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Re: THOUGHTS: Nates and ensellure
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Tom Rymour: What about 'ensellure'? I forget if it was the small of Lolita's back, or Ada's. Not a prosaic Saxon word, but one of those enticing, euphonious, filthy, fancy, foreign, French mots justes which have been infiltrating our plain speech since 1066.
JM: "Ensellure" ( or "lordosis", often indicating a not very erotic curvature of the spine, quite normal in pregnancy), in fact, appears both In Ada and in Lolita.
The passage with the adolescents, on the verge of starting an affair, is one of my favorites in "Ada" (and this is why I couldn't bring myself to lmite the size of my excerpted quote) .
ADA: (a) She might choose, for instance, an insect-mimicking orchid...The long beam slanting in from the french window glowed ...and while she delicately painted an eyespot or the lobes of a lip, rapturous concentration caused the tip of her tongue to curl at the corner of her mouth, and as the sun looked on, the fantastic, black-blue-brown-haired child seemed in her turn to mimic the mirror-of-Venus blossom. Her flimsy, loose frock happened to be so deeply cut out behind that whenever she concaved her back while moving her prominent scapulae to and fro and tilting her head ...— Van, who had drawn up to her seat as close as he dared, could see down her sleek ensellure as far as her coccyx and inhale the warmth of her entire body. His heart thumping, one miserable hand deep in his trouser pocket... — he bent over her, as she bent over her work. Very lightly he let his parched lips travel down her warm hair and hot nape...He would have lingered forever on the little middle knob of rounded delight on the back of her neck, had she kept it inclined forever...The vivid crimsoning of an exposed ear and the gradual torpor invading her paintbrush were the only signs... the purity of the sun-suffused room where a little girl, now glistening with sweat, was still painting her flower: the marvelous flower that simulated a bright moth that in turn simulated a scarab.
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(b) Detachedly, merely tactually, as if he had met those two slow-moving, hip-swaying graces only that night, Van...one palm, the left, on Ada’s long bare back and the other on Lucette’s spine, quite as naked and long (had she meant the lad or the ladder? Lapse of the lisping lips?)... His girl’s ensellure was hot ivory; Lucette’s was downy and damp.
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Lolita: "...This is how Rita enters the picture.//She was twice Lolita's age... with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back — I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up...between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth..."
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