more sailboats of thoughts

I can officially go only four days straight without watching Danger Man ever since I got the megaset. I've got exactly five episodes to go, including the two color ones. After I'm done with it all, I'll be rewatching a bunch to get a bunch of screencaps of random actors for my Hungarian friend.

I didn't do that much work over the three day holiday. There were the 24 Hour Plays on Saturday, during which a group of students writes, directs, acts out, and produces a series of plays. (I'll edit this later for more details because I've got to go now.)

Happy belated Easter/Pagan Fertility Day! Being me, of course I managed to miss out that this Sunday was Easter/Pagan Fertility Day despite seeing and hearing all sorts of announcements.

I might be getting a car within the forseeable future (next couple of months or so, from what I've been told.) Huzzah for tremendously froody neighbors who know people going off to college who want to sell their cars! At this point in time I'm just looking for something that will almost always be guaranteed to start up in the morning and won't spontaneously combust while driving. And preferably it has decent gas mileage, a CD player, and heat and air conditioning, too. It's rather extravagant of me, I know. Perhaps I'll be mercenary and drive some middle school students if their parents pay for gas money. I was filling up Ellie's car (the one that I drive at the moment) and nearly dropped the nozzle when I saw the total price. It's a pity that public transporation around here is virtually nonexistent.

Not to mention that I nearly drove right into a barrier dividing the road two days ago when I was startled by my cell phone ringing, but there only a few minor scratches near the bottom of the car. I'm really not used to these cell phone things yet. Bleh, I'm still trying to figure out how to program in a customized ring tone so that I can play around with all of those half-arrangements I've come up with over the past few months. I hope it uses hand bell chime notation (D6, F sharp 5 and whatnot) because I'm pretty familiar with that.

Did I mention that I really like my neighbors? Not that I ever disliked them to begin with, but I'm even more grateful for all that they've done for me and my family over the years. I definitely appreciate not having to go down the long shared driveway every morning to get the newspaper.

commentary on lolita, or confessions of a white widowed male

A beautiful quotation on film music which I discovered in an interview with Adrian Lyne's Lolita screenwriter, Stephen Schiff:

"A movie's score is its emotional touchstone; it has to be very immediate, and it has to speak to an audience in a language that requires no transposition."

I've found that the following soundtracks are absolutely magical when reading Lolita: Phillip Glass's the Hours, Yann Tiersen's Goodbye, Lenin! and Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo.

Now back to my original topic, assuming that I had one to begin with.

I was quite pleased to have a chance to discuss Lolita during CrWr as I was assigned to a small group tasked with the question (paraphrased), "Which novel could best replace Anna Karenina as the lector's reading choice in Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, keeping in mind the work's social and political agenda?"

Coincidentally I had been rereading Lolita over the weekend while frantically editing a piece for Moch which roughly touched upon a few of the same subjects-loss, innocence, youth, beauty of language. Luckily I had Lolita in my backpack, so I had a merry little discussion with zedhaus and others about why Lolita would work. Yes, you're replacing a Russian classic with another Russian classic, but even that's a bit of a stretch considering that Lolita was Nabokov's second work written originally in English. Lolita has the image of doomed lovers, the exploration of the many different kinds of love relationships, and, to quote from the summary printed on the back (lazy of me, I know!), "the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America," an assertion with which I disagree, by the way; I don't think that Nabokov had a strong political message in mind.

Unfortunately I think I lost most people there because nobody ever really reads Lolita for fun, or if they do they're looking for the raunchy bits. Well, such a reader will be disappointed, as one of my intrepid classmates remarked after flipping through my copy, "There isn't anything graphic about the sex; it's encapsulated in his language, and you've got to read through the lines." Nabokov is wonderfully frustrating with his wordplay and flowing passages about minutae; the meaning is veiled in the aesthetics of his images.

The thing that bothers me the most about the perceptions of Lolita is that most people assume that it's all about a perverted old man's domineering, abnormal relationship with a young girl. I'm not absolving Humbert-Humbert of his crimes by any means, but I will openly confess that I can't hate him. He is quite conscious of the fact that his sexual fascination with nymphets is grotesque. Some may blame Lolita as encouraging H-H, another folly. Lolita was fully aware of her power over H-H and willingly manipulated him to get what she wanted on occasion (the most notable example being her convincing H-H to go on a second cross-country road trip), but H-H took away any chances of having a happy childhood and home life. A true nymphet is unaware of her sexual appeal; she is aware that she has the power to attract, but doesn't necessarily consciously use these powers when she's interested in men. I don't think that either party is completely free of blame or the consequences for that matter, so it bothers me when people say that it's all H-H's or Dolores's fault. Nabokov once said that "The moral of Lolita is that there is no moral," and despite the murkiness of moral ambiguity I believe that it is folly to view the book as being totally fixated with the vulgarity of sexual perversion. The main attraction for me is Nabokov's writing style, a feature that tends to be overlooked with the public's preconception of Lolita as any crude sexually precocious young girl and her predatory older lover.

I must admit that part of my response stems from being sick of fending myself of accusations of being a pervert because Lolita is easily one of my favorite books in existence. I do understand that a lot of people dislike this book not because of the morals (or lack thereof?) but because they don't really understand what goes on. Lolita is something of a puzzle, and you really do have to reread it for it to make more sense. And I know that I will probably never understand every single reference, image, nuane of meaning, but it still enchants. I've forgotten how many times I've reread certain sections (in whole, I've reread the book thrice) but I've only grown to better appreciate the wit and the beauty of the words unfurling on the page.

I've read too much Lolita criticism within the past few hours instead of studying for French. Not that I need to study for French, anyway.

Edit: I just found out that my uncle Doug (the one who nearly became the first Chinese-American American naval admiral, and who has kindly let me joined his cell phone family plan) had a heart attack yesterday, but luckily it was a mild one, and he's recuperating fairly well in the hospital. I wish him well and hope that his upcoming bypass surgery is speedy and safe.