Sandy Klein sent an article on "Tragic Britney,
brought down just like Lolita ..."
Complete article at following URL:
Part of its wording: "One of
the saddest little public dramas of our times, captured daily by gleeful
paparazzi, is the ongoing nervous breakdown of the pop star Britney
Spears[...]Spears's breakdown reminds me of a tragedy contained within a novel,
and the novel in question is Nabokov's Lolita, the story of how Humbert Humbert,
a fastidious European aesthete and paedophile, seduced and destroyed a
12-year-old American girl. Lolita, despite the furore caused by its subject
matter, has always seemed to me an intensely sad and moral novel: it exposes not
only Humbert's chillingly selfish fascination with exploiting the precocious
sexuality [...] but also his towering indifference to the fact that he has
ruined her character and future prospects. [...] when she leaves Humbert, it
is for the arms of another
predator, until she finally winds up pregnant[...]
"
A "predatory" frequency rising up in the
present? By sheer marvellous coincidence someone called my
attention to an article entitled "Predator Angler" where a newsagent
accused an African fisherman for having killed a million-year old fish,
considered extinct until then...
As if his intervention was not revelatory of a mistaken assumption on
that kind of fish, he was introduced to the reader as an echologically
unsound cruel fisherman.
This fishy story, as it was explained to me, serves to illustrate
how a past circumstance, thought to be over and done with until some
kind of angler brings it to the surface of the present,
can still surprise us, as N. Krushcheva's s words did, by showing
us how concepts from a 1917 "revolutionary
realism" remain alive and ready to surface in the present, and as
ready to repel or enchant us as VN's "more ancient fictive
worlds". So...