To Zachary Morris and his Monsters!

In class we do refer to poor Humbert Humbert as a monster. Well he is isn't he? Zachary brought up the relationship between Frankenstien and Lolita. Our experience of H.H. is like the "experience of horror in relation to the monstrous," from Timothy Beal's book Religion and Its Monsters (Beal 7). Our encounter with Humbert Humbert is "as an encounter with mysterious otherness [monster] that elicits a vertigo-like combination of both fear and desire, repulsion and attraction" (Beal 7). That's true isn't it? Maybe my own reactions are off, but while I feel repulsed by Humbert, I also feel interested and attracted to him. He is charming, and from what he says, good-looking, but if anyone has seen the movie Twilight we know monsters can be beautiful like Edward, the handsome vampire Bella falls in love with. (Robert Pattinson makes a very sexy vampire monster in the movie, we forget he is a monster and cheer for him as well, but he is a good monster.)

Beal says that monsters "are figures of chaos and disorientation within order and orientation, revealing deep insecurities in one's faith in oneself, one's society and one's world" (5). The character of H.H. disturbs the reader's sense of security, stability, integrity, etc. We like a pedophile! We are cheering him on and then realize we've been sucked in by Nabokov and feel unsure of ourselves and our feelings. Are we dispicable for liking this dispicable man? We feel pity for him.

The intro and conclusion of Religion and Its Monsters talks about Frankenstien and could be helpful for developing the thread Zachary was interested in. I have the Beal book if you would like to look at it.

P.S. read my post below this one, it has some great links!

WHAT?!

If you haven't been to Emily's blog and clicked on the interview link, you must! I'm giving it to you again, the link to Nabokov's interviews in ENGLISH! If you scroll to the bottom of the page you will find some English words in a list among all the Russian and those are the interviews!! go there and check it out!

I had wondered why Nabokov included chess problems in his writing and liked them in general. Why chess!? Abracadabra , I found my answer while looking through the interviews! Nabokov's interview. (15) Novel [1970] -"Why are you including the chess problems with the poems? Because problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worth while art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity." Now that's a beautiful answer. These interviews seem like a good place to discover more about the artist/author we are studying.

Also! Check out this site Dr. Sexson unearthed: The Nabokov Code, A first encounter with Laura, his last, unfinished work, by Ron Rosenbaum . Talking about an experience with the "long-locked-away Holy Grail of higher lit," The Original of Laura. You can read the book, but after signing a paper, you can't disclose anything about it! It does create an aura of "something thrillingly forbidden" surrounding the book. But it is forbidden isn't it? Nabokov wanted it destroyed, but it lives and is going to be published. When we read The Original of Laura we will all be reading a forbidden book.

Time and Memory, a quick word

As we pondered our chilhood and the memories kept inside our brain with or without our knowledge we bow to Nabokov and his novel Lolita, echoing Humbert as a remembering self. As was told to us in class we know one of the themes of Lolita include Time and Memory. Click HERE to see a recent web article on people with super memories. As I was searching on the internet I found Olga Hasty, who has some interesting ideas about Nabokov and memory in her work Memory, Consciousness, and Time in Nabokov's Lolita saying,

"Although Humbert’s pedophilia takes center stage for most readers of Lolita, it is in fact not sex but memory that plays the leading role. The “Confession” presents recollected and not on-going events and abounds with figurations of memory. Indeed, the narrative is itself what a Durkheimian psychologist might call “an instrument for provoking recall." The remembering self Humbert projects is defined in terms of the exceptional memory he repeatedly draws to his reader’s attention and demonstrates in a profusion of literary references and recollected details...the literary references - when they are recognized - establish a space of memory that the reader shares with Humbert" (232).

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The other theme is time which could be why memory is so important. Because time passes we only have our memory to stay connected with what time has taken from us. Erica Jong in The New York Time on the web article, SUMMER READING; TIME HAS BEEN KIND TO THE NYMPHET: 'LOLITA' 30 YEARS LATER addresses Nabokov and time saying:

"In ''Speak, Memory,'' his autobiography, Nabokov calls himself a ''chronophobiac'' (another one of his arresting coinages), and to a great extent ''Lolita'' is a book about chronophobia every bit as much as Shakespeare's sonnets are about mutability and the fleeting of youth and beauty. Humbert Humbert is in love with something which by definition cannot last. That prepubescent state he calls nymphage lasts from 9 to 13 at best, a fleeting four years, often less. The honey-hued shoulders, the budbreasts, the brownish fragrance of the bobby-soxed nymphet all are destined to be abolished by the advent of womanhood, which Humbert despises every bit as much as he worships nymphage. Humbert's dilemma puts the dilemma of all obsessional lovers in high relief. What he loves he is doomed never to possess. It cannot be possessed because time rips it away from him even as he possesses it.
The villain here is time. And the dilemma is the dilemma of the mortal human being who foresees his own death. It is not a coincidence that so many of Nabokov's heroes are doomed and so many of his novels are cast in the form of posthumous autobiographies. His subjects are nothing less than mutability and time, Eros and Death, the twin subjects of all muse-poetry.
Humbert Humbert is, like so many Nabokovian narrators, a man obsessed with an irretrievable past. When he rediscovers his nymphet in Ramsdale (even the place names in ''Lolita'' are full of sexual innuendo and irony), he recognizes at once that he has discovered the reincarnated essence of his Riviera puppy love, who perished of typhus decades earlier:"

this blog won't exist if you don't read it

Dr. Sexson brought to our attention Jared's blog where he writes, "Nabokov is once again dealing with the immortalizing of character. By appealing to the readers to imagine Humbert, they are keeping him alive in the text and continuing their interest in the text." The self reflective quality of the book is a convention of metafiction, which could be classified as a literary device used by fiction writers. Nabokov does use this element in Lolita, which Jared pointed out, but uses it in other novels as well as I'm sure we will discover. If you want to learn more about metafiction click and wikipedia will give you a decent explanation with examples. If you are interested in the idea of immortalizing characters, maybe think about the responsibility of the author. Forever Humbert Humbert will live his life everyday to those very words that Nabokov writes and is only the person Nabokov writes. Humbert Humbert may never have wanted to be a pedophile, but thanks to Nabokov he is. Check out Paul Auster's novel Travels in the Scriptorium where the characters imprison their author.

Joyce, Nabokov, Sexson: notes to note

The top picture is of Nabokov's notes on Ulysses by J. Joyce found in the book Lectures on Literature. Note, I will get a better scanned picture for everyone this weekend, I had some issues.

Dr. Sexson's notes (above) on the first page in Ulysses by James Joyce. Click on the photograph to get an enlarged view. When I look at all this my first thought is, What does it all mean?

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In class today we talked about good readers, and the four good reader attributes from John Updike's quiz include:
-artistic sense
-imagination
-memory
-a dictionary

Nabokov understood the importance of a reader to the text and that a text is not fully itself until it is divulged into by a creative and intelligent reader. This is evident in his readings of Ulysses, a text as you may know that cannot be fully enjoyed by any reader who is less than incredibly creative and intelligent. Nabokov read Ulysses with attention to detail and creativity. CH. 4 of Ulysses, or rather, Calypso introduces the reader to Mr. Leopold Bloom for the first time and the first paragraph goes like this (**read out loud, hold your chin high, let your tongue flap and give the words the credit they deserve**) :

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked
thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with
crustcrumbs, fired hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys
which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."

Now compare this with our first introduction to Humbert Humbert in Lolita. (again read aloud, enunciate):

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip
of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on
the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Both passages are not only oral, but ingestible. When reading these passages out loud we chew our words like a piece of meat, feeling the weight and texture of the words in our mouth as we say them. Like Joyce and Nabokov pay special attention to the way your tongue moves when you read out loud.



*special thanks to Sutter who helped me with his insight on the subject matter

Nabokovian Photo Caption: Sam and Amy

This is me and my friend Amy in the midst of casually practicing for a performance. Amy's dad, John, took the photo of us posed and relaxed in their livingroom. This is their house in Kalispell located near the Kalispell Jr. High School. The year was 2005 observable at the bottom of the photo digitally included from the camera. The year we graduated from Flathead High School. Looking out the window behind us you can tell it is late in the evening because it is dark outside. We were having a chill euphonious evening session of song singing and guitar playing. This was an informal practice because we are sitting on the stale floral print couch that is covered by some pallid sheets rather than sitting on stools. We are hooked up to the mics, and the pick-ups are in the soundholes of the guitars. The subtle music stand is forgotten in the back left corner of the picture. Our papers, instead of carefully put on the music stand are probably strewn on the floor or on the table that you can't see, but where you can see the beloved nalgene bottle and quotidian fake plant. (Nalgene bottles are recently not a preferred water bottle because of bisphenol A used in the plastic that causes health risks, however you can buy nalgenes made without that chemical. Klean Kanteen seems to be a good waterbottle choice that I've chosen, or some sort of glass water bottle.) Both guitars are Martins and belong to Amy's dad, who loves John Denver and used to play guitar himself. He bought the sound equipment for us at First National Pawn for a good deal so we could book gigs around the valley. We used to pack all the equipment into my substandard piece of shit van and drive to local coffee shops and events to perform. The Sam and Amy duo may have lasted longer or recorded an album had we not been interested in going to college. I went to Bozeman and she went to St. Paul, MN. These past four years we've been lucky to see each other once a year and play. This picture evokes a yearning in me for the enchanting times Amy and I spent learning and creating songs together, making up harmonies, working on intros and outros, but predominantly I hanker for the times we spent together as friends, just doing our own thing.

Riddle Me This

Speak, Memory

Beginning of Chapter 4: "Uncle Ruka seems to have led an idle and oddly chaotic life. His diplomatic career was of the vaguest kind. He prided himself, however, on being an expert in decoding ciphered messages in any of the five languages he knew. We subjected him to a test one day, and in a twinkle he turned the sequesnce "5.13 24.11 13.16 9.12.5 5.13 24.11" into the opening words of a famous monologue in Shakespeare" (Nabokov 70).

So in following with Nabokov's love of details, I thought I'd pay attention to this one. Did anyone crack the code? "To be or not to be." I think the words 'famous monologue' gave it away but, it still took me a little bit. I didn't decipher any code, I just guessed. I looked around online to see if anyone had completely broken down the code and Here is a link I found to a forum with many ideas on the code. Appearantly many people have given this some thought.

Nabokov seemed to really like codes as did his Uncle Ruta. An article I found online, Nabokov's Final Riddle: Literary Prank Master's Post-Mortem Novel from Wired Magazine states, "Codes and concealed meanings were central to Nabokov's worldview, says Brian Boyd, an authority on the writer's life and work. 'Nabokov felt that the thrill of discovery was one of the highest things life had to offer,' Boyd says. 'But he also felt that ultimately the whole of reality seemed to be constructed as if by some great cosmic prankster.' "
Click on the above link to read the whole article.There is a lot more going on in Nabokov's novels than we expect. And I think I'll need more help finding the multilayered chess problem in Speak, Memory. Also there is lots to look out for in Pale Fire as the article also mentions.

My First Childhood Memory.........maybe

I remember all sorts of things about the first house I knew as a child. The problem is I'm not sure which memory is the first one. Here is one of the many that could be my first.

Our house was yellow (later painted blue) and it was on the cul-de-sac on Michael Dr. near Portland, OR. The hot summer days were perfect on the back porch or rather a concrete slab that was surrounded be a large green fenced in lawn. There was a swingset with a lookout tower and a slide. My mom had a little raised garden and there was a small shed next to that. We adopted a cat that lived under that shed. On one hot summer day my mom's friend Mary and her daughter Aliesha, who we called Shasha, came to hang out. Shash was a year older than me, but I don't think I knew that at the time. Shasha, my brother Ben, and I were all given homemade grape popsicles. We would take the outside chairs apart by removing the cloth that help the wooden frame up and turn the chairs upside down and line them up. We would each sit in the space created by the overturned chairs. And create a bus or train and eat our popsicles. Our mouths, tongues, lips, fingers, and clothes turned a nice purple pink. The refreshing purple grape ice felt so good to eat in the summer.

"Caress the detail, the divine detail." - Nabokov