Thursday, October 15

"Have you Achieved Pale Fire readiness?"

lemniscate Nabokov's ladder:

1. when you haven't read it
2. elementary discoveries
3. starting to grasp it
4. discovery of discovery

Vlad is the puppet master:

he wrote a commentary about Kinbote's commentary about Shade's poem, so basically a commentary on a commentary on a commentary that he wrote! Is that like a commentary cubed?

Other puppet masters:

Gepetto

N'SYNC

intentional fallacy

Indexes:

• 'A Clockwork Orange'
• Pale Fire

Arden Shakespeare: Timon of Athens: "The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction / Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun..."

The Index: "a cornucopia of clues for understanding the novel" ~Dr S

• G: Graddus- the killer of Shade, never mentioned in the poem. Perhaps in CK's mind?
• K: Kinbote- the narcissistic commentator, suffers from NPD who imposed himself into S's poem and life
• S: Shade- author of the poem, hardly mentioned at all in the index, always in reference to K
• Hazel and Sybil Shade: are the center of the poem, and yet almost entirely left out of the index

Serious Naricissm: failure to note other people exist and are important

Ben Chapman: in baseball AND literature!

There is no Frigate like a book! ~Emily Dickinson

"The person with the imagination has it all" "If you understand the imagination, you understand everything!" ~Dr S

Nabokov is like a temple priest

"Who do you go to to learn about 12 year old girls? You do not go to 12 year old girls! They know nothing! You go to the artist." ~ Dr S

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

"Mr. Rogers was wrong! Everyone is NOT special!" ~Dr S

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: "The world is a cage!"

"We are most artistically caged" ~pg 37

'the great bear' Hogarthian photos:

Starover Blue: Flag for the Russian navy

Hazel: ugly, but intelligent

Sibylian oracles

My paper: Lolita and Nefertiti

~During my time reading Lolita, there were many discoveries and many unveilings found amidst Nabokov’s words, but the one that I found most interesting was his mention of Queen Nefertiti. It is actually more in reference to her 6 children, but as I was reading I couldn’t stop thinking about her and her connection to Lolita. Not only is Nefertiti mentioned in the same paragraph as the references to Dante’s love for Beatrice and Petrarch’s for Laureen, but as I discovered, there were many more ‘coincidences’ scattered throughout the book (Nabokov 19).

~In my research I discovered that Nefertiti, whose name means “the beautiful one is come”, her origins are unclear, but there are many rumors as to who her parents were, some believe that the vizier Ay and his sister Tiy were her parents, but cannot be proven. She married to Pharaoh Amenhotep IV and had 6 children with him, one of which died in childbirth. Both Amenhotep and Nefertiti ardently worshiped the sun god Aten; so much so, they both changed their names in honor of him. Nefertiti changed her name to 'Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti' or 'The Aten is radiant because the-beautiful one has come', and Amenhotep changed his to ‘Akhenaten’ in honor of their god. Nefertiti was revered and loved by all of her people until her mysterious disappearance in 1335 BC (http://www.crystalinks.com/).

~When I read her biography I couldn’t believe how many similarities there were between her and Lolita. Both of these women had fathers that were unknown and confusing. Although the Nabokov says at the beginning of the novel that Harold Haze is Lolita’s father, Humbert Humbert confuses both the characters and the reader by saying that he is Lolita’s father, muddling her past. Lolita and her husband also lost a child during birth, and although Nabokov says that Lolita died while giving birth, the unreliability of most of what he says creates gaps that leave the reader wondering what really happened to her, not unlike Nefertiti herself.

~If these similarities aren’t crazy enough, let’s take a closer look at the sun god Aten. He was known as the disk of the sun, and worshipped as the creator of the world. During the rein of Akhenaten, he became the basis for their monotheistic religion. Similarly, Humbert Humbert had a monotheistic religion of Lolitaism, worshiping her as his creator and god. To follow this chain of thinking more specifically, there are 8 references throughout Lolita where Humbert Humbert refers to Lolita directly as a ‘sun’ or ‘sun-like.’ He refers to her as his “red sun of desire and decision” on page 71, as his “sun-colored little orphan” on page 111, refers to her “rosy sunshine” on page 119 and how “she radiated, despite her very childish appearance, some special languorous glow…” on page 159. Is it a coincidence that Nabokov referenced Nefertiti who worshiped the sun, and then showed numerous examples of how Humbert Humbert worshipped Lolita like the sun? Perhaps, but I believe that he did is purposely, as another layer of his onion-like novel for the observant reader to unpeel and delight in.

• Image from: http://iwilcope.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/nefertiti_400-1.jpg
• Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.
• Queen Nefertiti: The Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV http://www.crystalinks.com/nefertiti.html%20October%206, 2009

Tuesday, October 13

The Password is Pity

BLOG ASSIGNMENTS:

• Read all of the 2 page papers online, chose the best and comment on it
• Chose the top 6 things that you hate about Kinbote and blog about it

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PALE FIRE: DAY 1

Gen: generosity

Richard Powers' novel Generosity: An Enhancement a novel about someone who is too happy

Happy Go Lucky

Pity: pg 225 PF

"Do you deny that there are sins?" "I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain." "Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner?" "He could torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He could denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto." "And so the password is--?" "Pity." "But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?" "Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."

"Generosity, pity and passion are the norm"

There are infinite ways to interpret a text, and none of them are original!

"Do you really think these ideas pop out of your head like Athena popped out of Zeus'?" ~Dr S

At it's most elementary level this book is "about a poem and a guy that really likes the poem"

4 parts of the novel:

1. Forward by Kinbote
2. Poem by Shade
3. Commentary by Kinbote
4. Index by Kinbote

This is a story about literary critics, "critics are parasites on the work of literature because they wouldn't exist w/o the novel/ work in the first place"
Alfred Appel quoted PF numerous times in his Lolita intro

V. Nabokov's posthumous new book: The Original of Laura

Intro of Lolita vs Intro of PF:

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By the false azure in the windowpane;/ I was the smudge of ashen fluff- and I/ Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky./ And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate/ Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:/ Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass/ Hang all the furniture above the grass,/ And how delightful when a fall of snow/ Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so/ As to make chair and bed exactly stand/ Upon that snow, out in the crystal land!"

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-Lee-Ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

Which wins?

waxwing:

Did you know Rocky Votolato is in a band named Waxwing?

Zembla: A distant northern land

Novaya Zemlya: The new land

Off on a 'tangent' math, what?

Bandit Animals: "mask is the key word"

Raccoon

African Antelope

Australian Masked Owl

owl

panda

lemursmonkey

Zembla and waxwing: Stalkers/ lovers of Nabokov

glass and "reality": is a window

Nabokov's major theme: 'living beyond the prison walls of life'

HH: an ape who draws the bars of his own cage

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: the governess tells the story, but she is crazy!

Parker's Discovery about Kinbote

"All of your English teachers are crazy, crazy narcissists!" ~Dr S

Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock

Pale Fire:

• about a poem about a man who loses his daughter to suicide
• or the escape of Charles II from Zembla (a fictional land)

Neverwas

Robert Frost: 'Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening'

"you can only tell your own story, you cannot tell anyone elses"

It is always important when Nabokov points out that it is unimportant!!

Keat's 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer'

K-man 6:

The 6 most annoying things that K.... does:

1. completely ignores the fact that the poem is written by a grieving father
2. constantly talks about the fictional land of Zembla
3. stalks a poor, depressed couple
4. 'killed' John
5. takes EVERYTHING that ANYONE says about ANYTHING and makes it about himself
6. is 'that' neighbor

Dear Amanda:

All that I can really say to answer your question is that there is much, much more to Humbert and Lolita than meets the eye. Nabokov designed it that way, with many layers, to help teach us to be better readers. So my advice to you, if the content is what bothers you, look at it that way, as Nabokov teaching you how to read. Not read in the sense of letters and phonics, but read with the famous ladder rungs that Sexson is always talking about.

love, Brittini

My displacement...

A few weeks ago we were talking about fairy tale displacements, and I mentioned the one a wrote last year in Sexson's Children's lit class. I thought it might be fun to put it on my blog so you all can read it. But first, you must call upon your Coleridgeian 'suspension of disbelief' and imagine me reading this in an expertly amazing valley-girl voice...

“So, I’m like walking into the parking garage at the hospital and this guy walks up to me and says ‘hey there pretty lady.’ And I’m like ew, but then like, hey he’s kinda cute. Anyway… they he said…”

“So where you headed?”

“And I’m like, I’m going home. Then he was like…”

“I see. And what brings you to the hospital so late at night?”

“I told him everything of course, he had to be like twice my age, and I just felt so lucky to be talking to him. I mean like seriously Amy, he was gorgeous!”

Amy asked: “Oh my god! How exciting! Was he more like a Brad or a Tom?”

“Totally Brad, Tom is gross. Isn’t he like 50?!”

“I totally think so, anyway, what happened next?”

“And so he was like…”

“Oh that’s too bad, do you need a safe escort to your car?”

“And I’m like, sure, that would be super, you never know who is prowling around these places at night. Then he was like…”

“You look thirsty; do you want some water or something? I have some bottles in my car, it’s right over here.”

“And I was like, yeah actually I’m mega thirsty, and hungry too. And he was like…”

“I just went to the natural market and got these roots, they are supposed to make you skinny with just one bite.”

“And I was like oh my god! He thinks I’m fat! So I totally ate some, but not just one, like 5. I felt like such a pig! But then I started to feel really weird and the garage started swimming and the next thing I knew I was in this really dark place. I felt all like claustrophobic-like and really sick. But I started screaming as loud as I could and finally I heard some yelling, then this really loud banging and suddenly light came in and I realized that I was in a trunk of a car. And I was like ewww, I have no idea what is in here, it totally smells. Anyway, a police dude opened the door, he was totally a Tom! Really old and wrinkly. And told me that I had been kidnapped and asked if I was ok. Then my mom was there, and the cop started asking me what I remembered and I told him the whole story. About how I just went to visit my grandma in the hospital and sneak her in some wine, she always said that it was the alcohol that made her feel better; she is like totally addicted or something. And that I met a guy in the garage and he was really hot and I ate some root or something and that was all I remember. Later the cop told my mom that the plant was called something about a wolf* and that the man had been going around abducting young girls from parking garages that drove red cars. The whole thing was really weird; too bad he was so hot.”


*Aconitum or wolfsbane puts you into a sleep-like state if you have enough of it in your system

STUDY GUIDE

Format:

• multiple choice
• fill in the blanks
• short answer

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. What was the only hotel that HH and Lo stayed in part 1? ~The Enchanted Hunters
2. What is the significance of #342? ~Address of Haze home in Ramsdale, room # at EH, total number of hotels that HH and Lo stayed in
3. Pg 31 "logicians _______ and poets _______?" ~Loath, love
4. pg 9 "you can always count on a murderer for _____ prose style" ~fancy
5. Memorize last lines: "And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita"
6. pg 347 What does VN think he was truly born as? ~a landscape painter
7. Who can recognize a nymphet? ~an artist or a madman
8. Life imitates_______, more than _________ imitates life. ~art
9. synesthesia and speak, memory? ~when your senses are confused- you see sounds, or taste colors- VN suffered from this
10. What mustached man does Quilty resemble? ~Charlie Chaplin, Uncle Trapp, Hitler
11. Humbert is to _______, as ________ is to Nabokov. ~Quilty, the reader
12. What do Nabokov and HH think about sleep? ~they are both unspeakably repulsed by parting with consciousness
13. What does the name Dolores mean? ~sorrow
14. Mater Dolorosa ~ Lolita is the virgin mary?
15. Names of Jane Farllows dogs? ~Cavall and Melampus
16. What are the 4 things all good readers should have, according to VN? ~memory, imagination, artistic sense, a dictionary
17. Most important things that every author should be? ~storyteller, teacher and most importantly an enchanter
18. What color is Quilty's cocker spaniel's ball? ~red
19. Describe HH's forearms in 2 words. ~Hairy, masculine
20. What word is HH's greatest clue that Quilty took Lolita? ~waterproof
21. What do the story of Actaeon and Lolita have in common? ~Humbert – Hunter, Lolita – Forbidden Goddess
22. Name one of the plays that was written by Clare Quilty. ~The Little Nymph, The Lady that Loved Lightening, Fatherly Love, and The Strange Mushroom
23. Pg 98 Who killed Charlotte? ~Frederick Beale Jr
24. How did HH's mother die? ~picnic, lightening
25. What is the difference between parody and satire? ~p= teaches lessons, s= a game
26. In Speak, Memory what did VN's mom like to collect from the woods? ~ mushrooms
27. Pg 170 What is the order of Lo's favorite movies? ~Musicals, underworlders, westerners
28. Who is 'jutting jaw'? ~Dick Tracey
29. "reality" ~always needs quotations because there is no reality
30. What do the French Lt's Woman, Lolita, and Don Quixote have in common? ~they are all works of metafiction
31. What kind of car did Maxonovich, who stole away HH's first wife, Valeria, drive? ~a taxi
32. What are the passages that VN are super proud of? ~class list, kasbeam barber, taxovich and Lo playing tennis
33. Geometry of reality is: ~Lo playing tennis
34. What does Speak, Memory disprove of Darwins natural selection? ~butterflies imitative behaviors have no practical purpose, it's simply aesthetic
35. HH's age requirements for a nymphet? ~between 9 and 14 yrs old
36. What regions are nymphets not found? ~polar regions
37. READ OTHERS BLOGS!!!!!

Tuesday, October 6

'On the Road with Jack and Vlad'

Banned Book: Leaves of Grass

Why are books disturbing? Why banned?

Arthur Cunningham speaks about Walt Whitman:

• "anything powerful and true is going to cause trouble in the world"
• "float the stories on the vast river of Whitman"
• Full of music and a voice of sensuality dense and right at the same time

"Nabokov is in complete control of everything in his novel" ~Dr S

#4th best novel of the 20th C: it is the 'gold standard' of literature

Vlad is an "anthropomorphic Deity"

HH is 'charming and lecherous', he stole Lolita's soul

At the end, the story from comedy to tragedy

Jennie-Lynn's blog: Children at play pg 220-1

VN said that he hated Finnegan's Wake, but he actually understood and talked about it in Lolita!

Thursday, October 1

"Good Knight and Good Luck"

UPCOMING IMPORTANCES:

• Oct 6: Test question
• Oct 8: EXAM
• Oct 13: Short paper due (2-3 pages)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Discoveries:

Chris:

• pg 192 lines that disturb HH
• pg 111 the color red/ ruby/ rubious (pg 117)
• connects CQ and his broad shoulder

Adam:

• class list Knight, Kenneth moves like a chess knight to get to Lolita
• he 'exposes himself to others' like Kenneth MacAlpin
• Haze, Dolores (left one)
• Honeck, Rosaline (up)
• Knight, Kenneth (up)

Robert:

• pg 75 How was HH allowed to take Lolita away?
• he convinced everyone that he had an affair with Charlotte years ago, and that he was her real father, not Howard
• pg 77 the unreliable narrator tricks us, by making us believe that it's true, and that he really is her father (pg 101)

James:

• reading 'The Enchanter' by VN, written in 1939, was the last thing he wrote in Russian
• Nabokov is a LIAR "everything you read is a lie"
• zoology: primates and evolution of characters/ their progression
• "Logical gets construed as being zoological"

Zack:

• The name QUILTY
• Quilty, Ireland is located in Clare County, the pop is 243
• 342 is used in the book
• music group called Clare Quilty

Claire:

• Clare Quilty: Clearly Quit, Call it Query
• Lolita is a performer, she is always acting (pg 136, 147)
• HH is so concerned with details, he even notices the toilets in The Enchanted Hunter, but he fails to notice Quilty
• perhaps the fact that he doesn't notice him, means that we need to notice him?

____________________________________

TRICKSTER: Vlad is one, Quilty is one, even Lolita is a bad one

Refer to Sam's blog for more info on this


people who are 'set up' to learn a lesson by something else:

• The Game
• Saw
• The Labyrinth

The epic fight scene:

Roman Polanski

SAT question: "HH is to CQ, as VN is to the reader"

White shoed Mary: Nurse at the hospital that allowed Lolita to leave with Clare

Said they were 'Brothers'- mon frere- doppelgangers- alter ego

Hieronymus Bosch: the garden of earthly delights

pg 237 "One of the bathers had left the pool and, half-conceal by the peacocked shade of trees, stood quite still, holding the ends of the towel around his neck and following Lolita with his amber eyes. There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness, his damp black hair or what was left of it, glued to his round head, his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with bright droplets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood. And as I looked at his oval nut-brown face, it dawned upon me that what I had recognized him by was that reflection of my daughter's countenance- the same beatitude and grimace but made hideous by his maleness."

boxcar mustache: Hitler and Charlie Chaplin

The Circus:

logomancy

A. Person, Porlock, England

Dolores

"The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." ~EAP

Thursday, September 24

"Doomed Dears and Dead Brides"

BLOGGING HW:

• Don't forget to do discovery for blog: randomly chosen passage unpacked
• Focus for midterm paper by next week

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jeremy Irons reads the dirty sex scene "I recognized the tiny brown mole on her side..."

Riddled with DEATH:

• Charlotte gets run over by Aubrey McFate
• Lolita dies in childbirth
• Clare dies by HH
• HH dies in prison

This has to be, or we wouldn't be reading it...

Clare clues:

• Camp 'Q'
• 'broad-shouldered man'
• Aztec red car
• and much, much more! (pg 349 has the extensive list

Nabokov is teaching us how to read by putting in these many clues for us to find

A brief picture of Clare:

• likes fast cars, pets and porn
• dumb
• not well read
• crass
• "sinister"

A brief picture of HH:

• smart
• well read
• writes poetry
• evil?
• handsome

The Top 10 books (and then some...) chosen by authors:

1. Anna Karenina
2. Madame Bovary
3. War and Peace
4. Lolita
5. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
6. Hamlet
7. The Great Gatsby
8. Remembrance of Things Past
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch
11. Don Quixote
12. Moby Dick
13. Great Expectations
14. Ulysses

*please note that there are 4 by Russians!

WATERPROOF: Actaeon and Diana

Detectives that are hyper conscious:

• Monk
• Pysch
• The Mentalist

Convo with Clare and HH doesn't even know it! pg 126

"Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair of the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me: 'Where the devil did you get her?' 'I beg your pardon?' 'I said: the weather is getting better.' 'Seems so.' 'Who's the lassie?' 'My daughter.' 'You lie- she's not.' 'I beg your pardon?' 'I said: July was hot. Where's her mother?' 'Dead.' 'I see. Sorry. By the way, why don't you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then.' 'We'll be gone too. Good night.' 'Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?' 'Not now.' He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illuminated not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotels- and his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus."

Clare is the nephew of Ivor Quilty, the Ramsdale dentist

Lolita is in secret conversation with Clare a large amount of their trip, since The Enchanted Hunter because she is in love with him. She says "[Clare] broke my heart. [HH] merely broke my life" pg 279

Ash Wednesday by TS Eliot is the poem that HH's poem is based on

Umber moth

Humbert on Humbert:

pg 308 "And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes 'Otto Otto' and 'Mesmer Mesmer' and 'Lambert Lambert,' but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best"

pg 319 "The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person."

solipsism

The Strange World of Engineering

I worked this summer, as the last two summers for the Cowlitz County Public Works back home. The only difference was that this summer, instead of working for the road crew, I worked in the Engineering office. This was a very different experience for me, to be inside all of the time and have so much time on my hands. So I read. I read everything I didn't read for class last semester, everything I wanted to read, and things and I knew I needed to read but didn't want to. Eventually my coworkers realized that all I ever did was read so they would ask me about what I was reading and I would tell them everything. The good, the bad and the amazing.

After 3 months of this, they not only realized that I was an English major (and thus not qualified to work in an engineering office) but also wanted to know what classes I was taking in the fall. I told them: womens studies, history methods, english methods, exceptional children, and a nabokov class. As soon as I said the last, they all would say: "hey, isn't he that pervy Russian who wrote the dirty book about little girls?" I would say, yes, he wrote Lolita, but really it's not just about that, it's about the pervy old man. And they were all horrified that I had read it before. (what they must think of you Dr. Sexson!) I tried for weeks to explain to them that it was about so much more than a pedophile, it was about love and America. We had many arguments about this, and in the end I lost. They never did believe me.

I'm not sure what this shows. That you can't change the mind of someone set in their ways, even if they have never read the work? That people with preconceived notions cannot be changed by one blonde girl? I really don't know, but perhaps the conversation that we had will help them to think about things in a different way. Probably not though.

Autobiographies: From Ben to Vlad

When I first found out that Speak, Memory was an autobiography I heaved a huge sigh of disgust. The last autobiography that I read was by Ben Franklin and has made me hate him more than any man that has ever lived. His arrogance, contempt for anyone that he deems 'below' him and so called 'model' for the ideal citizen (last time I checked we didn't like it when our husbands cheated on us...) made me not only hate him with the fiery passion of one-thousand suns, but also vow to never pick up self-composed bio again. Now, knowing this, you can imagine exactly how I felt when I first encountered Speak, Memory.

Nabokov, being nothing like Ben in character or pen, is an artist. One that I not only feel better for having read, but also am glad that I did. Even under duress at the start, from the first lines "the cradle rocks above the abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness" I knew that this was going to be different (19). This novel was not an ode to himself, it was nod to everyone and everything that made him who he was. To all of the people in his life that helped him through this "eternity of darkness", and all of the people that hindered him. It was not a 'how to be a better person' step-by-step instruction guide, it was a 'this is the person I am, so deal with it' manifesto. And luckily for the reader, he was a pretty awesome guy.

Vladimir Nabokov was a poet both in word and phrase and guided you through his labyrinthine life with ease and wonder, leaving you begging for more. And, thanks to Sexson, more we will get.

Tuesday, September 15

"You are a murderer"

LOLITA:

• we have power in the novel, without us, the story doesn't exist

• metafiction: involved with HH "I won't exist unless you imagine me"

• Stranger than Fiction
• postmodern
• If you stop reading, you are a MURDERER, but if you keep reading you condone HH's actions. You can't win either way...
• "And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita" ~ pg 309

SPEAK, MEMORY endings:

• "the power of imagination is to imagine the things you are not"~ Dr. S
• is the evil character a reflection of the author? ie- Flannery O'Connor, Shakespeare, VN
• paranomasia
• The Bolshevik Revolution: homesick for a home that can only be visited in the imagination because they are in exile
• pg 54: is Heinrich von Kleist HH?? "...who, at thirty-three, had fallen passionately in love with [Christian August von Stagemann's] twelve-year-old daughter Hedwig Marie"
• Lewis Carroll and John Duston

VN is obsessed with lost time:

• pg 250 "I wonder, however, whether there is really much to be said for more anesthetic destinies, for, let us say, a smooth, safe, small-town continuity of time, with its primitive absence of perspective, when, at fifty, one is still dwelling in the clapboard house of one's childhood, so that every time one cleans the attic one comes across the same pile of old brown schoolbooks, still together among later accumulations of dead objects, and where, on summery Sunday mornings, one's wife stops on the sidewalk to endure for a minute or two that terrible, garrulous, dyed, church-bound McGee woman, who, way back in 1915, used to be pretty, naughty Margaret Ann of the mint-flavored mouth and nimble fingers."
• pg 283 "I got five dollars (quite a sum during the inflation in Germany) for my Russian Alice in Wonderland. I helped compile a Russian grammar for foreigners in which the first exercise began with the words Madam, ya diktor, vot banan (Madame, I am the doctor, here is a banana). Best of all, I used to compose for a daily emigre paper, the Berlin Rul', the first Russian crossword puzzles, which I baptized krestoslovitsi. I find it strange to recall that freak existence." (in All About Steve, Sandra Bullock plays a woman who creates crossword puzzles, not unlike Nabokov himself)
  

ALL ABOUT STEVE: Movie Trailer - The most amazing home videos are here

• pg 287-8 "Conversely, Sirin's admirers made much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirror-like angles of his clear, but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to 'windows giving upon a contiguous world... a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.' Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness."
• pg 296 "Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii for my love- from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. It is a pernicious habit, but I can do nothing about it." ~ this is as close as VN comes to talking about religion in S,M

Vera: his love

Henry James:

• Daisy Miller
• The Golden Bowl

Ecclesiastes 12:6 "Remember him--before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, or the wheel broken at the well"

America: The New World

photography induces a "soul-sucking death"

Harry Potter Pictures move and are alive, Dumbledore goes into a photograph after he dies...

Charles Whitman: the Texas sniper

ephiphany: 'a sudden manifestation of the divine'

Lolita is a mixture of: Cupid and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding hood, etc

'White widowed male'= black widow spider with the 'our glass' on her back, reminds me of Arachne from Ovid

the forward to Lolita is a fake!!! JR JR= VN

The Frame Narrative:

• the shack
• turn of the screw

places that are named after what they look like:
this is Horseshoe Lake, in Woodland, Wa
Displaced Fairytales:

Lolita is a FT, Little Red Riding Hood:

• Lolita= Red
• HH= big, bad wolf
• Charlotte= g-ma

First loves...

Nabokov loved HG Wells at an early age, in adulthood he realized how great he wasn't, but still loved him because of that young love. This got me to thinking, who do I love solely because I loved them as a child? I have compiled a list, it goes as follows:

• The Little House on the Prairie series: although it was amazing to me as a child, as an adult, the writing is poor and the images are not as vivid as I remember them
• The Boxcar Children
• Cappy the Camel