Subject
Re: VNCOLLATION (May 1997) (fwd)
Date
Body
-----------------------------------------
EDITOR's NOTE. Suellen Stringer-Hye <stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu>,
undoubtedly the world's leading authority on Nabokovian pop-lore (and in
the present case, cyber-kitsch) sends NABOKV-L her latest Collation of Net
Nabokoviana. Her VNCOLLATION series containing much valuable material has
been appearing on NABOKV-L for nearly threee years. NABOKV-L once again
thanks Suellen Stringer-Hye and Marianne Cotugno who helps gather the
data.
--------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
VNCOLLATION (May 1997)
How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?--Is America ready for
Lolita? Why is the interrogative essential for marketing Lolita? As
has already been announced on this list, RandomHouse Audio has
recently released the "Unabridged, Uncensored" 12 hour, 8 cassette
reading of Nabokov's _Lolita_by Jeremy Irons. Irons does a superb job
of rendering through intonation and phrasing Humbert's subtle
diabolism and supreme blindness. Several reviews have appeared, not
the least of which is Jeff Edmund's blurb on Zembla:
<http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/lolaud.htm>
In the April 18, Entertainment Weekly it was called: "the bedtime
story of the week". Ben Harte, in the May 12 _People Weekly_, said:
Jeremy Iron's air of faintly arid detachment and a penchant for
the minor key add up to an ideal match for Vladimir Nabokov's
mordant and melancholy classic.
Favorable reviews appeared in both the March 3, _Publisher's Weekly_
and the April 15 _Library Journal_.
**********************************************************************
LOLITA
Not only songs with Lolita as a theme (See Nabokv-l post ,4/14/97,
"Lolitology in Song & Worse") but an entire genre of music called
"Lolita Music" apparently exists. At the web site devoted to the
Slovenian band Lolita 95, a hint at the origins of this musical type
is found in the explanation of the band's name.
http://www.ljudmila.org:80/lolita/rokusa.html o Lolita got its
name after a certain book of a Russian immigrant. Somebody also
shot a film. Lolita is a girl, of 12. She has got a step father,
who is such and such. Lolita can be everything-also 'porno'.
Lolita is interpreted by each of lolitas (see SSKJ, 2. edition,
DZS 2010 lolitovec-a, a kind of a man who belongs to the
musicians of Slovene cult group Lolita, lolitas sent his
audience into raptures) in his own way. o In Slovenia the name
of the group, which plays 'lolita-music'. It differs from groups
of the same name in Sweden (12 Lolita groups) and the USA (6
Lolita groups).
Below are the URLS for several songs that fall into this category.
New versions of some mail readers allow the reader to click on the
URL and immediately drop into an html file. For those with older
versions it will still be necessary to do the usual cut and paste. I
have included a representative lyric from each song.
http://www.student.lu.se:80/~RAS95ADE/gillan/disco/lyrics/swe.htm
I don't want you
Hanging round my door
I can't stand it anymore baby
'cos you're jailbait
http://www.corpcomm.net:80/~lejacobs/sordid/lyrics/Lolita.html
and it smells like razor blades
I've been dead for days
God bless Lolita
for taking it all away
God bless Lolita, Lolita
Loli-con, or the Lolita Complex, the Japanese name for a prevalent
psychological complex in which middle-aged men obsess over school aged
girls is discussed in the April 20, New York Times. Japanese men
participate in club activities reminiscent of those offered at the
establishments of David Veen.
This is an ''image club,'' one of several hundred in Tokyo
where Japanese men pay about $ 150 an hour to live out their
fantasies about schoolgirls. In this club, customers can choose
from 11 rooms, including classrooms, a school gym changing
room, and a couple of imitation railway coaches, where, to the
recorded roar of a commuter train, men can molest straphangers
in school uniforms.
Actress Drew Barrymore, originally famous for her juvenile
role in Steven Spielberg's film, "ET:The Extraterrestrial" said in a
_People Magazine Online_ profile:
http://pathfinder.com/@@B2LM9wQA6222R8Xp/people/profiles/drew/drewgal
5.html
"..Sue Lyons,( whom she saw at age six in the film "Lolita")
was an inspiration: ...She was so [bleeping] sexy in that
movie.... Every little detail I totally grooved on. Lolita
became, like, this idol thing, you know? I totally fell into
it."
**********************************************************************
FASHION
The association of Lolita with fashion and fashions has been
documented, perhaps to the point of tedium. On the web page for the
fashion house "Lolita Lempicka", one more example of this
connection is again encountered.
http://www.worldmedia.fr:80/fashion/catwalk/bio/LLE.html
Fashion houses are often named after their founding
designer, but Josiane Pividal went about it differently. In
1983 Josiane and her husband Joseph, an interior designer,
created their label, "Lolita Lempicka", in homage to
Nabokov's novel and to the painter Tamara de Lempicka. As
the fashion house took off, the couple found it simpler to
change their names to Lolita and Joseph-Marie Lempicka.
The two excerpts below treat the Nabokov and fashion theme in an
unconventional manner and they are in "elegant correspondence" with
Ada's twin colors blue and green.
From the April 13, 1997 Feature section of the _Times of London_, in
the section "25 years ago this week" a letter Nabokov wrote to Kate
Rand Lloyd, editor of _American Vogue_ on April 13, 1972 is
reproduced:
I thank you for sending me a copy of the April 15 issue of
Vogue...Simona Morini's questions are admirable and my replies
to them are reproduced with a rare fidelity - to which I am not
accustomed in most published interviews. The pictures, alas, are
not as good as the text.
The one of Mr and Mrs Nabokov relaxing in the "green salon" not
only disfigures my wife and me, but hypertrophies our lower
limbs in a grotesque and incomprehensible manner. The facade
of the hotel on p74 is, on the other hand, charming and
somehow in elegant correspondence with my Givenchy tie on the
opposite page!
In the April 20 _Observer_, the fashion writer advises:
If you wear red you're sexy, and if you wear black you're chic.
But what is a woman in blue? Blue is elusive as well as sexy;
it's soft as well as smart. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel The
Gift, the hero is looking round a lodging house, wondering
whether to stay, when he sees in one room 'a high-backed
armchair: across its arms there lay in airy repose a gauze dress,
pale bluish and very short'. Suddenly falling in love with the
dress, or the girl who would wear such a dress, he takes the room.
**********************************************************************
NABOKOV PERSONAE
"Gonzo" journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, in an interview published
in the November 28, 1996 _Rolling Stone_, offered a typically scewed
and one would assume intentionally spurious second -hand account of
Nabokov's travels to SunValley, Idaho. These outings, Thompson
suggested, made it possible for Nabokov to write "from experience" ,
while composing _Lolita_.
"it was investigative journalism..I am new and rare" You were
after all looking into things: albeit those things don't
exist....
Is writing about sex as hard as writing about drugs?
It's difficult to do.
Are there any writers who you think do it effectively,
honestly, dirtily, and honestly.
Well I think Nabokov could.
A beautiful writer.
Hell of a good writer. A friend of mine, Mike Sondheim was up
in Sun Valley [Idaho] back in the 60s. He told me that Nabokov
used to come to Sun Valley Lodge with an 11 year old girl. He
said it was weirder than Lolita . "It's very nice to meet your
niece, Mr. Nabokov."
(EDITOR'S INTERPOLATION [dbj]. VN had left the US for what proved to be
permanent European residency in Sept. 1959. He briefly returned to write
his Lolita script for Kubrick (May-October 1961) and for the LOLITA
film premier in June 1962.)
Well that goes back to the New Journalism question, about
writing from experience.
When you read it you knew this was from real experience. This
was not Thomas Mann writing "Death in Venice" which seemed to be
a student's idea of what a hopeless crush would be, ...
And the reason for that is, Nabokov was up at Sun Valley with
an 11 year old girl.
I'm afraid Lolita strictly fits into the gonzo framework. But
man, that's where the fun is, you know why write about other
people's experiences?
A student's request for unpublished papers on the autobiographical
theme in Nabokov's _Mary_, was duly admonished when it was posted on
Nabokv-L. The same request, which must have been crossposted to
several lists, provoked this amusing and clever response on some
newsgroup, the name of which is no longer traceable since the file
has disappeared from it's original site on the internet:
>I am writing an English paper on Nabokov's use of his own life
and experiences in his work Mary (Mashen'ka). If you have an
unpublished term paper, essay, thesis, etc. PLEASE send it to
me. If it has internal citations and a bibliography (works
cited) page that is even better. Anything would be very
helpful. Thank you. >
Well, I'm glad you asked. While I am certainly no authority on
Nabokov, I was privileged to meet him shortly before his death.
I was a young medical student at the time, and he had been
admitted to Vanderbilt Medical Center for palliative therapy for
the cancer that was to kill him. He told me a great deal about
his life and his influences. Much like you, I didn't understand
much of it, since, like you, I had never actually *read*
anything of his or seriously thought about it on my own. I
always thought it was sad that a great writer had to spend his
last days with someone who was too lazy to pick up a book, but
that is one of the great tragedies of the human condition. But,
in my own defense, my medical studies took precedence over the
ramblings of a pain-crazed old man, just as you are too busy
drinking beer until you vomit to do original work. We are much
the same, you and I.
In this vein, the writer goes on to tell of Nabokov's immigration
from Uzbekistan to America where he meets a young girl by the name of
Mary. Together they become information brokers and insurance agents
until this becomes tiresome and the pair " hop.. a riverboat on the
Hudson and decide... to head off to the Mississippi" . Upon arrival in
New Orleans, they purchase their own Mississippi Riverboat.
Throughout the "post" are threaded the lyrics to the Ike and Tina
Turner song "Proud Mary". The note ends with an amiable,
"hope this helps!"
**********************************************************************
STUDENT PROJECTS
Nabokov's works are sometimes used in class assignments to explore
the use of "new technologies" in the creation of art.
http://www1.shore.net/~agrant/mas.html
Graphic designer Angelyn Grant's course at MIT, "Expressive
Typography and New Media", consisted of students ranging from
undergraduates to graduates, from various disciplines , who during a
one month winter session, meeting 3 times a week, used Nabokov's
short story "Signs and Symbols" to produce an experimental, online
"book". Projects extended from the creation of simple HTML
text to "live action" typography utilizing motion and color
to express individualized interpretations of the story. Starting
with the assumption that the reader of the "book" had already read
"Signs and Symbols" the "expressive typography" and "metaphoric
reading structures " were designed to offer insights into the story
and "aid the reader in further exploring the work".
Some of these projects require special software for viewing.
Sophisticated design technique and a sensitivity to the nuances of
Nabokov's story, make perusing these "books" worthwhile.
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/SSPCluster/Shade.h
tml In a Hypertext and Literary Theory course offered at Brown
University in 1993, Jason Hammel,for his callss project, used the
plotline of "Pale Fire" to further illustrate the questions of
authorship and ownership of text that "Pale Fire" itself addresses.
I chose to do another rewriting of V.N.'s book. I invented a
New Year's Eve party at which various university types-- none,
though, from the novel-- flirt, sip champagne, and gossip about
Shade's new poem. Kinbote is, of course, present but no where to
be found-- he is rummaging through Shade's things for evidence
that Sybil, John's wife, had ordered the poet to rewrite
sections which chronicled Kinbote's own royal adventures.
My concern with the web is that it rediscovers the material
already thrice authored in V.N.'s original book. Meshing my text
with his, I hoped to pose questions of ownership-- do I have the
rights to another poetry? Clearly Kinbote thought he did, as he
rewrote and wildly interpreted Shade's masterpiece. And I. . .I
felt, at last, freedom of words, and the chance to command their
patterns alongside V.N.'s prose tapestries.
**********************************************************************
CRITICISM
Throughout the many volumes of criticism that I have read on Nabokov,
I have never seen this metaphor used to describe Nabokov's concept of
"reading" :
Spike--http://www.hedweb.com/spike/0896name.htm
Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee jump... where we
may become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story that
we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov had a kind of
withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for kidding ourselves:
he had a fondness for snapping on the ropes and shouting down,
"You idiots!"
**********************************************************************
NABOKOVIAN TRIVIA
From _Cosmopolitan_, March 1997, the section entitled
"The moment I knew I was in love"
"He knew the first chapter of Lolita by heart. One night he
pulled out my copy and without opening it, started reciting.
Those are my favorite pages of anything I've ever read" ---Julie
29, -writer
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu
EDITOR's NOTE. Suellen Stringer-Hye <stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu>,
undoubtedly the world's leading authority on Nabokovian pop-lore (and in
the present case, cyber-kitsch) sends NABOKV-L her latest Collation of Net
Nabokoviana. Her VNCOLLATION series containing much valuable material has
been appearing on NABOKV-L for nearly threee years. NABOKV-L once again
thanks Suellen Stringer-Hye and Marianne Cotugno who helps gather the
data.
--------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
VNCOLLATION (May 1997)
How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?--Is America ready for
Lolita? Why is the interrogative essential for marketing Lolita? As
has already been announced on this list, RandomHouse Audio has
recently released the "Unabridged, Uncensored" 12 hour, 8 cassette
reading of Nabokov's _Lolita_by Jeremy Irons. Irons does a superb job
of rendering through intonation and phrasing Humbert's subtle
diabolism and supreme blindness. Several reviews have appeared, not
the least of which is Jeff Edmund's blurb on Zembla:
<http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/lolaud.htm>
In the April 18, Entertainment Weekly it was called: "the bedtime
story of the week". Ben Harte, in the May 12 _People Weekly_, said:
Jeremy Iron's air of faintly arid detachment and a penchant for
the minor key add up to an ideal match for Vladimir Nabokov's
mordant and melancholy classic.
Favorable reviews appeared in both the March 3, _Publisher's Weekly_
and the April 15 _Library Journal_.
**********************************************************************
LOLITA
Not only songs with Lolita as a theme (See Nabokv-l post ,4/14/97,
"Lolitology in Song & Worse") but an entire genre of music called
"Lolita Music" apparently exists. At the web site devoted to the
Slovenian band Lolita 95, a hint at the origins of this musical type
is found in the explanation of the band's name.
http://www.ljudmila.org:80/lolita/rokusa.html o Lolita got its
name after a certain book of a Russian immigrant. Somebody also
shot a film. Lolita is a girl, of 12. She has got a step father,
who is such and such. Lolita can be everything-also 'porno'.
Lolita is interpreted by each of lolitas (see SSKJ, 2. edition,
DZS 2010 lolitovec-a, a kind of a man who belongs to the
musicians of Slovene cult group Lolita, lolitas sent his
audience into raptures) in his own way. o In Slovenia the name
of the group, which plays 'lolita-music'. It differs from groups
of the same name in Sweden (12 Lolita groups) and the USA (6
Lolita groups).
Below are the URLS for several songs that fall into this category.
New versions of some mail readers allow the reader to click on the
URL and immediately drop into an html file. For those with older
versions it will still be necessary to do the usual cut and paste. I
have included a representative lyric from each song.
http://www.student.lu.se:80/~RAS95ADE/gillan/disco/lyrics/swe.htm
I don't want you
Hanging round my door
I can't stand it anymore baby
'cos you're jailbait
http://www.corpcomm.net:80/~lejacobs/sordid/lyrics/Lolita.html
and it smells like razor blades
I've been dead for days
God bless Lolita
for taking it all away
God bless Lolita, Lolita
Loli-con, or the Lolita Complex, the Japanese name for a prevalent
psychological complex in which middle-aged men obsess over school aged
girls is discussed in the April 20, New York Times. Japanese men
participate in club activities reminiscent of those offered at the
establishments of David Veen.
This is an ''image club,'' one of several hundred in Tokyo
where Japanese men pay about $ 150 an hour to live out their
fantasies about schoolgirls. In this club, customers can choose
from 11 rooms, including classrooms, a school gym changing
room, and a couple of imitation railway coaches, where, to the
recorded roar of a commuter train, men can molest straphangers
in school uniforms.
Actress Drew Barrymore, originally famous for her juvenile
role in Steven Spielberg's film, "ET:The Extraterrestrial" said in a
_People Magazine Online_ profile:
http://pathfinder.com/@@B2LM9wQA6222R8Xp/people/profiles/drew/drewgal
5.html
"..Sue Lyons,( whom she saw at age six in the film "Lolita")
was an inspiration: ...She was so [bleeping] sexy in that
movie.... Every little detail I totally grooved on. Lolita
became, like, this idol thing, you know? I totally fell into
it."
**********************************************************************
FASHION
The association of Lolita with fashion and fashions has been
documented, perhaps to the point of tedium. On the web page for the
fashion house "Lolita Lempicka", one more example of this
connection is again encountered.
http://www.worldmedia.fr:80/fashion/catwalk/bio/LLE.html
Fashion houses are often named after their founding
designer, but Josiane Pividal went about it differently. In
1983 Josiane and her husband Joseph, an interior designer,
created their label, "Lolita Lempicka", in homage to
Nabokov's novel and to the painter Tamara de Lempicka. As
the fashion house took off, the couple found it simpler to
change their names to Lolita and Joseph-Marie Lempicka.
The two excerpts below treat the Nabokov and fashion theme in an
unconventional manner and they are in "elegant correspondence" with
Ada's twin colors blue and green.
From the April 13, 1997 Feature section of the _Times of London_, in
the section "25 years ago this week" a letter Nabokov wrote to Kate
Rand Lloyd, editor of _American Vogue_ on April 13, 1972 is
reproduced:
I thank you for sending me a copy of the April 15 issue of
Vogue...Simona Morini's questions are admirable and my replies
to them are reproduced with a rare fidelity - to which I am not
accustomed in most published interviews. The pictures, alas, are
not as good as the text.
The one of Mr and Mrs Nabokov relaxing in the "green salon" not
only disfigures my wife and me, but hypertrophies our lower
limbs in a grotesque and incomprehensible manner. The facade
of the hotel on p74 is, on the other hand, charming and
somehow in elegant correspondence with my Givenchy tie on the
opposite page!
In the April 20 _Observer_, the fashion writer advises:
If you wear red you're sexy, and if you wear black you're chic.
But what is a woman in blue? Blue is elusive as well as sexy;
it's soft as well as smart. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel The
Gift, the hero is looking round a lodging house, wondering
whether to stay, when he sees in one room 'a high-backed
armchair: across its arms there lay in airy repose a gauze dress,
pale bluish and very short'. Suddenly falling in love with the
dress, or the girl who would wear such a dress, he takes the room.
**********************************************************************
NABOKOV PERSONAE
"Gonzo" journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, in an interview published
in the November 28, 1996 _Rolling Stone_, offered a typically scewed
and one would assume intentionally spurious second -hand account of
Nabokov's travels to SunValley, Idaho. These outings, Thompson
suggested, made it possible for Nabokov to write "from experience" ,
while composing _Lolita_.
"it was investigative journalism..I am new and rare" You were
after all looking into things: albeit those things don't
exist....
Is writing about sex as hard as writing about drugs?
It's difficult to do.
Are there any writers who you think do it effectively,
honestly, dirtily, and honestly.
Well I think Nabokov could.
A beautiful writer.
Hell of a good writer. A friend of mine, Mike Sondheim was up
in Sun Valley [Idaho] back in the 60s. He told me that Nabokov
used to come to Sun Valley Lodge with an 11 year old girl. He
said it was weirder than Lolita . "It's very nice to meet your
niece, Mr. Nabokov."
(EDITOR'S INTERPOLATION [dbj]. VN had left the US for what proved to be
permanent European residency in Sept. 1959. He briefly returned to write
his Lolita script for Kubrick (May-October 1961) and for the LOLITA
film premier in June 1962.)
Well that goes back to the New Journalism question, about
writing from experience.
When you read it you knew this was from real experience. This
was not Thomas Mann writing "Death in Venice" which seemed to be
a student's idea of what a hopeless crush would be, ...
And the reason for that is, Nabokov was up at Sun Valley with
an 11 year old girl.
I'm afraid Lolita strictly fits into the gonzo framework. But
man, that's where the fun is, you know why write about other
people's experiences?
A student's request for unpublished papers on the autobiographical
theme in Nabokov's _Mary_, was duly admonished when it was posted on
Nabokv-L. The same request, which must have been crossposted to
several lists, provoked this amusing and clever response on some
newsgroup, the name of which is no longer traceable since the file
has disappeared from it's original site on the internet:
>I am writing an English paper on Nabokov's use of his own life
and experiences in his work Mary (Mashen'ka). If you have an
unpublished term paper, essay, thesis, etc. PLEASE send it to
me. If it has internal citations and a bibliography (works
cited) page that is even better. Anything would be very
helpful. Thank you. >
Well, I'm glad you asked. While I am certainly no authority on
Nabokov, I was privileged to meet him shortly before his death.
I was a young medical student at the time, and he had been
admitted to Vanderbilt Medical Center for palliative therapy for
the cancer that was to kill him. He told me a great deal about
his life and his influences. Much like you, I didn't understand
much of it, since, like you, I had never actually *read*
anything of his or seriously thought about it on my own. I
always thought it was sad that a great writer had to spend his
last days with someone who was too lazy to pick up a book, but
that is one of the great tragedies of the human condition. But,
in my own defense, my medical studies took precedence over the
ramblings of a pain-crazed old man, just as you are too busy
drinking beer until you vomit to do original work. We are much
the same, you and I.
In this vein, the writer goes on to tell of Nabokov's immigration
from Uzbekistan to America where he meets a young girl by the name of
Mary. Together they become information brokers and insurance agents
until this becomes tiresome and the pair " hop.. a riverboat on the
Hudson and decide... to head off to the Mississippi" . Upon arrival in
New Orleans, they purchase their own Mississippi Riverboat.
Throughout the "post" are threaded the lyrics to the Ike and Tina
Turner song "Proud Mary". The note ends with an amiable,
"hope this helps!"
**********************************************************************
STUDENT PROJECTS
Nabokov's works are sometimes used in class assignments to explore
the use of "new technologies" in the creation of art.
http://www1.shore.net/~agrant/mas.html
Graphic designer Angelyn Grant's course at MIT, "Expressive
Typography and New Media", consisted of students ranging from
undergraduates to graduates, from various disciplines , who during a
one month winter session, meeting 3 times a week, used Nabokov's
short story "Signs and Symbols" to produce an experimental, online
"book". Projects extended from the creation of simple HTML
text to "live action" typography utilizing motion and color
to express individualized interpretations of the story. Starting
with the assumption that the reader of the "book" had already read
"Signs and Symbols" the "expressive typography" and "metaphoric
reading structures " were designed to offer insights into the story
and "aid the reader in further exploring the work".
Some of these projects require special software for viewing.
Sophisticated design technique and a sensitivity to the nuances of
Nabokov's story, make perusing these "books" worthwhile.
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/SSPCluster/Shade.h
tml In a Hypertext and Literary Theory course offered at Brown
University in 1993, Jason Hammel,for his callss project, used the
plotline of "Pale Fire" to further illustrate the questions of
authorship and ownership of text that "Pale Fire" itself addresses.
I chose to do another rewriting of V.N.'s book. I invented a
New Year's Eve party at which various university types-- none,
though, from the novel-- flirt, sip champagne, and gossip about
Shade's new poem. Kinbote is, of course, present but no where to
be found-- he is rummaging through Shade's things for evidence
that Sybil, John's wife, had ordered the poet to rewrite
sections which chronicled Kinbote's own royal adventures.
My concern with the web is that it rediscovers the material
already thrice authored in V.N.'s original book. Meshing my text
with his, I hoped to pose questions of ownership-- do I have the
rights to another poetry? Clearly Kinbote thought he did, as he
rewrote and wildly interpreted Shade's masterpiece. And I. . .I
felt, at last, freedom of words, and the chance to command their
patterns alongside V.N.'s prose tapestries.
**********************************************************************
CRITICISM
Throughout the many volumes of criticism that I have read on Nabokov,
I have never seen this metaphor used to describe Nabokov's concept of
"reading" :
Spike--http://www.hedweb.com/spike/0896name.htm
Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee jump... where we
may become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story that
we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov had a kind of
withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for kidding ourselves:
he had a fondness for snapping on the ropes and shouting down,
"You idiots!"
**********************************************************************
NABOKOVIAN TRIVIA
From _Cosmopolitan_, March 1997, the section entitled
"The moment I knew I was in love"
"He knew the first chapter of Lolita by heart. One night he
pulled out my copy and without opening it, started reciting.
Those are my favorite pages of anything I've ever read" ---Julie
29, -writer
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu