Chasing Lolita:How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again, Graham Vickers 2008 covers a lot of ground (book, movies, Horner) covered in more depth elsewhere but I read it in a couple hours and learned a lot.
Like how horrible Kubrick's choice of Lyons was. Lolita should not be even marginally sexually attractive to the rest of us, and wasn't in the book. Adrian Lyne did better.
I still don't. Unsurprisingly, "Lolita" is a trigger word for our net nanny. So will bow out for the nonce as the Compliance Officer is pinging me on IM.
Lolita bothers me a lot
1st the book has a literal level, and the attempt of feminists to appropriate it and concretize it, to make the book opaque ("this is not a metaphor or allegory") interests me as symptomatic.
Because Nabokov's recurring theme of the personal Romanticization of idiosyncratic/transgressive desire and obsession (Luzhin Defense, Pale Fire) can be tough to generalize. And leads to self-critique.
But I still feel there is another level I'm missing.
Speaking of unreliable narrators . . . I got thoroughly distracted by apurportedly factual journalistic account misplacing Interstate 78 by over 100 miles, and putting it in a county that doesn't have an interstate. Also, Roxborough and Wissahickon are neighborhoods in Philadelphia, not towns.
This is completely unrelated to anything but unfogged.com seems to have a bug where whatever the last post to have an image was - well, that image stays cached in feedly and illustrates every post for like 2 weeks after. Right now it is the very creepy British elf flower lady and I NEED IT TO STOP.
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For the record, the Green Crack was meh, the Wifi very nice, the headband even better, and the Bruce Banner #3, well, BB3 is the alltime world record holder. The candy was useless so don't care about the brownies. I need a smoking rush. Seven grams lasted a month, the best month of my life. For less than $100 dollars.
Listened to a fuckton of Sarah and Shinkansen and it was indeed trippy. I knew I had good taste. Oh, and my vast collection of long slow blues and Gillian Welch.
All gone. Don't know if it will ever happen again. Don't much mind.
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7: If on Windows, try ctl+F5 (original tip from teo several years ago).
I also enjoyed (if enjoyed is the right term for such a sad story?) the article. I had not realized the novel was inspired by a real-life account.
That seventh-grade report card is so bizarre! here's a girl who has been abducted by a creepy predator (with whom she now lives as a "daughter:" ugh), and the nuns are grading her on Conduct and Spelling and Arithmetic.
I had not realized the novel was inspired by a real-life account.
Nabokov always scorned people who tried to read political commentary or references to real-world events into his novels. There was an interesting book that came out a year or two ago, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer, that argued that he actually had a lot of subtle references to very specific historical events in his books. Maybe this is another one.
... and I can't deny the fact that you I'm useful, right now, I'm useful!
Your're engaging in witty repartee on a blog. What could be more useful than that?
Oh I can think of a lot of them as well, but thought maybe you could usefully come up with some that I hadn't thought of.
In fact I hereby propose it as a benchmark for measuring utility. ROPMAWBR: Rat Orgasms per Minute Above Witty Blog Repartee. (Or below,)
Your're engaging in witty repartee on a blog. What could be more useful than that?
Badinage.
24 has the witty response I wish I had thought of.
Anyway, I just read the article linked in the OP. I've never read Lolita, but I was strongly affected by the fact that the events narrated took place in the same early-twentieth-century working-class South Jersey environment that my grandmother grew up in and fled from as soon as she could for the mid-century UMC Philadelphia environment in which she raised my mom and her other children. Her alcoholic father would occasionally show up on her doorstep asking for money. I don't think she ever gave him any.
25: Are you engaging in self-deprecating persiflage?
This seems like a somewhat inappropriate thing to post given seriousness of the story in the OP, but the rat orgasms as measurement of utility kind of reminded me of some MRA-type who seriously had calculated a cost-per-orgasm or something like that, where he divided the amount of money he spent on a date by the # of orgasms he had, and then dumped a woman if it went over a certain amount. He was trying to convince all men to calculate their CPO. I just thought, human relationships....ur doin it wrong.
One Weird Trick Most 12-Year-Olds Have Figured Out to Lower Your CPO.
Thought after finishing a feminist analysis of Roeg's Bad Timing
Part of the problem I have had with Lolita is trying to see why that narrative is categorically different than all the other narratives of obsession:Maugham, Proust, Adele H, etc. I have been generous to feminists in assuming that there is something different there that I have been missing, but maybe too generous, and what is different and especially attractive to feminists is the opportunity to identify with a twelve-year-old girl.
We don't care very much about the moral dimensions of Stalin vs Hitler.
In some sense, we need or think it is better that those we perceive as victimized carry some extra measure of innocence, and conversely the perception of victimization conveys a measure of innocence restored.
"Ukrainians are being oppressed by Putin!"
"Dude, the Kievites are fascists"
"no they're not no they're not no they're not"
Goes to the post/thread above about RS/UVA. "Oh noes she lied. No she didn't, she couldn't have"
I have been generous to feminists in assuming that there is something different there that I have been missing, but maybe too generous, and what is different and especially attractive to feminists is the opportunity to identify with a twelve-year-old girl.
Let's just highlight this crazy sentence for a moment.
It's your OP
Tea Party says they are victimized, Klan says they are victimized, Wall Street asks why everybody is picking on them, it seems everybody is America is fighting to be perceived as abject and oppressed. When did "loser" become a power position, and where are all the unrepentant asshole rolemodels?
Sometimes I think it is just Americans running away from guilt (slavery, imperialism, capitalism) and trying to find a path to innocence restored, or at least displayed to others.
Peter Brook (not the director) says it is about the melodramatic imagination, that without religion modernity is thrown into endless intricate moral distinctions, because it is vitally important that we find out and reveal who is really the bad guy and who is the good girl in every micro-situation.
Twirls moustache and cackles
Oh you're just cranky because some woman you were aggressively leering at while walking your dogs called you out on it recently.
Nobody let bob watch the new live Peter Pan. The actress playing Pan is way too obviously an adult female for it to not be something creepy.