class discovery

I think at every page in Lolita I have had discoveries. If I was to look closely enough I’d see one in every sentence. Pawing through my book I’ve found one that I’d like to talk about in class tomorrow because it just really stuck with me after reading and I’m still a little bit bothered I should say by the passage because I think it would yield a lot deeper if I put more time into it. Its on page 192.

“One of the latticed squares in the small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position-a knight’s move from the top-always strangely disturbed me.”

This passage strangely disturbed me but I started to read it and think about it and some things began to make sense. Most importantly I believe the knight’s move…and L. nuffsaid. But not just an L a ruby L, Ruby as in Lolita’s lipstick, the Lipstick marks that marked their maps. Maps which CLarie QuiLty used to knight-in –shining-armor away Lolita. In fact this passage comes just ( a knights move) before Quilty is really a figure. This moment is just when Lolita begins to fall out of love with Humbert. I’m not quite on top of it but its starting to make sense to me, I feel that this has to be significant.

I sometimes feel that my vision fails me. I have trouble reading road sings and small print, I see most everything but sometimes its just not as clear as it had ought to be. I see the same way when reading, I’ve read the story and I know what happens, but I know that beneath –sometimes above- the text there are torrents of rivers that I can’t seem to stay afloat on. In re-reading Lolita I am awed at how much emerges but dismayed on what gets past me. (I’m not bummed or anything. quite the opposite it’s just that this is such a wild story) Anyways there’s this one feed I keep catching on to but it continually escapes me. Like a fat trout I just can’t slay-out. This theme of myopia! It is peppered about the text. and I can’t seem to see it clearly... Anyway so myopia is nearsightedness and I can see why or how that is a thread in this text. Humbert is a man of action (drastic.) and does not seem to foresee problems arising. Humbert is aware of this strange(rs) presence but does not see distantly, he does not see Quilty. Humbert is in love with the foreground of womanhood, but as it recedes (proceeds?) into the future it becomes distorted and ugly and muddled, the only beautiful things he can see are at what we could consider the beginning. Humbert is in awe of Lolita’s beginning, her childhood. Even his relationship with her is along the same pattern, it starts in beauty an then fades to bleary misery. The greek for myopia means closed eye. Maybe Humbert is living in a world with his eyes closed, (perhaps recalling his past) [holy shit!: just thought of something as I was spellchecking this blog. check out below] Ok so these things are clear to me. But. I know that Nabokov is too good for something so simple like that, he is deliberate with his use of this term. The whole damned book is myopic, we at first see what’s at the foreground, what’s meant to be seen, but we are missing this depth by fathoms. We even start with part I which is exciting and sexual and enticing and readers eat that up. Part two is a little less clear and we get sort of muddled with what’s going on and whos whos and all this production that is being put on. Its confusing. Nearsighted. And I know that there is a whole other something beyond that’s even more obscured, the stuff I can see is only Nabokov’s foreground. You really need to read this book with glasses.

Chapter three page 11.

“Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half Dutch, in her case. I remembered her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).”

The importance of style

I have been grinding these past few days or weeks over this book. It has quickly become one of the best written novels i have ever read and yet, one of the darkest. Not dark in a modern graphic fashion (see gothmo kids) but in a very real and moving way. Again i am not moved to depression or anything like that but its just very deep seated. It is like when-over the weekend- i watched Titus Andronicus. For those who have no seen this movie or read the play, i cannot describe to you the sheer horror of this film. But it was good! the same type of awful things play out as they would in that alleged movie Saw (stupid.) but in Titus it was something.
With Nabokov and obviously with Shakespeare i feel almost anything could be poetry.The class list for example. And i don't say this simply because they are who they are, but because i feel it when i read it.
This semester was my first one back after about a year out of school. The first two books i've read were an autobiography and a book about a pederast. But i've pined over them! it is a petro-rainbow.

Caliban- Be no afreard; the isle is full of noises,
sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt
not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then i dreaming,
The clouds methought would ope and show riches
ready to drop upon me, that, when i waked
I cried to dream again.

common place crumbs

in speaking with headmistriss pratt she calls him:
Mr. Humbird
Dr. Humburg
Mr. Humberson
Dr. Hummer
and Dorothy Hummerson.


"My west-door neighbor who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway."

To Amanda

I don't think that i have grasped the reasoning for a pedophile, but maybe:
Nabokov need a canvas for contrast. He needs a weathered, well-read, witty narrator to tell an ugly story. it is however -most importantly- a beautiful story about an ugly thing with beautiful characters in an often ugly scene painted most beautifully.
i guess

or maybe Nabokov was just so sure of himself -Vivian Bloodmark?- that he knew he was so good and badass, he just knew he could make even a monster into a masterpiece

Lolita common place vol. 1

It would be impossible for me to post all of my notes from this book for i would simply have to rewrite it, but here are a few that truly made me laugh.

"Nymphets do not occur in polar regions" 33

"with limp wet things overhanging the dubious tub (the question mark of hair inside)." 38

All of page 39

"and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular fraud." 43

**"Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room. Props: old, candy-stripped davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze-God bless the good man-had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue washed room, on a honey moon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementos, among these Dolores, were all over the place)." 57**

"Must have been an enormous molar with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry." 63

"As great authors than i have put it: "Let readers imagine" etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants." 65

" how eventually i might blackmail-no, that is too strong a word-mauvemail big haze." 71

"Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons." 73

Pop Synesthesia

Wes Anderson is a furtive Nabokov reader. He must be. While there is no tangible evidence to support this, there is in my mind no doubt.

While reading speak memory, I could not turn off my minds eye of depicting nearly every seen into neat Royal Tennenbaum moments. I have the suspicion that i alone suffer from this affliction but take for example Nabokov's childhood, specifically his schooling ...and then watch this
When reading i could even here the music playing out in my mind. I wish that i could have experience this with relation to something other than a movie, but at least it was a good one.
Tell me if you can, that this scene from the flick does not conjure up a passage from Speak Memory on 149 (read first then view)
She would be ten in November, I had been ten in April. Attention was drawn to a jagged bit of violet mussel shell upon hich she had stepped with the bare sole of her narrow long-toed foot. No, I was not English. Her greenish eyes seemed flecked with the overflow of the freckles that covered her sharp featured face...(I am tempted to continue writing but i fear i wont stop until page 310).
In fact when i read any of his love depictions my mind would spin the reel of film complete with the Nico song and all. Is this just me? Is this just pop-synesthesia?

Art for art's sake

You know how you say, "i wish i could have said that-wrote that-...post a blog about that"? in my last Dr. Sexson class we discussed touchstone moments, moments that inspire or moments of literary significance that you have come across. In class we were all asked to post several of our touchstone moments and i had few good ones, but there was one that a fellow student wrote, and the blog itself was a moment for me. And within that blog a frame of even more beauty: Ezra Pounds, In the Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

i can't remember who in my previous class wrote about this calling it real art for art's sake. but i'm jealous.