the only one that needs to be careful – they all do. So, as he claimed to the doctor, anything he’s doing on the tour really isn’t more than he’d be doing in his training gym back home at this point.

That doesn’t keep everyone from worrying about him, though.

For the most part, it’s gone well. Performing on tour with his friends, meeting so many fans, and traveling around the country has been a blast. He keeps up with his rehab regimen, frequently doing the whole rest, ice, compression, and heat deal on the bus between cities, and he’s only had to miss a show once due to overuse of his leg.

He’s doing what he loves, and truly he’s finding his love for it again after a rough couple of years. But now, things are different. He has two loves, and the other is in the audience tonight. They’ve been apart for a month, and yet when they saw each other this morning, Gale still jumped into his arms, kissed Bucky like it was nothing, looked at him like he was everything.

“I’m so glad you’re here!” Gale had exclaimed, with that bubbly, candy-sweet smile that is so rare and makes Bucky’s heart jump when he sees it. “I miss you.”

I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. It made Bucky feel all sappy, hearing those words, seeing Gale’s freckles and dimples and the real, unequivocal love in his eyes. It made him feel special, wanted, loved.

Bucky still wonders what he did to deserve that. He still thanks the universe every day for giving him a second chance with the most amazing guy in the world.

Croz puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, bringing him back to the present. They can hear the music of one of the girls’ numbers pumping through the stadium; it’s coming to an end, which means he needs to get ready to head out. “He’s proud of you, you know,” Croz says. “You should’ve seen the way he watched you during rehearsal.”

Bucky is quiet for a second, and then he nods hesitantly. He and Gale got into a bit of an argument when Bucky said he wanted to go on tour, after he had already promised to take time off. They didn’t speak for at least a day, and Bucky remembers being so afraid that he was about to lose the only good relationship he’d ever had all over again. He was so afraid he’d have to choose between gymnastics and Gale after all. 

But eventually, Bucky managed to push all that aside and try his hand at instigating a real, open discussion about what him on tour would look like and what precautions he’d take. They held onto each others’ hands and Bucky told Gale what he wanted, what he needed. Gale laid out his concerns, but also reiterated his overall support of Bucky’s career. And they talked. And listened. And Bucky never knew how good healthy communication could feel before. 

Gale was also there every step of the way as Bucky healed, rehabbed, and then started getting back into the gym again just about two months ago. He was there for the ups and downs, running to help Bucky stand back up when he fell, cheering him on with every forward step. 

He never gave up on Bucky. 

He’s proud of you, you know. 

“I know,” Bucky says to Croz. He thinks he might even believe it. 

“Alright, you’ll get to play with your boy toy later,” Curt jokes. He grabs Bucky’s hand and hauls him to his feet. “Come on, you’re up.”

Bucky has to admit, performing his big comeback number – which he’s come to think of as his “I’m back bitch” number – is incredibly cathartic. He wanted to perform to Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back,” but the production team said it wasn’t “family friendly” enough. 

No fun.

The number starts out with a dark stadium, and there’s a video on the big screen as he gets himself to the center of the floor. It shows a few highlights of his career, his Championship wins, his best Olympic moments, him goofing off with Curt and Croz in the gym. A recording of his voice plays over it, something about how, at some point, everyone faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles, or comes to a crossroads that might determine the course of their life. 

“…In my case, an injury that should have ended my career.”

Every night, Bucky stands in the middle of the floor, dimly illuminated by the light of the big screen. He doesn’t really even know what he says in the video, doesn’t remember. He hasn’t listened to it since it was first recorded, and he blocks it out night after night, except for the end.

He swallows thickly and looks up, sees a clip of his horrifying fall off high bar, cut before he hits the ground. Then a clip of him collapsing after rings back in August, unable to rise. Every night, it makes his heart beat too fast, makes the blood rush in his ears, just for a moment. But then every night, he hears his own voice, smooth and confident: “We rise to the occasion, no matter how hard it might be. We don’t give up, because giving up is not in our nature…”

There’s video clips of his recovery, after both incidents. Videos of him doing painful rehab after high bar. Videos of him back in the gym after rings. A shaky clip of him laughing after landing a tumbling pass again for the first time, running right to the cameraman for a hug.

Gale. He’s running to Gale. 

And it makes Bucky’s heart soar.

The video ends.

John Egan is a guy that likes attention, so standing, feet shoulder-width apart and hands on his hips like a superhero, in the middle of a dark arena as lights flash wildly around him and the beginnings of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck plays is very on brand for him. The flashing lights cast his shadow, long and fleeting, across the floor in all different directions until, finally, they light up and stay on, spotlighting him from all sides. He lets the wild grin overtake his face, pushes back against the pit in his stomach, the buzzing in his head. He shoves all the adrenaline he feels into this moment. He puts both hands in the air in a salute, as if he’s at a competition, and then he launches into a tumbling pass that has the crowd going wild. 

The original plan was for him to do a whole floor routine, but he’s trying to save his leg as much as he can, so he does his big opening pass and lands on an extra mat that the techs positioned in the corner, then he does a few easier passes before the lights fade out on him. A spotlight pops up over the high bar, where Curt jumps up and does a few giants, a couple release moves. Then there’s Croz on parallel bars. Alex on pommel. Brady on floor. Then to finish, Bucky jumps up on high bar, the apparatus that tried to break him, just to prove a point. He does a couple of easier releases before jumping off, a single flip, nothing fancy.

It gets him a deafening round of applause anyway.

The Thunderstruck number, every night, drives a range of emotions through Bucky like a truck, for better or for worse. It shoves salt in old wounds, forces him to relive some of his worst moments. And yet it feels so damn good, in a way, just to show people – “hey, I’m here. I’m still fighting. I’m not giving up.” Just to tell them – “if you’re fighting your own uphill battle, don’t stop. Please don’t stop. You don’t have to give up.”

So yeah, it’s cathartic. It makes him feel powerful. It makes him feel in control. It makes him feel like he did something right, at the end of the day. 

But he much prefers the more lighthearted parts of their show anyway. The ideas that spawned from a bunch of friends goofing off in a gym between practices. The ones that show their personalities and let them be silly and let them be a little stupid and let them be human instead of just athletes. 

There’s a Texas Hold ‘Em number where the guys and girls all dress up in cowboy hats, the guys in white shirts and jeans and the girls in sparkly leos. 

There’s some absolutely badass dance numbers from the girls, which Bucky loves watching. They’re full of attitude and confidence that makes him a little jealous. 

Then there’s the girls’ rendition of Pink by Lizzo followed by the guys’ take on I’m Just Ken. All the guys on tour get to wear neon tank tops and shorts as they animatedly jog out onto the floor. Nearly all of them spread out and start doing stupid exercise motions: Bucky pretends to lift weights while Brady does push ups, Croz does jumping jacks, Alex does sit ups, and the others pretend to box or jog in place or something.

Meanwhile, a spotlight illuminates Curt over on the balance beam, an apparatus that none of the guys have a clue about. He stands on it, all wobbly but exuding confidence, and he salutes a judge that isn’t there before trying out some of the girls’ skills. A wolf turn, a switch leap, a side aerial. Night after night he fails pretty miserably, sometimes nearly falling off the beam all together. He gets a lot of laughs from the audience before doing a pretty pathetic dismount and running to meet the other Kens on the floor, where they join hands and passionately sing the end of the song.

Every night, none of them can keep themselves from laughing, and they often nearly mess up their choreography, tripping over themselves and trying not to double over from the ridiculousness. Usually, that’s Bucky’s favorite number to perform.

But not tonight.

“So here’s the thing, DC,” he says into his mic as he comes out from backstage, passing the girls as they exit. He walks across the floor, back in his white tee and jeans instead of his Ken fit. “We’re gonna do something a bit different tonight. ‘Cause not only is this place my home, but it’s actually my lucky day, ‘cause a special someone is in the crowd tonight. You may be able to see him, right up here in the front row where I can look at his pretty face.” He points to Gale, who’s sitting in one of the best seats in the house, just feet from the spring floor. The man in question rolls his eyes as Bucky stops at the edge of the floor, right in front of him. Beside him, Marge laughs and shoves his shoulder. Benny reaches over and ruffles his hair. 

“What’d’ya say we bring him up here?” Bucky asks the crowd.

Gale shakes his head as if he has a choice. As if they didn’t literally rehearse this earlier today. He didn’t have a choice then, either. 

“Yep, come on, beautiful.” Bucky holds his hand out expectantly, until finally, after a very pointed I hate you glare and a long-suffering sigh, Gale takes his hand, stands up, and lets Bucky lead him onto the floor. 

The camera locks onto them immediately, showing them on the big screen for the entire arena to see. Gale is dressed in dark jeans, a gray t-shirt, and a worn leather jacket, looking as perfect as ever with his messy hair and beautiful… everything. 

Usually, the next number would be a delicate, choreographed dance combined with some skill demonstrations. A love story. Literally, it’s choreographed to Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” On a normal night, it consists of Bucky, Brady, and Croz each dancing with one of the lovely dancers they have on tour with them. The story-telling choreography is interspersed with the guys showing off some basic skills on parallel bars, high bar, and pommel horse. 

Tonight, Bucky’s dance partner gets this number off. He felt a little bad asking her if that would be okay, but the moment he explained what he wanted to do, she all but threw herself out of the mix for this one show. 

“Yes. Do that. You have to do that,” she insisted. 

And so Gale, even before he knew the plan, didn’t really have a choice. 

Gale Cleven’s moment of fame at the Paris Olympics turned into a bit more than a moment. He’s had companies fighting to sponsor him, wanting to throw him into commercials and ads all over the place. Despite his lack of interest in social media, his following has skyrocketed. Little kids are getting into horseback riding because of him. People remain obsessed with the “Clegan” love story, and they always comment on Bucky’s videos asking about Gale.

This crowd, packed with people of all ages from 3 to 93, loves him just as much. They go absolutely nuts when the camera focuses on him as he takes Bucky’s hand and they walk over to the pommel horse. “Give it up everyone!” Bucky yells into his mic. “Gale Cleven, Olympic silver medalist, your local equestrian legend, and my lovely, amazing boyfriend.”

They’re in a stadium filled with thousands of people, but the only person that can see Gale’s blush is Bucky. 

Bucky helps Gale hop up onto the pommel horse as the lights around them dim and a spotlight shines on the parallel bars to their left. The song begins to play out over the arena: “We were both young when I first saw you…”

Gale watches Croz and his partner start their dance around the base of the parallel bars. He got to watch during their rehearsal earlier today, but now he’s pulled away by the feeling of a hand wrapping over his hip. He glances over at Bucky, and his breath catches. 

They wait in the darkness for their part of the song, and as they sit together on the pommel horse, Bucky’s eyes are locked on him, even in the dim light. Shadows flit across their faces, eyes reflecting fleeting teases of the light flickering around them. Bucky has a strong arm wrapped securely around Gale, supporting his back.

He leans in close to whisper, “I’m glad you’re here. I wasn’t sure…”

Gale’s hand finds Bucky’s free one. “Don’t tell me you thought I wouldn’t come.”

Bucky shrugs. Because part of him did think that, no matter how ridiculous he knew it was. They’ve been video calling every other day since he went on tour, but it doesn’t compare to the surety of having Gale in his arms. Before Gale can say anything else, though, the lights start to rise around them at the end of the first chorus. 

“So I sneak out to the garden to see you…”

They stay sitting at first, Gale leaning into Bucky’s hold while Bucky points up at the ceiling, acting like they’re stargazing. They smile and laugh before Gale jumps off the pommel horse, still holding Bucky’s hand, and walks around to the other side, leading Bucky into a backflip off the horse.

Typically, Bucky’s part of this number is far more choreographed, seeing as his partner is usually a professional dancer. Gale Cleven… is not a dancer. So they have to improvise a little bit. Bucky’s decided it’s fine: what the audience loses in terms of seeing competent dancing, they gain in terms of seeing a real love story.

At the part that says ‘so close your eyes,’ Gale spins so his back is to Bucky, and Bucky’s hands cover his eyes. Instead of the usual sequence Bucky and his partner would do, involving lifts, rolls, dips, what have you, he simply twirls Gale around before kissing him softly – to cheers from the crowd. He takes both of Gale’s hands in his, and they spin around together, laughing the whole time as the camera records it all for the big screen.

Later, he’ll come across a video of this moment on social media, and he’ll save it to his favorites, to watch when he has a bad day.

He grabs Gale by the waist and lifts him easily up onto the end of the pommel horse, and he walks around to the other side as Gale spins around to meet him. Bucky takes his hand, kisses his knuckles gently, and helps him down again. Then Gale jogs off into the shadows, leaving Bucky to hop onto the apparatus to do some circles and flairs. 

He comes back as Bucky dismounts, and they grab onto each other’s hands from opposite sides of the pommel horse, looking into each others’ eyes. Then comes the only real original choreography that Gale agreed to do: drawing from his equestrian experience, he grabs onto the pommel and, in one swift motion, throws his leg up over the end of the pommel horse, as if he’s mounting a real horse. Bucky comes around behind him, and Gale draws his knees up so he can be lifted off the horse bridal style.

Gale can’t help but laugh as Bucky spins him around once, twice before setting him on his feet. They end up standing in front of the apparatus, pointing to the imagined sky once again as the lights around them fade out.

Cast in partial shadow as Brady and his partner dance around the high bar, they hold onto one another and spin slowly in circles, a twirl thrown in here and there. Gale whispers things like “you owe me” and Bucky replies “please, don’t act like you’re not having fun.”

“Dancing in front of thousands of people is a little outta my comfort zone.”

“They love you,” Bucky says, genuinely. Because they do.

At the end of the song, all three pairs come together on the spring floor. Bucky lifts and spins Gale one more time, and at the very end, when the other pairs look like they might kiss but stop just short, Gale is the one to lean in that last inch or two, kissing Bucky in front of thousands of people.

“Je t’aime,” he whispers as he pulls away, and it makes Bucky freeze. Je t’aime. I love you.

Whenever he hears those words, his mind still flashes to that day when he stormed Gale’s barn to declare his love after the Games were over. They’ve said it since, of course, but not often. It still feels… New. Special. Scary.

And yet Bucky wants to shout it into a hot mic for this entire stadium to hear. He won’t, but only because he knows Gale won’t like it.

And because the sound techs learned the hard way to triple check that Bucky Egan’s mic isn’t hot.

So his heart hammers in his chest as he looks into Gale’s eyes. Croz and Brady are already walking off into the shadows with their partners, but John and Gale remain center stage, Gale’s arms wrapped around Bucky’s neck and Bucky’s hands holding firmly to Gale’s waist. Like they belong there. The roar of the crowd is deafening, but all Bucky hears are Gale’s words echoing in his head.

I love you. I love you. I love you. 

He lifts a hand to cup Gale’s jaw, stroking a thumb over his flushed cheek. “I love you,” he says back, and he kind of can’t believe he had such a hard time saying it before. 

He’s on tour with some of the best gymnasts in the world, performing every night in front of thousands and thousands of fans. He’s got several Olympic medals to his name. His leg, while still not a sure thing, has healed well enough to let him do this. To have fun with his friends in the most extravagant way. To make him really believe that he might have another Olympic season left in him.

And all of that… it’s the stuff he’s hoped for since he was a kid.

It’s all enough to make him wonder if he’s dreaming sometimes. But right now, he has this moment. Right now, above all else, it’s the way Gale smiles at him that puts him on cloud nine, makes him think he did something right.

It’s that soft, just-for-him smile that lights up his world and makes him feel like he can do anything. He wants to be the reason for that smile for the rest of his life.

So he smiles back, and he says it again. “I love you.”

…

…

Here’s a shitty video of the real Love Story number

[yuurei20]

This is a little bit of a weird long question lol

I'm more asking your opinion about it haha

I'm trying to think on it - is Idia an Otaku because that's the setting the game is for (Japanese audience) and those are the signifiers that a Japanese audience would recognize as "nerd", or is he just an Otaku in general and would still be a "Weeb/Anime nerd" if the original audience was American/otherwise western.

Like - what I mean is in American pop culture, the "Weeb/Anime fan" is kind of a subset of nerd. Like none of the characters from "the big bang theory" (to my knowledge) are "weebs", they aren't our most generic image of a nerd. If a character/person is a "Weeb" it usually means they have a specific interest in Japanese media, and this doesn't necessarily correlate to other "nerdy" things.

Because in America/Western settings, Japanese fandom culture is foreign (thus me using Weeb instead of Otaku though plenty of people call themselves Otaku rather than weeb), so the implications of Idia being a Weeb is somewhat different - he's no longer a "generic nerdy character", but something a tad more specific.

So like - how there's beansfest or the use of honorifics or how the unique magic works with pronunciation - that usage of Japanese culture and language to express what Yana is trying to do, but it isn't necessarily meant to be Japanese in universe, because NRC is distinctly not set in Japan or even the Twst equivalent of Japan

Basically to sum up my rambly question - do you think Idia is supposed to be a "Nerd" in general or is he supposed to be an "Otaku"?

Tldr, would Idia be buying "comic books" in the EN localization or would it still be "Manga"

How exactly is our dear Idia the Nerdy foil to Hercules's Jock lmao

Hello hello!! Thank you for this question! ^^

Is there a word that can encompass both, in English? 👀

I think this connects to how the word "otaku" in Japanese seems to be different from the word "otaku" as it has been adopted by English, so this might be confusing 💦 But I will do my best!

I found an excerpt from a book called "Otaku Marketing" that provides an explanation of "otaku"'s original meaning, summarized here:

The basic definition of an 'otaku' is someone with a particular obsession who devotes an extreme amount of time and money to that interest and possesses deep knowledge and imagination regarding it. The term can be viewed negatively, describing a person who is immersed in subcultures that are difficult for the general public to understand, and who lacks communication skills. These days it has become more generally accepted with a meaning similar to "enthusiast" or "fan", and its usage has diversified, including terms like "health otaku" that contrast with the negative connotation, but the original image of otaku as being obsessively dedicated, introverted, and intense remains. Examples of otaku include military enthusiasts, railway enthusiasts, Johnny's Entertainment enthusiasts, Gundam enthusiasts, Hanshin Tiger enthusiasts, etc.

This is very much Idia ^^ There are many traits associated with otaku that we see in him, from his stutter to how quickly he speaks when excited, self depreciation combined with contradictory pride, net slang--even the manner in which he laughs and the personal pronoun that he uses.

In English it seems that, as you say, the Japanese-language concept of "otaku" has been separated into "nerd" and "weeb."

Idia is interested in things like puzzles, board games, horror movies with practical effects and Halloween, which might not be the first thing that comes to mind when an English-speaker hears the word "otaku" and may push him more into the "nerd" category.

Idia mentions reading manga and watching anime, but is this just because the game is being developed in the same country that produces those things?

Is this a case of Idia not being fully localized, and an American-developed Twst would have made him interested in American comic books and cartoons to suit its home audience, as you say?

I agree that NRC does not seem to be set in Japan or even a Twst-Japan-equivalent, but that might be exactly the point: Idia is interested in media from another country, and that is where things get interesting!

It seems that a Twst-Japan equivalent exists, and Idia is a big fan of their pop culture 👀

Sam mentions branches of his Mystery shop that exist in the "East," introducing things from real-world-Japan culture in the New Years events.

How canonical the New Year's events are meant to be is a little vague, especially because everyone (except Azul, Jade, Floyd and Scarabia) go home for New Year's in the main story--a point that is integral to the plot of Book 4.

But even if New Years is meant to be a fun little spin-off with no real connection to the culture of the actual universe, we also have a vignette where Idia explains what ninja are to Silver, saying that "they live in a far eastern country," and mentioning things like "shuriken," "fireball jutsu" and "samurai."

If there is another word in English that encompasses both "weeb" and "nerd" together, then I think that might be it! If it must be one or the other...I am not sure!

I have seen EN players who missed the Harveston event insisting that Idia doesn't actually like anime, just movies and video games, so it seems to be a divisive subject on EN.

Idia's interest in the pop culture from this unnamed country in the East is definitely not his defining personality trait, being only one of the many facets of who he is ^^

How to express this in English seems more complex than one may think!

Is it inaccurate to describe Idia as a "weeb" because of the depth of his interest in locally-produced board games and movies that have nothing to do with Twst-Japan-equivalent-media? If he is referred to as a "nerd," will there be friction because of lines like, "an anime can be so good it's literally life-changing"? Are the two groups mutually exclusive in English?

I am not sure I have an answer :> Would be most grateful for any opinions and ideas!

[opencommunion]

"While the North American colonists identified with the chosen people who sailed across the Atlantic to conquer the promised land, to be wrested from its unauthorized inhabitants and cleansed of their presence, the Latin American revolutionaries, in the wake of their argument with Spain, tended to denounce the genocidal practices of the conquistadores, Spanish in particular and European in general. Here too the road had been indicated by the black slaves of San Domingo who, after having broken with Napoleonic France and defeated its attempts to re-conquer it and reintroduce slavery, had assumed the Indian name of Haiti. ... Thanks to the politico-social homogeneity (strengthened by the availability of land and westward expansion) of its dominant class, and thanks also to the confinement of much of the ‘dangerous classes’ in slavery, the North American republic soon succeeded in achieving a stable structure. It took the form of a ‘master race democracy’ and a racial state, based on the rule of law within the white community and among the chosen people. The situation in Latin America was very different: between liberal beginnings and radical outcomes, the revolution had mobilized a front stamped with profound social and ethnic contradictions. Thus two contrasting ideas of liberty confronted one another: one calls to mind the English gentleman determined to dispose freely of his servants; the other ultimately refers to the struggle that had put an end to black slavery in San Domingo-Haiti.

Around 1830 the American continent presented a rather telling picture. While it had disappeared in a considerable part of Latin America, slavery remained in force in the European colonies, including British and Dutch ones, and above all in the United States. We can say that from the slave revolution onwards there developed a pent up confrontation, a kind of cold war, between San Domingo and the United States. On one side, we have a country that saw ex-slaves in power, authors of a revolution that was possibly unique in world history; on the other, a country almost always led in the early decades of its existence by slave owning presidents. ... Once the new revolutionary power had consolidated itself, it was a constant concern of the United States, where not a few ex-colonists took refuge, to overthrow or at least isolate it through a cordon sanitaire. It would be dangerous, observed Jefferson in 1799, to enter into commercial relations with San Domingo. That would result in ‘black crews’ disembarking in the United States, and these emancipated slaves could represent ‘combustion’ for the slaveholding South. On the basis of such concerns, South Carolina banned the entry into its territory of any ‘man of colour’ from San Domingo or any of the other French islands, which might in some way have been infected by the new, dangerous ideas of liberty and racial equality. Regardless of commercial exchanges, stressed influential political figures in the North American republic, by its very example the island risked challenging the institution of slavery far beyond its borders. ... Only after the end of the Civil War did the United States agree to open diplomatic relations with Haiti. But it was a move bereft of any warmth, and in fact functional for a project of ethnic cleansing. The idea, also entertained by Lincoln, of depositing on the island of black power the ex-slaves, who were to be deported from the republic that continued to be inspired by the principle of white supremacy and purity, had not yet been abandoned.

Hence a distinguished historian of slavery has appropriately warned against the tendency ‘to confuse liberal principles with antislavery commitment.’ ... Lincoln himself initially conducted the Civil War as a crusade against rebellion and separatism, not for the abolition of slavery, which could continue to survive in states loyal to central government. It was only later, with the recruitment of blacks into the Union army and hence with the direct intervention of slaves and ex-slaves in the conflict, that the civil war between whites was transformed into a revolution, conducted partly from above and partly from below, making the abolition of slavery inevitable." Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliot (2011)

[lady-raziel]

Do you also find it annoying how people will trash talk the USA by using statistics for the whole country instead of looking at them by state?

Like, for example, how they’ll claim we have terrible standards for paid maternity leave, but they’ll use the baseline for it and completely ignore the fact that paid maternity leave is different in each state.

Yeah. I think it’s difficult for people from other countries, especially smaller countries who are geographically small and overall more culturally cohesive, to grapple with the idea that America as a whole is a very challenging country to generalize. Like, yes, ok. I work at a government agency that looks at federal level statistics— the work my coworkers are required to do by statute requires them to look only at federal level data and draw conclusions based on that data. With large scale statistical analysis, you CAN say “based on census data of everybody, the AVERAGE demographics are x, y, and z and the AVERAGE income is x, the AVERAGE person pays this much in taxes, etc.” And those sorts of conclusions are valuable in certain senses and in certain situations.

However, making generalizations like that for a country of 333 million people is really only a very narrow view of the whole picture. People have said before that it’s more like America is actually 50 small countries in a trenchcoat, and honestly that’s not far off! It is pretty difficult to say “all Americans are x” when conditions in Alabama and Colorado can be literal opposite ends of the spectrum.

Even the “red state” and “blue state” generalizations can be pretty misleading— take Colorado again, for example. Colorado is widely considered a “blue/liberal state” because of the large high-population density progressive cities on the front range of the Rocky Mountains where most of the residents of the state are. However, this discounts the fact that in the rest of the rural areas of the state, especially the eastern half bordering Kansas, attitudes and policies are much more conservative.

Here’s a map that might be illustrative:

These are Colorado’s 8 congressional districts. Congressional districts are required to have approximately equal levels of population—therefore, you have geographically tiny districts in population centers and geographically large districts in rural areas. So the ENTIRE purple portion of District 3? That has the SAME number of people living in it as the tiny district 1 that contains the capitol of Denver. I’ll add another layer— despite Colorado being a “blue state,” that purple district is represented by Lauren Boebert, a notable MAGA conservative. So really, even in Colorado it’s hard to generalize and say “all Coloradans are x” because no they’re not—you have a variety even in the same state.

If you want to get EVEN more in the weeds, you can have wildly different types of demographics even within Congressional districts.

Here’s the map for Colorado’s 6th congressional district, currently represented by Jason Crow, a Democrat.

This district includes the city of Aurora— known for being a highly diverse area that has a high refugee population. You might also know the city of Aurora for being the site of the 2012 theatre shooting as well as being the home of Elijah McClain, a young African-American man murdered by police officers in 2019. So this Congressional district contains a large POC population and is not homogeneous. But this district is also interesting in that it also encompasses the WEALTHIEST CITY IN THE STATE, the 96% white Cherry Hills Village— which, considering Colorado has highly wealthy mountain resort towns like Aspen and Vail, is saying quite a lot. And this city is mere miles away from Aurora, where economic outcomes tend to be very different. Yet they are in the same Congressional district— so even on a local level its hard to make sweeping generalizations about most things and say “this is the one number or set of numbers that represents everything for everyone.”

Now imagine situations like this in every state and every congressional district across America. There is, of course, a place for large statistics, but such wide generalizations especially with context removed really don’t say much of anything unless you’re a data analyst studying something specific. It is hard to say definitively, especially on national data, that all Americans are a certain thing. This isn’t just an American problem with statistics, of course, not all people in any given country or population are going to be the same. Generalizing statistics can be good at a VERY broad overview that represent things worth conducting more specific crosscutting analysis to form more specific conclusions. However, a lot of people tend to view large stats as ways of stereotyping or confirming biases about groups of people in a way that SEEMS scientific or data based. They remove all context or specific crosstabs that actually paint a more accurate, but often messier, picture.

Big clean numbers are nice. But they rarely tell the full story or allow for nuance.

[nostalgebraist]

notes on ada or ardor, from the "summer of ardor 2013" reading group

This post contains my notes on the novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov, which I wrote in 2013 in connection with a small reading group for the book that I hosted for a few of my friends.

I've posted these notes online before, in several places. However, I recently discovered that all of its incarnations had disappeared, lost in the devouring maw of Web 2.0 you-are-the-product enshittification. (It was originally posted through "Facebook Notes," a feature that doesn't exist anymore; I also put it up as a series of "Goodreads Stories," a feature that also doesn't exist anymore.)

So, I'm putting them up again here, on tumblr.

I'm not under any illusions that tumblr will be around forever, and eventually I expect this copy to go the way of the others. Maybe when it does, I'll finally do the right thing and put it up on my (currently unused) personal website. But pasting it into the tumblr box is slightly easier, so here we are.

Looking back over these notes, I feel quite proud of them. I think I was underselling them in the original intro to the Goodreads edition, which (for the record) said the following:

These notes are certain [sic] inferior in comprehensiveness and erudition to, say, Brian Boyd's notes on Ada Online, or the Kyoto Reading Circle notes. In place of those qualities they mostly substitute bad jokes and webcomic references. The reasons you might, however, want to read this notes in addition to the existing sources are as follows: 1) Unlike everyone else, I try to avoid spoilers 2) I'm just a regular guy writing notes for his friends to read, which may be a good thing if you're an ordinary reader who doesn't want their face blasted off by endless scholarly discussions of minutiae

In fact, I actually went much further into "scholarly discussions of minutiae" than this would seem to suggest – with extensive citations of Boyd and others as needed – and I think I did a pretty good job of it, while not losing sight of bigger themes and stuff.

More generally, I feel like these notes really showcase my love and enthusiasm for the book.

----

The notes are divided into 11 sections, each of which covers a block of chapters we read in a particular week of the reading group. The goofy thematic titles for each of the weekly chapter blocks (e.g. "Oh, Inverted World" for the first one) are my inventions, part of my notes rather than the book itself.

I tried to avoid spoilers for later chapters when writing about earlier ones, though of course if you read the notes all the way through, you'll eventually get fully spoiled.

Except for one small added note (clearly signposted), these are given in their original 2013 form without any edits.

1. Oh, Inverted World (Part 1, Chapters 1-8)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chapters 1-8)

Let's review what we know so far. The story is apparently set on another planet (called "Demonia" or "Antiterra" -- I don't think these terms have come up yet, but I'm mentioning them for the sake of ease of reference). Its history and geography are quite similar to those of earth, although names are often different, and the dates of historical events can vary by up to 100 years. On Antiterra the northern reaches of North America have a mild, warm climate and, politically, form not an independent country (Canada) but a subsection of the U.S. called "Canady," which contains a "province" called "Estoty" which is inhabited largely by Russian-speakers in the west ("Russian Estoty") and Francophones in the east ("French Estoty"). What we call Russia on earth is called "Tartary" on Antiterra, and was settled by Tartars after the Russians were expelled to North America. (If you want some clarification on all of this, there is a very nerdy page about it called "The Geography of Antiterra" at http://www.dezimmer.net/ReAda/AntiterraGeography.htm .)

The mentally ill on Antiterra often have hallucinatory visions of our earth, which they call "Terra." This tendency began in a sort of fad in the Antiterran 1860s. A mysterious event called the "L disaster," which caused electricity to be banned, was responsible in some unspecified way for caused the Terra mania. At the time our protagonist, Van Veen, is writing, electricity has been made legal again, but in the story so far (covering the 1860s and 1880s) it is illegal and electrical devices have been replaced with hydrodynamic equivalents, such as the "dorophone" (hydrodynamic telephone). On the other hand, on the evidence of Ch. 6 at least, Antiterrans in 1884 (the date of Van and Ada's first meeting) have flying carpets and household robots. What little we see of conventional religion on Antiterra is peculiar: people say "thank Log" (short for "logos," maybe?) rather than "thank God," mention is made of "Faragod" ("the god of electricity"), and demons are seen as good rather than evil figures.

That's the setting; what about the story? The first three chapters are a convoluted and uninviting description of Van and Ada's ancestry, as well as (in Ch. 3) an account of the Terra mania and some of the differences between Antiterra and Terra. These three chapters make numerous but oblique references to the fact that Van and Ada, the two romantic leads, are not actually cousins -- as the family tree at the start of the book says -- but brother and sister: they are both actually the children of Demon and Marina, not of Demon and Aqua (Van's putative parents) and Dan and Marina (Ada's putative parents). After a description of Van's first amorous and sexual experiences in Ch. 4, we finally get some narrative traction in Ch. 5, where we start following 14-year-old Van in 1884 as he visits his relatives in Ardis Hall and meets his "cousin"/sister Ada -- who's a pedantic weirdo, but Van's, like, totally into it. That's pretty much it so far.

All of this is being described retrospectively, in the third person, by a very (implausibly?) old Van (he was born in 1870 and Ch. 4 says he "started to reconstruct his deepest past" in "the middle of the twentieth century"), with some notes in the margin by a similarly old Ada. The notes have been preserved in the text we're reading, which is curious in itself (an unedited, or partially edited, manuscript?).

One big question this book presents to the reader is whether Antiterra is real or whether it's something Van (who, in this latter conception, actually lives on our earth) has made up. When I first read the book, I thought "Antiterra is fake" was a plausible theory but by no means certain. Now, upon re-reading, it seems more and more obvious to me that Antiterra is just clearly fake -- the alternate Antiterran names are constantly shifting, for instance. So some of my notes below will talk about why I think Antiterra isn't real. (There is no critical consensus on this point, but that may just be because not enough people are paying attention.)

SOME RELEVANT TEXTS

As you probably know, Brian Boyd has been annotating Ada on his website. The annotations aren't done, and may never be -- he's up to Chapter 34 now, which is only a few chapters further than he'd gotten to when I first read the book two years ago. I will quote from these annotations often, but if you're worried about spoilers (for plot or for discoverable secrets) I don't recommend looking at them (although I used them heavily on my first read-through).

Boyd has also written a critical monograph called "Ada: The Place of Consciousness." I don't strongly recommend it, as it has the typical Boyd faults (justifies inherently implausible theories with over-complicated webs of evidence, expects first-time readers to have super-naive responses that no first-time readers actually have in practice, etc.) and in terms of the Boyd virtues (e.g. obsessive attention to detail) it has nothing to recommend it over the annotations. A better, and shorter, book is "Nabokov's Garden" by Bobbie Ann Mason (published -- really -- by Ardis Press in Ann Arbor), which gets closer to the heart of what Nabokov is doing than Boyd ever seems to.

There is also a set of annotations that Nabokov prepared himself to aid translators, called "Notes to Ada, by Vivian Darkbloom." Your copy may include them at the back. These are pretty sparse and pedestrian, but they are worth mentioning from time to time.

Ada makes a whole bunch of references to books and to visual art. According to Boyd and Mason, some of the more important textual reference points are:

Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Childhood/Boyhood/Youth) Chateaubriand (Atala/Rene)

Of these I have only read Anna Karenina.

NOTES

A note on pronunciation: "Ada," as Chapter 5 indicates, is pronounced "ahh-dahh," so that it sounds like "ardor" spoken in a non-rhotic accent. "Van" has the same type of "a" sound, since it is an abbreviation of "Ivan." "Veen" is, I think, pronounced like "vain," both for resonance with the word "vain" and because that's how it's pronounced in the Dutch surname "van Veen," which Van's name is supposed to remind us of. I've heard some people pronounce it like the first syllable of "Venus," though, and "Venus" is another intended resonance of the name.

" 'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor 3.05 Ltd., 1880)." (1) -- this inversion of the opening sentence of Anna Karenina (which Nabokov, incidentally, insisted should be called Anna Karenin in English) is many things. It's Nabokov making fun of bad translations. It is our narrator, Van Veen, declaring that his family, although sui generis (so to speak), is a happy one. It is an indication that we are entering a mirrored world in which some things may be different from what we're used to -- indeed, may take precisely the opposite form. It's an indication that this book will be (among other things) a parody of 19th century novels. Above all, it is a bizarre opening line that sets the tone for this bizarre book.

"Demon's twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns." (4) -- now that's my kind of 19th-century libertine! (Note, incidentally, that since Antiterra is also known as Demonia, Demon is effectively named after the earth [or the version of the earth he lives on], which is a good match for names like Marina and Aqua.)

" 'I deduce,' said the boy, 'three main facts . . . " (8) -- this first (textually, not chronologically) conversation between Van and Ada is wonderfully and implausibly dense. The upshot here is that the two have discovered the secret of Van's birth: Marina substituted her baby, whom Demon fathered, for Aqua's dead son, and the mentally impaired Aqua believed that the baby really was her child. This makes Van the son of Marina and Demon (rather than Aqua and Demon), and since the pair already knows that Ada's true father is Demon rather than Dan, this means they are both children of Marina and Demon -- full siblings. (This contradicts the family tree printed at the beginning, and -- despite numerous hints in the coming pages -- was actually missed by some early reviewers of the novel, who went through the whole thing believing that Van and Ada were cousins. Martin Amis, writing in 2009, thinks they are "half-siblings." My nerdrage knows no bounds.)

"by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother" (8) -- here's Boyd with the genealogy of this phrase: "Van says 'the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother' in allusion to the opening chapter of another famous novel, Ulysses (pub. 1922), by James Joyce (1882-1941). In the opening chapter Buck Mulligan, looking seaward, and like Van and Ada also showing off in the first conversation in the novel, exclaims: 'Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton' ([Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986], 4; 1.77-78). 'Algy' here is Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909): 'I will go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea' ('The Triumph of Time,' pub. 1866, ll. 257-58). 'Epi oinopa ponton' means 'over the wine-dark sea,' a Homeric formula recurring throughout the Odyssey. Notice that Nabokov's 'dark-blue great-grandmother' wittily combines the 'grey' color term in Joyce's recycling of Swinburne's phrase and the 'great sweet mother' in Swinburne, with the 'great' again wittily given an improbable new value in 'great-grandmother.' "

Chapter 2 -- according to Boyd, the bad play Marina acts in here is a parody of bad translations/adaptations of Eugene Onegin. Unlike some of you, I haven't read Eugene Onegin, so the jokes are lost on me.

"the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone over to Japan forever" (14) -- for some reason I can't stop laughing over the weird, unexpected use of the word "Samurai" here. (It seems ripe for being turned into some sort of surrealist compliment/insult, e.g. "Rob, you are a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai!")

"Van, I trust your taste and your talent but are we quite sure we should keep reverting so zestfully to that wicked world which after all may have existed only oneirologically, Van? marginal jotting in Ada's 1965 hand; crossed out lightly in her latest wavering one." (15) -- this is the first of what I think of as "moments of instability," moments when the book suggests that there is some crucial secret of its nature that we are not privy to. What is it that "may have existed only oneirologically"? Van and Ada's highly detailed ideas about what their parents' courtship was like? Antiterra as a whole? (If the latter, this would explain why Ada later crossed out the comment, since Chapter 3 makes it clear that Van is determined to stick with the Antiterra idea.) "Reverting" suggests regression (towards something worse, more immature) as well as turning something over (from the root "vert") as images are turned over by a mirror.

"The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated)" (17) -- strange that he would have to point the latter out in a world in which the L disaster is "well-known historically." "L" can stand for "electricity" (the L disaster has caused electricity to be banned) -- also "Ladore"? (Or Lenin. Or other, more spoilery options.)

"1869 (by no means a mirabilic year)" (19) -- Boyd's annotation for this reads as follows: "a pun on annus mirabilis (Latin, 'wonderful year,' applied especially to 1666, the year of London's Great Fire, in John Dryden's 'Annus Mirabilis,' 1667); on aqua mirabilis, sometimes shortened simply to mirabilis, 'a distilled cordial made of spirits, sage, betony, balm and other aromatic ingredients' (W2), since Aqua is about to be introduced; and as Proffer suggests on Russian mir, 'peace,' and Latin bellum, 'war,' since 1869 was the year Tolstoy's War and Peace was completed." Now that's a pun!

"Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon's senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French /plaisir/, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (/une chair/) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a geminate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations." (19) -- And that is a sentence!

"Demon Veen married Aqua Durmanov -- out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend." (19) -- Karkat would be proud!

"Abraham Milton" on p. 18 becomes "Milton Abraham" on p. 21. Curiouser and curiouser.

"this our sufficient world. . . . Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.)" (21) -- second moment of instability. What is Van's "purpose"? This one is easier to make sense of under an "Antiterra isn't real" theory, since in that case Antiterra is sufficient for Van's purposes (i.e. for the reasons that led him to invent it), but not, e.g., for the purposes of other people whose real actions might be misrepresented there. If Antiterra is real, then Ada is either reminding Van of the general fact that some people are less satisfied with the world than he is, or reminding him in particular of people who hope their souls will transmigrate to Terra after death.

With its mystical manias and its college students dropping out to join 'fashionable' social causes, the Antiterran 1860s seem to imitate the Terran 1960s, in which Nabokov was writing.

Strange to have "Anna Karenin, a novel" (25), with that helpful explanatory clause, when on the first page the same novel (with a less accurate name) was "famous." "Manipulate each other" sounds more sexual than what actually happens in A.K., fitting for Ada's combination of 19th century stylings and sexual frankness.

" ' . . . it would have been so much more plausible, esthetically, ecstatically, Estotially speaking -- if she were really my mother.' " (30) -- an enigmatic outburst. Boyd's annotation for "Estotially" says "given the incest laws in Estoty?"

"such details of his infancy as really mattered (for the special purpose the reconstruction pursued)" (31) -- third moment of instability. (What is this "special purpose"? Is is the same as "your purpose" on p. 21?)

"He knew she was nothing but a fubsy pig-pink whorelet and would elbow her face away when she attempted to kiss him after he had finished" (33) -- this will turn out to be pretty representative of how Van sees women.

Chapters 5 and 6 -- we are now past the abstruse genealogical/scene-setting chapters, and, suddenly and somewhat incongruously, we're dropped into a Wes Anderson movie or something. Everything is visually lush and sort of cutesy. Something like this tone will persist, with various interruptions, for quite a while, but don't be fooled into thinking this is all the book has to offer.

"Ardelia" (36) -- Van's misremembering of "Adelaida" (Ada).

"the tiny, tremulous poodlet" (37) -- I present this phrase without comment.

" 'I used to love history,' said Marina. 'I loved to identify myself with famous women. There's a ladybird on your plate, Van. Especially with famous beauties -- Lincoln's second wife or Queen Josephine.' " (38) -- that's Marina for you. Also we can now add "Lincoln" to the two variants of "Abraham Milton."

" . . . jikkers were banned by the airpatrol; but four years later Van who loved that sport bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking-tubes, and generally bring it back into magic order . . . " (44) -- I'm 99% sure the jikkers with their "hawking-tubes" were the inspiration for the flying carpets called "Hawking mats" that appear in the Hyperion series by science fiction writer Dan Simmons, which I coincidentally happened to be reading concurrently with Ada in summer 2011. (Simmons is a Nabokov fan and uses the name "Ardis" in the series as well. Of course when he uses "Hawking" it's also a reference to Stephen Hawking.)

"Owing to a mixture of overlapping styles and tiles (not easily explainable in non-technical terms to non-roof-lovers)" (45) -- "non-roof-lovers" is certainly not a category that enters my mind very often.

"le Docteur Chronique, I mean Crolique" (49) -- [insert weed joke here]

"Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago" (53) -- Vivian Darkbloom explains: "play on 'Zhivago' ('zhiv' in Russian means alive and 'mertv' dead)."

"Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did." (54) -- Apparently Finnegans Wake existed in 1884 on Antiterra. Boyd says: "The famous lyrical prose passage involving two washerwomen by the Liffey, at the end of the 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' chapter (I.viii) of Finnegans Wake (1938) -- a passage Joyce recorded in his own voice -- includes the refrain 'Tell me,' which in its last transformation becomes 'Tell me, tell me, tell me elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone.' (216.03-04). Though a great admirer of Ulysses, Nabokov thought Finnegans Wake 'a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room. . . . Finnegans Wake’s façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity.' (Strong Opinions 71)"

"The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth" (55) -- "Diabolical Anal Appendages" is a great band name.

"Les Malheurs de Swann" (55) -- Vivian Darkbloom: "cross between Les malheurs de Sophie by Mme de Ségur (née Countess Rostopchin) and Proust’s Un amour de Swann."

2. Youth in Revolt (Part 1, Chapters 9-16)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 9-16)

So, starting around Ch. 10 or so, we find ourselves REALLY CLEARLY situated inside the mind of a teenage boy. Everything is openly sexualized, even the food ("enormous purple pink plums, one with a wet yellow burst-split" [62] -- eww). Nabokov usually isn't this overt about this kind of stuff (if he includes it at all), and it was pretty startling to me the first time I read this book.

Back then these chapters startled me in a number of ways, really -- most of them having to do with the way they realistically, perhaps too realistically, take us into the world of adolescents with all their horniness and haughtiness. Van and Ada, who were likable enough in the previous section, begin to grate in this one. Take, for instance, the way their sense of superiority to Mlle Larivière infects not only their own dialogue but also the narration:

". . . the story lacked 'realism' within its own terms . . . That was the fatal flaw in the Larivière pathos-piece, but at the time young Van and younger Ada could not quite grope for that point although they felt instinctively the falsity of the whole affair." (87)

If we take this as an editorial comment from Nabokov himself (rather than just from old Van), it seems pretty self-indulgent: he has created a character who is an incompetent writer, has attack her writing in the voices of his other characters, and now attacks her in the narration itself -- pointing out flaws that he created to begin with! What's even worse is how close Van, and especially Ada, are to Nabokov in various ways -- e.g. Ada's interest in botany and entomology and her distaste for bad translations -- which makes this close to self-congratulatory self-insert 19th-century-novel fanfiction.

Is this interpretation false? Well, I think so, but for reasons that only become clear later on. For the moment, I'll just say that if your reaction to these chapters is "get off my lawn, you damn kids," your reaction is valid, and probably what Nabokov intended. (I mean, not to say their romance doesn't have some appeal; of course it does.)

NOTES

"punctuating Ada’s discourse with little ejaculations" (62) -- see what I mean about sexualizing everything?

" 'It was sort of long, long. I mean (interrupting herself)… like a tentacle… no, let me see' " (62) -- I rest my case.

Chapter 12 is beautiful and odd in its own unique way.

"among the instruments in the horsecart" (72) -- "horsecart" is an anagram for "orchestra." Darkbloom: "horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades ('symbols in an orchal orchestra')."

"Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: 'real things' which were unfrequent and priceless, simply 'things' which formed the routine stuff of life; and 'ghost things,' also called 'fogs,' such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a 'tower,' or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and 'real bridges' were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral 'thing' might look or even actually become 'real' or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid 'fog.' When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with 'ruined towers' and 'broken bridges.' " (74) -- I like this passage, and this system. I've forgotten a lot of stuff from this book but this has always stuck in my mind.

"The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing. 'We shall try to eat one later,' she observed . . . " (75) -- Ada, you are so WEIRD.

" . . . the child was permitted to wear her lolita . . . a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt" (77) -- how Japanese of her. Seriously, though, this is one of the many throwaway references to Lolita in Nabokov's later work, which have always gotten on my nerves for some reason. I guess it's poking fun at the public's perception of him as primarily "the guy who wrote Lolita," but it also seems like more fuel for that very perception? I dunno.

" . . . thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg’s novel" (77) -- Osberg is an anagram of Borges, to whom Nabokov has often been compared.

"with red poppies or peonies, 'deficient in botanical reality,' as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream. (Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.)" (77) -- another moment of instability at which I can only smile and nod. No clue what this means.

"[thus in the MS. Ed.]" (79) -- so the manuscript has been edited, but in a hands-off way, preserving errors and marginal notes rather than removing them or smoothing them out.

"'But, my poor Mathilde, the necklace was false: it cost only five hundred francs!' " (83) -- this story is the Antiterran equivalent of Maupassant's La Parure (thanks, Boyd). I do wonder if there's any intended parallel here to Van being substituted for Aqua's child.

"Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours." (86) -- even the most trivial details in this book are just so entertainingly described.

Chapter 15 -- I really like the way this chapter seems to be a parody of "loss of innocence" scenes, complete with the heavy-handed Tree of Knowledge symbolism. Since it rings true that Van and Ada might retrospectively view their lives in parodic terms, the scene also works "normally," as characterization, even while it also works as a parody.

"to snatch, as they say, a first shy kiss" (95) -- the innuendo pile doesn't stop from getting taller, if you believe Boyd: "Pun. Cf. Boyd 1985/2001: 243: 'seems to allude to a stock expression -- but the actual idiom is "steal a kiss." Why then that "as they say" just after snatch? Because, of course, there is one colloquial use of "snatch" ': vulva." (On the other hand, I remember the phrase "snatch a kiss" appearing in the romance-novelly chapter of Ulysses, so unless that was the same joke, it may just be an antiquated idiom . . . )

"with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping" (98) -- hard to read even a few words of this book without encountering some sort of mischief. "Ardilla" means squirrel in Spanish, FYI.

3. And I'll Bury My Soul in a Scrapbook (Part 1, Chapters 17-24)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 17-24)

Van and Ada's romance begins in earnest with an appropriately pyrotechnic backdrop; DIY sex ed is facilitated by the vast Ardis library; poems are transmogrified and crossbred; Lucette gets in the way; the style is sometimes gorgeous and sometimes playful or jokey to the point of tedium. The attic scene at the end of Ch. 1 fits somewhere in here, chronologically speaking. Meanwhile, the density of references has gone up precipitously, so I've written a lot more notes, most of which are quoted or cribbed from Boyd. There is the feeling of a steady rise in difficulty after the easy early Ardis chapters, like a musical piece that slowly builds in complexity.

If you're up to date, can you leave a comment saying whether you like the book so far? Just curious. I know this book is polarizing, and I don't want to feel like I'm leading you down a very long blind alley.

NOTES

Compared the leering and arch chapters directly preceding it, Chapter 17 is rather lovely. The tone in much of Part 1 seems to waver between romantic and satiric, with one of the two dominating the other in each chapter (speaking roughly).

"Their lips were absurdly similar in style, tint and tissue. Van's upper one resembled in shape a long-winged sea bird coming directly at you, while the nether lip, fat and sullen, gave a touch of brutality to his usual expression. Nothing of that brutality existed in the case of Ada's lips, but the bow shape of the upper one and the largeness of the lower one with its disdainful prominence and opaque pink repeated Van's mouth in a feminine key." (102) -- just felt like noting this down because it's an example of this book's excellent descriptions of sensory detail. Note the motif of Van's "brutality" (Ada's reaction to Van's hand-walking performance in Ch. 13: "I felt there was something dreadful, brutal, dark, and, yes, dreadful, about the whole thing" [86]).

"Nose, cheek, chin -- all possessed such a softness of outline (associated retrospectively with keepsakes, and picture hats, and frightfully expensive little courtesans in Wicklow)" (103) -- unsubtle foreshadowing: apparently Van will be soliciting courtesans later on.

"pascaltrezza" (103) -- Darkbloom: "pascaltrezza: in this pun, which combines Pascal with scaltrezza (Ital., 'sharp wit') and treza (a Provençal word for 'tressed stalks'), the French 'pas' negates the 'pensant' of the ‘roseau’ in his famous phrase 'man is a thinking reed.' " Sick pun, bro!

"Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive." (103) -- okay, I'm going to have to stop noting down every cool or cute line in this chapter or else I'll just be noting down the whole thing. Boyd quibbles: "Rembrandt . . . is generally much less festive than such compatriots and contemporaries as Franz Hals (c.1581-1665) and Jan Steen (1625/6-1679). Van may particularly have in mind the decidedly festive 'Self-portrait with Saskia' . . . "

"What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word 'deified'?" (104) -- my quote moratorium has lasted less than a page, it seems.

" . . . the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life . . . How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world!" (104) -- this chapter seems intent on briefing us about the shape of the overall plot. Note that a moment ago we got a reminder that Lucette died young ("at eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-five, finis" [104]), though technically that could be deduced from the family tree at the beginning.

" 'I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.' " (105) -- Boyd: "Damozel is an archaic variant of 'damsel,' revived by Sir Walter Scott and other romantics after him 'to express a more stately notion than is now conveyed by damsel' (OED). Eglantine, especially [sic? -Rob] the sweetbriar (Rosa eglantera). Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599) in The Faerie Queene (1590-96) uses both words toward the end of Book III, Canto VI (The Garden of Adonis), 'eglantine' in stanza 44, 'damozel' in stanza 54."

"a cad" (105) -- presumably Demon.

"after Mlle Larivière had threatened to smear poor Ada's fingertips with French mustard and tie green, yellow, orange, red, pink riding hoods of wool around them" (106) -- Boyd cites Jay Alan Edelnant's Ph.D. thesis, which notes that "this sequence implies 'green thumb' and 'pinkie.' ".

"born between Paris and Tagne (as he'd better, said Ada, who liked crossing orchids)." (106) -- Boyd notes that "Tagne" is not a real place and "seems a back formation from 'montagne' in the poem (106.25), as if it were 'mon Tagne,' 'my Tagne.' " The poem that follows is a hybrid ("crossing orchids") between the most famous poems of Baudelaire and (the actual) Chateaubriand (the latter poem will show up again in Ch. 22, where V&A will play with various phrases of the form "mon [X]"). Darkbloom translates it as "my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness -- "

"Lucette’s and Lucile’s" (106) -- "Lucille, incidentally, was the true name of Chateaubriand’s sister, with whom he was in love" (Vera Nabokov).

" . . . and briefly attaining a drugged beatitude into which, as into a vacuum, the ferocity of the itch would rush with renewed strength." (107) -- a good description of this familiar experience.

"Nowadays it seems to be getting extinct, what with the cooler climate" (108) -- apparently the Antiterran climate has been growing closer to the Terran one?

"Suddenly Van heard her lovely dark voice on the staircase saying in an upward direction, 'Je l’ai vu dans une des corbeilles de la bibliothèque' -- presumably in reference to some geranium or violet or slipper orchid." (125) -- Ada's utterance, "I saw it in one of the wastepaper-baskets of the library," is actually (presumably) a response to Blanche asking about the location of her slipper, which she lost at the start of Ch. 19 ("Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase." [114]).

"She wore -- though not in collusion with him" (126) -- Boyd's annotation reads: "Why might we have thought that Ada had donned her black shorts and white jersey in collusion with Van?" I dunno, man.

From Boyd's Forenote to Ch. 21: "The prohibition against knowing about sex matches the Edenic prohibition against tasting of the Tree of Knowledge, and the theme of Ardis as Garden of Eden somehow resounds even amid the hush of the library. Just as the solitary couple in the left panel of Bosch’s Garden of Delights gives way to the throngs of sensualists, fructivores and sexual acrobats in the triptych’s central panel, in an endless slow merry-go-round of desire, so Van and Ada returning now as lovers to the library sample sex as something endlessly repeated through time: in evolutionary terms, from Serromyia flies and the lowliest farm animals to geishas and Casanovas; in cultural terms, from Oriental erotica, Shastras and Nefzawis, to litterateurs and sexologists."

"May 1, 1884 . . . 14,841 items" (130) -- I quote Boyd's annotation here because it's the kind of hyper-minute and hyper-trivial analysis only Boyd, for better or for worse, can provide: "The echo of the date ('1, 1884') in the number of items in the library (which would have been even closer had Nabokov chosen April 1, 1884: 1-4-1884: why did he choose 'Mayday' rather than April Fool’s Day?; and see 133.01 and n.) and the palindromic quality of '14841' (which also happens to be the sum of the squares of 120 and 21, the latter the number of the chapter -- is this significant, in this self-referential section? -- and the former a near palindrome of it, with 'nothing' added -- was that intended?) reflect Nabokov’s abilities as mathematical prodigy in his infant years, and his preoccupation with pattern in both nature (butterfly wing-markings, for instance) and art (versification, for instance)."

"A bawdy critic in a collection of articles which she now could gleefully consult (Les muses s'amusent)" (133) -- Nabokov's invention, title means "The Muses Have Fun." (Boyd)

"Ivan Ivanov" (134) -- sounds like a reference to Van, but Boyd notes also: " 'Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov' is the archetypal Russian; see for instance Bernard Guilbert Guerney’s translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls (but not in Gogol himself), ch. 11: 'why, on several occasions caricatures had actually been put out depicting Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov talking with John Bull' (1942; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, 252.)"

"Kapuskan patois" (136) -- Boyd: "Kapuskan patois: Which, judging by the sample, seems to consists of a mix of French, American and Spanish, the European languages (except for Portuguese) of Earth’s Americas. Kapuskasing is a town in northern Ontario (49.25N, 82.26W), in an area of Ontario where French and English are both widely spoken." As for the "Kapuskan" quote itself: "This comically transparent macaronic passage yields: 'The only sure method of deceiving nature is for a strong-guy to continue-continue-continue until the pleasure brims; and then, at the last moment, to switch to the other groove; but because an ardent or a heavy woman cannot turn over quick enough, the transition is helped by the position of torovago.' "

"Heinrich Müller" (136) -- Darkbloom: "author of Poxus, etc." Of course this is Henry Miller, author (on Terra many decades later) of Sexus, etc. (For a good time, check out Gore Vidal's review of Sexus.)

"My sister . . . " (138) -- for the song by Chateaubriand on which this is based (which was crossbred with Baudelaire back in Ch. 17), see here. (If you want to avoid a quotation from a later chapter of Ada, stop reading at the sentence beginning "The poem, with score and tune . . . ")

"Ma soeur, te souvient-il encore / Du château que baignait la Dore?" (138) -- straight from the Chateaubriand: "My sister, do you still remember / The castle bathed by the Dore?"

"Sestra moya, tï pomnish' goru / I dub vïsokiy, i Ladoru?" (138) -- Darkbloom's trans.: "my sister, do you remember the mountain, and the tall oak, and the Ladore?"

"Oh! qui me rendra mon Aline / Et le grand chêne et ma colline?" (138) -- Darkbloom's trans.: "oh who will give me back my Aline, and the big oak, and my hill?" Slight alteration of the final sestet of the Chateaubriand: "mountain" has been changed to "hill" and "Helene" has become "Aline," the name of Chateaubriand's elder brother's wife (significance?). Darkbloom on the original: "The final (fifth) sestet begins with 'Oh! qui me rendra mon Hélène, Et ma montagne et le grand chêne' -- one of the leitmotivs of the present novel."

"Oh! qui me rendra, mon Adèle / Et ma montagne et l'hirondelle?" (138) -- now the name is "Adele" (now the addressee rather than the object) and the "great oak" is the "swallow." Adele brings "Adelaida" (Ada's real name) to mind just as "Lucile" below does for Lucette/Lucinda.

"Oh! qui me rendra ma Lucile, / La Dore et l'hirondelle agile?" (139) -- now it's "the Dore" and "the agile swallow." Lucile is the real name of Chateaubriand's sister. "Agile swallow" comes from an utterance of Mlle Lariviere's ("And see that agile swallow!" [87]), as do some other bits here.

"Oh, who will render in our tongue" (139) -- pun on earlier "rendra" ("give back").

"say 'chort' (devil) . . . which he had never heard her do before" (139) -- Van's forgetting that he had her say "chort" on p. 96. Speaking of devils, note that "Ada" means "of hell" (i.e. it's the genitive of "hell") in Russian.

"To the average physiologist, the energy of those two youngsters might have seemed abnormal" (139) -- part of a motif about Van and Ada's exceptional nature; cf. the earlier mention of the "demon blood" (20) they inherited from their father (which brings us back, thematically, to hell).

"yclept" (141) -- "Meaning 'called,' 'named,' this word, elsewhere obsolete, survived as an allowable archaism in poetry." (Boyd)

" 'I kept for years -- it must be in my Ardis nursery -- the anthology you once gave me; and the little poem you wanted me to learn by heart is still word-perfect in a safe place of my jumbled mind, with the packers trampling on my things, and upsetting crates, and voices calling: time to go, time to go. Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. . . . ' " (146) -- well, that's heartbreaking. Note that Van, typically (as we shall see), does not comment on the pathos of the situation.

"Here, said the guide . . . " (146): Nabokov wrote, in third person, to Bobbie Ann Mason: "The poem Peter and Margaret is of course Nabokov’s own composition. Not a single reader (as far as he knows) has understood that it is a stylized glimpse of a mysterious person visiting the place, open to tourists, where in legendary times ('legendary' in Antiterra terms) a certain Peter T. had his last interview with the Queen’s sister. Although he accuses the old guide of being a 'ghost,' it is he, in the reversal of time, who is a ghostly tourist, the ghost of Peter T. himself. It is a very beautiful little poem, it should send a tingle down the spine of the reader." For a full report on the reference here and the way this poem by the fictional "Robert Brown" emulates Tennyson and Browning, see here.

"But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years -- problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space -- and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die" (153) -- death has poked its head into the frame a number of times in these chapters ("the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life" [104], "a fatidic shiver" [146], " their . . . in many ways fatal romance" [148]), and it does so again in this remarkable sentence. Et in Arcadia ego?

"just finished reading her new story" (154) -- this one is based on Maupassant's "La Petite Roque" (AKA "Little Louise Roque"). There's a summary here.

4. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Part 1, Chapters 25-34)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 25-34)

In which Van learns you can never really recapture your childhood.

The story now shifts into a new phase: where Van's preoccupying monomania used to be his attraction to Ada, it is now his jealousy of anyone who might, conceivably, have designs on her. There is a newly neurotic tone to many of these chapters, and Van's characteristic allusiveness starts to seem defensive rather than expressive or simply playful. Meanwhile, Lucette herself has become infatuated with Van. (What is it with this family?)

NOTES

"kitchen Kim with his camera" (156) -- pay close attention to Kim and his camera.

"Tel un lis sauvage confiant au désert" (157) -- "Thus a wild lily entrusting the wilderness" (Darkbloom). A quote from Les Trois Règnes de la Nature by Abbé Jacques Delille (in context: "Thus a wild lily / Entrusting to the wilderness the perfume it exhales, / Hides its virginal beauty from the indiscreet winds"). Delille seems to have been one of the many, many authors on Nabokov's shit list.

" . . . and this attire was hardly convenient for making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in a natural bower of aspens; xliC mujzikml, after which she said: . . ." (157) -- just when you thought this book couldn't get any weirder, it just starts throwing glitchy gibberish at you with no warning whatsoever. Of course, all is explained in the next chapter, but I really like the audacity of it. (The joke here is that if you actually decode the text, it's completely tame, at least on a surface level: "making his way through the brush and crossing a brook to reach Ada in a natural bower of aspens; they embraced.")

"the letter scene in Tschaikow’s opera Onegin and Olga" (158) -- Boyd: "Nabokov mocks here the inaccuracies of theatrical adaptations of literary texts, including the Chaikovsky adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (see 10.11-12.20 and nn. and 511.34: 'the preposterous libretto'). The letter scene, itself specifically parodied at 11.02-20 (and nn.), of course focuses on Tatiana as letter-writer. A version that had misconstrued Pushkin’s story enough to have her sister Olga share the title with Onegin might even omit Tatiana altogether. In Pt. 1 Ch. 2 the show in which Marina plays the letter-writing role seems to be called Eugene and Lara (13.22), which at least preserves as well as distorts some of Tatiana’s surname (Larina); but by now, the disintegration has become even more complete, as the other Larina girl takes over the title role."

"I don't know. I adore you. I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go." (158) -- "adore"/"Ladore" here resonates nicely with the unspoken (but, in this book, always present) "ardor."

"Stumbling on melons, fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop" (159) -- Darkbloom: "allusions to passages in Marvell’s 'Garden' and Rimbaud’s 'Mémoire.'" (From Marvell's Garden: "Stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.") [TV narrator voice] "Previously on Ada or Ardor": Rimbaud's poem was referenced a number of times in Van and Ada's esoteric lunch-table conversation in Ch. 10.

In Chapter 27 we begin to get a sense of Van's conventionally masculine double standard about infidelity.

"Villa Armina: Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her." (163) -- Ouch!

"garbotosh" (165) -- reference to a famous poster for the film Anna Christie, which pictures Greta Garbo wearing a macintosh. As it happens, all of the physical characteristics listed later in this passage are consistent with the idea that Cordula is supposed to look like Garbo. Garbo was rumored to have had affairs with women. (She also -- perhaps relevantly? -- played the title character in the 1935 adaptation of Anna Karenina.)

"ambivert" (165) -- apparently this means "a type of person intermediate between the introvert and the extrovert," though of course it sounds as though it means "bisexual."

"by his amour-propre, not by their sale amour" (168) -- "amour-propre" can mean either "self-love" or "clean love"; the former appears to be the actual meaning here, but the latter allows the phrase to appear to contrast more directly with "sale amour" ("dirty love"). Darkbloom: "pun borrowed from Tolstoy's 'Resurrection.'"

"On the contrary: a private picture of their fondling each other kept pricking him with perverse gratification." (168) -- another "yep, Van sure is a teenage boy" moment. (It wasn't until I copied this quote down here that I noticed the retrospectively obvious innuendo in "pricking." Maybe it's best to assume that every word of this book is some sort of innuendo until proven otherwise . . . )

"Adula" (168) -- resonates of course with "adulation."

"the entire treatment of the Marcel and Albertine affair" (169) -- Van refers to the theory that the character Albertine in In Search of Lost Time is really a gender-swapped male, i.e., that her affair with Marcel is actually a veiled depiction of a male homosexual affair.

"(On fait son grand Joyce after doing one's petit Proust. In Ada's lovely hand.)" -- the previous sentence links up to Joyce's Ulysses in several difficult-to-catch ways, described by Boyd here. Note that Van's monologue about Proust was itself in the style of Proustian dialogue.

"He could solve an Euler-type problem" (171) -- an insignificant detail, but as a math guy I'm of course curious what exactly is meant by this phrase. There are many problems associated with Euler, who was one of the most prolific mathematicians ever. In the French translation of Ada this becomes "a problem in Euler integrals." Euler integrals are certain special mathematical functions, which doesn't nail down what the problems in question are, but gives us a general idea of what sort of knowledge is involved -- calculus, probably. (Van is 10!)

"I have often wondered why the Russian for it" (175) -- by "it" he means "cheating."

"Van worked under Tyomkin, at the Chose famous clinic, on an ambitious dissertation he never completed, 'Terra: Eremitic Reality or Collective Dream?' " (182) -- the nature of the Terra pathology, along with the nature of time and space, will be one of Van's major interests as an adult.

"a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time" (185) -- "ardis" means "point of an arrow" in Greek, so this is a modification of the conventional phrase "the arrow of time."

"Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the idea-mongers and so forth." (185) -- yep, we're definitely reading a Nabokov book here.

"Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life -- acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children." (185) -- this makes explicit what might already have been clear: the connection between Van's interest in card tricks, acrobatic feats, etc. and his penchant for playing tricks with words.

"and (I have a note here, for the ghost of a novel) 'the low cut of her black dress allowed the establishment of a sharp contrast between the familiar mat whiteness of her skin and the brutal black horsetail of her new hair-do.'" (188) -- a vertical A-B-A (or, equivalently, A-D-A) pattern. The novel in question here is presumably Ada itself, which apparently means that this bit is some earlier note or thought that has been incorporated into the text. Note that the dramatic arc of Ada follows something like an A-D-A pattern, and that the title itself contains more than one such pattern (the word "Ada" is one, and the fact that "Ada" sounds like "Ardor" makes the phrase "Ada or Ardor" another).

"'My teacher,' she said, 'at the Drama School thinks I'm better in farces than in tragedy. If they only knew!'" (191) -- a self-conscious nod to the tension between comedy and drama in this novel?

"her only true love, the head of the arrow" (192) -- another ardis.

"I'll have them reassembled in Ladore when I motor there one of these days." (193-4) -- and here's another attempt to triumph over the ardis of time, this one much closer to the sort of examples found in introductory physics textbooks. The collecting of the necklace pieces seems like a pretty transparent metaphor for the lovers' attempt in this scene to recapture what they had in 1884.

Note that Ada has become less interested in biology (nature) and more interested in acting (artifice). Bobbie Ann Mason sees this as an effect of the corrupting influence of her "unnatural" affair with Van.

"Her director, G.A. Vronsky" (197) -- Vronsky is Anna's lover in Anna Karenina. His name is combined here with "the 'common Russian-Jewish name' Gavronsky" (Boyd citing Alfred Appel). Cf. Marina's lover "Baron d’Onsky" (13).

"what begins with a 'de' and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant" (199) -- "Since the Oder is the main river of Silesia, a historical region of eastern Europe now mostly in Poland although with small portions in Germany and the Czech Republic, the riddle spells the hint: 'deodorant.'" (Boyd).

"She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia." (199) -- cool sentence. Nenuphars are water lilies.

"The indecent 'telegraph'" (201) -- the banning of electricity has had amusing consequences for Antiterran profanity.

"(reversing the action of Dr. Ero, pursued by the Invisible Albino in one of the greatest novels of English literature)" (203) -- Darkbloom: "thus the h-dropping policeman in Wells’s Invisible Man defined the latter’s treacherous friend." Could additionally be a reference to Ellison's Invisible Man. (In an interview, Nabokov discusses the notion of meeting literary figures in heaven: "It would be fun to hear Shakespeare roar with ribald laughter on being told what Freud (roasting in the other place) made of his plays. It would satisfy one's sense of justice to see H. G. Wells invited to more parties under the cypresses than slightly bogus Conrad.")

"the sunglasses of much-sung lasses" (203) -- that's a pretty good one.

"two black and one golden-red head" (204) -- a possible A-D-A, although it seems more likely that Van is in the middle (in which case it's an A-D-A by gender, I guess).

5. Father Lucifer (Part 1, Chapters 35-38)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 35-38)

The Ardis of 1888 continues to be awkward. Scrabble is played. Demon stops by and wants to ask whether Van and Ada are involved, but never manages to.

To be honest, with the exception of the Scrabble scene, I'm not that fond of these chapters -- the plot has been lagging lately and the reader could be forgiven for wondering whether any of this is going anywhere or whether the rest of the book will be comprised of minor, unpleasant Veen family interactions described at great length. Mark my words, though: the next section (the rest of Part 1) is utter gold, and is what convinced me I loved the book the first time around.

And as always, no matter how slow the plot is, there's plenty of trivia to note! Speaking of which, Boyd's online notes end at Ch. 34, although note that there are some interesting notes (composed with Boyd's help) here that go up through Ch. 38. After this, we're flying blind.

NOTES

"the oars crippled by refraction" (217) -- nice metaphor.

"my acarpous destiny" (219) -- "acarpous" means "fruitless."

"A diligent student of case histories, Dr. Van Veen never quite managed to match ardent twelve-year-old Ada with a non-delinquent, non-nymphomaniac, mentally highly developed, spiritually happy and normal English child in his files, although many similar little girls had bloomed -- and run to seed -- in the old châteaux of France and Estotiland as portrayed in extravagant romances and senile memoirs." (219) -- a self-conscious nod to the implausibility of Ada the character. Minor evidence for theories of the "Van invented Ada" variety (of which I am fond).

"Captain Grant's Microgalaxies" (220) -- Darkbloom: "known on Terra as Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, by Jules Verne."

"ailleurs" (220) -- "go away" (?), lit. "elsewhere."

The ending of Ch. 35 has been "scrawled on a separate writing-pad page" and is apparently by a very old Van, possibly on his last night before death. It is appropriately (?) strange. Mentions of the process of composition sometimes coincide with especially abstruse and odd passages (cf. the sections alternately written by Van and Ada in Ch. 12). Is this an indication that these were written last, by an older senile Van / Ada, who either wrote strangely because they were senile or simply died before having the chance to revise this material (or both)?

"and now a century later seems to be again in vogue, so I am told, under the name of 'Scrabble,' invented by some genius quite independently from its original form or forms." (222-3) -- cf. earlier " 'We [Van and Ada in 1884] played mostly Scrabble and Snap,' said Van." (163)

"Lucette would later recall how her sister's triumphs in doubling, tripling, and even nonupling (when passing through two red squares) the numerical value of words evolved monstrous forms in her delirium during a severe streptococcal ague in September, 1888, in California." (223) -- like the Noodle Incident, this is all the more hilarious for its lack of specificity. ("Evolved monstrous forms"?)

"Baron Klim Avidov" (223) -- anagram for "Vladimir Nabokov" (Kyoto Reading Circle notes).

"Avidov . . . at a particule" (223-4) -- "The gist of this short incident is that Avidov was accused by the Englishman Keyway of his pretentions to aristocratic lineage by using the French 'de' before his name (d’Avidov)." (Kyoto Reading Circle notes)

"By July the ten A's had dwindled to nine, and the four D's to three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned Armchair, but the D was lost" (224) -- A-D-A reference, of course, and maybe another arrow of time / entropy thing? (The "A" of paradisiacal Ardis lost and then regained.)

"it was pitiful to see Lucette cling to her last five letters (with none left in the box) forming the beautiful ARDIS which her governess had told her meant 'the point of an arrow' -- but only in Greek, alas." (225) -- I'm sure you could do some "clinging to Ardis" / "arrow of time" thematic stuff with this. (I have kind of a one-track mind today, it seems.)

"the amusing VANIADA" (226) -- this coinage will turn up again.

"TORFYaNUYu" (227) -- there is a peat motif (yes, you heard me, a peat motif) in this book: "Veen" for instance means "peat bog" in Dutch. (Boyd has written an article called "Ada, the Bog and the Garden: or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in Ada.")

V&A's virtuosic triumphs over Lucette in Ch. 36 leave me wondering exactly what they feel they have to prove (numerous decades later!).

"some 'blue' (peat-bog) land" (236) -- peat again.

"his "prebrandial" brandy (an ancient quip)" (238) -- cf. "he liked . . . middle-aged puns" (4).

"You look quite satanically fit, Dad." (239) -- I wonder what exactly "satanically" means on Antiterra, where religion seems to have been tweaked somewhat, and demons are benign figures. (Note the reference to the Eden story later in this chapter, and the Eden reference that dominates Ch. 15.)

" 'You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man' " (241) -- this may be fortune-teller frivolity, but it is interesting to wonder whether it has any deeper meaning in the context of the plot.

"the sweetest word in the language rhymes with 'billiard' " -- Kyoto Reading Circle: "The word is 'milliard,' thousand million, that is, billion."

"That’s very black of you" (241) -- Kyoto Reading Circle: "Converted 'white of you,' a Southern racist compliment which means 'good of you.' "

"Filius aquae" (243) -- Darkbloom: " 'son of water,' bad pun on filum aquae, the middle way, 'the thread of the stream'." But, as the Kyoto Reading Circle observes, this is also a reference to Van's parentage (he is not "filius aquae," "son of Aqua"). This chapter is packed with hints about Van and Ada's parentage, particularly to the fact that Ada is Demon's daughter.

"Tell him I’m the youngest Venutian? Does he belong, too? Show the sign? Better not. Invent." (244) -- in Ch. 28, Dick offered Van a membership to the "Villa Venus Club." Apparently Van is now a member.

"Old Demon, iridescent wings humped" (245) -- one of several references so far to Demon's "wings." Presumably a flight of fancy rather than a literal description, but then so much of Van's tale is difficult to believe that a literally winged father might not be so out of place. (But if the wings really existed we might expect some remark about how he had been named for them, when in fact we just hear that Demon is "a form of Demian or Dementius" [4].)

"which Ada de Grandfief here has twisted into English" (246) -- yet another colorful version of "translate."

" 'Which is amply sufficient," said Demon, "for my little needs, and those of my little friends.' " (247) -- cf. "Sufficient for your purpose, Van" (21).

"the unfortunate plant used to be considered by the ancient inhabitants of the Ladore region not so much as a remedy for the bite of a reptile, as the token of a very young woman’s easy delivery" (247) -- the reference to the pains of childbirth here continues the Adam and Eve reference begun in Ada's preceding line, in which she links snakes and "corruption."

" 'I'm Fanny Price, actually' . . . 'In the staircase scene' " (249) -- not having read Mansfield Park, I can't divine the significance of either of these statements. Google leads me to this: "The stairs leading to the attic also have significance in the novel. A week after Fanny’s arrival at Mansfield Park, Edmund finds his cousin sitting on the stairs that lead to the attic. Her placement on the stairs reinforces the view of Fanny as a person between two worlds. She can no longer live with her family in Portsmouth and does not feel that the Bertram house is her home either. She is never completely part of the Bertram family until later in the novel; and in her first years with the family, Fanny does not feel fully accepted as a member of the household."

"this gemel planet" (256) -- "gemel" is a heraldic term meaning "coupled" or "paired."

"the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get 'something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology')" (256) -- the 12th birthday gift Ada received and hated back in Ch. 13 ("a huge beautiful doll -- unfortunately, and strangely, more or less naked; still more strangely, with a braced right leg and a bandaged left arm, and a boxful of plaster jackets and rubber accessories, instead of the usual frocks and frills" [84]).

"certicle storms" (258) -- Darkbloom: "certicle: anagram of 'electric.' " Electricity may be taboo, but Antiterrans still need a way to refer to natural electrical phenomena. (Also brings "cervical" to mind?)

"Antiamberians" (258) -- apparently some sort of anti-electricity group. The word "electricity" itself comes from the Greek word for "amber." Philip Pullman, thinking along the same lines, had his otherworldly characters in the His Dark Materials trilogy use "anbaric" (from the Arabic for "amber") energy.

"young Bout hurried in dragging the long green cord (visibly palpitating in a series of swells and contractions rather like a serpent ingesting a field mouse) of the ornate, brass-and-nacre receiver" (260) -- a hydrodynamic telephone sure is a funny image.

"his key: 221" (262) -- Demon is linked a number of times in this Chapter to Sherlock Holmes, who lived on 221 Baker Street (Kyoto Reading Circle).

"till dee do us part" (263) -- "dee" is the first letter in Demon's name: when Demon finally discovers their affair, Ada expects him to order them to stop. Also, possibly, a reference to the negative associations of the "D" segment of the A-D-A sequence (if this book is about paradises lost and then regained, "A" is the paradise while "D" is its absence).

6. Van/Ada, Blanche/Van, Rack/Ada, Percy/Ada, Van/Cordula, Hurt/Comfort, Mpreg (Part 1, Chapters 39-43)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 39-43)

Shit just got real.

NOTES

"Speaking as a character in an old novel" (266) -- this "old novel" motif is starting to get a bit worn out.

"One of your aunt's servants is the sister of one of our servants and two pretty gossips form a dangerous team" (271) -- the former servant is Blanche. (Cf. "better than waste them on her, let him give them, she said, to Blanche's lovely sister" [277].)

"Percy, you were to die very soon -- and not from that pellet in your fat leg, on the turf of a Crimean ravine, but a couple of minutes later when you opened your eyes and felt relieved and secure in the shelter of the macchie; you were to die very soon, Percy; but that July day in Ladore County, lolling under the pines, royally drunk after some earlier festivity, with lust in your heart and a sticky glass in your strong blond-haired hand, listening to a literary bore, chatting with an aging actress and ogling her sullen daughter, you reveled in the spicy situation, old sport, chin-chin, and no wonder. Burly, handsome, indolent and ferocious, a crack Rugger player, a cracker of country girls, you combined the charm of the off-duty athlete with the engaging drawl of a fashionable ass. I think what I hated most about your handsome moon face was that baby complexion, the smooth-skinned jaws of the easy shaver. I had begun to bleed every time, and was going to do so for seven decades." (273) -- enjoyably spiteful paragraph. Strange to think of Van, over ninety, having lived with Ada for decades, writing this as though still angry at Percy. (I always tend to assume that Van's uses of the first person indicate heights of emotional intensity or involvement, though that may be too simple.)

"It was, he understood, a collation of shepherds." (274) -- no idea what to make of the shepherds. Suggestions welcome.

"Ada strolled up. 'My hero,' she said, hardly looking at him, with that inscrutable air she had that let one guess whether she expressed sarcasm or ecstasy, or a parody of one or the other." (278) -- doubles, of course, as a description of Ada the book.

"We do not care to follow the thoughts troubling Ada, whose attention to her book was far shallower than might seem; we will not, nay, cannot follow them with any success, for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise." (280-1) -- strange to point this out when the book almost never follows Ada's thoughts, and the excuse rings hollow since Van's thoughts are, by contrast, followed relentlessly. I wonder what that "green snake in a dark paradise" means. There have been various Eden references (Shattal tree, dinner party), but none that seem to match up satisfactorily with that phrase.

"Therefore we find ourselves more comfortably sitting within Van while his Ada sits within Lucette, and both sit within Van (and all three in me, adds Ada)." (281) -- all three are in Ada the book, of course . . . "and all three in me" also makes me think of the Trinity. (If older Ada is incarnating in younger Lucette, then Ada is the Father and Lucette is the Son, which would make Van the Holy Spirit, which is funny since the Holy Spirit, unlike the other two, is believed by some to be female. [Is this my silliest line of speculation yet?])

"Van was lying in his netted nest under the liriodendrons, reading Antiterrenus on Rattner." (283) -- cf. p. 230: "Van lay reading Rattner on Terra, a difficult and depressing work." Mirror-reflection motif, of course.

"I've seen him in Sexico" (286) -- now that is a good bad movie title.

"It was not the sly demon smile of remembered or promised ardor, but the exquisite human glow of happiness and helplessness. . . . They stood brow to brow, brown to white, black to black, he supporting her elbows, she playing her limp light fingers over his collarbone, and how he 'ladored,' he said, the dark aroma of her hair blending with crushed lily stalks, Turkish cigarettes and the lassitude that comes from 'lass.' " (286-7) -- the writing has returned to romantic gorgeousness; it's been a long time since we've been here. Note that the style of this passage, and the use of the adore/Ladore pun, recalls the passage on p. 158-9 when Van and Ada part for the first time. Van seems to view his relationship with Ada in the most idealized terms at moments that directly precede their partings.

"That's a beautiful passage, Van. I shall cry all night (late interpolation)." (287) -- not sure what to make of this, but it seems significant.

"she was wearing his diamonds for the first time" (288) -- apparently Van did repair the diamond necklace after all?

I love Chapter 41. Nabokov is very good at rendering the moment when it all comes crashing down, and much of Ch. 41 is a wonderfully well-written, aching and hilarious depiction of what it feels like when your brain hits a fact it just can't deal with. In a lot of Nabokov's novels, though, this moment happens at the end, while here it's right in the middle: the demonic D of the A-D-A pattern ("till Dee do us part"). An A-D-A dramatic arc, if plotted with something like "happiness" on the vertical axis, would form a "V" shape (or, if mirror-inverted -- with both paradises exposed as false? -- an "A" shape).

"her quaint English, elegiac and stilted, as spoken only in obsolete novels" (292) -- this has the form of a diss towards Blanche, but its impact is kind of distorted by the fact that all sorts of things in Ada, including Ardis Hall itself, are describes as reminiscent of "old novels." "Obsolete novels" is kind of a strange notion in the context of this book, which is itself written in an archaic mode.

" 'Van,' she said, 'I must tell you my dream before I forget. You and I were high up in the Alps . . . ' " (296) -- the coincidence of Van and Ada's dreams here recalls dream coincidences in Anna Karenina and Ulysses. (Nabokov, in this interview: "Activist, demonstration-struck students of the present decade would, I suppose, either drop my course after a couple of lectures or end by getting a fat F if they could not answer such exam questions as: Discuss the twinned-dream theme in the case of two teams of dreamers, Stephen D.-Bloom, and Vronski-Anna.")

"Aqua used to say that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be happy on Demonia, our splendid planet. Van felt that for him to survive on this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born, he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men." (301) -- unless I'm forgetting something, this is the first appearance of either of the names of Van's planet. Given that they will appear frequently from here on out, this seems statistically unlikely to be a coincidence. It's as if Van has invented these nasty-sounding terms to express his despair at this particular moment, and only later retconned them in as "official" names for his (fantasy) planet.

I remember reading somewhere that the duel in Ch. 42 is heavily derivative of Eugene Onegin. The author I was reading claimed this as reason to doubt the duel ever actually happened. (Which makes sense if, and only if, you're working in a general framework that says Van has access to something like western literature as it exists on earth.)

"In 1884, during my first summer at Ardis, I seduced your daughter" (309) -- clarifies that Ada is Demon's daughter, in case the reader still hasn't picked up on it.

"Van noticed a speckled movement on his right: two little spectators -- a fat girl and a boy in a sailorsuit, wearing glasses, with a basket of mushrooms between them. It was not the chocolate-muncher in Cordula's compartment, but a boy very much like him, and as this flashed through Van's mind he felt the jolt of the bullet ripping off, or so it felt, the entire left side of his torso" (310-11) -- I feel like this is significant (either Cordula and the boy or their doppelgängers appear as here like angels of [near-]death?), but I have no idea where to go with it.

Van's prepared monologue to Rack (314-15) is so weird I almost want to call it another "moment of instability." Death has been an important motif up until this point; now Van meditates, seemingly without prompting, on the afterlife. The futility of this magisterial proclamation (which Rack doesn't even appear to hear) is hilarious, but the passage is unnerving in a way that goes beyond that comedic function. There is a feeling that the book is going off the rails, that we and Van, not Rack, are in fact plummeting into "the panic and pain of infinite night" (315).

"kissing her rosy hot face and kneading her soft catlike body through her black silk dress" (318) -- to contrast with the swoonyspoony purple prose in the highest-pitch V&A encounters, Van's exciting moments with other women get assigned this down-to-earth porn-novel style. (I may be imagining this contrast -- I'll have to see whether it persists in the rest of the book.)

"But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been -- perhaps, next to the pitcher peri -- a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis." (320) -- of course Van is trying to link the death of Percy -- far away, having nothing to do with him or Ada -- with his own desire to kill Percy and its motivation. Is that all that's going on here, though? Another odd, extended passage which, like the earlier monologue, serves to remind us that we're not in Kansas/Ardis anymore. (Incidentally, in this passage two open parentheses are closed with only one close parenthesis -- this is the case both in my edition and on Ada Online. Is this meant to be unsettling? Stop me before I read into trivial details again!)

"anxious to enjoy Cordula as soon as humanly and humanely possible" (320) -- nice turn of phrase.

"When in early September Van Veen left Manhattan for Lute, he was pregnant." (325) -- a funny piece of trivia: some early editions (including some of the copies at the NYU library) have "he was pregnant" idiotically "corrected" to "she was pregnant." Anyway, this parting shot for Part 1 is a anticlimactic parody of the climactic important of pregnancy in 19th-century fiction. (In the Darkbloom notes, VN says it's specifically a reference to Kitty Levin's pregnancy in Anna Karenina.) The genesis of a creative work is a poor substitute for a real pregnancy as a culmination to a story so concerned with sex and romance -- a fact only accentuated by the relatively minor status of the creative work in question (which we'll learn about in the next section).

7. L. Van Hubbard and the Modern Science of Mental Health (Part 2, Chapters 1-5)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Chs. 1-5)

This week's section is more varied than some. Van reads letters from Ada; writes a science fiction novel based on his patients' experiences; visits a chain of high-class brothels whose origins and peculiarities are described in more detail than we really need, thank you very much; riffs on dreams; and has an incredibly awkward reunion with Lucette.

NOTES

"I implore you for breath [sic! Ed.] of understanding" (332) -- there are several editor's notes in Ada's letters here (from the fictional, Nabokov-created editor). They call into question turns of phrase that seem like deliberate wordplay, which makes one wonder just who this editor is and whether their competence can be trusted. It also raises the question of why these particular instances of wordplay are being singled out in this wordplay-heavy book. Does the editor, for instance, have some grudge against Ada's (the character's) writing style?

"[Los Angeles, mid-September, 1888]" (332) -- Ada's "severe streptococcal ague," which made her delirious, occurred "in September, 1888, in California" (223). But if this has had any influence upon this letter, I can't discern it.

"He and I have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town" (333) -- apparently either Vegas or Reno has been replaced with a city called "Nevada" on Antiterra. Similarly, the use of the word "Manhattan" in the book seems to indicate that instead of a New York City, Antiterra just has a city called Manhattan.

"Van, you are responsible (or Fate through you is responsible, ce qui revient au même) for having let loose something mad in me when we were only children" (334) -- the idea that Van has somehow corrupted Ada will recur.

"in early Thargelion, 1888" (335) -- Thargelion is . . . apparently the second month of spring in the Attic Greek calendar? Maybe Sam can explain this reference to me.

"as they were bound to be in the long ruin [sic! "run" in her blue stocking. Ed.]" (335) -- another problematic "sic." Also, I confess I don't know what the editor means by "in her blue stocking." Has Ada herself has made this correction in blue pen? [2024 edit: huh, apparently I didn't know the term "bluestocking" (meaning "feminist") back in 2013.]

"When Van retrieved in 1940 this thin batch of five letters, each in its VPL pink silk-paper case, from the safe in his Swiss bank where they had been preserved for exactly one half of a century, he was baffled by their small number. The expansion of the past, the luxuriant growth of memory had magnified that number to at least fifty." (336) -- this seems to call into question much of the book so far, since if Van can misremember a simple fact this severely, how the hell did he remember all of the little novelistic details he's included? Van does provide an excuse for this particular case a moment later, but this is a strong reminder that we aren't supposed to take Ada as a purely factual account.

"the impeccable paranymph" (337) -- a paranymph is an attendant in a ceremony, originally an attendant to the bridge and groom in an ancient Greek wedding.

I really like Chapter 2, mostly for the fact that it sheds light on Terra, one of this book's enduring mysteries.

"In his struggle to keep the writer of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality." (339-40) -- "carmined" here could indicate that Theresa is an analogue of Lucette, a redhead.

"his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua’s last doctor" (340) -- the doctor was "Sig Heiler" (28). Darkbloom on Sig Leymanksi: "anagram of the name of a waggish British novelist keenly interested in physics fiction." The novelist in question is Kingsley Amis.

"with Theresa swimming inside like a micromermaid" (340) -- Michael Maar in his book "Speak, Nabokov" links Lucette with the Little Mermaid of the classic fairy tale. I remember very little of his discussion, but I imagine this was part of the evidence. (The Little Mermaid of the Disney movie, which long postdates Ada, was a redhead, but I can't find any indication that this was a traditional feature.)

"a sumptuously fripped up, trite, tedious and obscure fable, with a few absolutely marvelous metaphors marring the otherwise total ineptitude of the tale." (344) -- anticipates, of course, one subset of the Terran reactions to Van's later work "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle."

"Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists)" (344) -- remember that "Osberg" is an anagram of "Borges." Ouch!

"The Perfumed Garden" (344) -- this book, a "fifteenth-century Arabic sex manual and work of erotic literature" (Wikipedia), actually exists, and according to Bobbie Ann Mason is a significant source for Ada. I don't remember much about Mason's appendix on the subject, though.

Chapter 3 is something else, that's for sure. The best interpretation I can come up with is that it, or some subset of it, is an erotic dream of Van's that has been incorporated into the text. He is clearly half-asleep as he writes the end of Chapter 2. Van's sleepy state of mind may explain the sudden mentions of Eric van Veen and his dream in that section, which at that point have never been mentioned and are a mystery to the reader. If Van falls asleep with thoughts of Eric van Veen in his mind, it makes sense that he would dream of floramors. The narrative action in Ch. 3 (what little of it there is) has the sudden shifts and strangeness of dreams, and the exposition has the implausibility of the sort of "backstory" that dreams often present as given knowledge, as well as the extravagant elaborations often characteristic of sexual fantasies. Having awoken, Van recounts his dream (Ch. 3) and then, inspired, proceeds to riff on dreams in general, and erotic dreams in particular, in an imagined psychology lecture (Ch. 4).

There are problems with this. The most obvious is, of course, that if Van is doing this, why doesn't he tell us? It seems especially perverse to spend a brief paragraph on erotic dreams -- beginning with "Van's sexual dreams are embarrassing to describe" -- if in fact the previous chapter was an extended description of one. There's also the fact that the Venus club has been mentioned before, so we're clearly supposed to believe it exists, even if we don't believe every detail from Ch. 3. And although much of the design of the Villa Venus club resembles a sexual fantasy, there's actually a pre-existing justification for this in the idea that it was the sexual fantasy of a horny teenager, realized in reality after his death.

"David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction (in no way related to the Veens of our rambling romance)" (347) -- a reminder that "van Veen" is, in the real world, usually encountered as a Dutch surname. So if we want to play the plausibility game, it seems more likely that David and Eric van Veen were real names, and "Ivan Veen" a pseudonym inspired by them, than vice versa. (But since so many Nabokov characters have zany names, this is probably a pointless exercise, unless we want to call into doubt absolutely everything.)

"a chain of palatial brothels that his inheritance would allow him to establish all over 'both hemispheres of our callipygian globe' " (348) -- that's definitely the best use of the word "callipygian" I've ever seen. (Not that it has much competition.)

Note that, according to Nabokov in an interview, the image of Van holding a young prostitute in a ruined villa was the first seed of Ada the novel in his mind, and he was pleased with himself for managing to work it into the finished product.

"impeccable buttocks" (351) -- a funny phrase given the etymologically literal meaning of "impeccable": "unable to sin."

"a well-known oneirotic device" (354) -- a hint that this a dream.

"subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt" (355) -- "mountains subside and heights deteriorate."

"was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained" (357) -- compare to earlier "Adula" (168), formed by merging the names of Ada and Cordula.

"but the soft little creature in Van's desperate grasp was Ada" (358) -- this could mean several things. Most conservatively, Van is trying to recapture Ardis by imagining that prostitutes like this one are Ada. But it is also possible that this is a literal description of a dream shift: a stranger in his dream has just turned into Ada. This seems especially plausible given the way the word "Ada" comes at the end of the sentence, forming the "punchline" of the sentence and perhaps of the whole chapter. This kind of ambiguity is characteristic of Van's style (remember Demon's "wings" -- and there will be more examples).

"Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada]" (365) -- the brackets seem to indicate that this comment is from the editor, but then the lack of an "Ed." seems to indicate otherwise. Maybe Van is imitating the editor.

"At sixteen she looked considerably more dissolute than her sister had seemed at that fatal age." (367) -- the use of the word "fatal" in this book is very odd (see e.g. Ada as "pale fatal sister" [307]). How is sixteen a "fatal" age? "Fatal" can mean something like "fateful" and I assume that's the primary meaning in most of these cases. That the word has another, more common meaning provides resonance with the death motif and a link between death and fate.

"Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was "We-have-so-much-to say"; the other was 'We have absolutely nothing to say.' " (370) -- that's a good way of putting it.

"ejaculated Lucette" (370) -- the beginning (I think) of a series of silly sexual innuendoes in this scene, similar to those in the early Ardis sections. Intuitively enough, this tendency toward innuendo seems to be a hallmark of scenes in which Van is in the presence of an attractive woman and doesn't have a steady girlfriend.

"[thus in the MS. Ed.]" -- we saw this phrase once before, in Part 1 Ch. 13 (p. 79). There, too, Van wrote the start of a paragraph twice. I would conjecture that this mistake reflects the feverish anxiety that characterizes the present chapter -- which Van may be reliving as he writes -- except I don't think anything similar can be said of Ch. 13. (This could also be an indication that these chapters were written late, and thus revised relatively little before Van's death.)

"It certainly came from Lucette's sister. He knew that shade and that shape. "That shade of blue, that shape of you" (corny song on the Sonorola)." (372) -- indication that Ada writes in blue pen? (See earlier "blue stocking.")

"The mental in Van always rimmed the sensuous: unforgettable, roughish, villous, Villaviciosa velour." (373) -- sensuous words for a sensuous sensation. "Villous": "(of a structure, esp. the epithelium) Covered with villi." ("Villi": "small, finger-like projections that protrude from the epithelial lining of the intestinal wall.") "Villaviciosa" is the name of several places in Spain and the Philippines. "Velour": "A plush woven fabric resembling velvet, chiefly used for soft furnishings, clothing, and hats."

"[quite possibly, this is not remembered speech but an extract from her letter or letters. Ed.]" (374) -- this could probably be said about almost any of the speech in this book, couldn't it?

"We were Mongolian tumblers, monograms, anagrams, adalucindas." (375) -- cf. the description of Marina as experienced by Demon: "an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a geminate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations." (19)

"campophone" (376) -- could be from Latin "campus" (field) or the Greek root "kamp-" meaning "bend." The latter seems more likely, especially since "phone" is Greek and we've seen "dorophone" from Greek "hydro." It's unclear what a "campophone" is, and since it affects the radiators, it seems to be a type of dorophone.

"polliphone" (376) -- could be from Latin "pollex" (thumb) or Greek "polloi" (many, majority). (I don't actually know Greek so I could be screwing up these Greek roots.) Might also be a reference to Pollux, one of two famous twins? The phones are morphing, like Abraham Milton / Milton Abraham / Abraham Lincoln.

"Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse." (377) -- as I mentioned a while ago, Bergson seems to have been a source for Van's, and Nabokov's, views of time. (From this interview: "At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin.")

"Vandemonian" (377) -- "a white inhabitant of Tasmania," according to Merriam-Webster.

"A ribald contemporary of Justinus, the Roman scholar." (384) -- at least on Terra, this is false, as Herodas and Justin were separated by several centuries. (That's one thing that's nice about the alternate world: it gives Van an alibi for each lapse in his erudition.)

"campophoned" (385) -- back to "campophone" from "polliphone."

" 'I also know,' said Lucette as if continuing their recent exchange, 'who he is.' She pointed to the inscription 'Voltemand Hall' on the brow of the building from which they now emerged. Van gave her a quick glance -- but she simply meant the courtier in Hamlet." (386) -- Voltemand was the pseudonym under which Letters From Terra was published, hence Van's misinterpretation.

8. Cameras and Obscurities (Part 2, Chapters 6-9)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Chs. 6-9)

Ardis regained? Peeping Kim. Two sisters and a brother. Three sisters.

NOTES

"He . . . had a structurally perfect stool (its cruciform symmetry reminding him of the morning before his duel)" (389) -- Van has aesthetic standards for everything, it seems. As it turns out, if we go back to Part 1 Ch. 42 -- the morning before Van's duel -- we find the very same phrase ("He shaved, disposed of two blood-stained safety blades by leaving them in a massive bronze ashtray, had a structurally perfect stool" [309-10]). I remember Boyd pointing this out in The Place of Consciousness. Apparently some reviewers complained about the repetition, but Boyd claims that they don't appreciate the "structural perfection" of the whole book, in which repetitions have some special role. (I don't remember this part of Boyd's argument very well -- it struck me as pretty silly and hence I have retained only this, its silliest detail.)

"libellula" (390) -- "a genus of dragonflies, commonly called Skimmers" (Wikipedia). Since Van "broke down on '…ulla,' " what he's actually said is "I saw you circling above me on libel," but I dunno if that has any significance.

"denunciation of demoniac life" (391) -- presumably "demoniac life" means "life on Demonia" (similar to e.g. "earthly existence"), but the associations of the word "demon" in this book are complex and I don't really know what to make of them. There's the planet Demonia (Antiterra), V&A's father Demon, incidental uses of words like "demoniac" and "satanic," and the fact that demons are good rather than evil figures in Antiterran religion. As Maar has noted, there's a longstanding association between demons/hell and pedophilia in Nabokov, perhaps indicating that N identifies pedophilia as some sort of ultimate or absolute evil -- e.g. Humbert Humbert says that the girls to whom he is attracted have a "not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac)" nature, and in Nabokov's early poem "Lilith," the pedophilic narrator realizes in the last line that he is in hell.

"Veen and Dean" (393) -- this seems to encourage us to pronounce "Veen" to rhyme with "Dean," for symmetry -- but then see e.g. "Vain Van Veen" (299), which gives an identical push in the opposite direction.

"He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest" (394) -- someone should write an article called "The Omni-Incest Narrator in Ada."

"mossio votre cossin" (396) -- "monsieur your cousin" (Darkbloom).

"Mademoiselle n'aurait jamais dû recevoir ce gredin" (397) -- "should have never received that scoundrel" (Darkbloom).

"Sumerechnikov! He took sumerographs of Uncle Vanya years ago." (399) -- Darkbloom: "His name comes from Russ. sumerki, twilight; see also p. 43." The Darkbloom annotation for p. 43 identifies sumerki as "dusk" rather than "twilight." On p. 43 itself, we find "The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière brothers, had taken Ada’s maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a doomed youth, after his farewell concert." The Lumiere brothers were real people, the inventors of the earliest motion-picture equipment in history. This all sheds some light on Van's quip "The Twilight before the Lumières" (399).

The density of unusual words ("leering caruncula in the unreticent reticulation" [401]), and of multilingual wordplay, has increased in this chapter, possibly to accompany Ada's return to the frame.

"it was Mr Ben Wright's last petard at Ardis" (401) -- Darkbloom: "Mr Ben Wright, a poet in his own right, is associated throughout with pets (farts)." Wright was "fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina and Mlle Larivière home" (140), and in 1888 he has been replaced as coachman by a guy named . . . Trofim Fartukov (actually from Russ. fartuk, apron). This also (see p. 418) appears to be the true origin of "pet" as V&A's pet name for Lucette. It is perhaps a sign of the basic goodness of our blessed Terra that no scholar, to my knowledge, has written at any length about the intricacies of farting in Ada.

"Bright derision can easily grade, through a cline of glee, into a look of rapture" (402) -- good sentence.

"this Love under the Lindens by one Eelmann transported into English by Thomas Gladstone" (403) -- Darkbloom: "O'Neil, Thomas Mann, and his translator tangle in this paragraph." We can add "transport" to the stack of derisive replacements for "translate."

"But, in the sudden storm, calculations went to the canicular devils." (403) -- cf. "l’ardeur de la canicule" and "the ardor of your little canicule" (95). "Canicule" refers to the "dog days" of summer ("the hot period between early July and early September").

"Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre!" (406) -- Darkbloom explains all. "Foute: French swear word made to sound 'foot.' " "Ars: Lat., art." "Carte du Tendre: 'Map of Tender Love,' sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_of_Tendre )

"I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle." (406) -- trivia note: in Nabokov's last novel, Look At The Harlequins!, the protagonist, an alternate universe version of Nabokov, writes a body of work that strongly resembles Nabokov's own. His equivalent of Ada is titled "Ardis." (The actual book "was entitled at first Villa Venus, then The Veens, then Ardor, and finally Ada," according to this essay.)

"Knabenkräuter" (408) -- Darkbloom: "Germ., orchids (and testacles)."

"She married our Russian coachman . . . Oh she did? That's delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it." (408) -- why doesn't Van remember this from Ada's letter? (" . . . as your sweet Cinderella de Torf (now Madame Trofim Fartukov) used to say . . . " [334].)

"She had never realized, she said again and again (as if intent to reclaim the past from the matter-of-fact triviality of the album), that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids, whose reading consisted of Gwen de Vere and Klara Mertvago, adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis's ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle), added freshly composed lines -- naive, lackey-daisical, but heartfelt -- to cyclic folk songs. Eccentric police officers grew enamored with the glamour of incest. Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love. Nightwatchmen fought insomnia and the fire of the clap with the weapons of Vaniada's Adventures. Herdsmen, spared by thunderbolts on remote hill-sides, used their huge "moaning horns" as ear trumpets to catch the lilts of Ladore. Virgin chatelaines in marble-floored manors fondled their lone flames fanned by Van's romance. And another century would pass, and the painted word would be retouched by the still richer brush of time." (409) -- this delightful paragraph seems like a particularly overt and silly instance of the kind of tall-tale embellishment that we are supposed to imagine Van and Ada have applied to most parts of their story (to one extent or another).

Chapter 8 starts off with lots of long jeweled sentences, then descends into obscure weirdness after the Veens get drunk.

" 'Van, too, was upset,' replied Ada cryptically and grazed with freshly rouged lips tipsy Lucette's fanciest freckle." (413) -- notice how the sound echoes here (cr[yptically]/gr[azed]/fr[eshly]/fr[eckle], [graz]ed/[roug]ed, lips/tips[y], f[anciest]/f[reckle]) create the sensory impression of the words "grazing" one another.

"Nikak-s net" (415) -- Darkbloom: "Russ., certainly not."

"vorschmacks" (416) -- Darkbloom: "Germ., hors-d'oeuvres."

"in a nulliverse, in Rattner's 'menald world' where the only principle is random variation" (416) -- "menald": "speckled, variegated." Not sure what Lucette is getting at here.

"you cannot demand pudicity on the part of a delphinet!" (416) -- "delphinet" appears to be a Nabokovian coinage. It seems to be a diminutive of some "delph-" word . . . the flower genus "Delphinium"? The name "Delphine"? Suggestions welcome.

"the flat palpitating belly of a seasand nymph" (418) -- Lucette/mermaid connection.

"Thus seen from above" (418) -- the long, elaborate visual description here is the opposite of the quickly escalating action one might expect from an erotic scene like this. The joke is how far this passage is from ordinary sex writing; it's hard to imagine anyone getting turned on by it. (Which recalls the debate over whether Lolita was pornographic.)

". . . but I know somebody who is not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that's Cordula Tobacco alias Madame Perwitsky." (420) -- huh??? Google searching for "polecat slang" reveals only that in the South it means "skunk," and a "perwitsky" is apparently a "tiger weasel." No idea what she means here.

"After a while he adored [sic! Ed.] the pancakes" (420) -- OK, the editor has a point here. If this is wordplay on "ordered," it's pretty feeble. There may be an element of self-parody here -- after all this isn't too far from some of the more frivolous of Van's/Nabokov's clearly intentional jokes.

"Esmeralda and mermaid" (421) -- Lucette/mermaid.

"for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for 'life.' Ed.]" (421) -- similar to the case just mentioned. I wonder what we're meant to make of the varying frequency of editorial comments -- most chapters have none, but (e.g.) Chs. 1, 5, and 8 of Part 2 have several. Maybe this is an indication of compositional order.

"The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor)." (425) -- there's a wry nod to the nature of adolescent love in the fact that Van, though obsessed with Ada, never actually shares her central passions. First he's bored with her interest in natural history, then he's so bored with her interest in acting that he looks back fondly on the natural history phase.

"I seem to have always felt, for example, that acting should be focused not on 'characters,' not on 'types' of something or other, not on the fokus-pokus of a social theme, but exclusively on the subjective and unique poetry of the author" (246) -- Reminder Number (n+1) That We Are Reading A Vladimir Nabokov Novel

"In 'real' life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void" (426) -- cf. Lucette's "in a nulliverse, in Rattner's 'menald world' where the only principle is random variation" (416). As before, I'm not sure what we are supposed to make of this idea. There's a recurring idea, I think, that Antiterra is variegated/motley/diverse, perhaps in a "random" way ("the multicolored and evil world into which he was born" [301]). Rattner's "menald world" is presumably Antiterra. Does Terra, by contrast, possess some sort of unity or harmony?

"so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters" -- this (technically just "Three Sisters") is in fact the title of the real play on Terra. Much of the rest of this chapter probably makes more sense if you've read the play . . .

"We all know those old wardrobes in old hotels in the Old World subalpine zone." (430) -- but of course!

"the rose sore of Eros alone" (431) -- oh my god, this is a double anagram and a really good phrase in its own right. Picture me as Sweet Bro stricken with awe.

9. The Many-Worlds Interpretation (Part 2, Chapter 10 to Part 3, Chapter 4)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Ch. 10 to Part 3, Ch. 4)

Where Part 1 ended with a parody climax, Part 2 ends with a real climax -- in fact two real climaxes, the latter of which is suddenly defused in one of this weird book's weirdest moments.

Then, after a lurching fast-forward through many Ada-less years, we get yet another cringe-inducing encounter with desperate Lucette in Part 3 Ch. 3. At this point, Van's refusal to indulge Lucette's desires is beginning to seem almost perverse; it's understandable that he doesn't want to lead her on when he doesn't love her, but that kind of consideration hasn't stopped him from becoming involved with other women. For much of the book Van has come off simply as an amoral aesthete, but as we near the end, he is -- between the blinding of Kim and his conduct with Lucette -- starting to seem like something much worse.

This raises a number of questions: how are we supposed to feel about the coming Van-Ada reunion (which we know is happening because of Ada's annotations to the manuscript) if Van is such a bastard? And why, when Van makes up numerous details (e.g. in the Ardis chapters) that he couldn't possibly have remembered, does he allow himself to come off so badly in the latter parts of the book? If he has no commitment to strict factual accuracy, why not just twist the facts to make himself look better in the Lucette scenes? It would be one thing if Van's guilt over his own mistakes were a major theme of his book (and it may in fact be, in some hidden sense), but Van is curiously silent on these issues, as though expecting the reader to take his bad behavior in stride. Issues like these make this book (to me) both fascinating and intensely creepy in a way that would not be possible if Van's flaws were dealt with more overtly.

NOTES

"He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling." -- Demon's wings again.

"The only personage they had not reckoned with was the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel" (433) -- so Antiterrans depict Death roughly the same way Terrans do, despite the differences in religion.

"but [Dan's] death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch." (433) -- Dan, like Aqua, has descended into madness before dying. There is a symmetry to this: each of V&A's parents has a sibling (of the same gender) who has died in this way, and madness is now attested to on both the Durmanov and Veen sides of the family. There is an antisymmetry in the content of the madness -- Aqua dies dreaming of heaven-like Terra, while Dan dies haunted by visions out of Bosch's depiction of hell. (According to Boyd the reference here is to Bosch's triptych The Last Judgment. Demon brings up "that other triptych," the Garden of Earthly Delights; Mason's book contains some discussion of The Garden of Earthly Delights as a broader influence upon Ada.) Have Van or Ada inherited the mental illness that plagued their aunt and uncle? (Who are their putative mother and putative father -- and what's the significant of that?) It's interesting that Nabokov encourages us to think about this possibility just before the bizarre ending of Part 3.

"might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey . . . but Cordula was not dull and had not been present" (434) -- Van invents a thought process for Demon, then disputes it. The point of contention is odd, since Cordula has come off as pretty "dull" in all of Van's own accounts of her thus far.

"looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance)" (434) -- a nice statement of Van's broader MO.

"According to Bess (which is 'fiend' in Russian)" (435) -- actually, it means "demon" (e.g. Dostoyevsky's novel "Bésy," usually translated "Demons").

"how incestuously -- c’est le mot -- art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet" (436) -- this remark of Demon's calls back to the peculiar phrase " 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure" (19) used to describe Demon's enjoyment of his mistress Marina's similarity to his wife Aqua.

"what we have to study [in Bosch], as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice" (437) -- hilarious.

"Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken" (438) -- the real name of Hieronymus Bosch.

"hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im" (438) -- the Russian is "to hell's hounds" or "to the canine devils" (so roughly the equivalent of "hell curs"). "Canicule" may be relevant here (Ada/hell connection)? The Russian phrase appears two other times in Ada, translated differently each time: "hydrodynamic telephones and miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach'im (Russian 'to the devil')" (23), and "But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach'im, to hell's hounds" (151).

"Norbert von Miller" (440) -- mentioned earlier by Marina on p. 261.

"Kim who would have bothered Ada again had he not been carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood" (441) -- so Van did blind Kim after all. (That Van actively did this -- that Kim wasn't just a casualty of coincidence like Percy and Rack -- is confirmed at the end of the chapter.) Boyd, in The Place of Consciousness, makes much of the fact that this gruesome detail is mentioned almost in passing and could easily be overlooked in a book with so many lurid incidental details. To fully grasp the nastiness of Van's character, we must pay attention.

"his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov" (443) -- an play by Pushkin titled "Boris Godunov" was adapted by Mussorgsky into an opera, so this calls back to the bad Eugene Onegin adaptation Demon watches in Part 1 Ch. 2.

"My first is a vehicle that twists dead daisies around its spokes; my second is Oldmanhattan slang for 'money' " (444) -- a "van" is certainly a vehicle, though I can't find anything online about "veen" as slang for money.

"My second is also the meeting place of two steep slopes." (444) -- "ravine"?

"Right-hand lower drawer of my practically unused new desk -- which is quite as big as Dad’s, with Sig’s compliments." (444) -- this Freud joke is one of the several details in this passage that remind us of Aqua's suicide.

"Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened -- or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. Anyway, what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples." (445) -- moment of instability! In the poem Pale Fire, the phrase "[And here time forked.]" appears shortly before Hazel Shade's suicide. In this passage the idea of forking time is used to illustrate a suicide attempt that Van doesn't go through with. But is that all? The idea of changing to a different time track, in which Van is holding a comb rather than a gun, could just be a colorful way of saying that Van putting down the gun. But given the resonances of madness that have build up in the course of this chapter -- and Van's enduring interest in the nature of time -- this could well be more literal than that. One interpretation is that the rest of the book from hereon out is fantasy, and the novel is an elaborate suicide note.

"There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do." (446) -- elaboration of the earlier moment of instability, and a return of the "dream" motif that taunts the reader throughout Ada. On one level, this could be a simple statement that Van is ready to end the chapter (and Part 2) rather than ramble about further in an effectively inexhaustible trove of relevant memories. If we want to adopt something like the "suicide note" theory, this is instead a statement that other alternative futures -- in which Van does not commit suicide -- can be imagined, but the one he has started to sketch here (in which he blinds Kim, is reunited with Ada, etc.) "will do" -- and indeed it forms the basis of the remainder of the novel.

Time has moved more quickly in each successive section of Ada. Part 1 covers four years and takes up half the book. Part 2 does five years in half that length. Now Part 3 Ch. 1 fast-forwards through seven years of Van's life in a few pages. As a reader, it's easy to forget just how much time is elapsing here, and it can be illuminating to remind oneself of it. For instance, the meeting with Greg and Cordula in Ch. 2 seems like a relatively minor scene, not too different from many of the earlier scenes involving secondary characters -- but it is only the second event (after Marina's death) in seven years that Van has deemed worthy of relating in any detail! The most obvious explanation for this is that Greg and Cordula are people he remembers from his Ardis days, and so they are important to him -- and to the central story of this book -- in a way that many of the events of this period were not. (Moreover, it is Greg who tells Van that Lucette is in town, and thus precipitates his much more significant meeting with her.) I also wonder, though, whether Van's feelings for Cordula aren't deeper than he has let on (which would explain that defensive [?] "Cordula was not dull" earlier).

"Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited." (450) -- another suggestion that Van and/or Ada are destined to end up on Terra ("You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man" [241]).

"She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five." (457) -- as before with Cordula, the language here is blunt and unromantic.

"Invitation to a Climax" (459) -- this parody of the title of another VN novel invites one to think about "beheading" as a metaphor for male orgasm.

"For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. . . . a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily [sic] postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman" (460-1) -- this description of Van standing behind Lucette is meant to remind us of a famous Toulouse-Lautrec poster.

" ' . . I’m like Dolores—when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air." ' 'Never could finish that novel -- much too pretentious.' " (464) -- a joke about Lolita, of course. The phrase "only a picture painted on air" doesn't get any Google hits that aren't related to Ada, incidentally.

"It’s safer and faster by plane" (465) -- as far as I can tell, this is the first mention of planes on Antiterra. (Flight of some sort has always been possible there, however, by means of the "jikkers.") Planes appeared earlier in Aqua's visions of Terra: "she saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea" (21), so this is one indication that (because of the temporal discrepancy between the two worlds) Terran visions can actually foretell what will happen on Antiterra. Several details in this chapter and the next seem to indicate that electricity has recently been unbanned (another noted feature of Terra was that electricity was used freely).

"I have an important, important telephone call to make, but I don’t want you to listen" (466) -- "telephone," not "dorophone," since they're using electricity now.

" 'That’s rich,' said Lucette, 'you’ve gone far enough with me on several occasions, even when I was a kid; your refusing to go further is a mere quibble on your part; and besides, besides you’ve been unfaithful to her with a thousand girls, you dirty cheat!' " (467) -- this all seems pretty undeniable . . . indeed, as I said above, Van's refusal to become involved with Lucette has grown to seem almost perverse given the rest of his personality.

"What was he? Who was he? Why was he? He thought of his slackness, clumsiness, dereliction of spirit." (471) -- both the introspection and the self-criticism in this chapter are utterly atypical of Van, though it wasn't until I encountered them here that I realized just how absent they've been from the preceding 470 pages.

"In his sadder moments, as now, he attributed at least part of his 'success' to his rank, to his wealth, to the numerous donations, which (in a kind of extension of his overtipping the haggard beggars who cleaned rooms, manned lifts, smiled in hotel corridors) he kept showering upon worthwhile institutions and students." (471-2) -- this, for instance, is startling. Until this point, money has very rarely entered Van's thinking (except when e.g. he tells Demon that he isn't financially dependent on him because of his inheritance from Aqua), and his judgments of value have tended to align frictionlessly with the striations of aristocratic rank (e.g. Cordula, whom he doesn't much respect, is "quite a notch below our set" [330], to say nothing of the way he treats various servants, maids, etc). It's hard to imagine the entitled, amoral Van we know agonizing over whether he really deserves his success (if that is indeed what is happening here).

10. Rolling in the Deep (Part 3, Chapters 5-8)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 3, Chs. 5-8)

Interviewer: There seem to be similarities in the rhythm and tone of Speak, Memory and Ada, and in the way you and Van retrieve the past in images. Do you both work along similar lines?

Nabokov: The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. It is a familiar embarrassment that I face with very faint qualms, particularly since I am not really aware of any special similarities -- just as one is not aware of sharing mannerisms with a detestable kinsman. I loathe Van Veen.

(Source: 1969 interview with Time magazine)

Things are starting to become clear -- at least in a sense.

Lucette's death in Part 3 Ch. 5 is arguably the central scene of the book, and it rearranges our conception of everything around it. Lucette begins to seem more important than she had originally seemed (in this book entitled "Ada" -- not "The Veens," which was one of Nabokov's working titles). There is a reality to her plight and Van's shame in that chapter that is lacking in many of the Ada scenes, particularly in the unconvincing and artificial reunion with Ada that follows in Part 3 Ch. 8. Moreover, much of the book's thematic skeleton seems to have radiated outward from Lucette's death rather than from anything having to do with Ada.

Consider, for instance, the influence of Lucette's watery death on Part 1 Chapter 3, in which Van first begins to explicitly lay out the nature of Antiterra. Van's putative mother, really his aunt (just as Lucette is merely a half-sister), named Aqua, encounters a series of comedically negligent psychologists and kills herself by taking an overdose of pills. In Aqua's vision of Terra, people freely use electricity, but on Antiterra electricity is banned, and the only consequence that is mentioned with any frequency over the course of the book is the banning of telephones -- such as the electric telephone on which Van has his shameful conversation with Lucette just before her death. (They have been replaced with devices that use water.) The chapter opens with the sentence:

"The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen." (17)

Electricity is banned (which pretty much means "telephones are banned") because of "the L disaster" -- and now we can be pretty sure what that "L" really stands for! The book is addressed to "lemans" (lovers) rather than "gravemen": Van is saying that he plans to write about the love between him and Ada, not the grave matter of Lucette's death. But as we know, Van can't seem to keep either death or Lucette from intruding into his chronicle. By Part 3 the original plan seems to have derailed, and in Part 3 Ch. 5 the book reaches its climax in, yes, a "treatment at length" of "the details of the L disaster."

"Gravemen" brings Hamlet to mind, which in turn brings to mind Van's comparison of Lucette to Ophelia. Van's refusal to sleep with Lucette is indeed kind of Hamlet-like. Van explains his behavior not as assumed madness but as a supposed concern for Lucette's own well-being. But this concern clashes with the amoral and sexually uninhibited nature of the Van Veen we have known so far, and ends up seeming as strange as Hamlet's behavior. One could say that Van's interactions with Ada are over-analyzed, and his interactions with Lucette are under-analyzed. My hunch is that the latter are more true to life, and that Van's relentless "concern" for Lucette makes more sense in some real context which he does not deign to give us, instead turning away from Lucette again and again to focus on Ada.

Compared to the intensity and reality of the Tobakoff chapter, the scenes with Ada that close out Part 3 are thin, dull, and artificial. The sense of unreality is heightened by the mentions of "life forking" and Van's fake death. Even by the rather unreal standards set up in earlier V&A scenes, these interactions feel out-of-character: Ada is saddled with some very un-Ada-esque lines ("The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?" [530]), while Van's lines are jarringly corny ("Castle True, Castle Bright! Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!" [ibid]). Plausibility -- even plausibility of Van Veen's peculiar sort -- is fraying at the seams; Van's heart just doesn't seem to be in this anymore. The book is almost over, and we know that Van and Ada will (at last!) be reunited by the end . . . but with so little of the book left, there is no hope that this reunion will be a romantic triumph rather than a shambling, perfunctory stumble across the finish line.

Given the significance of telephones in Ada, I'm inclined to think that Van's phone conversation with Lucette might be the very center of the book:

"No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him: 'Mozhno pridti teper' (can I come now)?” asked Lucette. 'Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),' answered Van. A small pause followed; then she hung up." (491)

"I'm not alone" -- the lie that is at the root of all of Van's shame? It's this kind of thinking that leads me to my favorite theory of Ada: that Van only had one sister, who was basically Lucette. Ada Veen, Van's perfect double, is an invention made to justify statements like that "I'm not alone," when in reality Van is alone with only his shame over Lucette's death as company. ("Lucette" comes from "Lucile," the name of Chateaubriand's beloved sister. "Ada" is a palindrome, a mathematical contrivance, a mere mirror-flipping of the Vs in "Van Veen" -- and born from Van's torment ["of hell"].)

NOTES

"Professor Counterstone" (474) -- play on "Antiterra" (stone/earth).

"His gaze, traveling on, tripped over Dr. Ivan Veen and pulled up at the next name. What constricted his heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips? Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought they could explain everything." (475) -- an interesting twist on the "old novels" motif. Ada as a whole presents itself as a man's self-conscious attempt to cram his life story into the conventions of "old novels," and now here is a detail that he feels he can't fit into the mold.

"Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain!" (477) -- huh?

"To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open-air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts" (477) -- could be a reflection of the Antiterran climate getting colder at the latitude of Ardis. Then again, it could just be a cold day.

"Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs" (477) -- "Spring in Fialta" is the title of a famous Nabokov story. Note also "Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up" (477).

"Van peeled off his jersey and stayed on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the platinum sun in its aura of “film-color” but only managing to fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil temptation." (482) -- temptation here is "evil" . . . strange how normally dissolute Van hews to something like a moral principle in this one case, with no clear motivation and with disastrous consequences. Why?

"He discovered an insidious omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible -- to an automatic reader -- since the truncated end of one sentence, and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted to form a syntactically correct passage" (484) -- since the book we are reading is an incompletely edited manuscript, the suggestion seems to be that this sort of insidious error might also be present in it. Maddening!

"had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his typescript) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly)." (484) -- from Augustine's Confessions. Seems to underscore how out-of-character Van's stoicism is, since Van and Augustine are normally polar opposites in many respects (e.g. self-esteem).

"It’s crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating jazzband." (484) -- amusing nod to the origins of the word "jazz."

"As he gloomily looked at her thin bare shoulders, so mobile and tensile that one wondered if she could not cross them in front of her like stylized angel wings" (485) -- interesting parallel to Demon's wings. Remember that Lucette, unlike Van and Ada, doesn't have "demon blood."

"He could describe her dress only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches)" (486) -- struthious: "of or relating to the ostriches and related birds." You learn something new every day.

"Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg’s novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit)" (488) -- recall that on Antiterra, Osberg (anagram of Borges) is the author of a book that resembles Lolita.

One can probably a lot of interpretive mileage out of "Don Juan's Last Fling," the movie that Van and Lucette watch. Low-hanging fruit: is Van (rhymes with Don) himself sort of a combination of Don Juan and Don Quixote, like the protagonist of DJLF?

"In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord)and using a temporary expedient less far-fetched than that hit upon by Father Sergius (who chops off the wrong member in Count Tolstoy’s famous anecdote), vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years ago." (490) -- both first and third person appear here in the same sentence, perhaps a sign of Van's state of agitation while writing this passage. I'm not sure what "succession of words" he's referring to. Is there a rhyme in this sentence or somewhere in the surrounding passages?

"He welcomed the thought which suddenly seemed so absolutely true, and new, and as lividly real as the slowly widening gap of the sitting room’s doorway, namely, that on the morrow (which was at least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl’s brother, that he knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work, and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a brief affair and because Ada was still a child." (491) -- the similarity of Van and Lucette's situations is interesting. As an excuse for not becoming involved with Lucette, this is pretty transparently feeble, since Van is still so clearly invested in getting back together with Ada.

"At that point the surface of logic began to be affected by a ripple of sleep, but he sprang back into full consciousness at the sound of the telephone." (491) -- if Van invented Antiterra, then it's possible that stye presence of telephones (not dorophones!) at several important moments late in the book, such as this one, gave Van the idea that telephones should be banned in the earlier parts of the story. (Remember that telephones were banned on account of something called "the L disaster." It's now becoming quite clear what that "L" probably stands for.)

"No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him: 'Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?' asked Lucette. 'Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),' answered Van." (491) -- seems like a crucial moment, perhaps the seed of the many earlier descriptions of Van and Ada's unique similarity, symmetry, etc. This shameful statement can perhaps be vindicated if Van is somehow always not alone, because of the very existence of his double/twin/soul mate.

"Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne" (493) -- Darkbloom: "Sunday. Lunch on thé grass. Everybody sticks. My mother-in-law swallows her dentures. Her little bitch, etc. After which, etc. (see p. 375, a painter's diary Lucette has been reading)" [my copy says 375, which by our pagination here should be around 479-80, but I'm not sure if that's right?]

"Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet" (493) -- "Violet" appears to be Van's typist. Their interactions have been typed verbatim in this passage -- why?

"As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude." (494) -- good sentence; cf. Van's "I'm not alone." Interesting and unnerving that Van has made up the experiences related here, since he can't possibly know Lucette's actual final thoughts.

"She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook" (494) -- reference to the brook scene in Part 1 Ch. 23. Of course the doll swept away by the current foreshadows the means of Lucette's death. Boyd, who seems to have taken that "unanalyzable" as a challenge, devotes much of The Place of Consciousness to the doll scene and its echoes.

"As a psychologist, I know the unsoundness of speculations as to whether Ophelia would not have drowned herself after all, without the help of a treacherous sliver, even if she had married her Voltemand." (497) -- the replacement of Hamlet by Voltemand (an ambassador and very minor character in Hamlet) is a reference to Van's use of Voltemand as a pseudonym.

"In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet Lucettes are doomed." (498) -- important for the Terra/Antiterra divide.

"Cher ami [etc.]" (499) -- the Darkbloom notes translate Cordula's entire letter (which is in French -- why?): "Dear friend, my husband and I, were deeply upset by the frightful news. It was to me - and this I'll always remember - that practically on the eve of her death the poor girl addressed herself to arrange things on the Tobakoff, which is always crowded and which from now on I'll never take again, slightly out of superstition and very much out of sympathy for gentle, tender Lucette. I had been so happy to do all I could, as somebody had told me that you would be there too. Actually, she said so herself; she seemed so joyful to spend a few days on the upper deck with her dear cousin! The psychology of suicide is a mystery that no scientist can explain. I have never shed so many tears, it almost makes me drop my pen. We return to Malbrook around mid-August. Yours ever." There is a very Nabokovian twist to the statement "the psychology of suicide is a mystery that no scientist can explain" -- it sounds like a banal commonplace at first, but in fact Van's inability to foresee Lucette's suicide is a major source of shame.

"[This letter] would not have been written at all if your last line, your cry of unhappiness, were not my cry of triumph." (500) -- the "last line" in question is "I cannot express, dear Van, how unhappy I am, the more so as we never learned in the arbors of Ardis that such unhappiness could exist." Why is this a "triumph" for Van? Simply because it is a restatement of the supposed Edenic innocence of Ardis?

"Artistically, and ardisiacally, the best moment is one of the last" (500) -- cf. the much more opaque "esthetically, ecstatically, Estotially speaking" (30).

"And o’er the summits of the Tacit / He, banned from Paradise, flew on: / Beneath him, like a brilliant’s facet, / Mount Peck with snows eternal shone." (502) -- Darkbloom: "parody of four lines in Lermontov's The Demon."

No clue what to make of the strange "Andrey Vaynlender" letter.

"Mont Roux" (508) -- a version of Montreux, the region of Switzerland where Nabokov lived while writing this novel. "Roux" means red, so this might be a Lucette reference?

"Vrubel’s wonderful picture of Father, those demented diamonds staring at me, painted into me." (509) -- refers to Vrubel's paintings of the titular figure from Lermontov's poem "Demon." (See e.g. "Demon Seated in a Garden.".) "Demented" resonates with the early identification of "Demon" as "a form of Demian or Dementius" (4).

"and on the opposite shore of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex (Scex) Noir, Black Rock." (509) -- cf. the first sentence of Part 1 Ch. 3: "The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen." (17)

"A dead and dry hummingbird moth lay on the window ledge of the lavatory. Thank goodness, symbols did not exist either in dreams or in the life in between." (510) -- cf. "You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!" (530)

"His reply was inept, and the whole episode had a faint paramnesic tang—and next instant Van was shot dead from behind (such things happen, some tourists are very unbalanced) and stepped into his next phase of existence." (510) -- what the fuck? Perhaps Van is simply contending, in jest, that another meeting with Ada could not happen except in heaven and thus that he must be dead. But this is also another intimation of unreality, or potential reality, like the mention of "life forking" at the end of Part 2 and at the end of this chapter.

"cygneous" (511) -- "curved like the neck of a swan." Cf. Lucette's "struthious" dress.

"As Andrey’s crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister’s naric codicil." (513) -- "naric": "of or relating to the nares [the pair of openings of the nose or nasal cavity]." So a "naric codicil" would be a sort of "supplement" to the nasal openings.

"During that dismal dinner (enlivened only by the sharlott and five bottles of Moët, out of which Van consumed more than three) he avoided looking at that part of Ada which is called “the face”—a vivid, divine, mysteriously shocking part, which, in that essential form, is rarely met with among human beings (pasty and warty marks do not count)." (516) -- good sentence.

"(A pause.)" (517) -- Darkbloom: "This and the whole conversation parody Chekhov's mannerisms."

"in my works, I try not to ‘explain’ anything, I merely describe." (519) -- perhaps applicable to Ada itself, Van's final "work."

"and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening." (520) -- Darkbloom: "Olorinus: from Lat. olor, swan (Leda's lover)."

"Somebody said, wheeling a table nearby: “It’s one of the Vane sisters,” and he awoke murmuring with professional appreciation the oneiric word-play combining his name and surname" (521) -- reference to "The Vane Sisters," a famous Nabokov story in which the first letters of the words in the final paragraph carry an acrostic message from the beyond.

"Rufomonticulus" (522) -- presumably the Latin name of Mont Roux.

"Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon." (523) -- cool sentence.

" 'Ne ricane pas!' exclaimed Ada. 'The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?' " (530) -- this whole exchange, though presented as a kind of tragic culmination of Van-Ada exchanges (e.g. with the recapitulation of the "Qui me rendra" stuff), seems oddly out-of-character: Van's lines are self-parodically Romantic while Ada's are unusually simple and banal.

"As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell." (530) -- good sentence!

" 'Castle True, Castle Bright!' he now cried, 'Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!' " (531) -- the Tree might be the Shattal Tree, or perhaps the tree that Ada stands with her back to in Part 1 Ch. 39 (p. 272), and which later forms an integral part of the agonizing image of her that Van carries away with him when he leaves Ardis in 1888. The Moth could be one of the various moths Ada enthuses about at Ardis in 1884, or the dead moth mentioned earlier in this chapter?

"Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet" (530) -- V&A's two summers in Ardis (1884 and 1888), their time in Manhattan, and now their rendezvous in Mont Roux.

"Ach, perestagne!" (530) -- intentionally or not, this provides a new variant: "Ach, perestagne" replaces "Et ma montagne" (138).

"Life forked and reforked." (531) -- this again.

11. And Much, Much More (Part 4 to Part 5, Chapter 6)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 4 to Part 5, Ch. 6)

If Van Veen were to record a hip-hop album -- under the name "Mascodegama," of course -- it would be titled "The Texture of Rhyme." Possible subject matter: being the youngest Venutian, blinding Kim Beauharnais, the important difference between his own sick flow and the non-passage of Pure Time . . .

So now we've come to the end. There is all kinds of weird stuff going on Part 4 and Part 5. First we have Van's philosophical treatise (which espouses views very close to Nabokov's own and seems to have been intended as an attempt at serious philosophical writing, however silly much of it may strike me and various other readers). Then we have Part 6: a bizarre, at times rapturous but just as often petty and underwhelming account of Van and Ada's last years together.

What should we make of the fact that, faced with decades of romantic satisfaction to describe, Van tells us about the bodily annoyances of old age and the charms of his cute typist (and the "gipsy girl" next door)? Is he simply asserting that his and Ada's connection is ineffable, mystical, impossible to explain to non-Vaniadans? (Whereof Van cannot speak, thereof he must be silent? Ada's final line in Part 4 supports this interpretation, if we take the entirety of Part 5 to be the completion of her sentence "It is like -- ": Vaniadan experience is as ineffable as Time.) Or is Van giving up, pencilling in the very crudest sketch of a "happily ever after" ending that he knows is totally unconvincing? His suggestion that he has regained the earliest days of Ardis -- "Their life together responded antiphonally to their first summer in 1884" (574) -- is belied by the formal design of the novel, as Part 5 is the shortest of the Parts, the most sparing with detail. Time's arrow remains undefeated. How can he be so vague when describing recent months when he was so fantastically precise about stuff that happened when he was 14? Is this how memory really works? Surely not.

We are adrift. What on (anti-)earth did we just read? The hilarious ending, in which Van (?) imagines a blurb that sells Ada as a work of grand entertainment, simply underscores how far we are from anything resembling an ordinary novel. The text seems to be Van's attempt to squeeze his life story into the novel format (specifically, into the form of a big, dramatic Russian classic like Anna Karenina). There are numerous indications that he is willing to go to great lengths of invention. It is pretty much impossible to take the story straight; it continually pokes and prods the reader with its own implausibility, instability, inconsistency ("Abraham Milton / Milton Abraham / Lincoln"). In some tricky novels there is a clear "standard model" from which one can defiantly deviate (e.g., in Pale Fire, the various "Shade invented Kinbote or vice versa" theories are replacements for the basic interpretation of the book that any ordinary reader comes to, in which S and K are real, distinct people). Ada, by contrast, has no stable top layer -- and perhaps no bottom. As readers we have to figure out what in Van's story is real and what is invented. But to do so, we must speculate about the psychology of the "real Van" -- and that psychology will depend on our opinions about what is real and what is invented!

An ideal start for someone contemplating these problems is David Auerbach's blog post "Kinbote Triumphant in Hell: The Riddle of Nabokov’s Ada." It's where I've gotten a lot of my own ideas about the book, like the significance of Lucette's last call. I'll just quote a few paragraphs here:

I won’t attempt to figure out precisely what is real and what is not in the book because I don’t think I stand much of a chance, but I will make some broad guesses. I am inclined to be extremely skeptical of the mostly unchronicled decades of happiness with Ada, as well as of the success of Van’s book. The happier the events, the more dubious I am. The tragic events–Lucette’s death being the central one–most likely hold greater reality. Ada’s intrusions throughout, but especially at the end of the book, seem more likely to be a voice within Van, not an actual person. I think it highly unlikely that Van and Ada are ever happily reunited. Nabokov did not intend to redeem Van Veen through suffering, but particularly in the later novels, Nabokov’s rotten characters do tend to be spared any real happiness. I strongly suspect that to be the case here. The idyllic, hermetic, and very long Part 1 is a pastiche or a parody of the 19th century Russian novel. Inverting Tolstoy’s maxim turns it into a joke. Hence from the beginning Van is protecting himself and not being straight, and the offputting nature of the whole text is a reflection of Van’s solipsism. He is building a sealed coffin for himself that he intends no one to penetrate. He will avoid unpleasantness as much as possible, even at the cost of making himself unpleasant. With each subsequent section things get more miserable, the length gets shorter, and different strategies of avoidance are invoked. The late years of happiness with Ada are more likely years of self-torture, any success in love or life a delusion on Van’s part. By Part 4, he has abandoned plot in favor of mere allusions to wish-fulfillment and philosophical self-indulgence. At his supposed happiest he is least able to describe anything that happened to him.

(Auerbach ends up speculating that the text might actually have been written by Andrey Vinelander, which strikes me as almost uniquely unlikely . . . )

Ada is my favorite Nabokov novel, and probably tied for my favorite novel overall. In the end, it's one of the darkest and creepiest novels I've ever read, precisely because of the bottomlessness of its potential horror. Other books tell us about nasty characters and nasty situations; this one merely shows us a bunch of fanciful wishful thinking and leaves us to guess the real situation from which it is as escape (with plenty of suggestive references to hell, in case we need some general pointers). It is a closed system, standing securely upon its own head, self-contained, self-referential, self-possessed. There is a risk in this. The book is purely itself, and Van is purely himself, from the first page to the last. It does not provide a convenient ledge on which the author and reader can congregate and snicker at the far-off characters. It's written in third person (because that's how Van wrote it); there is no voice there untouched by Van's, no world untainted by Antiterra. As Auerbach puts it:

. . . we don’t see anything pushing back against Van Veen. All opposing forces tend to dissolve away sooner or later. The marshaling of fantasy to defy reality becomes a structuring principle of the book even to the point of alienating readers from it, lest they crack open Van’s coffin and discover his secrets. Where there is little reality, there is little sympathy to be had, hence the uninvolving nature of so many of the characters, not least Van himself. While Van puts up a good front to a point, ultimately he knows he’s not fooling anyone with his “happy family chronicle.” What starts off in Part 5 as the joyous introduction ends with solipsistic torment in a self-fashioned hell. And what better analogy for a solipsistic world than incest?

Or, as Martin Amis puts it, under the impression that he is criticizing the book rather than pointing out one of its design features:

And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien – a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts: a world where "nothing matters", and "everything is allowed".

But I love the closed system of Ada because it feels real, in the sense that it feels psychologically authentic. People really do create great systems of private associations like this; people really do neurotically rearrange and sanitize their memories like this. We all have it within us to fetishize the past like this, to take a few key moments and make of them an Ardis that exerts a grotesque influence on our lives -- one which ends up having less and less to do with real arbors or Adas. And when we do this it is not simple or straightforward; it is not pleasant to read about; it is the kind of convoluted, obsessive, opaque, obscure personal mythology that Auerbach calls "uninviting" and that we find all throughout Ada.

And of course the book is gorgeously written -- in a way that is often obscure but never feels obscurantist. I remember one reviewer saying that they enjoyed every sentence in Ada, even the ones they didn't understand; this seems to apply more generally to every aspect of the book. Even when I have no clue what he's doing, I never feel like Nabokov is just trying to fuck with me. Every element of the closed system is authentic, on the unique terms of that system.

The final words of the book are a characteristically brilliant flourish: Nabokov finishes off his hilarious parody of ad copy by repurposing an advertising cliche -- "and much, much more" -- so as to lend it a new meaning that is stunning, moving, and even terrifying in a sort of Lovecraft way. How many strange and unsettling details this book contains! How many the reader must undoubtedly have missed! (The blurb encourages the reader to go back and re-read.) This book teems. "And much, much more" -- too much! Too much!

To remind us that there's always (much, much) more to discover, I'll let the master have the final word -- and in the process claim "loathed" Van Veen as one of his "favorites" (?):

I wonder if there is really so much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that’s obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters -- in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera– are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel -- and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.

(Nabokov, interviewed for Bayerischer Rundfunk, 1971)

(Okay, okay. One last thing from me. The book opens with the following note: "With the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Oranger, a few incidental figures, and some non-American citizens, all the persons mentioned by name in this book are dead. [Ed.]" Who are these "non-American citizens"? The phrasing seems to imply that they are not "incidental figures," yet I can't think of any characters of any importance, besides the Orangers, who might have outlived the Veens.)

NOTES

"novo-sapiens" (536) -- seems like it should be "novus-sapiens," but I guess Nabokov/Van wanted the similarity in sound.

"Man, in that sense, will never die, because there may never be a taxonomical point in his evolutionary progress that could be determined as the last stage of man in the cline turning him into Neohomo, or some horrible, throbbing slime." (536) -- reminiscent of the speculations about quasi-mystical future forms of mankind that were popular in science fiction at the time (e.g. in Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End").

"One can be a lover of Space and its possibilities: take, for example, speed, the smoothness and sword-swish of speed; the aquiline glory of ruling velocity; the joy cry of the curve; and one can be an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration. I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." (537) -- nice passage.

"Aurelius Augustinus" (537) -- Saint Augustine, whose discussions of the conscious experience of time are similar to Van's.

"The direction of Time, the ardis of Time, one-way Time, here is something that looks useful to me one moment, but dwindles the next to the level of an illusion obscurely related to the mysteries of growth and gravitation." (538) -- and yet the directionality of time has been one of the main themes of the whole book. Van gives up the game when he uses the word "ardis." Maybe he doesn't intend irreversibility to fall within the scope of this treatise, but when that treatise is written as an account of his journey toward his final and lasting reunion with Ada, surely irreversibility can't be truly irrelevant . . . ?

"The irreversibility of Time (which is not heading anywhere in the first place) is a very parochial affair: had our organs and orgitrons not been asymmetrical, our view of Time might have been amphitheatric and altogether grand, like ragged night and jagged mountains around a small, twinkling, satisfied hamlet." (538-9) -- or, in cross-section, something like a "V" shape.

"But beware, anime meus, of the marcel wave of fashionable art; avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun (itself a suicide -- as those who know their Verlaine will note)." (540) -- a flurry of spurious references (Augustine, Proust, Procrustes, Verlaine) that seems intended to warn by example: puns and allusions will get you nowhere in this business, no matter how fun they are. Darkbloom: "assassin pun: a pun on pointe assassine (from a poem by Verlaine)."

"We, poor Spatians, are better adapted, in our three-dimensional Lacrimaval" (541) -- for "Lacrimaval" Google only turns up full text versions of Ada. Presumably it's a version of "Vale of Tears."

" 'Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,' says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher ('Martin Gardiner') in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165." (542) -- an Antiterran reversal of the real fact that, on Terra, Martin Gardner (not "Gardiner" as in the text) quoted John Shade in his book The Ambidextrous Universe. The appearance of John Shade (invented poet from Pale Fire) as a real person in Antiterra is Nabokovian fan service along the same lines as Professor Pnin's cameo appearance at at the university in Pale Fire.

"Minkowski" (542) -- mathematician who contributed to special relativity and first introduced the modern/relativistic version of four-dimensional space-time.

"At this point, I suspect, I should say something about my attitude to 'Relativity.' It is not sympathetic. What many cosmogonists tend to accept as an objective truth is really the flaw inherent in mathematics which parades as truth." (543) -- astonishingly, Nabokov himself actually believed this. ("While not having much physics, I reject Einstein's slick formulae; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist." [1968 BBC interview]) Since he loved mimicry and other trickery in biology, it's surprising that he didn't see the same appeal in the way that the strangeness of relativistic space-time hides behind a nicely intuitive Newtonian veil until one gets close to light speed.

"Alice in the Camera Obscura" (547) -- seems to be a mixture of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Camera Obscura," the original title of the Nabokov novel usually called "Laughter in the Dark." Also an allusion to Kim taking pictures of Ada? Another example of shifting Antiterran names, since on p. 53 the Antiterran equivalent of Carroll's book was "Palace in Wonderland." (See also "Ada in Wonderland" [127], "Ada's Adventures in Adaland" [568] -- which leads us to conclude that Van is working from something like the actual earthly title, since where else could he have gotten that "Adventures" from?)

"Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu" (549) -- compare to this from Ch. 3: "A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes" (27).

"Now blows the wind of the Present at the top of the Past -- at the top of the passes I have been proud to reach in my life, the Umbrail, the Fluela, the Furka, of my clearest consciousness!" (549) -- as one might expect from context, these are all passes in Switzerland.

"Here they are, the two rocky ruin-crowned hills that I have retained for seventeen years in my mind with decalcomaniac romantic vividness" (551) -- "Decalcomania, from the French décalcomanie, is a decorative technique by which engravings and prints may be transferred to pottery or other materials. Today the shortened version is 'Decal'. " (Wikipedia)

"He transmitted by the new 'instantogram,' flashed to the Geneva airport, a message ending in the last word of her 1905 cable" (552) -- unless I'm missing something, the word is "rainbows"? (508)

"Now it so happened that she had never -- never, at least, in adult life -- spoken to him by phone; hence the phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vibration, of her vocal cords, the little 'leap' in her larynx, the laugh clinging to the contour of the phrase, as if afraid in girlish glee to slip off the quick words it rode." (555) -- another significant telephone call, and another possible source for the banning of telephones -- although this one isn't connected with the "L disaster" in any way I can discern, and the psychological motivation for inventing a ban on telephones would be less clear here.

"lucubratiuncula" (559) -- "The act of working by night; lucubration, nocturnal study, night work." (Wiktionary). Apparently it's a diminutive of another Latin word meaning the same thing? "A little night work"?

" 'To be' means to know one 'has been.' 'Not to be' implies the only 'new' kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future." (559) -- more Hamlet. Also, I wonder what Van's denial of the existence of the future (expressed here and earlier) has to do with the themes of the novel? Perhaps nothing: at various points in Parts 4 (like the irreversibility comments mentioned above), Van dismisses as irrelevant certain issues that are very relevant to the novel's story, as though Nabokov is trying to tell us that we're supposed to read this as an actual, serious philosophical treatise rather than a thinly veiled expression of personal anxieties. But then it's hard not to deem it significant that these thoughts about the future come right after Ada's departure . . .

"But the future remains aloof from our fancies and feelings. At every moment it is an infinity of branching possibilities." (560-1) -- more of the "forking" motif, though it's not clear to me what this claim has to do with Van's deadpan (though presumably? non-literal) descriptions of branching possibilities earlier in the book.

" 'I told him to turn,' she said, 'somewhere near Morzhey ('morses' or 'walruses,' a Russian pun on 'Morges' -- maybe a mermaid’s message). And you slept, you could sleep!' " (562) -- Darkbloom, uncharacteristically, points out something that should already be clear: "mermaid: allusion to Lucette." Boyd, in The Place of Consciousness, goes wild with this idea and claims that Lucette, acting from beyond the grave, actually told Ada to turn back. He would later espouse an analogous theory of Pale Fire. Yes, according to Brian Boyd that is the secret of both these books: when women commit suicide they come back as ghosts who send the protagonists helpful messages. I'm sorry, but I don't exactly find this kind of thing adds much to the books . . .

"My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction." (563) -- I might be reckoning this wrong, but my impression is that Part 4 begins the process of "disintegrating again into bland abstraction" after Ada leaves, and the only thing that prevents Van's original plan from running to completion is the eucatastrophic final reunion.

"I wonder if the attempt to discover those things is worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it. It is like -- " (563) -- what is the significance of this? Is Ada completing the "reversal of analogies" by supplying her own analogy, hence completing Van's original plan after all (and thus reconfirming the fundamental unity between Van and Ada)? Is Nabokov inviting us to consider the whole of the following Part 5 as an account of something unknowable? ("It is like [Part 5]"? Or perhaps "it is like [the many years skipped between Parts 4 and 5]"?) IIRC, Look At The Harlequins! ends, with a dash, in the middle of a sentence of dialogue; I wonder if the same is true of some of the Nabokov novels or stories I haven't read.

"This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle." (567) -- interesting choice of proportions. Note how the notion of Part 5 as the "true introduction" works as an instance of the time-reversal motif, and also as a nod to Nabokov's idea that books can only be truly appreciated upon re-reading. Having reached the final Part of Ada or Ardor, the reader is finally ready to be "introduced" to it.

" 'matches the highest forms of human thought—pure mathematics & decipherment' (unpublished ad)." (567) -- though diminished by that "(unpublished ad)," this is an uncharacteristically -- and pleasingly -- positive reference to the pleasures of mathematics, about which Nabokov otherwise had little good to say.

"a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the “funnies” of his boyhood" (570) -- perhaps meant to recall "the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed)" (5-6). There are a number of references in Part 5 to the very early sections of the book. The beginning and the end are one: the tips of the "V" or "A."

"the bedside light (a gurgling new surrogate -- real lammer having been forbidden again by 1930)" (572) -- another callback to the beginning: " the extremely elaborate and still very expensive hydrodynamic telephones and miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach'im (Russian 'to the devil') with the banning of an unmentionable "lammer." (There Darkbloom glosses "lammer" as "allusion to electricity.") The re-banning of electricity is produces an A-D-A. (And now that the two significant telephones calls had passed, what purpose could it serve on Antiterra / in Van's story?)

"Their life together responded antiphonally to their first summer in 1884" (574) -- confirms what had been implicitly made clear.

"An overwhelming tenderness impelled him to kneel suddenly at her feet in dramatic yet utterly sincere attitudes, puzzling to anyone who might enter with a vacuum cleaner." (574) -- another instance of overly romantic corniness. These seem to cluster near the end of the book; it's hard to imagine young Van doing anything like this, even in his imagination.

"She was (and still is -- ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump […..]" (576) -- it's not clear to me whether the editor has omitted something or is merely expressing, through indicated silence, his offense at this comment about his wife.

"she had supported for ten years her mother’s children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]" (576) -- but apparently Ronald Oranger doesn't want us to know what. (What does this mean? Am I just being dense?)

"this strange, friendless, rather repulsive nonagenarian (cries of “no, no!” in lectorial, sororial, editorial brackets)." (577) -- strange: who did write this? And hasn't it been quite a long time since we saw a note from Ada? (If I'm not mistaken it was back in Part 2 Ch. 2, p. 338, about Letters From Terra: "I disagree, it’s a nice, nice little book! Ada’s note.")

"one of his last papers (1959) entitled The Farce of Group Therapy in Sexual Maladjustment" (577) -- a joke about the threesome scene.

"Ada, who amused herself by translating . . . John Shade into Russian and French" (577) -- John Shade on Antiterra again.

"E, p, i -- why 'y,' my dear?" (578) -- Darkbloom explains that this is Violet trying to spell the word "epistemic," which occurs earlier on this page.

"That work [The Texture of Time], she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park." (579) -- another callback to the beginning. Suggests that a certain appreciation for the subtle "texture" of conscious experience is a key part of V&A's connection to one another. (Remember Ada's towers/bridges system?)

"They found the historical background absurdly farfetched and considered starting legal proceedings against Vitry—not for having stolen the L.F.T. idea, but for having distorted Terrestrial politics as obtained by Van with such diligence and skill from extrasensorial sources and manic dreams." (581) -- and yet the account of earth history given here is much more accurate than the one that Van gives in LFT (described in Part 2 Ch. 2).

"in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position" (581) -- this death, along with the scope of the project ("some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors") link the LFT film with the real-life film Ben Hur.

"From the tremendous correspondence that piled up on Van’s desk during a few years of world fame, one gathered that thousands of more or less unbalanced people believed (so striking was the visual impact of the Vitry-Veen film) in the secret Government-concealed identity of Terra and Antiterra. Demonian reality dwindled to a casual illusion. Actually, we had passed through all that. Politicians, dubbed Old Felt and Uncle Joe in forgotten comics, had really existed. Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago -- they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general." (582) -- I'm sure CML would take me to task if I didn't point out that this is reminiscent of the Borges story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." It's also a huge moment of instability, and perhaps the most frustrating instance of the ambiguity between literal and figurative in Van's style (e.g. Demon's wings, forking time). Is Van merely saying that the dreams of Terra were surprisingly prophetic, and that Antiterra as of the 1960s is surprisingly similar to the Terra envisioned by patients in the late 19th century? Or is he simply giving up the whole game and declaring, with infuriating insouciance, that the whole story took place in the real world after all? (Incidentally, the period on Terra corresponding to V&A's last years on Antiterra would be . . . the 2010s, i.e., now. To channel C again: "Far out, man, far fuckin' out.")

"Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. . . . The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes. Hard but not insurmountable (I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands)." (583-4) -- the presence of the concept of death even in the earliest parts of the book is here confirmed. (Compare to Van's attempt to disclaim this side of the story: "a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen" [17]).

" 'As lovers and siblings,' she cried, 'we have a double chance of being together in eternity, in terrarity' " (583) -- cf. this from p. 158: "I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go." "Terrenity" (unlike "terrarity") is a real word, meaning "Earthiness; worldliness."

"And I knew a girl called Adora, little thing in my last floramor. What makes me see that bit as the purest sanglot in the book?" (584) -- perhaps the fact that that scene was the first one Nabokov came up with for the book, as he revealed in an interview.

"And finally, there is the featureless pseudo-future, blank and black, an everlasting nonlastingness, the crowning paradox of our boxed brain’s eschatologies!" (585) -- good sentence!

"And if you land then on Terra Caelestis" (585) -- "caelestis" means "heavenly" or "celestial" in Latin. May be a reference to "Harmonia Caelestis" ("a cycle of 55 sacred cantatas attributed to the Hungarian composer Paul I, 1st Prince Esterházy of Galántha (1635–1713)" [Wikipedia])?

"She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed—a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern." (585) -- seems like a strong suggestion that Van's happy life with Ada is invented? (But of course Ada is saying this as a 12-year-old, and the "eighty years" here are the whole rest of the story.)

The lines given on p. 585 are indeed lines 569-572 of the poem "Pale Fire" (from the novel Pale Fire). I don't know what non-metrical significance the omission of the "boths" could have (claimed by imagined Freudians on p. 586).

"Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right -- I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!" (586) -- what should we make of this acknowledgement? If V&A acknowledge their responsibility in Lucette's death, then why hasn't it had more of a footprint in the book? (Of course, it probably has, just covertly.)

"whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America -- for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams?" (588) -- a possible justification for the invention of Antiterra. Note the double meaning of "principle part" (also a grammatical term) -- part of a motif about how textual/verbal the Ada world is ("old novels," etc).

"Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the 'Ardis' part of the book." (588) -- the reminiscences in question are presumably Tolstoy's "Childhood, Boyhood, Youth." Also, "innocence" is (at least in one sense) a hilarious word to use for the randy Veens.

"That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages." (588) -- I love the awkward, ugly language here: "possesses an aspect prohibited by law."

"Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book." (588) -- the cloying cliche "tragic fate" seems to mock the intuitively appealing interpretation that Lucette's death is supposed to be the emotional climax of the book. This sentence itself parodies the awkwardness of trying to hawk fictional tragedy as an appealing experience -- "tragic" clashes with "highlights" and "delightful."

"It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country." (588) -- more hilariously awkward/platitudinous language.

"They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere." (588) -- the word "villa" and the innuendo in "erected" remind us of a different set of villas, the Villa Venus club.

"Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail" (589) -- you can say that again.

"a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook" (589) -- Lucette's doll lost in the brook again ("the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook" [494]).

"and much, much more" (589) -- see above (in every sense!).

[gunnerfc]

🎄WOSO FICMAS: Dec. 19 - Stina Blackstenius🎄

Stina Blackstenius x Reader (Arsenal & USWNT) | WC: 751

Dec. 19 prompt - getting snowed in

-> all translations from google!

-> woso ficmas masterlist can be found here!

You were excited to be spending Christmas in Sweden with Stina and her family, having spent the last Christmas in America with your family. The two of you have spent the past two days packing, wanting to make sure you didn’t forget anything essential or anyone’s presents.

You planned to leave for the airport in the morning, wanting to arrive in Sweden a few days before the holiday to have more time to spend in the country. With packing done and bags by the door ready to go bright and early, you and your blonde girlfriend both exhausted from running around all day decided to go to bed a bit earlier, opting to get as much sleep as possible.

It was around 6:30 am when your alarm went off, signaling it was time for you to get up. With a tired groan, you reached for your phone, trying to turn the annoying alarm off. You smiled down at your sleeping girlfriend, hating to have to wake her up.

You lifted your hand to move a piece of blonde hair from her face, leaning down to give her a quick kiss on her forehead before whispering her name a few times. Your smile grew as you watched her eyes finally flutter open.

“god morgon min älskade (good morning, my love),” you whispered, your voice still heavy with sleep.

“god morgon älskling (good morning, darling),” Stina whispered back, sitting up to give you a quick kiss.

The blonde sat up fully to stretch her arms before getting up to go get ready for your day of travel. You watched her the whole time, You're sure you looked like the human version of the heart eyes emoji. When the bathroom door closed, you picked up your phone to double-check your check-in time at the airport. Instead of a flight confirmation, you were met with a cancelation, the reason saying “weather-related cancelation.”

With wide eyes, you shot up from your bed, moving to look out the window. Pulling back the curtains that kept the light out, you were now looking at the ground heavily coated in snow and it continuously falling from the sky with no sign of stopping.

“Babe!” you shouted, eyes still wide in shock over the amount of snow that had fallen while you were asleep. You had checked the weather the night before, not seeing anything about potential snowfall. The bathroom door flew open, your girlfriend’s eyes just as wide as yours.

“Vad?! (what?!)” Stina’s voice full of concern.

“I don’t think we’re going to Sweden,” you mumbled, eyes still trained on the white-covered yard.

You heard your girlfriend mutter a quiet “what” as she walked to the window, coming face to face with the snow. You held up your phone to show her the cancellation of your flights. These fights were found last minute and with no idea of when the snow would be melting, you doubted you would be spending Christmas in Sweden after all.

As you watched your girlfriend’s eyes scan your phone, you saw her bite her lip in an effort to stop tears from forming in her eyes. You pulled the phone from her hands, tossing it on the bed and pulling the blonde into your arms.

“Jag är ledsen, älskling. (I’m sorry, darling/babe.)” you said softly, knowing how much Stina was looking forward to going home for the holidays with you.

Stina pulled away from your body, giving you a small smile and a whispered “it’s okay.”

The Swede moved to get her phone from where it was plugged up on her nightstand, leaving the bedroom to call her family to let them know about the change of plans. You could hear the sadness in her voice as she spoke over the phone. You might not have been able to go to Sweden for Christmas but you were determined to bring ‘Christmas in Sweden’ to London.

You spent the rest of the day googling different Christmas traditions and even texted your other two Swedish Arsenal teammates to get their opinions. You spent the rest of the days leading up to Christmas making sure that your girlfriend felt at home as much as possible. And when Christmas morning rolled around, you made sure to get up first to video call Stina’s family. It wasn't the same as actually being in Sweden but Stina was grateful for the effort you put in to cheer her up. The two of you could always go next year.

[ungrateful-cyborg-moved]

DT spoilers

Between those saying that nothing was imperfectly done in the writing of DT and its characters and those unhappy with anything and everything, I feel like an aspect that gets quite overlooked is why the story couldn't have been written with the WoL as the central character.

We're asked to come to Tural not because the people are in immediate danger but because an idealistic princess fears for what might happen if one of her brothers wins the Rite of Succession.

It's vastly different when we get embroidered in a political mess in a heavily corrupted nation (Ishgard) or come to help a people in immediate danger against a threat only us can deal with (Thavnair) than when we're here to mentor/accompany a royal heir.

We come to Tural firmly on the side of the statu quo and for the WoL it's quite frankly a novelty.

So yeah. Obviously, Wuk Lamat is the one who had to be at the center of the story. It's *her* country, in more than one way. And she's the one who we want on the throne, so obviously we're not going to act in her place. She has to prove herself, even once she's Dawnservant.

But in my opinion, most of the criticism wouldn't have happened if the stakes hadn't been world shattering after the coronation.

Because saving shards is very much *our* job. Whereas if the danger Zoraal Ja had posed was simply that he meant to invade the North America of Etheirys rather that the entire world, and if Sphene had only kept her eyes on Tural instead of the Source AND its shards, Wuk Lamat remaining the focal point of the story would have felt a lot more in line with what was at stake.

I have other issues such as the Scions 'stealing' lines from the WoL that would have made us feel more mentor-y/knowledgeable/more useful overall, but I really feel like most of what people blame on Wuk Lamat's writing is actually a problem of scaling in the second half.

[drysaladandketchup]

hi! sorry you can absolutely delete this if u don’t feel like answering or anything cause this is kind of vent-y (?) and isn’t like… actually a question but i am SO annoyed at some hockey fans and how they decide to treat leon. i am german and i live in america and the way leon gets treated in fanfictions and hockey discourse gives me serious flashbacks on how i am treated here. ik leon speaks perfect english but i wish people remembered that that’s still his second!!! language!!! it’s not his native language!!! sometimes he will come across differently then he actually is!!! his words will get twisted and he will be misunderstood because it’s not his native language!!!! every time he’s described as pissy and arrogant and rude (in a genuinely rude way) a vulnerable german kid living in america dies… 😔😔😔 and then the mattdrai fanfictions (admittedly i have not read that many because im just a not a big fan of the pairing but it was one of the main ships that got me into the fandom) i just hate that he seems to be so villainized (?). i might be biased (i am) lol but i am soo sick of it rrrr sorry sorry this got way too long. you just spoke about it before so i felt like you might understand where i'm coming from. peace

Oh my dear anon, people continuing to personify Leon as arrogant, emotionless, and rude is becoming my villain origin story. I'm happy to vent alongside you. I have talked about this before, and it does still bother me when I see it. Because I'm biased too. I love this guy haha.

Just for context, I'm Canadian, born and raised, and as of yet haven't lived in another country where I've had to fluently speak a second language or adjust to a culture I was not raised with. So I am by no means someone who can speak on that experience. But I'm sorry you've faced that kind of judgment.

I've written my thoughts on this subject before, here and here, so I'll try not to rehash everything I've said in the past. But as you say anon, I do think Leon is woefully misunderstood. He himself has said he thinks he's misunderstood, and that he comes off as too direct at times, that it's, 'probably the German in me.' He speaks English perfectly well, very fluently, and he's been living in Canada so long it would be weirder if he wasn't culturally affected and adjusted in some way. But he's still very much German; socially, culturally, linguistically. You don't just lose one entirely just because you've been exposed to and entrenched in another.

Sometimes he says things that can come off differently in English than probably intended, or at least that are easily misinterpreted by a North American audience, but that's a far cry from being 'pissy', as he's been branded by fans and media alike (also as an aside even people speaking their first language get their words mixed up and twisted sometimes, so I think we should just cut everyone some more slack when speaking maybe?).

And look, admittedly I've called him bitchy at times in my tags, as a joke, because yeah like literally any other person on earth, sometimes he says or does something that is snarky or poking fun or off-brand humour. But that's not inherently bad, nor is it inherently German. That's just part of his personality, a singular behaviour in a singular moment. I don't genuinely think he's an angry or aggressive or mean person. I think he's literally just a human being with multitudes.

His occasional tone of voice or his sometimes blunt way of speaking or his sarcastic sense of humour--things that could at least in part be because of his being German but are also not at all exclusive to or ubiquitous among Germans--is why some people make him out to be this aggressive or mean-spirited person, but like... obviously that is not only not true if you pay even an ounce of attention to him beyond a few choice soundbites and clips, but it's also insulting in general. As you say, people assuming the worst of you simply because of differences in communication or expression is the farthest thing from okay. Insinuating that he's brutish or emotionless or rude because he's German is obviously bigoted. It's xenophobic. Not to mention, as you said, it just makes it that much harder for other Germans to approach this audience without fearing they'll be judged the same way.

Now, obviously I don't know the guy personally, I only know what of him is public, but he seems like the farthest thing from rude or standoffish or arrogant. He really isn't any different from any other player (skills not withstanding), but for some reason he doesn't seem to get the same leeway between his on-ice persona and his off-ice persona, or from one instance to the next. For some reason, he's held under this microscope and reduced to his 'worst' moments more than a lot of other players I've seen. He does anything without a smile on his face or makes even one joke or comment that's less than flattering (or falls flat due to language differences), he's immediately made out to be a bad guy.

And to touch on mattdrai, which I do love a lot--and it's okay if it's not something you're into anon, you don't have to justify what you do or don't like :)-- I've said before that I think Matthew and Leon aren't always written very true to life. And I totally agree with you that the issue I sometimes see with Leon's characterization is that he is written like he's arrogant and lacking in emotion (at least outwardly), sometimes even acting like some overly-aggressive bully, and that's just so far from the reality that we know. And yes, some writers, like some fans, actively point to the fact that he's German to explain that. As if that's just how all Germans are, by nature of being German. Which, as I said and as you know anon, is so many kinds of wrong and horrible.

Yes yes he does dumb things on the ice sometimes and he and Matthew (and others) have exchanged shoves and whacks and chirps over the years. But again, if folks watched literally anything with Leon outside of those moments, they'd know that those are incidents, not his whole personality. I'm not over here pretending like he's never done anything wrong or questionable or stupid, but who hasn't? He's not a villain for that. Just like he's not perfect. We're all human.

Oof sorry anon this response got away from me a bit lol. Sorry if this got a little off topic, but I am nothing if not someone who rants and rambles. This topic drives me nuts; I can only imagine how upsetting and frustrating it is for you, as a German living in America.

But my ask box is always open for venting <3

[johannestevans]

Peace in the New World

Short fiction. Moshe and Yosl discuss life after work. 

2k, rated T. Two Jews talking over tea in late 19th century USA. Bonding over poverty, philosophy, old trauma, that sort of thing. 

CW for mentions of past abuse, although oblique. Adapted from a TweetFic. 

On Patreon / / On Medium.

---

Yosl worked these days down by the docks – he was a very big man, muscular, with very strong hands, and he looks like a dockworker. He never looked out of place amongst them when Moshe saw him at the dockside or walking with the other big, burly men about the streets.

When they’d taken him on as a lodger, he’d been a little nervous of him, had thought he might be brash or a lush, but Sprintze had said that that some of the other dockworkers’ wives spoke well of him, that he was kind, respectful, and Sprintze’s judgement was always good.

He’d still scarcely been able to believe it the first evening he’d come home from his own work and seen him sitting at the table in their small living room, working so delicately with his big hands. He had been the son of a bookbinder, had worked alongside him in his shop before coming to America, and he took on little jobs here and there.

With a lot of time dedicated to his craft and a great care taken with his pens, he wrote out astonishingly beautiful calligraphy on good cardstock, and it took Moshe’s breath away sometimes to glance over at the work he was doing, the art he was creating.

He wrote out fine wedding invitations or little decorative cards, wrote out poems or sections of the Torah, and alongside the fine and lovely lettering, he could draw small etchings, would occasionally add in elements of gold or silver filigree, or splashes of colour.

“Do you miss it?” Moshe asked one evening.

They had been sitting in companionable silence for a little over an hour, Esther already laid down to sleep – she’d been struggling with bad dreams of late, and Sprintze was in with her, perhaps reading or sewing if she wasn’t asleep herself, no matter that it was so early.

“Miss what?” Yosl asked without looking up from his work.

“What it was like,” Moshe said. “The Old Country. You had different work there, work like this, creating beauty. You didn’t have to live as a lodger.”

“No, I lived in a sprawling library from one hill to the other,” said Moshe dryly, and Yosl laughed, looking down into his evening drink and shaking his head.

“I’m not disparaging your work at the docks, I’m sorry if it—”

“No, it’s not disparaging,” Yosl said. “This is fine, educated work, more respectable than hauling cargo at the docks – but work there’s little call for here in America, not enough to fund a man’s life or account for a family. Why shouldn’t I miss the comfort or respect my old life might have offered me?”

“Do you?”

“Sometimes,” Yosl said. “But my father dying, I could not stand it, to live there, in the grief, in the shadows he left behind him. I respect the things he taught me, the skills he carried with me – I carry on his legacy when I do these little things here and there – but to step into his shoes, to take on the whole shop for myself? For people to think of the sign as being my name, and not his?” He shook his sadly, setting aside his pen. “I could not stand it. The Sefer Hasidism warns us against wearing the shoes of the dead – would I not be filling his shoes, to take his place? His memory haunted me, not as an unclean or cruel spirit, but just as so much grief.”

Moshe exhaled, leaning forward and looking at the other man properly as he rested his hands on his belly. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“No, don’t be sorry,” Yosl said, giving him a small, sad smile. “It’s good for a man to speak on his grief to another, I think – my father was a great man, principled, studied. It is that I loved him so much that I could not stand to live in the shadow of his loss. And in any case, as a practical concern, the time a bookbinder can make a living even in Poland, I feel that time is soon at an end.”

“Perhaps,” Moshe said. “It’s beautiful work, what you do, but slow, old. There is not much care for that here in America.”

“No,” Yosl said. “The New World, they call it, but it’s not just here, is it? The whole world is changing – evolving, developing. The old ways, too slow, too old-fashioned, too high-strung, too buttoned-up.”

“People are impatient, demand more speed, more haste, more rush. Why not more beauty?” Moshe asked, and Yosl chuckled.

“One for the rabbi, I think, not for me,” he said, and Moshe laughed as well. “Your father, does he live?”

“No, but we had a great deal of forewarning before his death, he’d been a very ill man,” Moshe murmured, rubbing his knuckles through his beard. “It doesn’t make the loss of him easier to bear, I feel the emptiness he left behind sometimes, the shadow of him, as you say, but at least it wasn’t sudden. We had time to grieve him while he was alive, I suppose you might say – and to share in it with him, which I think brought a little solace.” He felt a twinge of old guilt, as he did from time to time. “Does that sound awful, involving a man in our grief for him?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Yosl said. “What is grief but love at its end? How can it be anything but a privilege to share in it?”

“You’re a very soothing man, you know,” said Moshe. “As good as Reb Levinson.”

“But my mouth doesn’t dimple when I smile like his does,” Yosl pointed out, and they both laughed, taking care to keep it quiet so that the sound didn’t carry.

As Yosl picked up his card and blotted it, setting it aside to dry, Moshe said, “Sprintze said you’ve been teaching Esther. I wanted to thank you.”

“No need for that,” said Yosl. “She’s a good student, a good learner.”

“She’s a girl,” Moshe said, and he watched the shrug of Yosl’s broad shoulders, watched his expression scarcely change at all. “Why teach her? What do you think she’ll do with it, what you teach her?”

It was an experimental question, a test of sorts, and Moshe wondered if Yosl knew that Moshe was testing him, if he was pressing on him. If he did, he showed no sign of it.

“Whatever she wants,” the bookbinder answered simply. “I didn’t make the word, I was only taught it – now, I teach it. What she does with it is her own business. Argue scripture with her husband, if she wishes – teach their children.”

“A lot of men wouldn’t think to waste time teaching another man’s daughter this sort of thing,” Moshe said. “They dismiss a little girl with no thought at all.”

“I’m just one man, not a mean of them,” said Yosl, and it made Moshe laugh again, although he took care to muffle the sound with his sleeve. Yosl’s cheeks didn’t dimple when he smiled, but his eyes crinkled in a very pleasant way.

“You been to the marriage broker?”

“No,” said Yosl. “Why, want rid of me?”

“We need a lodger’s rent – and you have the money for it, but I don’t know what you got it for a wife.”

“Too true.”

“But you don’t want one?”

“I don’t have the money, you said.”

“Still.”

Yosl said, after a few more seconds of quiet, “I could be a husband, I think, but not a father. And I wouldn’t deny a woman motherhood.”

“You teach my girl – but you couldn’t father your own?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My father…” Yosl began, and then stopped, breathing in very slowly. “He was a bad man.”

“But you said—”

“Principled, studied, a great man, all of those things, yes. I grieve him, I do, but he was not a good man. Your father, you said, was loving, mine was… Mine was not.”

Moshe reached out and touched the other man, squeezed his shoulder, and he didn’t comment on the slight mistiness of Yosl’s eyes. Half-jokingly, he asked, “What happened to honour thy father, eh?”

“I honoured my mother,” Yosl said. “Half the job is enough for me.”

“They must love you at the docks.”

“They do, in fact.”

“Esther loves you too,” Moshe said, smiling. “Sprintze says you dote on her.”

Tension showed in Yosl’s thickly corded neck, in his shoulders, and as Moshe walked past him to rinse out his cup, Yosl turned his head to look back at him. “Moshe,” he said. “Are you angry?”

“Angry?” Moshe repeated. “By God, no. You think I’m angry? My daughter has a mother and father to love her – now another to teach her, and a smarter man than me.”

“I’m just the lodger.”

“The lodger who dotes on my daughter and repaired the stove for my wife before I came home from work.”

“Sprintze’s a dutiful wife.”

“She is, and a very good one.”

“I mean nothing untoward.”

“I know you don’t – she says you don’t look at her.”

“I do.”

“No.”

Yosl didn’t seem to know what to say to that. His brow was furrowed, his expression serious. Moshe and Sprintze had talked a little more about this in private, on nights when Yosl was out overnight.

“He did something awful to you, your father,” Moshe said.

“Things, multiple, yes.”

“Things that would make you…” He didn’t know what words to use. He and Sprintze could use certain words amongst themselves, but even then, he wouldn’t use them elsewhere.

Moshe is hardly the most pious of men, but he’d asked the rabbi’s son for advice on the subject – Reb Levinson himself was too old, would never have known how to approach it no matter his nice dimples, but his son was wise enough.

“Things that would make you unable to be a husband,” Moshe said. “To, er… fulfil your duties.”

Yosl’s expression softened, and he exhaled. “Not in the way I suspect you’re imagining,” he said quietly, with a glance toward the door, but there had been no sound from where Sprintze and Esther were settled in bed. “But yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s a shameful thing.”

“I don’t see the shame in it. You love, you teach, you write. You honour your father no matter his sins, his cruelties toward you.”

“How would you know shame, Moshe? What have you got to be ashamed of?”

“I’m poor, ain’t I?”

“Pah. Only in money.”

Moshe grinned at him, and Yosl smiled back. He wasn’t a big drinker, but when Moshe took down two glasses from the shelf instead of one, he didn’t make his customary protest. He took the glass as offered and stared down into it, at the strong spirit Moshe poured within.

“L’chaim,” Moshe said.

“I’d say l’chaim and v’l’vracha,” Yosl said, “but I feel pretty blessed.”

“What, we’re rich enough to be turning down blessings now?”

“We?” Yosl repeated wryly, but he smiled as he clinked their glasses together, and they knocked them back as one. “You should take one in for Sprintze,” he said – Moshe’s hand was already on the bottle, and they had to stifle their laughter to keep from waking up the whole building when their gazes met.

* * *

Sprintze took the glass when Moshe stepped into their bedroom, and she held it in her lap as she watched him undress, easing off his clothes. She had been sewing, Moshe supposed – her needlework was now set aside, but the lantern was still lit, albeit dimmed.

“That man is a blessing, you know,” Moshe said.

“I’ve been saying, haven’t I?” she responded softly. “L’chaim,” she murmured, and drained the glass, setting it beside her sewing.

Moshe leaned over Esther’s sleeping form to kiss her on the head before climbing into bed beside his wife, banding an arm around her belly.

“We should get a bigger bed,” Sprintze murmured.

“You don’t want a bigger apartment first?”

“You didn’t say no.”

“S’pose I didn’t,” said Moshe. “He’s gonna be working all night. He was picking up another card to start on when I came in here.”

“Whichever of us wakes up in the night first, tell him to bed down,” she said.

Moshe couldn’t see her well in the dark as she turned off the lantern, but he could brush their noses together, and he kissed her lips, stroking his thumb over her cheek.

“Deal,” he murmured. “But if I tell him and he argues—”

“I’ll come out and whip you both,” she finished, and Moshe muffled his laugh this time against her neck.

FIN.