Tuesday, September 1

Class List:

I'm not sure if this is the passage that Dr. S read on the first day of class, but it is one of my favorites from the essay at the end:

"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of the Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann." (pg 315)

On our class list: "for sooth, a poem" ~Dr. S

WARNING: In this class you will experience/ discover:

• spine thrills
• "coincidences that poets love and logicians loath"
• 'art for art's sake' only exists to give you ecstasy
• that Darwin was wrong, butterflies are not only nature's deceivers, they also exist for pure art
• " There is no truth, only memory" ~Dr. S
• mimicry: butterflies and truth
• lepidopterology: the study of butterflies
• The marriage of science and art are in Lolita
• Butterfly: psyche and soul
• correct pronunciation: nabOkov
• the recollection of time and memory
• Nabokov: not only a writer, but more importantly a LITERARY STYLIST, not to be confused with a hair stylist "style is matter"

First blog entry: Probe your childhood for your first memory