"When the lamp of art is made to shine"

One of the things that I loved about living in Ithaca when I studied at Cornell was that Nabokov had once lived and worked there. Somehow, in that isolated cow-town, brilliant ideas were born and given flight into the world, and knowing that made those long years endurable, especially when I learned that he perfected the slang in Lolita by riding around on the local bus and listening to teenagers talk.

Tonight I was looking for details on one of my (admittedly lesser) hobbies, collecting butterflies under glass, when I stumbled across Zembla, a beautifully comprehensive website devoted to Nabokov. It serves as the online presence for the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, and notes, "Members join the Society by subscribing to The Nabokovian, so that there is no membership fee as such."

I just signed up for the listserv! Dreamy. See also: "Nabokov Under Glass," an exhibition of papers from the Berg Collection.