November 17, 2012
Lolita Strangelove
"Stanley Kubrick draws a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses under the title ‘Lolita’ on the end of a prop bomb while on the set of his film Dr. Strangelove."
daisyfreshlo
October 24, 2012
My happiness is a kind of challenge
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
― Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters
kinbote
October 23, 2012
October 18, 2012
October 02, 2012
madly hopelessly
My Muse said this was one of her favorite parts of the 90's "Lolita" movie. Humbert and Annabel.
sweet-lo-lee-ta / lolitasheartshapedglasses
September 28, 2012
September 24, 2012
September 20, 2012
safe from creeping relatives and rust
On Discovering a Butterfly
I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer -- and I want no other fame.
Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
Vladimir Nabokov
broken wingsby *ipeksen
September 13, 2012
Toska
“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
Vladimir Nabokov
September 07, 2012
August 31, 2012
visual stimulation
My mother did everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation.
Speak, Memory; Vladimir Nabokov
Patrick Williams
August 27, 2012
sex is but the ancilla of art
It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.
― Vladimir Nabokov
welcome, ghosts
August 23, 2012
August 06, 2012
a sudden smooth nether loveliness
Night. Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to describe her face, her ways—and I cannot, because my own desire for her blinds me when she is near. I am not used to being with nymphets, damn it. If I close my eyes I see but an immobilized fraction of her, a cinematographic still, a sudden smooth nether loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits tying her shoe. “Dolores Haze, ne nontrez pas vos zhambes” (this is her mother who thinks she knows French).
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
lo.lee.ta
August 05, 2012
I am expert, frugal, intolerant
anton corbijn / V. Nabokov
August 04, 2012
"Vladimir Nabokov was one the greatest novelists who ever lived"
“To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.”—Vladimir Nabokov
+ Nabokov, Lolita, and Boxing
+ Vladimir Nabokov’s ringside vision of art and life
[ F Y N ]
July 02, 2012
June 09, 2012
monotonous & unfocussed
12
Instead, there was a new distraction:
something in my memory flashing,
as if unfocussed, and then clearer,
only to vanish once again.
Then I became abruptly bored
by work with needle and with screw,
observing the shimmer in the pattern,
of monotonous infusoria,
unravelling the bowels of a grass snake.
No longer did the lab seem heaven;
I started to imagine how, at the vicar’s,
she and I would meet once more.
The University Poem, Vladimir Nabokov
+ Vladimir Nabokov, beyond the novels
+ 'Selected Poems': The Essential Nabokov In Verse
May 13, 2012
May 02, 2012
agony of insomnia
“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Yet only a few hours later the light of Hell had gone out, and I writhed, I wrung my four limbs, yes, in an agony of insomnia, trying to find some combination between pillow and back, sheet and shoulder, linen and leg, to help me, help me, oh, help me to reach the Eden of a rainy dawn.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
April 06, 2012
reader entraptment
Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures By Leona Toker / astrosnowball
March 30, 2012
poetics & idiosyncratic coinages
Hartman's analysis also applies on the level of Lolita's poetics, especially when the realities of death, aging, and ends creep into Humbert's narrative. Having just introduced his mother into the background of his childhood in the French Riviera, Humbert dismisses her summarily, recounting her sudden death with one abrupt gesture: "picnic, lightning" (10). She becomes the paradigm for the women in his life, all of whom enter the story in the shadow of their eventual deaths. Humbert's penchant for hapax logomena and idiosyncratic coinages parallel in language the foreshortened life of Lolita: despite their ostensible vibrancy, they are dying phrases, obsolete just after their initial utterance. A master of so many poetic devices, Humbert riddles the narrative with instances of tmesis, the figure Hartman identifies as the epitome of poetry's elided middles and over specified ends (344). From his evocation of "the Old and rotting World" (85) he left behind, to his self-characterization as "an enchanted and very tight hunter" (268), Humbert repeatedly pries apart common phrases to insert the world outside his solipsism. But unlike the classical model where necessity is parted for the sake of art, the order is reversed in Humbert's fantasy world: tmesis allows ends to rush back in. Images that traditionally evoke nostalgia become symptomatic of inevitable decay.
Lolita's Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel - Vladimir Nabokov by James Tweedie
lolita by Marina Kozinaki via fuckyeahnymphets
March 23, 2012
March 18, 2012
February 29, 2012
he doesn’t know that a world exists outside himself
"Vladimir Nabokov claimed that the “initial shiver of inspiration” for “Lolita” came from a newspaper account of an ape in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris that produced the first drawing ever made by an animal. “This sketch,” he reported, “showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” The story neatly encapsulates the tragedy and comedy of Humbert Humbert: for all his preternatural brilliance — no one of his kind has ever set such things down on a page — he knows less than nothing because he doesn’t know that a world exists outside himself."
February 18, 2012
kissing your dim dear face
“I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part.”
Vladimir Nabokov
X-Factor #232
February 10, 2012
here shall John always stumble
We all have such fateful objects--it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another--carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.
Vladimir Nabokov
February 01, 2012
[ past ]
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
January 26, 2012
in the stars, my brain
I had opted to be quiet. I had nothing nice to say. why be hurtful? Imagine how I felt when you spewed all the venom I held back right at me . If your goal was to constantly frustrate me, you win. I can't fucking find you. I've come to learn that you know how to torture me like the best of them.
“And then black night. The blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.”
Canto Two, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov/ reluctantly subject to your disposal...
January 25, 2012
that unique design for which I yearn
“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
January 24, 2012
the way desire burns bluely
Nabokov’s Blues
William Matthews
The wallful of quoted passages from his work,with the requisite specimens pinned nextto their literary cameo appearances, was too gooda temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t,why should we? The prose dipped and shimmeredand the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them.....
it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita,The scant hour we could lavish on the Bluesflew by, and we improvised a path through carsand slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow
to wherever we went next. I must have been mute,or whatever I said won from silence nothingit mourned to lose.....
This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the waydesire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core:just as you’re having what you wanted most,you want it more and more until that’s morethan you, or it, or both of you, can bear.
January 10, 2012
January 09, 2012
“All Colors made me happy, even gray.”
I got "Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade" in the mail today and I couldn't be more exicted. My love of Artsy Books and Nabokov combined at last.
December 26, 2011
now thou too must go; just here we part
Thus life has been an endless line of land
receding endlessly.... And so that's that,
you say under your breath, and wave your hand,
and then your handkerchief, and then your hat.
To all these things I've said the fatal word,
using a tongue I had so tuned and tamed
that -- like some ancient sonneteer -- I heard
its echoes by posterity acclaimed.
But now thou too must go; just here we part,
softest of tongues, my true one, all my own....
And I am left to grope for heart and art
and start anew with clumsy tools of stone.
Vladimir Nabokov
pauline&fritz
December 12, 2011
first sight
"It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight." Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch.29
Sandra
August 30, 2011
brief crack of light
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
Nabokov, Speak Memory
August 28, 2011
July 18, 2011
July 03, 2011
sometimes as Lo
I am the book of Dolores B. Haze
otherwise known as Dolly
(sometimes as Lo) age twelve
and almost a quarter
I come with a curse
and my pages
are private
if you read me, be warned
I am the Book of Dolores
beware:
put me back in my box
and be happy
Kim Morrissey, Poems For Men Who Dream of Lolita
June 11, 2011
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
On Discovering a Butterfly
I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer -- and I want no other fame.
Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
Nabokov
a butterfly he has always wanted to catch By BEYOURPET
May 19, 2011
May 06, 2011
fed by exile
Lolita is probably more important than The Odyssey. It is better written, at least.
» In Which These Are The 100 Greatest Writers Of All Time
Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul - these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilisations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness; mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.
» Istanbul: Memories of a City by Orhan Pamuk
March 21, 2011
sex is but the ancilla of art
"It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art."
Vladimir Nabokov
March 20, 2011
the scepter of my passion
I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
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