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*** I also found this VNCollation extremely interesting and informative.
It must have taken Suellen many days to compile it all, for which
I am very grateful to her. GD ***
From: joseph brown <joeb@real.com>
This is an impressive compendium. I'm sure we will witness more mass
media hysteria surrounding the inveitable US release (in some context) of
Lyne's film.
I think this issue exposes the quintessence of the "American Moral
Paradox": had the film featured a protagonist who tortured and murdered
minors, it would be perfectly suitable for prime time television!
Since sexuality is involved, we'll be lucky to finally see a video
release, expurgated or not.
Joseph Brown
joeb@real.com
At 17:55 02/20/98 -0800, you wrote:
>From: Suellen Stringer-Hye <Stringers@LIBRARY.Vanderbilt.edu>
>
>Pornography, the First Amendment, and Lolita,---it all comes round
>again...
>
>On October 17, Joan E. Bertin, in a _Los Angeles Times_ op-ed piece
>discussed the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 in its relation
>to Adrian Lyne's now famously unreleased film version of Lolita.
>Bertin denounces the Childhood Pornography Prevention Act stating that
>this will not effectively stop sexual abuse and exploitation. She
>complains that:
>
>
> ...even if a movie like "Lolita" was filmed with an adult body
> double, it apparently would be prohibited if it contains
> simulated sexual conduct that appears to involve a minor. If you
> recall, that's what "Lolita" is about: a man's sexual obsession
> with a pubescent girl.
>
>Seconding this viewpoint , _The Economist_ ran an anonymous article
>called "Self-appointed censors" in the October 11, issue. The author
> uses "Lolita's" distribution woes to frame a discussion about
>censorship.
>
> IN MOST western democracies, state censorship of publishing and
> the arts has, thankfully, more or less disappeared. But there is
> a subtler threat to freedom of artistic expression that liberals,
> in the old fashioned sense, ought to be worried about. This is
> the claim heard more and more from shocked or offended groups to
> a special say, even a veto, over what books are published or what
> art is shown.
>
>On the other side of the argument, a December 30, _New York Times_
> article reported that a German group that campaigns against
>pedophilia called for a ban on screenings of the new film version of
>''Lolita".'' The group, Kim Initiative, denounced the film as ''an
>attempt to promote pedophilia."
>
>
>Norman Podhoretz , an early protege of Lionel Trilling, and a
>champion of neo-conservativism in his long tenure as editor of
>_Commentary_, in and April 1997 _Commentary_ article entitled
>"Lolita, My mother-in-law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flint"
>blames Nabokov for positioning Lolita at the precipice of unbridled
>pederasty. Excerpts from this article appear below. Full text can be
>found at: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9704/norman.html
>
> NOT LONG ago, the Library of America put out a beautiful new
> three-volume edition of the novels and memoirs of Vladimir
> Nabokov, and I decided to seize upon it as a convenient occasion
> for reacquainting myself with his work. Which explains why I
> happened to be reading Lolita on the very day a story by Nina
> Bernstein appeared on the front page of the New York Times that
> cast a horrifying new light on Nabokov's masterpiece. It also
> brought memories to the surface that had long been buried, and
> simultaneously forced me into rethinking a number of questions I
> had up till then considered fairly well resolved. As I was going
> through this difficult process, I was given a few more pushes by
> Milos Forman's movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and two
> recently published books, Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge2
> and Rochelle Gurstein's The Repeal of Reticence.3 By the time I
> was through, my peace of mind had been so disturbed that I was
> left wishing that those old memories and those settled questions
> had been allowed to remain in their contentedly slumberous state.
>
>
>Podhertz makes comments such as these:
>
> But as I have now come to understand on rereading Nabokov in the
> new Library of America edition, there was something less
> admirable that went along with his linguistic genius and that he
> also had in common with Joyce: a contempt for his audience. I
> realize this is a very harsh charge, but how else can one
> honestly describe the attitude implicit in a style so in love
> with itself that it often loses sight of what it is supposed to
> be conveying, and so aesthetically narcissistic that it
> intransigently refuses to make any concessions whatsoever to the
> reader, even to the point of often requiring an editor's
> footnotes to decipher the pyrotechnical wordplay in which it so
> mischievously indulges?
>
>
>
> The very brilliance of his language, the very sharpness of his
> wit, the very artfulness of his treatment all help to shatter the
> taboo and thereby to rob pedophilia of its horror. In other words,
> in aestheticizing the hideous, Nabokov as I can now clearly
> see-comes very close to prettifying it.
>
> Worse yet, he comes very close to excusing it.
>
>
>However preposterous Podhoretz's accusations, many in the film
>industry may be afraid that release of Lyne's film in the US will
>trigger a wave of pedophilia for which they or their interests will be
>considered responsible. And who can say this is not true? A casual
>search on the internet for "Lolita" delivers two index screens of
>hard-core porn sites before ever a mention of Nabokov or his novel
>appears. The subtle indictment of the "Lolita" mentality that is a
>part of the book's complexity is lost on the non-readers who traffic
>these sites.
>
>In the November 1996 interview I conducted with Stephen Schiff, the
>sceenwriter for Lyne's "Lolita", we did not discuss the current
>difficulties in finding a distributor. When I recently asked him
>about the above situation, he commented,
>
> What, precisely, do the fears of a movie's causing a "wave of
> pedophilia" amount to? Does someone really believe that a
> viewer of "Lolita" might sit in the movie theatre, watching the
> deterioration of Humbert's life, and say to himself, "Huh!
> Pedophilia! Never thought of that! Think I'll try it!"?
>
> That, as absurd as it sounds, is nevertheless the tenor of the
> public terror. It is not, of course, the tenor of the studios'
> terror. What they fear is something more bottom-line:
> picketers, boycotts, stockholder revolts, small-town sheriffs
> confiscating prints and jailing everyone involved, etc. Those
> fears seem infinitely more reasonable to me than the bogeyman
> of a "wave of pedophilia," but they are still not reason enough
> to keep this movie off American screens.
>
>In the meantime, many articles discussing the film from both
>"first amendment" and "artistic" viewpoints have surfaced. Below is a
>quick list of some of the most notable appearing after 9/1/97.
>(Recent articles mentioned on Nabokv-l not included)
>
>Richard Covington, "'Lolita Makes The European Rounds"
> _Los Angeles Times_, January 20, 1998, p. 1.
>
>John Blades, "A Look at Lolita", _Chicago Tribune_, January 4, 1998,
> p. 12,
>
>Liz Smith,"The Woes of Lolita" _Newsday_, November 11, 1997, p.A15.
>
>Anonymous,"Pedophilia is Taboo, but incest seems
> accepted"Sun-Sentinel_ (Fort Lauderdale, FL), , October 2, 1997,
> p.5E.
>
>Derek Malcolm, "Pass The Popcorn; Bah! Humbert!" _The Guardian_
> (London) September 25, 1997, p. T8.
>
>Celestine Bohlen "A New 'Lolita' Stalls in Europe; Hollywood
> Snubs Remake of the Tale of an Adolescent Siren", _New York
> Times_ September 23, 1997, p. 1.
>
>Derek Malcolm, "Lolita Back In The Limelight", _The Guardian_
> (London), September 22, 1997, p.20.
>
>Anonymous, "Babylon can be a hard sell", _Economist_
> October 11, 1997, p.108
>
>Jack Kroll, "Lolita's Fatal Attraction", _Newsweek_
> October 6, 1997, p.72.
>
>John Leonard, "The New Puritanism"; _ Nation_
> Nov 24, 1997 p.11.
>
>Rachel Abramowitz, "How do you solve a problem like Lolita?"
> _Premiere_ p. 80.
>
>
>*********************************************************************
>SERGEI and HOMOSEXUALITY
>
> In Berlin, Charting Gay Art's Struggle to Emerge
>
>An August 3, 1997 article in the New York Times by Michael Ratcliffe
>describes an exhibit held in Berlin at the Academy of Arts to
>celebrate 100 years of the international gay movement. Comprised of
>1,000 paintings, drawings, photographs, documents and books the
>exhibit sought to express the exuberance of "...a homosexual culture
>that has become global in the last years of this century."
>
> Vladimir Nabokov's gay brother, Sergei, about whom he writes
> with bewildered remorse in his memoirs, died of exhaustion in
> the concentration camp at Neuengamme. We look with new eyes at
> the 1918 photograph of five Nabokov siblings: not first, as
> before, at the supercool, pale-browed genius of 19 on the left,
> but at Sergei, an intense, owlish adolescent in Yalta school
> uniform and pince-nez. They don't even look related. (Their
> father had been a leading liberal campaigner for sexual reforms
> in St. Petersburg in the 1890's.) The Gestapo warrant for
> Sergei's arrest is also here; the Nazis kept everything.
>
>
>*********************************************************************
>JAKOB AND JEWEL: VN AND POPULAR CULTURE
>
>
>Two musicians, Jewel and Jakob Dylan have recently been
>characterized in the popular press by their taste for Nabokov.
>Gerri Hirshey in a June 12, 1997 article called "Jakob's Ladder"
>describes this scenario,
>
>
> "Disco sucks!" bellows a husky partisan in a Bruins jersey. A
> lacy, burgundy-colored bra floats onstage. Then - thunk! - a
> yellowed, dogeared paperback of Lolita lands at the scuffed toes
> of Jakob's black brogans. He looks puzzled, a bit concerned. How
> could anyone out there guess his fondness for Nabokov ? Could
> they possibly know that he can read a page of the old
> reprobate's lush prose and see a half-dozen songs fly out of it?
> Round midnight, sitting in the darkened back lounge of the
> Wallflowers' rolling bus, Jakob Dylan will wonder aloud: "Where
> are they getting their information? How?"
>
>In "The Shaping of Jewel" which appeared on July 21,1997, in _Time _,
>Howard Chua-Eoan depicts the rock singer as,
>
> The street-smart optimism of pop's new goddess rises from a
> life of near poverty in Alaska and San Diego Her metaphors can
> be equine. She has said she is not a workhorse, not a racehorse,
> but a show horse. She brings up a fictional character who looked
> "impossibly sad, like a horse's eyes." It is a quote, she says,
> from Nabokov, and she pronounces the novelist's name correctly,
> with the stress on the second syllable, exactly as exacting old
> Vladimir used to instruct his readers. He might have been able
> to appreciate this latest of pop goddesses, this star of the
> Lilith Fair. After all, it was a Nabokov character who said that
> while he was capable of loving Eve, "it was Lilith he longed
> for." Jewel's is a fey, insidious charm, equal parts worldly and
> naive, where flaws-the crooked nose and crooked teeth she is so
> proud of-only betray an uncommon beauty. Then there is the
> improbable match of slender youth and that voice-an
> astonishingly versatile instrument ranging from soul-shattering
> yodels to the most eloquent of whispers to arch Cole Porter-ish
> recitative.
>
>
>KURT VONNEGUT
>
>Kurt Vonnegut, recently in the news due to the novel
>commonly publicized as his last, is compared to Nabokov in this
>excerpt from an article "Vonnegut's last laugh: A talk with America's
>greatest living Saab dealer" in the October 7, _Village Voice_ .
>
>
> However unlikely it sounds-plenty, right?-I also think Vonnegut
> and Nabokov have things in common. No, not everything: Vonnegut,
> I love. Nabokov, I revere. But they're both the products of lost
> paradises, which reverberate in their work with a nostalgia
> unmarred by self-pity. Nabokov's idyllic, cushy Russian youth
> has the advantage of sounding like paradise; Vonnegut's was
> prewar Indianapolis, which doesn't. His parents didn't have a
> happy adulthood: his mother finally killed herself not long
> before Kurt was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. Even so,
> he's one of the few American writers to have had a happy
> childhood, which was also a privileged one, until his
> prosperous family went bust in the Depression.
>
>
>
>STOLEN BOOKS
>
>As reported in the December 7, 1997 _New York Times_ p. 3,
> in order to protect books that are regularly stolen, Tower Records
>created a behind-the-counter placard that reads : ''Tower's Most
>Wanted,'' and features sinister-looking photos and the names of
>the authors of these books. Hot authors are Jack Keruoac,
>Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver,
>Cormac McCarthy, Henry Miller and Jim Thompson. Keeping this good
>company is, of course, Vladimir Nabokov.
>
> Citywide, the hottest books are, ''Junkie'' by William S.
> Burroughs, ''On the Road'' by Jack Kerouac and ''Lolita'' by
> Vladimir Nabokov . In addition, anything by Charles Bukowski has
> to be nailed down.
>
>The article, far from denouncing thievery decides,
>
> Perhaps people shouldn't be so concerned by all this theft.
> There are those who say that the taste reflected by the thieves
> is the taste not of Americans in general, but simply of those
> who steal. And there is some good news. At least there are
> people left who still want to read.
>
>YOUNG GIRLS
>
>In the March 1997 Los Angeles Magazine, Lawrence Weschler makes an
>interesting comparison between Gidget and Lolita in an article called
>"From Hitler to Hollywood". The article traces the fortunes and
>fates of German emigres who landed in Hollywood after WWII.
>
> IN THE MID 1950s, A GERMAN emigre writer named Frederick Kohner
> watched, mystified, as his Americanized teenage daughter
> learned to surf on Malibu Beach. Kohner decided to write a
> fictionalized account of his daughter's exploits, deploying as
> the book's title the nickname she had acquired at the beach:
> Gidget. Around the same time, a Russian emigre named Nabokov
> living in Ithaca, New York, published astory about another
> American teenager called Lolita. Both books concerned girls
> coming of age, both were quintessentially American, and both
> were by emigres.
>
>
>PSORIASIS
>
>In the December 20 -27th _British Medical Journal_ Frans Meulenberg
>profiles literary incidents of psoriasis along with the true life
>occurences that inspired them. He discusses in detail John Updike's
>bouts with the disease and the manifestation of them in several of
>his works. He also states,
>
> Vladimir Nabokov concealed his psoriasis. For example, in the
> collection of interviews with Nabokov the term psoriasis is
> never used." In February 1937 Nabokov suffered a bad attack.'2
> On 15 May of that year he somewhat pathetically wrote to his
> wife, Vera: "I continue with the radiation treatments every day
> and am pretty much cured. You know-now I can tell you
> frankly-the indescribable torments I endured in February, before
> these treatments, drove me to the border of suicide-a border I
> was not authorised to cross because I had you in my luggage."'"
> His biographer mentions only one more exacerbation of psoriasis
> after that, which occurred in the late 1960s when the strain of
> writing the novel Ada fell from Nabokov's shoulders.
>
>
>
> Whereas Updike has written about psoriasis at length, Nabokov
> devotes one page to the disease, in the novel Ada.'8 He mentions
> "a spectacular skin disease that had been portrayed recently by
> a famous American novelist in his Chiron and described in
> side-splitting style by a co-sufferer who wrote essays for a
> London weekly." The two patients with psoriasis in Ada exchange
> notes with tips: "Mercury!" or "Hohensonne works wonders." Other
> pieces of advice are found in a one volume encyclopaedia, and
> involve taking hot baths at least twice a month and avoiding
> spices.
>
>
>The article concludes with this insight.
>
> Psoriasis functions as a metaphor for the creative process.
> Psoriasis is the result of the implosion of the artist, and the
> novels on psoriasis cultivate the idea that the psoriasis plaque
> is the Achilles heel of the introvert individualist, the artist
> who looks upon the world as a guardsman from the ivory tower of
> his psoriasis. His salvation is a make believe world or an
> entirely private world: the imagined past or the world of art.
>
>*********************************************************************
> LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
>
> Letters
> The Nation
> New York
> Dec 22, 1997
>
>
> I was sad to see in John Leonard's sprightly article on
> Lolita ["The New Puritanism," Nov. 24] that he picked up the
> canard that William Styron floated (and apologized to me for
> later) that Farrar Straus had turned down Lolita. The facts
> are-and they are so stated in the Nabokov letters-that I
> offered a contract to Nabokov for his book, and he said he
> would accept it provided he could use a nom de plume, as he
> feared he would lose his job at Cornell if he did not
> disguise himself. All my dealings were directly with him, but
> also via Elena Wilson, an old friend, and I showed the
> manuscript to Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy and of course Edmund
> Wilson. They had mixed reactions. Obviously I told Nabokov
> that I couldn't do that as we would be asked to defend the
> book and needed the author to stand with us. That's the story.
>
> ROGER W STRAUS
>
> Farrar, Straus & Giroux
>
>LEONARD REPLIES
>
> New York City
>
> Canard perhaps, but picked up from Boyd's biography, Volume
> II: "Meanwhile Edmund Wilson had suggested that Nabokov show
> Lolita to his current publisher, Farrar Straus. Roger Straus
> turned the book down and counseled Nabokov against publishing
> it pseudonymously, for although that might at first safeguard
> Cornell, it would weaken the book's chances in court." No
> mention of Straus offering a contract. Similarly: "Viking,
> Simon and Schuster New Directions, Farrar Straus, and now
> Doubleday all thought it impossible to publish the book and
> avoid prosecution. It was high time to look abroad." So much
> for very long biographies and short selective memories. JOHN
> LEONARD
>
>*********************************************************************
>
>
>BIBLIOGRAPHY
>
>Two books of interest to Nabokophiles but not likely to be noted in
>the usual channels of communication are abstracted below.
>
>
>BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL: A Thousand Years of Russia's Artistic
>Experience
>
>W. Bruce Lincoln. Viking, $34.95 (544p) ISBN 0-679-87568-6
>
> Lincoln investigates the psychological and aesthetic tensions
> in artists like composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whom he
> views as suspended between East and West. Relying heavily on
> primary sources, he gauges the impact of emigres like Tsvetaeva,
> Nabokov , Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, who developed new forms that
> merged with artistic currents long suppressed in the Soviet
> Union to create a new force in Russian life of the post-Soviet
> era
>
>DARWIN'S ORCHESTRA: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts
>Michael Sims. Henry Holt 1997 508p ISBN 0-8050-4220-2
>
> This book is a series of essays drawn from the literature of
> Natural History and Popular Culture and adhering to a daybook
> format --one essay for each day of the year. 12, June 1948 is
> entitled "Nabokov's Butterflies" because of the fact that
> Nabokov's own account of his lifelong fascination with
> butterflies appeared in the June 12, 1948 issue of the _New
> Yorker_ . Nabokov also figures in the 17, November 1912 essay,
> "The Metamorphosis of Franz K". On this day Kafka began writing
> Der Verwandlung. _Darwin's Orchestra_ is a quirky book of
> facts and dates, well researched and a lot of fun.
>Suellen Stringer-Hye
>Jean and Alexander Heard Library
>Vanderbilt University
>stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu
>
>
It must have taken Suellen many days to compile it all, for which
I am very grateful to her. GD ***
From: joseph brown <joeb@real.com>
This is an impressive compendium. I'm sure we will witness more mass
media hysteria surrounding the inveitable US release (in some context) of
Lyne's film.
I think this issue exposes the quintessence of the "American Moral
Paradox": had the film featured a protagonist who tortured and murdered
minors, it would be perfectly suitable for prime time television!
Since sexuality is involved, we'll be lucky to finally see a video
release, expurgated or not.
Joseph Brown
joeb@real.com
At 17:55 02/20/98 -0800, you wrote:
>From: Suellen Stringer-Hye <Stringers@LIBRARY.Vanderbilt.edu>
>
>Pornography, the First Amendment, and Lolita,---it all comes round
>again...
>
>On October 17, Joan E. Bertin, in a _Los Angeles Times_ op-ed piece
>discussed the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 in its relation
>to Adrian Lyne's now famously unreleased film version of Lolita.
>Bertin denounces the Childhood Pornography Prevention Act stating that
>this will not effectively stop sexual abuse and exploitation. She
>complains that:
>
>
> ...even if a movie like "Lolita" was filmed with an adult body
> double, it apparently would be prohibited if it contains
> simulated sexual conduct that appears to involve a minor. If you
> recall, that's what "Lolita" is about: a man's sexual obsession
> with a pubescent girl.
>
>Seconding this viewpoint , _The Economist_ ran an anonymous article
>called "Self-appointed censors" in the October 11, issue. The author
> uses "Lolita's" distribution woes to frame a discussion about
>censorship.
>
> IN MOST western democracies, state censorship of publishing and
> the arts has, thankfully, more or less disappeared. But there is
> a subtler threat to freedom of artistic expression that liberals,
> in the old fashioned sense, ought to be worried about. This is
> the claim heard more and more from shocked or offended groups to
> a special say, even a veto, over what books are published or what
> art is shown.
>
>On the other side of the argument, a December 30, _New York Times_
> article reported that a German group that campaigns against
>pedophilia called for a ban on screenings of the new film version of
>''Lolita".'' The group, Kim Initiative, denounced the film as ''an
>attempt to promote pedophilia."
>
>
>Norman Podhoretz , an early protege of Lionel Trilling, and a
>champion of neo-conservativism in his long tenure as editor of
>_Commentary_, in and April 1997 _Commentary_ article entitled
>"Lolita, My mother-in-law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flint"
>blames Nabokov for positioning Lolita at the precipice of unbridled
>pederasty. Excerpts from this article appear below. Full text can be
>found at: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9704/norman.html
>
> NOT LONG ago, the Library of America put out a beautiful new
> three-volume edition of the novels and memoirs of Vladimir
> Nabokov, and I decided to seize upon it as a convenient occasion
> for reacquainting myself with his work. Which explains why I
> happened to be reading Lolita on the very day a story by Nina
> Bernstein appeared on the front page of the New York Times that
> cast a horrifying new light on Nabokov's masterpiece. It also
> brought memories to the surface that had long been buried, and
> simultaneously forced me into rethinking a number of questions I
> had up till then considered fairly well resolved. As I was going
> through this difficult process, I was given a few more pushes by
> Milos Forman's movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and two
> recently published books, Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge2
> and Rochelle Gurstein's The Repeal of Reticence.3 By the time I
> was through, my peace of mind had been so disturbed that I was
> left wishing that those old memories and those settled questions
> had been allowed to remain in their contentedly slumberous state.
>
>
>Podhertz makes comments such as these:
>
> But as I have now come to understand on rereading Nabokov in the
> new Library of America edition, there was something less
> admirable that went along with his linguistic genius and that he
> also had in common with Joyce: a contempt for his audience. I
> realize this is a very harsh charge, but how else can one
> honestly describe the attitude implicit in a style so in love
> with itself that it often loses sight of what it is supposed to
> be conveying, and so aesthetically narcissistic that it
> intransigently refuses to make any concessions whatsoever to the
> reader, even to the point of often requiring an editor's
> footnotes to decipher the pyrotechnical wordplay in which it so
> mischievously indulges?
>
>
>
> The very brilliance of his language, the very sharpness of his
> wit, the very artfulness of his treatment all help to shatter the
> taboo and thereby to rob pedophilia of its horror. In other words,
> in aestheticizing the hideous, Nabokov as I can now clearly
> see-comes very close to prettifying it.
>
> Worse yet, he comes very close to excusing it.
>
>
>However preposterous Podhoretz's accusations, many in the film
>industry may be afraid that release of Lyne's film in the US will
>trigger a wave of pedophilia for which they or their interests will be
>considered responsible. And who can say this is not true? A casual
>search on the internet for "Lolita" delivers two index screens of
>hard-core porn sites before ever a mention of Nabokov or his novel
>appears. The subtle indictment of the "Lolita" mentality that is a
>part of the book's complexity is lost on the non-readers who traffic
>these sites.
>
>In the November 1996 interview I conducted with Stephen Schiff, the
>sceenwriter for Lyne's "Lolita", we did not discuss the current
>difficulties in finding a distributor. When I recently asked him
>about the above situation, he commented,
>
> What, precisely, do the fears of a movie's causing a "wave of
> pedophilia" amount to? Does someone really believe that a
> viewer of "Lolita" might sit in the movie theatre, watching the
> deterioration of Humbert's life, and say to himself, "Huh!
> Pedophilia! Never thought of that! Think I'll try it!"?
>
> That, as absurd as it sounds, is nevertheless the tenor of the
> public terror. It is not, of course, the tenor of the studios'
> terror. What they fear is something more bottom-line:
> picketers, boycotts, stockholder revolts, small-town sheriffs
> confiscating prints and jailing everyone involved, etc. Those
> fears seem infinitely more reasonable to me than the bogeyman
> of a "wave of pedophilia," but they are still not reason enough
> to keep this movie off American screens.
>
>In the meantime, many articles discussing the film from both
>"first amendment" and "artistic" viewpoints have surfaced. Below is a
>quick list of some of the most notable appearing after 9/1/97.
>(Recent articles mentioned on Nabokv-l not included)
>
>Richard Covington, "'Lolita Makes The European Rounds"
> _Los Angeles Times_, January 20, 1998, p. 1.
>
>John Blades, "A Look at Lolita", _Chicago Tribune_, January 4, 1998,
> p. 12,
>
>Liz Smith,"The Woes of Lolita" _Newsday_, November 11, 1997, p.A15.
>
>Anonymous,"Pedophilia is Taboo, but incest seems
> accepted"Sun-Sentinel_ (Fort Lauderdale, FL), , October 2, 1997,
> p.5E.
>
>Derek Malcolm, "Pass The Popcorn; Bah! Humbert!" _The Guardian_
> (London) September 25, 1997, p. T8.
>
>Celestine Bohlen "A New 'Lolita' Stalls in Europe; Hollywood
> Snubs Remake of the Tale of an Adolescent Siren", _New York
> Times_ September 23, 1997, p. 1.
>
>Derek Malcolm, "Lolita Back In The Limelight", _The Guardian_
> (London), September 22, 1997, p.20.
>
>Anonymous, "Babylon can be a hard sell", _Economist_
> October 11, 1997, p.108
>
>Jack Kroll, "Lolita's Fatal Attraction", _Newsweek_
> October 6, 1997, p.72.
>
>John Leonard, "The New Puritanism"; _ Nation_
> Nov 24, 1997 p.11.
>
>Rachel Abramowitz, "How do you solve a problem like Lolita?"
> _Premiere_ p. 80.
>
>
>*********************************************************************
>SERGEI and HOMOSEXUALITY
>
> In Berlin, Charting Gay Art's Struggle to Emerge
>
>An August 3, 1997 article in the New York Times by Michael Ratcliffe
>describes an exhibit held in Berlin at the Academy of Arts to
>celebrate 100 years of the international gay movement. Comprised of
>1,000 paintings, drawings, photographs, documents and books the
>exhibit sought to express the exuberance of "...a homosexual culture
>that has become global in the last years of this century."
>
> Vladimir Nabokov's gay brother, Sergei, about whom he writes
> with bewildered remorse in his memoirs, died of exhaustion in
> the concentration camp at Neuengamme. We look with new eyes at
> the 1918 photograph of five Nabokov siblings: not first, as
> before, at the supercool, pale-browed genius of 19 on the left,
> but at Sergei, an intense, owlish adolescent in Yalta school
> uniform and pince-nez. They don't even look related. (Their
> father had been a leading liberal campaigner for sexual reforms
> in St. Petersburg in the 1890's.) The Gestapo warrant for
> Sergei's arrest is also here; the Nazis kept everything.
>
>
>*********************************************************************
>JAKOB AND JEWEL: VN AND POPULAR CULTURE
>
>
>Two musicians, Jewel and Jakob Dylan have recently been
>characterized in the popular press by their taste for Nabokov.
>Gerri Hirshey in a June 12, 1997 article called "Jakob's Ladder"
>describes this scenario,
>
>
> "Disco sucks!" bellows a husky partisan in a Bruins jersey. A
> lacy, burgundy-colored bra floats onstage. Then - thunk! - a
> yellowed, dogeared paperback of Lolita lands at the scuffed toes
> of Jakob's black brogans. He looks puzzled, a bit concerned. How
> could anyone out there guess his fondness for Nabokov ? Could
> they possibly know that he can read a page of the old
> reprobate's lush prose and see a half-dozen songs fly out of it?
> Round midnight, sitting in the darkened back lounge of the
> Wallflowers' rolling bus, Jakob Dylan will wonder aloud: "Where
> are they getting their information? How?"
>
>In "The Shaping of Jewel" which appeared on July 21,1997, in _Time _,
>Howard Chua-Eoan depicts the rock singer as,
>
> The street-smart optimism of pop's new goddess rises from a
> life of near poverty in Alaska and San Diego Her metaphors can
> be equine. She has said she is not a workhorse, not a racehorse,
> but a show horse. She brings up a fictional character who looked
> "impossibly sad, like a horse's eyes." It is a quote, she says,
> from Nabokov, and she pronounces the novelist's name correctly,
> with the stress on the second syllable, exactly as exacting old
> Vladimir used to instruct his readers. He might have been able
> to appreciate this latest of pop goddesses, this star of the
> Lilith Fair. After all, it was a Nabokov character who said that
> while he was capable of loving Eve, "it was Lilith he longed
> for." Jewel's is a fey, insidious charm, equal parts worldly and
> naive, where flaws-the crooked nose and crooked teeth she is so
> proud of-only betray an uncommon beauty. Then there is the
> improbable match of slender youth and that voice-an
> astonishingly versatile instrument ranging from soul-shattering
> yodels to the most eloquent of whispers to arch Cole Porter-ish
> recitative.
>
>
>KURT VONNEGUT
>
>Kurt Vonnegut, recently in the news due to the novel
>commonly publicized as his last, is compared to Nabokov in this
>excerpt from an article "Vonnegut's last laugh: A talk with America's
>greatest living Saab dealer" in the October 7, _Village Voice_ .
>
>
> However unlikely it sounds-plenty, right?-I also think Vonnegut
> and Nabokov have things in common. No, not everything: Vonnegut,
> I love. Nabokov, I revere. But they're both the products of lost
> paradises, which reverberate in their work with a nostalgia
> unmarred by self-pity. Nabokov's idyllic, cushy Russian youth
> has the advantage of sounding like paradise; Vonnegut's was
> prewar Indianapolis, which doesn't. His parents didn't have a
> happy adulthood: his mother finally killed herself not long
> before Kurt was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. Even so,
> he's one of the few American writers to have had a happy
> childhood, which was also a privileged one, until his
> prosperous family went bust in the Depression.
>
>
>
>STOLEN BOOKS
>
>As reported in the December 7, 1997 _New York Times_ p. 3,
> in order to protect books that are regularly stolen, Tower Records
>created a behind-the-counter placard that reads : ''Tower's Most
>Wanted,'' and features sinister-looking photos and the names of
>the authors of these books. Hot authors are Jack Keruoac,
>Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver,
>Cormac McCarthy, Henry Miller and Jim Thompson. Keeping this good
>company is, of course, Vladimir Nabokov.
>
> Citywide, the hottest books are, ''Junkie'' by William S.
> Burroughs, ''On the Road'' by Jack Kerouac and ''Lolita'' by
> Vladimir Nabokov . In addition, anything by Charles Bukowski has
> to be nailed down.
>
>The article, far from denouncing thievery decides,
>
> Perhaps people shouldn't be so concerned by all this theft.
> There are those who say that the taste reflected by the thieves
> is the taste not of Americans in general, but simply of those
> who steal. And there is some good news. At least there are
> people left who still want to read.
>
>YOUNG GIRLS
>
>In the March 1997 Los Angeles Magazine, Lawrence Weschler makes an
>interesting comparison between Gidget and Lolita in an article called
>"From Hitler to Hollywood". The article traces the fortunes and
>fates of German emigres who landed in Hollywood after WWII.
>
> IN THE MID 1950s, A GERMAN emigre writer named Frederick Kohner
> watched, mystified, as his Americanized teenage daughter
> learned to surf on Malibu Beach. Kohner decided to write a
> fictionalized account of his daughter's exploits, deploying as
> the book's title the nickname she had acquired at the beach:
> Gidget. Around the same time, a Russian emigre named Nabokov
> living in Ithaca, New York, published astory about another
> American teenager called Lolita. Both books concerned girls
> coming of age, both were quintessentially American, and both
> were by emigres.
>
>
>PSORIASIS
>
>In the December 20 -27th _British Medical Journal_ Frans Meulenberg
>profiles literary incidents of psoriasis along with the true life
>occurences that inspired them. He discusses in detail John Updike's
>bouts with the disease and the manifestation of them in several of
>his works. He also states,
>
> Vladimir Nabokov concealed his psoriasis. For example, in the
> collection of interviews with Nabokov the term psoriasis is
> never used." In February 1937 Nabokov suffered a bad attack.'2
> On 15 May of that year he somewhat pathetically wrote to his
> wife, Vera: "I continue with the radiation treatments every day
> and am pretty much cured. You know-now I can tell you
> frankly-the indescribable torments I endured in February, before
> these treatments, drove me to the border of suicide-a border I
> was not authorised to cross because I had you in my luggage."'"
> His biographer mentions only one more exacerbation of psoriasis
> after that, which occurred in the late 1960s when the strain of
> writing the novel Ada fell from Nabokov's shoulders.
>
>
>
> Whereas Updike has written about psoriasis at length, Nabokov
> devotes one page to the disease, in the novel Ada.'8 He mentions
> "a spectacular skin disease that had been portrayed recently by
> a famous American novelist in his Chiron and described in
> side-splitting style by a co-sufferer who wrote essays for a
> London weekly." The two patients with psoriasis in Ada exchange
> notes with tips: "Mercury!" or "Hohensonne works wonders." Other
> pieces of advice are found in a one volume encyclopaedia, and
> involve taking hot baths at least twice a month and avoiding
> spices.
>
>
>The article concludes with this insight.
>
> Psoriasis functions as a metaphor for the creative process.
> Psoriasis is the result of the implosion of the artist, and the
> novels on psoriasis cultivate the idea that the psoriasis plaque
> is the Achilles heel of the introvert individualist, the artist
> who looks upon the world as a guardsman from the ivory tower of
> his psoriasis. His salvation is a make believe world or an
> entirely private world: the imagined past or the world of art.
>
>*********************************************************************
> LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
>
> Letters
> The Nation
> New York
> Dec 22, 1997
>
>
> I was sad to see in John Leonard's sprightly article on
> Lolita ["The New Puritanism," Nov. 24] that he picked up the
> canard that William Styron floated (and apologized to me for
> later) that Farrar Straus had turned down Lolita. The facts
> are-and they are so stated in the Nabokov letters-that I
> offered a contract to Nabokov for his book, and he said he
> would accept it provided he could use a nom de plume, as he
> feared he would lose his job at Cornell if he did not
> disguise himself. All my dealings were directly with him, but
> also via Elena Wilson, an old friend, and I showed the
> manuscript to Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy and of course Edmund
> Wilson. They had mixed reactions. Obviously I told Nabokov
> that I couldn't do that as we would be asked to defend the
> book and needed the author to stand with us. That's the story.
>
> ROGER W STRAUS
>
> Farrar, Straus & Giroux
>
>LEONARD REPLIES
>
> New York City
>
> Canard perhaps, but picked up from Boyd's biography, Volume
> II: "Meanwhile Edmund Wilson had suggested that Nabokov show
> Lolita to his current publisher, Farrar Straus. Roger Straus
> turned the book down and counseled Nabokov against publishing
> it pseudonymously, for although that might at first safeguard
> Cornell, it would weaken the book's chances in court." No
> mention of Straus offering a contract. Similarly: "Viking,
> Simon and Schuster New Directions, Farrar Straus, and now
> Doubleday all thought it impossible to publish the book and
> avoid prosecution. It was high time to look abroad." So much
> for very long biographies and short selective memories. JOHN
> LEONARD
>
>*********************************************************************
>
>
>BIBLIOGRAPHY
>
>Two books of interest to Nabokophiles but not likely to be noted in
>the usual channels of communication are abstracted below.
>
>
>BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL: A Thousand Years of Russia's Artistic
>Experience
>
>W. Bruce Lincoln. Viking, $34.95 (544p) ISBN 0-679-87568-6
>
> Lincoln investigates the psychological and aesthetic tensions
> in artists like composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whom he
> views as suspended between East and West. Relying heavily on
> primary sources, he gauges the impact of emigres like Tsvetaeva,
> Nabokov , Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, who developed new forms that
> merged with artistic currents long suppressed in the Soviet
> Union to create a new force in Russian life of the post-Soviet
> era
>
>DARWIN'S ORCHESTRA: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts
>Michael Sims. Henry Holt 1997 508p ISBN 0-8050-4220-2
>
> This book is a series of essays drawn from the literature of
> Natural History and Popular Culture and adhering to a daybook
> format --one essay for each day of the year. 12, June 1948 is
> entitled "Nabokov's Butterflies" because of the fact that
> Nabokov's own account of his lifelong fascination with
> butterflies appeared in the June 12, 1948 issue of the _New
> Yorker_ . Nabokov also figures in the 17, November 1912 essay,
> "The Metamorphosis of Franz K". On this day Kafka began writing
> Der Verwandlung. _Darwin's Orchestra_ is a quirky book of
> facts and dates, well researched and a lot of fun.
>Suellen Stringer-Hye
>Jean and Alexander Heard Library
>Vanderbilt University
>stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu
>
>