Achtung Baby!

Japanese Culture and Nabokov meet the DC Universe

from the FINAL CRISIS: SKETCHBOOK

Of course Grant Morrison would create a character called "Shy Crazy Lolita Canary" who is part of "Japan's number one pop culture heroes, the Super Young Team" (Final Crisis #2). Nabokov via Japanese Culture say hello to the DC Universe.

Mr. Nabokov had Strong Opinions, but one person ain't listening

+ NPR: Nabokov Novel to Be Published, Against Dying Wish
+ Dear Dmitri Nabokov: Don’t Burn Laura! Let Draft Gather Dust (2005)
+ Wikipedia: "The Original of Laura"

If sex is the sermon made of art....

"If sex, you see, is the sermon made of art. Love is the lady of that tower". Vladimir Nabokov discusses "Lolita" on "Close Up", a circa 1950's CBC program: Part 1 & 2.  

Nabokov writes fiction because it is "an interesting thing to do...I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions" (16). Second, Nabokov loathes social satire. He has "neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not the critics think that in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent. But I am annoyed when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America" (23). Third, Nabokov doubts that "we can postulate the objective existence of a 'modern world' on which an artist should have any definite or important opinion"
MARTIN AMIS: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov

All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny, even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all.
Martin Amis

+ Martin Amis - The War Against Cliché
+ A Chronology of Lolita

James A. Reeves

the refuge of art

[ Angelo Badalamenti: Dark Lolita ]

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.
V.N, Lolita

+ Lolita, USA: A geographical scrutiny of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita
+ Nabokov wanted his final, unfinished work destroyed. Should his son get out the matches?

Dolores, barely legal

+ Crime To See 'American Beauty' Or 'Lolita'

// Eric Clapton - I Want A Little Girl
// The Strokes - Barely Legal
// The Killers - When You Were Young ( live@Abbey Road )
// Hawksley Workman - Lethal and Young

"And the rest is rust and stardust..."

One of the prized books on my shelf, a signed first printing of Stardust signed by Neil with a drawing of a Luna in it. Neil is awesome. Are you going to go see the movie or What!

+ NPR: A Magical Fairy Tale Hits the Big Screen
+ NEIL GAIMAN AND CHARLES VESS' STARDUST - new printing

[ Maude Maggart - Stardust ]

And the rest is rust and stardust. --Nabokov.

El Señor Nabokov

+ El Señor Nabokov on French Television with Spanish subtitles - Translated by request.

Spanish Text on the screen at the start of the clip: "..and its the abyss between his age and the age of the child that creates the emptiness between them; within that space, that vertigo, the seduction and attraction to mortal danger."

Voice Over: And that's how he defined the conflict of his great work, Vladimir Nabokov in the French program "aprostrophes". An interview by Bernard [?], that is now coming out in Spain on DVD with high regards, as this happens to be the only televised document in existence about one of the capital authors of the 20th century.

Brian Boyd remembers him, in his volume about Nabokov's American years that has just been released. Also, Lecture circles has released the 3rd edition of a book celebrating the 50th anniversary of VN's work, which includes the novel and his original script .

A great occasion, to visit Lolita in any of its forms, when it has aged half a century - maintaining intact its troubling and painful capacity to fascinate.

Aches Lolita for the sharp ambitious edge she walks barefoot.

Aches because it does not tell the story of a pervert but that of an enamored man.

And it aches because it is society, embodied by the lying Quilty - which sounds a lot like guilty in English - that is repugnant.

The censors of the time occupied themselves with not letting Kubrick display the strong erotic charge which had made a scandal of the book, forcing him to use his genius to convert the explicit into the timid.

Lolita turns half a century with the face of Sue Lyon, served by [ names the cast ] for this "surreal, obsessive and troubling" movie as stated by [ name of some critic ] and a true masterpiece by Stanley Kubrick.

+ Lolita (1997) Deleted Scenes
+ Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg
+ Nabokov's house
+ Nabokov's office
+ Grow-A-Brain VN Archive

"Siegel recalls Pynchon saying he did attend some of Vladimir Nabokov's lectures at Cornell but that he could hardly make out what Nabokov was saying because of his thick Russian accent."
Pynchon's Wikipedia entry

+ Nabokov reads from "Lolita"

[ You Look So Young ]

Dolores and Humbert by Tomer Hanuka

Jayhawks - You Look So Young 

+ A Paradise with Skies the Color of Hell Flames
+ In the Lyne of Pale Fire

[ Dolores ]

[ Freedy Johnston - Dolores ]

+ The case of Amy Fisher, dubbed the "Long Island Lolita", helped popularize the term among a new generation. Screenwriter Alan Ball considered writing a play based on the Fisher case, but the story soon got away from him and mutated into the screenplay which became American Beauty (1999). The narrator's name, Lester Burnham, is an anagram of "Humbert learns"; the name of the girl he lusts after, Angela Hayes, is also a play on Dolores Haze. [via]

+ Video: Elefant - "Lolita - Director's Cut"  (nsfw)

+ Video: Vladimir Nabokov talks about Lolita (Parlez vous francais?)

+ Lolita (1997) Trailer

+ There is such a place as Lolita, Texas

Lolita 1990

Peter Lindbergh + Milla + Harry Dean Stanton = Lolita 1990

U16 Girls

Public service announcement: ‘Lolita’ is a comedy

[ Travis - U16 Girls ]

Era Lo, sencillamente Lo...

"Era Lo, sencillamente Lo por la mañana, cuando estaba derecha, con su metro cuarenta y ocho de estatura, con un pie enfundado en un calcetín. Era Lola cuando llevaba puestos los pantalones. Era Dolly en la escuela. Era Dolores cuando firmaba. Pero en mis brazos siempre fué Lolita."
(Tomado del libro "Lolita" de Vladimir Nabokov)

It never occured to me to read Lolita in Spanish.

Paris Review + Nabokov

VLADIMIR NABOKOV , The Paris Review Summer-Fall 1967

The DNA of Literature is full of great quotes like..

HUNTER S. THOMPSON: “Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?”

Interviews..  TRUMAN CAPOTE ,  PABLO NERUDA ,  ALDOUS HUXLEY

Nabokov Playboy

" Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial masterpiece Lolita was published 50 years ago. Thirteen authors and artists explain why the novel still resonates."  Including Adrian Lyne, Joyce Carol Oates, Dmitri Nabokov and Brian Boyd. Playboy Magazine, December 2005.

+ 1940s sex kidnap inspired Lolita [via]
+ Nabokov's interview. (03)  Playboy [1964]

50 years of Dolores Haze

Thanks goes to Tony for reminding me of the 50th anniversary of "Lolita".

+ 50 Years Later, 'Lolita' Still Seduces Readers
+ NYT: Forever Young
+ Ageless: Why Lolita, now fifty, endures
+ Remembering Lolita

+ Previously...[ Nabokov Archive ]
+ Grow-A-Brain: Nabokov Archive
+ Martin Amis on Lolita

" A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets."

ODE TO A MODEL

ODE TO A MODEL
V. Nabokov

I have followed you, model,
in magazine ads through all seasons,
from dead leaf on the sod
to red leaf on the breeze,

from your lily-white armpit
to the tip of your butterfly eyelash,
charming and pitiful,
silly and stylish.

Or in kneesocks and tartan
standing there like some fabulous symbol
parted feet pointing outward
-- pedal form of akimbo.

On a lawn, in a parody
of Spring and its cherry-tree
near a vase and a parapet
virgin practising archery.

Ballerina, black-masked
near a parapet of alabaster.
“Can one -- somebody asked --
rhyme ‘star’ and ‘disaster’?”

Can one picture a blackbird
as the negative of a small firebird?
Can a record, run backward,
turn ‘repaid’ into ‘diaper’?

Can one marry a model?
Kill your past, make you real, raise a family
by removing you bodily
from the back numbers of Sham?

// Unusual Vladimir Nabokov Links //

[ I came so far for beauty ]

" Her shoulders were intolerably graceful: I would never permit my wife to wear strapless gowns with such shoulders, but how could she be my wife? Renny says to Nell in the English version of Monparnasse's rather comic tale: "The infamous shadow of our unnatural affair will follow us into the low depths of the Inferno which our Father who is in the sky shows to us with his superb digit." For some odd reason the worse translations are not from the Chinese, but from plain French."
Vladimir Nabokov, "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle"

[ Stina Nordenstam -  I came so far for beauty ]

"They were the only beauty, the last magic. Breavman knew what he knew, that their bodies never died. Everything else was fiction. It was the beauty they carried. He remembered them all, there was nothing lost. To serve them. His mind sang praise as he climbed a street to the mountain.
For the body of Heather, which slept and slept.
For the body of Bertha, which fell with apples and a flute.
For the body of Lisa, early and late, which smelled of speed and forests.
For the body of Tamara, whose thighs made him a fetishist of thighs.
For the body of Norma, goosefleshed, wet.
For the body of Patricia, which he had still to tame.
For the body of Shell, which was altogether sweet in his memory, which he loved as he walked, the little breasts he wrote about, and her hair which was so black it shone blue.
For all the bodies in and out of bathing suits, clothes, water, going between rooms, lying on grass, taking the print of grass, dancing discipline, leaping over horses, growing in mirrors, felt like treasure, slobbered over, cheated for, all of them, the great ballet line, the cream in them, the sun on them, the oil anointed."
Leonard Cohen, "The Favorite Game"

"I don't think in any language.."

Drawing by Siegfried Woldhek

"I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all"
- BBC Interview with V. Nabokov, 1962. From the Introduction to McSweeney's 13.

The Enchanter

Since Tony brought it up in a comment he made to an earlier post, here's one of my favorite book covers.

[ From The Literary Encyclopedia ] The principal Nabokovian antecedent to The Enchanter (and indeed to Lolita) is to be located within his novel The Gift (written 1933-38), when a minor character suggests the following synopsis for a novel (Penguin edition, 172-3):

Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog – but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness – gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl – you know what I mean – when nothing is formed yet, but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind – A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes – and of course she doesn't even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely – the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot – a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out – and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D'you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy?

The great voice of Mr. Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov  Speaks to the BBC in 1969   [ via Nabokovia ]

Lolita + Nick Cave [ via WaxWing ]

[ Nabokov ] reads from "Lolita"

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Profession: none, or "starlet"
Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?
Why are you hiding, darling?
(I Talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling).
Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?
What make is the magic carpet?
Is a Cream Cougar the present craze?
And where are you parked, my car pet?
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?

[ Nabokov Reads - Mp3 ]

Nabokov

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
Vladimir Nabokov 

Nabokov + Murikami

L E S S I S B E S T ,   M R . N A B O K O V .

On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning