• About
  • Books By Jammer
  • Contact Info
  • Jammer’s Podcasts

White Tower Musings

~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

White Tower Musings

Tag Archives: Lolita

Kubrick’s Lolita, Or The Lingering Corruption of the Lollipop-Lolita Part 4

13 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Christopher Hitchens, Film Review, Literature, Sexuality

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"How Did They Ever Make a Movie Out of Lolita?", Camp Climax, Christopher Hitchens, Claire Quilty, Film, film review, Humbert Humbert, James Mason, Literature, Lolita, Lolita Garden Scene, Novel, pedophilia, Peter Sellers, Psycho, Robert Osbourne, sex, Sexual Perversion, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, Sexualization of Girls, Shelley Winters, Stanley Kubrick, Sue Lyon, TCM, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita

lolita-poster

“How did they ever make a movie out of Lolita?” is a sentence I despise, largely because I didn’t think of it first.  I know it’s petty, but being a writer and being likeable is difficult enough, that’s why I suspect most of us try and begin our essays and novels with catching, opening lines that invite our reader to give a shit.  And so when one of us comes up with a catchy line that nobody can forget it tends to leave us bitter and grumbling in front of our word processors.book-cover-lolita1

My regular reader will no doubt have observed that I’ve been going through a dedicated Lolita phase.  After finishing the novel again recently I’ve decided to sit down and really dig into the material of the book, of the writer Nabokov, and of the various books and art products that have emerged since the publication of the book.  Having written now about the novel, and the novella precursor, it seemed only appropriate to tackle the 1962 film by Stanley Kubrick given the fact that it’s this film which has partly helped the Lolita phenomenon become what it was and is.

I honestly can’t remember what my earliest experience with the film actually was, though I’m almost positive that it had to be TCM.  My parents were good to me in the fact that they almost always had either TCM or TV Land playing on the television, that is when I wasn’t being a little tyrant and demanding the right to watch Freakazoid and Loony Tunes.  I consider Robert Osbourne a kind of third parent because he introduced me to people such as Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, Sydney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, and of course John Wayne.  This education of yester-year’s cinema eventually became a boon to me as I could relate and communicate with older people who had grown up watching such movies and programming, and it taught me the language of films and film history as well.  My first impression of Lolita then, was one of the “commercials” that ran between the films and Osborne’s intros, and of course it began with that line that I both despise and adore.

It wasn’t long thereafter that I eventually saw the film, though I did make sure that I had read the novel first.  I’d like to say that the film’s content made a distinct impression on me and that I became aware of the brilliance of the film, and of course of it’s director Stanley Kubrick, but I was a teenage boy.  I was far more interested in memorizing every episode of Family Guy and every line of Pulp Fiction.giphy

I recently bought Lolita on Blu-ray and watched it again and my impression of the film has changed dramatically because, much like the novel, Stanley Kubrick’s movie is one long fascination with a disturbing idea which Christopher Hitchens noted in his essay Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita:

The most unsettling suggestion of all must be the latent idea that nymphetomania is, as well as a form of sex, a form of love.  (76).

This observation is absolutely everything when approaching Lolita, whether it’s the novel or the film, though it’s especially important when tackling the film because the way Kubrick directs the picture is as a traditional Hollywood love story.  Throughout the film Lolita and Humbert Humbert interact, not as a young girl and a fully grown man, but almost as emotional equals.MV5BMTY5NTAwMjU0NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTIwNjIwMjE@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1264,1000_AL_

Throughout the film Delores Haze, who is oddly enough never referred to as Delores but always as Lolita, is presented a precocious teenager girl, but also as a mature individual with her own will and idea of who and what she is.  When Humbert and Lolita arrive at the hotel where the first rape actually takes place, Kubrick plays the dynamic of the two not as a hungry, perverted man lusting after a child, but as Lolita seducing Humbert:

Lolita Haze: Why don’t we play a game?

Humbert Humbert: A game? Come on. No, you get on to room service at once.

Lolita Haze: No, really. I learned some real good games in camp. One in “particularly” was fun.lolita2-hula-hoop

Humbert Humbert: Well, why don’t you describe this one in “particularly” good game?

Lolita Haze: Well, I played it with Charlie.

Humbert Humbert: Charlie? Who’s he?

Lolita Haze: Charlie? He’s that guy you met in the office.

Humbert Humbert: You mean that boy? You and he?

Lolita Haze: Yeah. You sure you can’t guess what game I’m talking about?

Humbert Humbert: I’m not a very good guesser.2534

Lolita Haze: [whispers in his ear and giggles]

Humbert Humbert: I don’t know what game you played.

Lolita Haze: [whispers in his ear again] You mean you never played that game when you were a kid?

Humbert Humbert: No.

Lolita Haze: Alrighty then…

There’s also an earlier scene shortly after Humbert picks Lolita up from the summer camp, brilliantly called “Camp Climax for Girls.”  As they’re driving Humbert attempts small talk and Lolita speaks with him seductively.

Humbert Humbert: You know, I’ve missed you terribly.

Lolita Haze: I haven’t missed you. In fact, I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you.

Humbert Humbert: Oh?8d706bdbbd71d96cb0383013bcebe0c1

Lolita Haze: But it doesn’t matter a bit, because you’ve stopped caring anyway.

Humbert Humbert: What makes you say I’ve stopped caring for you?

Lolita Haze: Well, you haven’t even kissed me yet, have you?

And looking near the end of the picture when Lolita is pregnant and living with a sweet but simple man named Dick, she offers Humbert a kind of apology for her “roaming” from him physically.

Lolita Haze: [Trying to console Humbert] I’m really sorry that I cheated so much. But I guess that’s just the way things are.Lolita-Kubrick-2011

If the reader is somewhat sickened by these passages it’s just a sign that they recognize how bizarre, and in fact how disturbing this presentation actually is.  It’s not uncommon for young women to develop crushes on older men during puberty, but this has more to do with emotional and sexual development.  Such crushes and infatuations are early attempts to understand attraction and to experiment and play with it so that, when they are more mature, they can actually act on their feelings.

Kubrick might be faulted or criticized for presenting Lolita as an emotionally mature young woman who openly and freely engages in a relationship with an older man who’s clearly using her, but as I watched the film again I realized that in fact, much like Nabokov himself who manipulated his reader through prose, Kubrick is using the MV5BMjRkZDA4ZGYtMzdlNS00OTc2LThhYWEtMDUyYjI1NWNiODBhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjgyNjk3MzE@._V1_language of cinema to imply perversion without ever outright showing it.

Because the film premiered in 1962, Kubrick was still working with the censorships and sensibilities of film companies at that time.  This can be fun for the reader intellectually if they pay attention because in one scene Charlotte Haze, while showing Humbert about the house, actually flushes a toilet.  When the reader remembers that, until the movie Psycho premiered just two years before this film, a director could neither flush nor even show a toilet on camera.  There’s a feeling while watching such a small act that Kubrick is beginning the small subversions that would eventually allow film makers more freedom.  But of course past the toilet flush there is the now iconic garden scene in which Humbert Humbert actually sees Lolita out and about and sun bathing.

I remarked to my sister how well this scene is done while we were watching it, because Kubrick is smart enough to leave Lolita, played by a then sixteen year old Sue Lyon asLolita Gif the center of the everything.  The viewer first sees Lolita from the back, sunbathing and wearing nothing but a large feathery hat, dark sunglasses, and a pink bikini (the film is black and white but some color photographs exist revealing the outfits actual color).  The shot shifts from behind Lolita to Humbert’s shocked and obviously aroused expression before going back to Lolita and from there Kubrick works his ability as a director.  Charlotte Haze describes the garden while the viewer is left to “gaze” upon Lolita.  Lolita herself looks up from her book, stares at the viewer, slowly removes her sunglasses, and offers up a look that hints at curiosity and mild erotic interest, meanwhile she never steps out of her pose.  The scene lingers and the viewer becomes aware that they are not looking at a young girl who is beginning to, if I can kubrickborrow the botanical term, “blossom” into womanhood.  In fact they are looking at Humbert’s desire, for the lingering shot and her entire suggested sexuality is entirely Humbert’s imagining.  And so the so the viewer is invited to participate in Humbert’s erotic fascination with Lolita, looking at her body and wondering to themselves if this gaze that is centered on her isn’t just implied, but something that is actually erotic.

Naturally, when you’re a teenage boy the same age as Sue Lyons was when she made the movie, the eroticism doesn’t feel weird at all because you’re the same age.  11-lolitaIt’s just crush.  As I age however, I notice more and more that whatever initial erotic feelings I had at this image feels creepier and creepier.  It’s now at a point where I can remember being young and attracted to girls that age, but I refuse to acknowledge any kind of erotic fascination with the image.  That’s all a fancy-pants way of saying that when I watched Lolita again I felt absolutely repulsed at the erotic suggestion.

But that recognition was enough for me to recognize that Kubrick was purposefully playing up that angle.

Much like the actual novel Lolita, Kubrick tries to make the story feel like a love story to show that, beneath the surface of a supposed love story there is in fact nothing but sexual corruption.  This is easily apparent in the various little moments of the story, and one of the best elements is the afore mentioned “Camp Climax for Girls.”  2048f8fa60d2449bf773d5581d3ef7fe--lolita--james-masonThe reader actually gets a moment when Humbert is surrounded by young women, many of them wearing swim-suits, and the viewer is left watching the image of all these young girls displaying their bodies.  The shot works because the viewer is invited to consider the sexual nature of all these girls, but at the same time is reminded that, because of Humbert’s presence that this erotic display really isn’t one.  It’s just girls being girls.  Likewise later on in the film Delores Haze participates in a play by the corrupt playwright Clare Quilty.  The “play,” when the viewer actually sees it, is in fact a kind of fertility display and this lets the reader observe the sexual undercurrent running throughout.Lolita soda

But Quilty himself needs to be addressed because he is arguably the most incredible part of the movie, largely because he is played by the chameleon Peter Sellers.  Sellers presents Quilty as this aloof yet wacky man who is sexually corrupt and, if I can borrow an old expression, “queer as a three dollar bill.”

As a queer man I should probably be offended by the implied idea that Quilty is queer, but if the reader actually observes Quilty it becomes clear that the man isn’t part of the LGBT community.  Quilty is just a sexual pervert.  Before Humbert and Lolita arrive at the hotel the reader is given a small scene in which Quilty and his partner, a largely silent asian woman, are conversing with a bellhop named Swine:

Clare Quilty: She’s a yellow belt. I’m a green belt. That’s the way nature made it. What happens is, she throws me all over the place.lolita-peter-sellers

Swine: She throws you all over the place?

Clare Quilty: Yes. What she does, she gets me in a, sort of, thing called a sweeping ankle throw. She sweeps my ankles away from under me. I go down with one helluva bang.

Swine: Doesn’t it hurt?

Clare Quilty: Well, I sort of lay there in pain, but I love it. I really love it. I lay there hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness. It’s really the greatest.

This would be strange enough were it not a later scene when Quilty so obviously attempts to get Humbert to let him see Lolita.111812311_o

Humbert Humbert: Well, it’s nothing, but… she had an accident.

Clare Quilty: Oh gee, she had an accident? That’s really terrible, I mean, fancy a fellow’s wife having… a normal guy having… his wife having an accident like that. W-what happened to her?

Humbert Humbert: Er, she was hit by a car.

Clare Quilty: Gee, no wonder she’s not here. Gee, you must feel pretty bad about it. W-w-w-w-when uh eh w-what’s happening, is she coming out later or something?

Humbert Humbert: Well, that was the understanding.lo_397

Clare Quilty: What, in an ambulance? Hahahaha! Gee, I’m sorry, I-I-I-shouldn’t say that; I get sorta carried away, you know, being so normal and everything.

It’s easy to read this passage and observe that Quilty is a strange man, but it’s in Seller’s performance of Quilty as a bumbling, queer sort of man that the viewer is able to really feel the corrupt sexual nature.  Sellers is the key to the movie Lolita, because while James Mason plays Humbert as a dominating, sexual deviant, Kubrick plays him up as a man in love, while Quilty is simply a sexual predator.  In this way the suggestion of Nymphetomania as a form of love is progressed because Humbert becomes not a corrupt man, but just a man who loses his love to a man “more” perverted than himself.  Lolita herself acknowledges and confirms this for the reader during the final scene in which Humbert discusses with her how she left him:

Humbert Humbert: [Referring to Quilty] What happened to this Oriental-minded genius? When you left the hospital, where did he take you?lolita-escaped

Lolita Haze: To New Mexico.

Humbert Humbert: Whereabouts in New Mexico?

Lolita Haze: To a dude ranch near Santa Fe. The only problem with it was he had such a bunch of weird friends staying there.

Humbert Humbert: What kind of “weird” friends?

Lolita Haze: Weird! Painters, nudists, writers, weightlifters… But I figured I could take anything for a couple of weeks.

This final reveal is a bit of strange experience because, when Lolita finally divulges this, many of the suspicions are confirmed and Quilty becomes the monster of the film, rather than Humbert himself.  At least that is the perception that I ended the film with 001-lolita-theredlistafter watching it again.  And of course, that reaction troubled me immensely because it neglects the reality that Humbert Humbert is a pedophile who seduced Lolita’s mother so that he could get closer to Lolita so that he could ultimately rape her.

I’ve addressed in my previous Lolita essays that Humbert Humbert writes the entire narrative of Lolita, leaving the poor Delores Haze in a position where her story is told without her consent or input.  The film offers something different than this vision, and while Lolita does seem to have some kind of agency in the film, it’s important to remember that Kubrick, as a director, was always concerned about the narrative structure of films and how the images crafted his visions.7e6d899d49fd6f4f22276d5c573c625b--vladimir-nabokov-vintage-photographs

At first glance Lolita appears to be a love story, but a closer examination reveals a troublesome story about a man manipulating a young woman who is still trying to figure out who she is and what she wants.  Lolita is never given any kind of freedom to determine who she is, and while on the surface she seems to be inviting Humbert and Quilty to engage with her sexually, this still is undercut by the reality that she’s a young teenage girl who’s barely figured out her sexuality, let alone her actual personality.

Lolita is a story about the troublesome surface and reality of sexuality in America during the early 1960s.  And Kubrick is successful in constantly pointing out that sexuality was always hiding beneath the surface of everything.  Under the veneer of the gardens and suburban homes there was a lurking sexuality that was at times troublesome and even corrosive.  Children were vulnerable to predators, and because the narrative of sex was something that was still taboo, even when it was out in plain sight, what was obvious couldn’t be actually said aloud.

Lolita as a film is a story about the constant suggestion and implication that is hidden beneath what is actually said and done.  In this way the film offers a beautiful way of storytelling because, unlike prose, more viewers will recognize the leering gaze as Lolita Haze lays in the backyard.  They’ll recognize what’s being suggested is the idea that Lolita is a sexual object, and, hopefully, they’ll recognize that it isn’t their suggestion but in fact the suggestion of a corrupt man who’s writing her story right out of her control.

lolita-1962-opening-credits

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from the film Lolita were provided by IMDb.

 

**Writer’s Note**

It’s actually pretty difficult to find ANY video bloggers who have attempted to analyze to explore the film.  However I did find two people on YouTube who seemed up to the challenge.  If the reader would like they can follow the link below to the videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IpBNS5kksE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdj0dKrKnUw

I’ve also found a brief video that is a three minute interview with Suellyn Lyon, the main star of the film, about the actual movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bHz-N6bJ3I

 

***Writer’s Note***

The life story of Sue Lyon is not particularly pleasant, and Kubrick’s film is largely the reason for it.  I suppose that’s why I wanted to end on a positive note, and so I found two pictures of Lyon and Kubrick rehearsing lines and seeming to enjoy themselves.  A lovely reminder that beneath the “sexual icon,” there was a young woman wanting to become an actress and working with one of the greatest directors of all time.

 

stanley-kubrick-4
a36b402bceca7a6c852fa563cc8f575d

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Lolita That Isn’t Lolita But Eventually Became Lolita: Nabokov’s The Enchanter-Lolita Part 3

01 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Christopher Hitchens, Essay, Literature, Novels, Sexuality, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"Magic Wand", Arguably, Azar Nafisi, Christopher Hitchens, Essay, Fairy Tale, Federico Infante Tutt'Art, Hurricane Lolita, If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome, Literature, Lolita, Novel, Novella, Nympthetomania, Oxford Dictionary, pedophilia, Penis, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Sexuality, The Enchanter, viviparous, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita, Wizard, Writing

7345631

Like so many books in my life, I can thank Christopher Hitchens for introducing me The Enchanter.

My regular reader has probably noted that recently I finished the novel Lolita and since then I have been trying to write and read as much as possible about the book, which is another way of saying I won’t shut up about it.  Still in my defense Lolita is not just any novel and there’s literally mountains of discourse about the book, and also in my defense I knew that when I was going to write about Lolita it would never be just one essay.  It was going to be some kind of series that dug into the meat of the novel as well as the background material, and, in the case of The Enchanter, any and all books which might have laid the groundwork for what eventually became the now iconic and established narrative that is Lolita, but I’m getting away from myself as always by trying to explain my motivations.  Back to Hitch.10383597

I was researching Lolita and trying to find any and all online essays that explored the novel when I looked up and remembered that Hitchens’s collection Arguably contains an essay entirely devoted to Lolita entitled Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita.  It’s an apt title because thus far I’ve observed that opinions and interpretations about Lolita are like a hurricane in the way they are a force that sucks up everything and anything that comes within its path, and anyone trying to get one small take or opinion is doomed to fail hopelessly.  The essay was published in The Atlantic in 2005 as a fifty-year-anniversary reflection on the lasting importance of the novel, as well as an interpretive examination of the difficult topic of the narrative.

He observes this after opening with a quick examination of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran by placing the book in some cultural contexts:7603

Then we must approach the question of how innocent we are in all this. Humbert writes without the smallest intention of titillating his audience. The whole narrative is, after all, his extended jailhouse/madhouse plea to an unseen jury. He has nothing but disgust for the really pornographic debauchee Quilty, for whose murder he has been confined. But he does refer to him as a “brother,” and at one point addresses us, too, as “Reader! Bruder!,” which is presumably designed to make one think of Baudelaire’s address of Les Fleurs du Mal to “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!” I once read of an interview given by Roman Polanski in which he described listening to a lurid radio account of his offense even as he was fleeing to the airport. He suddenly realized the trouble he was in, he said, when he came to appreciate that he had done something for which a lot of people would furiously envy him. Hamlet refers to Ophelia as a nymph (“Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered”), but she is of marriageable age, whereas a nymphet is another thing altogether.

Actually, it is impossible to think of employing Lolita for immoral or unsavory purposes, and there is now a great general determination to approach the whole book in an unfussed, grown-up, broad-minded spirit. “Do not misunderstand me,” said Amis père when he reviewed the first edition, “if I say that one of the troubles with Lolita is that, so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough.” (71-2)Lolita soda

This is continued later by another small mention of the book I wish to discuss here:

How complicit, then, is Nabokov himself? The common joking phrase among adult men, when they see nymphets on the street or in the park or, nowadays, on television and in bars, is “Don’t even think about it.” But it is very clear that Nabokov did think about it, and had thought about it a lot. An earlier novella, written in Russian and published only after his death—The Enchanter—centers on a jeweler who hangs around playgrounds and forces himself into gruesome sex and marriage with a vachelike mother, all for the sake of witnessing her death and then possessing and enjoying her twelve-year-old daughter. (73-4).

Hitchens’s essay has a lot to do with Lolita and a lot less to do with The Enchanter, in fact he only employs the novella (god how I despise that term) as a means of showing that Nabokov had reflected of the tendency of grown men to “notice” young girls who are either developing or at a point where they are about to “blossom.”  Still this was enough for me to pick up a copy of the book and begin reading, and after reading Lolita the relevance of The Enchanter isn’t lost on me.  In fact my impression now is one of concern for the fact that this book is either ignored or else largely untouched by teachers and writers.238943

The Enchanter is exactly what Hitchens laid out in Hurricane Lolita.  A grown man who works as a jeweler has an erotic obsession with little girls and spends time in playgrounds watching them play when he sees a twelve year old girl that he becomes enraptured with.  He marries the girl’s mother and endures her illnesses until she dies at which point he takes the girl and attempts to rape her in a hotel room.  Unlike Lolita however, the young girl resists at the first encounter by screaming which causes pandemonium and the narrator realizes that he is done for and promptly throws himself in front of a moving truck where he’s struck and then dragged for several feet before dying.

What’s arguably the most shocking element of The Enchanter, at least during the first reading, is that the narrator has no hesitance or caution in describing the girls’ physical body, or else his outright desire for her.  Perhaps it’s simply because I read Lolita first, and became wooed by Humbert Humbert’s “fancy prose style,” but I found myself regularly struck by the writing and in all deference for myself, it really takes a lot to shock me.  I think what’s most disturbing about The Enchanter is the honesty.Nabokov 1

If the reader just observes one scene near the end when the narrator is about to assault the child they might be able to observe the honesty I’m talking about:

Then, starting little by little to cast his spell, he began passing his magic wand above her body, almost touching the skin, torturing himself with her attraction, her visible proximity, the fantastic confrontation permitted by the slumber of this naked girl, whome he was measuring, as it were, with an enchanted yardstick—until she made a faint motion, and turned her face away with a barely audible, somnolent smack of her lips.  Everything again froze still, and now, amid her brown locks, he could make out her crimson border of her ear and the palm of her liberated hand, forgotten in its previous position.  Onward, onward.  (73).

“Magic wand” and “Yardstick” means penis.  At least that’s what I thought when I read this scene.  I imagined a man holding his dick and performingLolita-Kubrick-2011 his “measurements” and doing my best to hold back the vomit that was collecting in my throat while doing so.  I still believe that “Magic wand” does mean penis and that this is everything that the reader would at first believe.  What holds me back from believing this scene to be nothing but grotesque pedophilia however is Nabokov, because over the course of a career the man was able to prove himself duly capable of achieving and creating magic with his prose.  And despite the sexual corruption that’s taking place in this passage, I’ve realized that Nabokov’s ultimate aim with this small book is to begin to tell a fairy tale that would eventually become Lolita.

Before I get to that though I first want to talk about spreading seed.  Obviously with the content under discussion this may seem a grotesque locution, but it’s an important idea nonetheless.interesting_201502261118596

Creative writing despite some appearances is not an exercise in which ideas simply follow an arrow, in fact the actual process of writing is a damn clusterfuck that can sometimes make the Gordian Knot look like a ripped shoelace.  Ideas can come and go in an instant, and some images that seem sublime inside of the writer’s head can look like whale vomit once they’re on the page.  This can diminish the passion of the artist who clung to those inward notions as if they were the one true faith and the reality of their weak prose can kill an idea and lead one to alcoholism or opium addiction, whichever’s sexier this century.

image+(31)This is all a long way of saying that creative ideas take time in order to gel or establish themselves and so writers often “spread seeds” of ideas over long periods of time.  This can usually just be a single sentence written hastily on the back of a receipt, a small picture drawn in a moment in a sketchbook, or in the case of Tolkien one single sentence written on a blank page of an exam book.  Writers, the ones that are worth the reader’s time anyway, are always thinking and writing ideas down, spreading seeds out to the wind hoping something will grow.

With this metaphor in hand, I read The Enchanter as a worthwhile book all it’s own, but at the same time I believe the reader would find great value in this book as a seed that was spread hoping for something greater.  And looking at just one passage this is most certainly the case.  The narrator is describing how he will keep the young girl all his own:

Federico Infante Tutt'Art@

Federico Infante Tutt’Art@

Yet, precisely because during the first two years or so the captive would be ignorant of the temporarily noxious nexus between the puppet in her hands and the puppet-master’s panting, between the plum in her mouth the rapture of the distant tree, he would have to be particularly cautious, not to let her go anywhere alone, make frequent changes of domicile (the ideal would be vanilla in a blind garden), keep a sharp eye out lest she make friends with other children or have occasion to start chatting with the woman from the greengrocer’s or the char, […].  (55).

This passage is almost word for word of the conspiracies of Humbert Humbert and his “beloved” Lolita and as such demonstrates that much of The Enchanter was an early idea for the later novel which would come to define Nabokov’s artistic legacy.

But despite I feel like there is a much more important idea to be discovered through The Enchanter because if the reader thinks of the short book as nothing but an early pre-Lolita sketch, they miss something really powerful which is the argument that the entire story is a fairy-tale.

The “Magic Wand” may just be Nabokov having a little fun with words and 001gwaBAzy732SOL3q343&690trying to play around with language as his usual habit.  But the text of The Enchanter works often like a fairy tale for the nameless narrator at times becomes a kind of “big-bad-wolf” or else a master illusionist much like the wicked sorcerers and witches that would haunt fairy tales.  The man is working constantly to hide his true self beneath the appearance of a father and husband so that he can get closer and closer to achieving his ultimate goal.  Much like the evil enchanters of fairy tales, the jeweler weaves an illusion throughout the text leaving the little girl and the mother open and susceptible to his eventual predation.

His ability as an illusionist is expressed clearly in one later passage:

Against the light of that happiness, no matter what age she attained—seventeen, twenty—her present image would always transpire through her metamorphoses, nourishing their translucent strata from its internal fountainhead.  And this very process would allow him, with no loss or diminishment, to savor each unblemished stage of her transformations.  Besides she herself, delineated and elongated into womanhood, would never again be free to dissociate, in her consciousness and her memory, her own development from that of their love, her childhood lolita3-foliorecollections from her recollections of male tenderness.  Consequently, past, present, and future would appear to her as a single radiance whose source had emanated, as she had herself, from him, from her viviparous lover.  (56-7).

There is a great deal taking place in this small passage, but in fact this quote provides absolutely everything that is taking place in The Enchanter.  What’s most important I suppose is the question: what in the sam-hill-fuck does viviparous mean?  Curious I googled it and stumbled upon the following definition care of the Oxford English Dictionary:

adjective

1–Zoology
(of an animal) bringing forth live young which have developed inside the body of the parent.

2–Botany
(of a plant) reproducing from buds which form plantlets while still attached to the parent plant, or from seeds which germinate within the fruit.kubrick

Putting aside the atrociousness that is the concept of a man actually contemplating fucking his own offspring, what’s important in the language of this passage is the fact that the narrator is contemplating and constructing the illusion for his victim.  The young girl, who fortunately never falls victim to this odious man, would live in a dream, or at least a reality in which there was no real sense of time.  The man would be the sole-locus of her entire world, and by implication her existence would serve only to pleasure him sexually and perhaps later her children sired by this perverted cretin.  This is shocking enough, and I know the reader will almost certainly be reviled by the sexual nature of this manipulation, but it’s in this plan that Nabokov succeeds in making a kind of fairy tale.

The narrator of The Enchanter might just be a jeweler who wants to rape a twelve year old girl, but the complexity of his vision is almost one of a fairy-tale sorcerer who wants to suck the life out a child.  In this way, even if Nabokov is creating the early lolita2-hula-hoopsketch of a later novel, he’s establishing a modern fairy tale and reminding his reader that while the surface world has altered, the core idea of the story is one that is all too familiar.

There will always be individuals who hate themselves, or revile their bodies, and rather than try to overcome that petty emotion they prey upon the weak.  Pedophiles are the monsters that were hiding behind trees in old tales, and it’s foolish to think that, just because the world is paved in concrete and steel and glass towers, that such monsters would simply disappear.

In fact the opposite is true, the wicked wizards and witches who would use what magic they had to hurt children are still around, and like those old illusionists, they’re willing to caste visions that enchant those who fall prey to it.

lolita4-folio

 

 

*Writers Note*

All quotes taken from The Enchanter were from the paperback Vintage edition.  All Quotes from Vladimir Nabkov: Hurrican Lolita were taken from the First Edition 12 Books Hardback of Arguably, however I have provided a link to the article below if the reader can’t find a copy of the book.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/12/hurricane-lolita/304386/

 

The definition for Viviparous was provided by the online Oxford English Dictionary which the reader can read for themselves by following the link below:

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/viviparous

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

“America the Beautiful”, Or The Saving Grace of Comics and Soda-Pop: Lolita Part 2

27 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Book Review, Essay, Literature, Novels, Satire/Humor, Sexuality, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Legal" Lolitas, "New World" vs "Old World", American Landscape, Book Review, Comics, Delores Haze, Essay, Eurocentrism, Individual Will, John Colapinto, Literature, Lolita, Manifest Destiny, Nabokov's America, Novel, Rape, rape-culture, Sexuality, Vladimir Nabokov

Utah

Pedophilia and sexual corruption really shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind when looking at the great plateau’s of Utah. Fortunately it isn’t.  My first actual thought goes to John Ford’s The Searcher’s.  There’s plenty of shots of John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter riding their horses over those endless seas of orange sand looking for Debbie Edwards (Natalie Wood) who’s been kidnapped by Indians and most likely sexually assaulted by them and by just following that line of thought I’m right back to where I started.  The desert is supposed to be a tabula rasa but instead, it seems, it’s just a breeding grounds for perverts.book-cover-lolita1

With that lovely observation however I think back to Lolita and my recent attempt to write about the novel.  My first essay about the book was to observe the sexual assault that is the primary content.  Humbert Humbert, a rambling European pervert, stays in the home of a woman named Charlotte Haze who has a young daughter named Delores who Humbert renames as Lolita.  He marries Charlotte, and when she dies in an automobile accident, he gains possession of Lolita and spends the rest of the novel traveling with her around the United States raping her until she escapes and takes up with another sexual deviant, a writer named Quilty, who Humbert eventually kills at the end of the novel.

Lolita is a book that is written in many reader’s minds before they have even picked up the book because Lolita as a word has gained a magnificent potency in our society.  Referring to a girl as Lolitaesque is enough to suggest that she is a sexual being that looks incredibly childlike.  Looking through the “key terms” section of my stats for White Tower Musings I can usually expect lovely search combinations like “Black Dick Lolita Fuck” or “Lolita suk dick,” “Lolita bukkake,” “Lolita pussy porn” or perhaps the ever lovely “paid money school legal cute Lolita teen blowjob dick.”  The tragic part is at this point I tend to be more depressed at the constant and atrocious grammar and spelling errors than I am by the fact there are people who want to fuck “legal” Lolitas.

Lolita-Kubrick-2011

Well, no, actually.  I’m seriously fucking bothered by this, but at some point the grammar becomes an issue.

The reader may be wondering whether there is any real artistic merit to Lolita other than using it as a means of discussing rape and pedophilia, but as I was reading the novel again I was reminded by another interpretation that’s been buzzing in my skull since graduate school.

As I mentioned in my previous Lolita essay, a friend of mine taught the novel to a group of largely unresponsive undergraduates who couldn’t, or in some cases wouldn’t, look past the rape to see if Nabokov was aiming for something different in terms of an aesthetic approach.  He attempted to bring in outside articles and critics to the debate, but the content tended to keep most people stubbornly resolved in their assessment.  My complete memory is a bit fuzzy, but as I recall he told me that one argument about the novel Lolita was that, rather than being solely a book about pedophilia, it was largely a satire about Eurocentrism and mocking Americans that are duped or suckered in by it.

Vladimir Nabokov was traveling the country with his wife and children collecting 7e6d899d49fd6f4f22276d5c573c625b--vladimir-nabokov-vintage-photographsbutterflies while he was writing Lolita, and this exercise allowed him the opportunity to really see the territory of the United States.  Many scholars have noted this inspiration in their many articles about the novel, one of which was a book review in the New Yorker entitled Nabokov’s America.

The essay appeared in The New Yorker in 2015, and in the article John Colapinto discusses biographies of Nabokov along with his travels and turbulent life.  In one passage Colapinto discusses a biography of Nabokov and uses it as a means of exploring Nabokov’s creative focus at the time:

Much of the novel’s energy derives from the love-hate relationship Nabokov had with America’s postwar culture of crap TV shows, bad westerns, squawking jukeboxes—the invigorating trash that informs the story of a cultured European’s sexual obsession with an American bobby-soxer who is, as Humbert calls her, the “ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.” Nabokov always refused the label of satirist, and it would be an oversimplification to say that “Lolita” merely skewers the materialism of fifties America; throughout the book, there is a sense of hypnotized wonder and delight at the happy consumerism of the country and its inhabitants, and Nabokov took overt joy at clipping and cataloguing examples of that consumerism, which he carefully worked into the very texture of “Lolita.”

Colapinto’s article is sporadic, jumping 56a903796e83bc51eb8e08b70299c893from point to point, and in fact after reading it again recently I’m not entirely sure it’s a boon in terms of commentary about Lolita, but within this paragraph at least there’s the start of an idea, which is that contained within the novel there is an examination about consumerism and the way the American landscape and consciousness feeds this passion.

The United States as a country and as an idea has always been intimately connected with the notion of enterprise.  The early European settlers who came to establish colonies for religious freedom were possessed by the idea that this “new world” held an opportunity.  The new land (or really “home” to the people who were living there already) was athumbnailImage chance to make a new life, establish a new society, and find an agency that hadn’t existed in the old world and the old life.  Even after the American Revolution this notion continued because with the sale of the Louisiana Purchase news ideas of Manifest Destiny were created to justify the Westerward push of Europeans deeper into the continent.  And even after the United States had pushed to the very Edge of California, the Klondike and Alaskan Territories offered new wealth, and the islands of the Pacific offered tropical paradises.  Consistent with a study of the history of the United States, there is the idea that this country is the “New World” and promises hope and possibilities for those willing, or brave enough, to try and conquer it.3760252_orig

But beneath this rhetoric there is always a heap of bodies and people getting screwed, both literally and figuratively.  Which leads me back to Lolita.

The character of Humbert Humbert seems a perfect embodiment of this rhetoric because Lolita is his story, his narrative of personal satisfaction and agency, and the reader would do well to remember that his victim never gets her story told.  While Lolita is a story about rape in the sexual sense, the far more pernicious element is the symbolic and psychologic abuse of Dolres Haze and the American landscape which allows the rapes to occur.

While reading Lolita, and reading more and more essays about the novel, I came upon a small quote which, delightfully, managed to sum up everything I’d been trying to say up to that point:001gwaBAzy732SOL3q343&690

And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-lac garland still as brief as a lad’s, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight.  We had been everywhere.  We had really seen nothing.  And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.  (175-6).

On one side note I can never read this passage without cringing.  Granted there are plenty of passages in Lolita that leave one queasy (that is assuming you have a soul), but the image of Delores Haze caught in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere crying in the same room as her rapist is a hard image to forget, and, honestly, I don’t want to forget it.

This passage is one of many in which Humbert manages to reveal his true self throughout Lolita, and like each of his reveals, his repulsive character becomes clearer to the reader who at first is simply disgusted with him for the outright sexual assault.  Looking at this passage the reader gets the sense that it’s not just Delores Haze which has been molested by Humbert, but in fact the landscape of the American territory.  The plains, mountains, valleys, plateaus, villages, towns, tourist traps, forests, and cities in the great expanse of country are nothing but empty sights for Humbert who is honest 007_ltaabout the fact that he does not really care about such sights.  In fact he admits openly in one passage that the appeal of such wonders is simply for his own sick amusement:

[…]but also the fact that far from being an indolent partie de plasisir, our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d’etre (these French clichés are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss.  (154)

Behold ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the lord hath offered him unto my hand.  After reading this passage Humbert has more or less given away his entire position, because it’s clear that no matter how beautifully he expresses his adoration of the American landscape it’s all just bullshit to cover his criminal offences.  If one just looks a few pages earlier the reader is able to see such a bluff:

By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did my best LargeEthnicToleranceMapfor hours on end to give her the impression of “going places,” of rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight.  I have never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us, across the crazy quilts of forty-eight states.  Voraciously we consumed those long high-ways, in rapt silence we glided over theit glossy black dance floors.  Not only had Lo no eye for Scenery but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape; which I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for a quite a time to the delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey.  (152).

I suppose at this point my contester is probably owed the chance to speak.  So what?  We’ve addressed already that Lolita is a weird book about a creepy pedophile who rapes a little girl while traveling around the country.  What’s the point of digging deeper into that?  Once you get to the issue of sexual assault what could possibly be worse than that?

This is a tough question because it’s one I’m not entirely comfortable answering.  I don’t want to make it seem like I don’t care about Delores Haze, or about actual rape victims because I do.  Humbert Humbert is a sick creep but his offenses reveal a larger issue which can tie into the dilemma of rape and sexual violence.  Lolita is most certainly an examination of sexual assault, but by that same line of reasoning the book is an attack against Eurocentrism.vladimir-nabokov

If the reader doesn’t know this term it’s unfortunate because it’s a concept that every citizen of the U.S. should consider.  Eurocentrism refers to the practice or idea that European culture is inherently superior to American society, language, or culture at large.  The reader has probably experienced this in some capacity whenever they listen to British actors speak.  There is a lingering notion that the British accent is somehow more refined or sophisticated than the American accent, and while I could write whole volumes about this, all I need from the reader right now is recognition.  Humbert, when he appears in Charlotte Haze’s home is seen as this worldly, heavenly being simply for the fact that he can speak multiple languages and has some vague background in academia.  Humbert’s good looks and European accent hide his true nature to the Americans he interacts with.  And if I can push this a little further Humbert’s manipulation of Delores Haze ultimately reflects a larger trend of European people’s looking to the New World to find what they want.  Lolita bookIn the case of Humbert this involves the rape of a twelve-year-old girl, but looking at the way the man can become a symbol for the larger historical trend Humbert is simply another in a long line of Europeans who came to America and built a life at the expense of the people already living there.

Delores Haze loses everything in her life: her mother, her home, her magazines, her friends, her freedom, and even her name.  Humbert strips Delores, performing a kind of psychological imperialism until the girl is almost completely bare of something she could call her own.  At this point then the reader may complain, where is the hope then, for Delores?  Funnily enough, it’s in the idea of the American territory and consciousness that Lolita finds some kind of saving grace.

During the long road trip Humbert explains that while he is controlling virtually every aspect of Lolita’s life, but something is missing and remains beyond his grasp:

How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until she had done her morning duty.  And I was such a thoughtful friend, such a passionate father, such a Secret Heart Lolitagood pediatrician, attending to all the wants of my little auburn brunette’s body!  My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.  On especially tropical afternoons, in the sticky closeness of the siesta, I liked the cool feel of armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap.  There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove.  Her eyes would follow the adventures of her favorite strip characters […]; she studied the photographic results of head-on collisions; she never doubted the reality of place, time and circumstance alleged to match the publicity pictures naked-thighed-beauties; and she was curiously fascinated by the photographs of local brides, some in full wedding apparel, holding bouquets and wearing glasses.  (165).1938-actioncomics1

I recognize that it’s near impossible to get past the graphic imagery of this passage, but the reader should try because what’s taking place in this scene is ultimately what redeems the novel in my eyes.  Delores Haze loses so much territory to Humbert Humbert as the narratives progresses, but what he cannot take away from her is that small ounce of integrity and personal territory which is her personal self.  He effectively rapes the landscape of the United States with his perversion and at the same time he attempts to control the territory of her body.  While he succeeds in this first endeavor he cannot take her independent spirit which, while it may seem largely shallow in its consumerism, is still some semblance of the American mindset.Lolita soda

Delores is a young woman who wants to read comics, drink soda-pop, and play with boys her own age.  That mentality may not be distinctly American, but at the time Lolita was written it was intimately tied up with consumerism and capitalism which was the defining American Philosophy.

There’s a victory then in Lolita, for even if Delores Haze is the victim of Humbert’s vicious and corrupt sexual deviance, he cannot manage to colonize and strip her of that small spirit which wants to make a real life for itself, free from the grasp of this failure who can only find in the beauty of the American countryside a few motels to work out his sexual problems.

Majestic Vista of the Grand Canyon at Dusk

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note:

All quotes taken from Lolita were cited from the Vintage International paperback edition.  All quotes from Nabokov’s America were taken from the New Yorker article which I have provided a link to below.  Enjoy:

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/nabokovs-america

 

**Writer’s Note**

While working on research for this essay I found a documentary entitled How do you Solve a Problem Like Lolita?  Apart from envying the title (then again I used this bit for my Eraserhead review so what the fuck am I jealous for?) I found it useful for these series of essays and thought my reader might be interested.  You can follow the link fellow for the first part of the documentary, and the other three parts should be on the suggested titles side of the screen.  Enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy6d6x29weI

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Surface Matters: Lolita Part 1

02 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Book Review, Literature, Novels, Sexuality, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"Nymphet", Art, Charlotte Haze, Childhood, Delores Haze, Delorez Haxe is Lolita's Real Name, Frederico Infante, GoodReads, Harry Potter, Humbert Humbert, Invitation to a Beheading, linguistics, Literature, Lolita, Novel, pedophilia, Pnin, prose, Rape, Rape in Literature, rape-culture, sexual assault, sexual assault within the home, sexual idealism, Sexual Rhetoric, Victim Blaming, Vladimir Nabokov, Writing

book-cover-lolita1

Despite the now gargantuan pile of books that is building up around me everyday, I keep looking back to the books on my shelves and thinking to myself, “I need to read that one again.”  Part of it is the fact that I always find something new in the books that I’ve read before; it’s either a sentence that excels in aesthetic merit, or else a passage that seems to capture where I am intellectually or emotionally at that time.  The other reason is because of Goodreads.  I observed after a while that my friend Aleya would make regular posts on Facebook that were made through Goodreads.  They were 1329354351-1329354351_goodreads_4always the cover of a book and said either, “Aleya has begun [TITLE X]” or else “Aleya has finished [TITLE X].”  This intrigued me and when I asked her about it she mentioned that you could link your Goodreads account to your Facebook page.  I set up my account, and after only a month I discovered that you could see a years’ worth of books that you read as one large picture.  The image of all the different titles was illuminating because each book was a different experience, a different memory, and showed me exactly what I was doing, reading, and thinking about at the time.  Because of this I’ve been looking back over the books I’ve read and been thinking, “that really needs to be in the log.”  As such my copy of Lolita (distinct with its picture of a little girl’s pink lips) made its way into my path again, and I saw an opportunity to add another book to the log.

I really wish I could remember when I first read Lolita.  My earliest memory of actually reading the book was one summer during a binge of the Harry Potter series.  I’d just finished The Goblet of Fire and was about to move onto the Order of the Phoenix when a strange thought entered my head: “I should read Lolita.”  The context of a pedophile controlling and raping a fourteen-year-old girl in between the magical adventures of Harry and his friends in the castle of Hogwarts probably would be enough to kill most people’s so-called “innocence,” but the book was illuminating.vladimir-nabokov

Childhood that was being poisoned by corrupt adults seemed to make sense in its context for the arrival of Voldemort seemed a perfect segway into the whiny gasbag that is Humbert Humbert.

Reading the book again I’ve had time to read other Nabokov works such as Pnin, Invitation to a Beheading, and several of his short stories and so the most beautiful part of reading Lolita is the prose.  I often compliment Nabokov for his writing, and this isn’t just literary kiss-assing on my part.  Nabokov truly is one of the greatest, Federico Infante Tutt'Art@if not the greatest, proseists of the twenty-first century.  Every sentence is a careful construction and the man has a linguistic skill that many writers could only aspire to.  Part of it is a careful attention to puns that litter throughout the work, but more than anything is Nabokov’s ability to seduce with linguistics.

The opening lines of Lolita remain the most beautiful opening passage of any novel I have read, so much so that I’ve stored it in memory and can recite it at will:

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.

It’s impossible to read this out loud and not feel uplifted and simultaneously repulsed, and if that isn’t a demonstration of Nabokov’s ability nothing is.  The content of this opening is enough to make one squirm but the constant use of “l’s” and “t’s” creates an auditory balm that just settles over the reader wooing them to Humbert Humbert who continues his “invitation” to the reader with a veiled order:

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.  She was Lola in slacks.  She was Dolly at school.  She was Delores on the dotted line.  But in my arms she was always Lolita.Lolita Gif

Did she have a precursor.?  She did, indeed she did.  In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.  In a princedom by the sea.  Oh when?  About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer.  You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.  Look at this tangle of thorns.  (9).

This opening remains troublesome because if the reader was paying attention it’s clear that what is taking place is not a seduction, but a veiled order to listen to his story and so from the start the tone of Lolita is clear. Humbert Humbert is not interested in defending himself, he’s interested in seducing his reader so that he can exert his will over them and, more importantly, his interpretation of the events of Lolita.13fed63a399123d67cc77f094a1833f7--romantic-paintings-modern-art

Numerous critics and readers have observed the conflict of Lolita for Nabokov’s prose is beautiful, so much so that my creative writing teacher could recite this opening at will and just pause and reflect on the beauty of it.  Humbert Humbert is a man gifted with a “fancy prose style” and because of this he’s able to try and sway the reader who should really be far more concerned with the fact that he’s regularly raping a twelve-year-old girl, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

If the reader has never read Lolita before, some background of the plot is necessary.  Humbert Humbert is a man who, when he was young, had a failed sexual liaison with a family Friend’s daughter on the beach.  Because of this failure his sexuality become stunted and he begins a lifelong pursuit of “Nymphets” his term for young girls about the age of twelve.  He has a failed marriage and then hops place to place in Europe before coming to America where, in the home of a woman named Charlotte Haze, he meets a young woman named Delores Haze who becomes the center of his erotic and psychological being.  He marries Charlotte, who dies not long after the marriage starts, and this gives Humbert the chance to abscond with Lolita across the territory of the United States.  Humbert spends the next two years traveling with Lolita and raping her while keeping her locked tight within his grasp.  Eventually Delores escapes with the help of a writer named Quilty who Humbert Murders at the end of the novel.007_lta

The duplicitous nature of Humbert is established early in the novel, for while Humbert is presented as a kind young man who had an unfulfilled erotic experience with a girl his own age, over time he becomes a crafty pervert whose chief talent is duplicity.  Later in the novel after he has suffered a failed marriage he enters a sanitarium where his favorite hobby is tricking the doctors on staff.  Humbert describes this activity gaily:

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style […] teasing them with fake “primal scenes”; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual prediction.  (34).

It’s this quality of Humbert, his need to constantly reveal and conceal his true self, that can make reading Lolita somewhat exasperating.  In fact, I’ll be completely honest, there isn’t a page in this novel where I didn’t want to slap Humbert just for being a self-righteous and duplicitous jackass.

There’s nothing so obnoxious as someone who is constantly the victim of some past or ever occurring offense, but when one is the agent of one’s own destruction it makes it doubly annoying.  Humbert is constantly calling himself the victim of a real affliction, and the later passages of the novel reveal him writing at length about how he is the subject of Lolita’s cruelty because she doesn’t return his amorous feelings.  And perhaps the most troublesome aspect of the novel is that there are times when his prose is so thick with ornate arrangements of words that the reader is almost compelled to believe him.

If the reader is careful however, and remains diligent, Humbert often reveals himself in small instances.  During one passage in which he’s recalling a diary he kept while living with Delores and Charlotte he describes his true nature:lolita4-folio

My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back.  I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens.  Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand.  My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard.  Is Lo in her room?  Gently I tug on the silk.  She is not.  (49).

Later in the novel when he contemplates killing Lolita’s mother Charlotte he elaborates a long, thought-out plan and reveals himself once again:

Simple, was it not?  But what d’ye know, folks—I just could not make myself do it!  (87).

Though perhaps the most revealing is a passage that occurs not just but a few paragraphs later:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them.  image_4We are not sex fiends!  We do not rape as good soldiers do.  We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet.  Empirically, no killers are we.  Poets never kill.  (87-8).

If the reader is absolutely repulsed by this passage they shouldn’t feel bad at all for that is my exact reaction.  Humbert is often defending his desire for “nymphets,” a term that was introduced into the general lexicon after the novel was published, and reading this passage which can border on the erotic is disturbing.  It’s a sane reaction to be bothered or repulsed by Lolita, but it’s when the reader turns away and decides to stop listening out of disgust that a real problem occurs.001gwaBAzy732SOL3q343&690

The surface matters.  It matters because it’s a topic many would prefer not to talk about.

Within the last decade, I’ve become more and more aware of the reality of rape-culture, at least as far as the culture of the United States is concerned (I can only ever speak for my own culture), and while this has temporarily hurt some of my comfort, the knowledge is worth more than my ease.  One particular story stands out.  My wife would often, while we were just dating, read me stories about women who were victims of rape and ignored or else victim-blamed.  The most pernicious story was one of a twelve-year-old girl in the Houston area who was gang-raped by a group of teen-age boys.  None of them served any jail-time because the defense argued she had “dressed provocatively.”

Now my first reaction wasn’t to cry, but to often scream at the top of my lungs, “How the fuckity fuck does a twelve-year-old “dress provocatively?”

Yet this the world and society I’m living in.  The victim being denied a voice isn’t a new development, for in fact Nabokov uses this as a strategy of writing Lolita.  The reader should note that the little girl who is the center of Humbert’s desire isn’t actually named Lolita, that’s his name for her when he speaks about his desire.  In fact her name is Delores Haze, yet the reader might completely miss this during their reading because they are always being narrated to by Humbert.  The victim’s story is silenced because Humbert presents himself often as the victim, the victim of a form of rational love.  There’s no possible way he could possibly be a murderer or rapist because his feelings for Lolita are pure.lolita3-folio

I’ve thrown quite a lot at my reader who may be wondering at this point where to begin with their criticism.  Why should they bother reading a book about pedophilia in the first place?  It’s revolting and by the sounds of it Nabokov was just a pervert who was hiding behind his character to express gross feelings and sentiments?  Why should I pick up a book that, by the sounds of it, is just going to repulse me and make me sick?

My reader has more or less summed up the standing argument against Lolita, and the various criticisms laid against it.  A few years back one of my friends in graduate school was teaching an American Literature course and he had the fortune (or misfortune) to teach the novel Lolita and the general charge against the novel was exactly the points made before.  Most students shut down and refused to listen to the analysis or look past the rape to see the deeper literary and rhetorical goals of the novel.  All they could see was the rape of Delores Haze.008_lta

This isn’t my place to hop up and say they were wrong to do so.  Reading the novel again I’m finding it easier and easier to cut through Humbert’s fluff and observe every level of his sexual corruption and manipulations.  This doesn’t always lead to a comfortable read, in fact often reading the book I feel repulsed.  My reader may object then that I have proven them right, but in point of fact I’ve proven them wrong.  It’s for the very reason I feel repulsed that this book matters.

Rape is an act of violence that has been allowed to have more and more exposure in contemporary media.  Whether it was the fifth season of Game of Thrones which seemed to have a rape in every other episode, to the fact that Law & Order SVU has somehow managed to outlast the original series, to the fact that Bill Cosby has now become a national headline.  These are just some examples, and not even the most potent illustrations of how rape-culture is infecting the society.  But they do serve as a reminder that most people are aware of the crime of rape and the damage it has upon people who have to live and try to exist after becoming a victim of rape.Screen Shot 2015-09-16 at 17.39.02

Lolita as a novel is more relevant than ever because the culture, as it exists now, is open to discussing the contents of the novel and reminding people that sexual assault isn’t just an abstract idea, it’s a concrete reality that affects people in the real world.

But I’ll end this first discussion of the book with an important observation.  Humbert Humbert was a stranger who entered the home of Charlotte Haze and eventually managed to capture her daughter, but the idea of someone within the home as the attacker is perhaps the strongest argument for the reading of Lolita because most instances of pedophilia are not random strangers, but instead family friends or members who rape their children or siblings.  It’s this last fact that perhaps makes most people so uncomfortable because many would prefer not to think about that.  The idea of the home is that it is a safe space from the chaotic mess of the outside world.  The corruption of rape isn’t supposed to exist, or at least nor originate from this safe space and many would prefer to hold onto that surface reality rather than acknowledge that the home isn’t always safe.  Sometimes people get hurt by the ones who are supposed to love them.

I intend to write more about Lolita in a few more essays, but in this first approach I just wanted to address this surface issue because it’s the element that creates the most controversy around the novel.  But where most readers focus on the element of Humbert’s sexual manipulations, the far more important element is that Nabokov succeeded in demonstrating that parents worrying about their children being prey to sexual deviants didn’t need to look outside their living rooms, because unfortunately the spider had already set up shop and might have been sitting next to them on the couch.

MV5BMjRkZDA4ZGYtMzdlNS00OTc2LThhYWEtMDUyYjI1NWNiODBhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjgyNjk3MzE@._V1_

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

I probably need to give my reader more credit.  If you weren’t reading my essay then I wouldn’t be speaking with them directly.

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

If the reader is at all interested, I’ve found a few website which have compiled some statistics about the rate of sexual assault, what are the ages of attackers, and their types of relationships with the victims.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violence

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem

https://victimsofcrime.org/media/reporting-on-child-sexual-abuse/child-sexual-abuse-statistics

https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/Pages/rape-notification.aspx

 

***Writer’s Note***

While researching this essay, I managed to find a link to an article published on Slate.  I’ve provided it here below:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2005/12/lolita_at_50.html

 

****Writer’s Note****

I apologize to the reader who brought up the idea that Nabokov might be expressing personal desires through Lolita; I never got around to debunking this idea.  This is a common charge against Nabokov’s Lolita, but unfortunately it is the most misinformed criticism and therefore the easiest to combat.  Just because an author writes about a topic does not means that he or she validates or believes in such a moral system.  Edgar Allen Poe often wrote in first person personas that were often mad lunatics or sexual deviants but that does not mean Poe supported premature burials or animal abuse.  There is a divide between the writer, the author, and the creative persona.  tHe writer is merely the person who writes the text, the author is the original manager of the inspiration, and the creative persona is the person what is being written by the author.  This system exists to give the writer distance from his or her creation, allowing a freedom to express and explore ideas that they may find repulsive, frightening, or else simply evil.  Nabokov was not a pedophile, he was merely a writer who wrote a character who was.  If readers intend to hold authors responsible for the actions of their characters, or worse, assume that their characters are the extensions of their creator’s personality then artists will not be free to tackle difficult subjects like rape, murder, pedophilia, and torture in which case life will be nothing but Family Circus Cartoons and I will not live in that world.

Unless it’s Nietzsche’s Family Circus, that shit’s hilarious.

5

 

 

*****Writer’s Note*****

Several of the watercolor images in this article are from an illustrated copy of Lolita.  The artist’s name is Frederico Infante and if the reader is curious about how he handled, what would be for many potential career suicide, they can read about it in an article published on The independent by following the link below:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/lolita-folio-society-edition-of-vladimir-nabokovs-famous-novel-features-illustrations-by-federico-a6701671.html

DDvUZzaXcAANynQ

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Pink Lips & Bubbles

27 Saturday May 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Literature, Novels, Satire/Humor, Still Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Art, Bubbles, glasses, Joshua Jammer Smith, Literature, Lolita, Novel, original photograph, Satire, spoon, still life, tea, Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita

Pink Lips & Bubbles

21 May 2017

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Tell-Tale Hearts Sing Songs of Madness Sublime

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Edgar Allen Poe, horror, Literature, Philosophy, Short Story

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"World Without Man", Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Clarissa Explains It All, Doug, Edgar Allen Poe, Even Stevens, Gothic, Heart Beating, Heavy Metal, horror, Humbert Humbert, Literature, Lolita, Madness as Sublime, murder, Neil deGrasee Tyson, Philosophy, Poe: Poetry and Tales, psychology, Psychosis, Short Story, Sublime, Tawney Dean, Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amantillado, The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart

 poe

Psychosis apparently does wonder for one’s ability with prose.  This isn’t just my own estimation for Humbert Humbert, the obnoxious pervert protagonist, technical literary term for the record, says as much in the novel Lolita.  In the very opening passage of the book, after he writes what is objectively one of the most beautiful opening paragraphs in literary history, he notes his own ability with language when he says:

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. (9).

And Humbert Humbert is not just being ironic as he recognizes that he is purposefully embellishing the language for the sake of writing pretty words, he’s actually falling back upon a previous narrative, specifically The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe which offers the same sentiment.  The unnamed narrator begins his tale with a now iconic and still frightening condition:

TRUE! –nervous –very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses –not destroyed —3792be4e3a103d688a03fe6b715982a0not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily –how calmly I can tell you the whole story.  (555).

It becomes clear that should I ever wish to be taken seriously as a writer I have one course of action: become insane and start penning short stories about my exploits.  My only reservation is that murder is a vastly underrated enterprise and their union benefits miserable.

I honestly believe that the show Even Stevens was my first experience with The Tell-Tale Heart.  The obligatory emo/goth best friend girl character, who’s name I honestly couldn’t remember until I margo-harshman-1337844081Googled it, Tawney Dean, describes the plot of the short story to Steven who is experiencing some kind of guilt and after that my memory of the 90s fades mostly out of a built in defense mechanism against nostalgia.  Though Clarissa Explains It All and Doug do seem strikingly familiar.  This was The Tell-Tale Heart, but I had actually encountered Poe’s work before this.  My first experience of Poe was The Pagemaster when the Raven shouts “Nevermore,” even if I didn’t get the reference.  Poe as a man has become a cartoon character largely appropriated by teenage fuck-ups, I’m saying that as a former one myself, who enjoy the superficial darkness of the text without trying to dig deeper into the philosophical implications his works have to offer.  Growing up I enjoyed Poe’s stories, especially since my seventh-grade English teacher taught us The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amantillado, and The Raven all in one week.

Despite my early love of Poe, or perhaps because of it, I eventually came to distrust my fascination with the man and his writing because his aesthetic seemed taken over by superficial morons who enjoyed reading his poems in graveyards while vaping andEdgar_Allen_Poe listening to The Crow soundtrack.  If I sound bitter about this it is only because my feelings on the matter have become clearer as I age.  Poe’s aesthetic seems at first like something you should grow out of, like Ayn Rand or The Superfriends, when in fact Poe’s writing is a brilliant testament to the possibilities of the creative landscape of the United States, much like The Superfriends.  Poe eventually came back into my life through the essay R.W. Emerson, and then later a fellow student in graduate school who also became my friend.  I’ll get to that in a bit.

I decided to return to Poe after a long estrangement, starting with the first Poe I could think of.  The Tell-Tale Heart is in fact one of the most common introduction of Poe’s work, because it seems to define his aesthetic to the great body of teachers, students, and casual readers.  This is actually rather incorrect, but I’ll deal with that later.  I read the story again, finding in the words a new territory.

Madness is a common ground for horror, and The Tell-Tale Heart from the very start makes this territory the focus of the story.  The protagonist is the narrator, a man who has clearly gone insane.  The cause of his mental illness is never specified for he moves quickly to the fact that he had an unspecified relationship with an older man, whom he says he loved, but who possessed a milked-over eye that drove him eventually to murder the 0cb1b1fe47eaf094fd714dc7f97589a9old man.  He then hides the body in the floor boards of the house, comfortable that he will get away with the crime, until, not long after the old man is dead, a group of Policemen respond to a noise complaint.  They search the house but find nothing at which point the protagonist invites them to stay and enjoy some tea.  They accept, and while the man entertains them he begins to hear the sound of beating.  He discovers, to his great horror, that it is the sound of the old man’s heart beating ever louder and louder.  Fueled by his madness and paranoia he succumbs to the guilt and confesses to the crime.

This beating has, since the publication of this short story in 1843, been one of the hallmarks not only of the horror genre, but story-telling in general.  The heartbeat is a simple yet effective tool of story-tellers to convey tension and, in its own way, the “JAWS Theme” tumblr_mv8yv3nR8Z1qb5qxmo3_500with it’s simple two notes takes advantage of this structure to create the glorious tension that near ruined the economy of seaside towns in the early eighties.  The reason the heartbeat works is because it is a simple yet effective trick that mimics the readers own heartbeat which, depending on the story, only builds with the development of paranoia.  Though to be fair the success of the story is based upon the writer’s ability and Poe most certainly demonstrates this in his writing.

Poe describes the heartbeat as the narrator is preparing to murder the Old Man:

And now have I not told you what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.  I knew that sound well, too.  It was the beating of the old man’s heart.  It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.  (557).tth

And he goes on:

The old man’s terror must have been extreme!  It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!—do you mark me well?  I have told you that I am nervous; so I am.  And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror.  (557).

And finally he erupts in a denouement that is both climactic with a hint of a quasi-Twilight-Zone vibe:

No doubt I now grew very pale; –but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased –and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound –much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath –and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly –more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men –but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what f42309dd09935173f096997f6192181bcould I do? I foamed –I raved –I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder –louder –louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! –no, no! They heard! –they suspected! –they knew! –they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now –again! –hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!

“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! –tear up the planks! here, here! –It is the beating of his hideous heart!”  (559).

My contester appears as I finish this quote, curious and rapacious as ever to catch me off guard, and they sing the query eternal asking me: so what?  Everybody reads The Tell-Tale Heart in high school, at least if they’re from America, and everybody always arrives at the same conclusion, the story is about guilt.  Once you’ve figured out the lesson that you can never escape your guilt what good can come from reading or discussing this story?

As always my contester raises a fascinating question, but also, as ever and always, they have missed18poe a great opportunity.  They should also clarify that if you’re from the United States, not America, that you read Poe because technically Ecuador and Chile are in the Americas but that doesn’t mean they automatically receive the same education we do.  I agree that one of the defining interpretations of the short story is the notion of guilt, but when I sat down to begin this essay I wondered at this narrative, because I myself couldn’t find a starting point, or a central idea to wrap my head around.  Desperate I went to Facebook and asked my group of friends if they had any ideas.  My friend TJ suggested a queer reading of the story, given the protagonists confession that he “loved” the old man, and while I like this idea it wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to go with this time around.  My other friend Michael, not the Prometheus one, built upon another idea of TJ’s, which is the notion of Poe exploring the sublime.  And here I had a starting point, or, at this point realistically speaking, a central thesis.

Poe’s work inspired most of the Gothic subcultures of horror writing in the United States, if not the world, and writers such as H.P Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Stephen King have followed this aesthetic writing stories that terrify their readers, but beneath this surface aesthetic lies a profound philosophy.  Most people might not see a philosophy in Poe beneath the black birds, dead bodies, and madness, but in fact the_tell_tale_heart_by_murraycita-d7iuhxithese elements reveal the deeper notion of a reality beyond human comprehension: the sublime.  As a word, sublime has fallen upon hard times, and not just because there’s a shitty band from the 90s named after it.  Sublime is often misinterpreted to mean something beautiful, but in fact sublime as a word is meant to be used to refer to natural events like mountains, tornados, hurricanes, or, if you want to step outside the realm of man, the depths of space and the phenomena that occur in the heavens.  A sublime event or force or feeling is one in which the viewer feels a profound sense of awe that is accompanied by fear.  One can watch a tornado or a nuclear blast and feel afraid of it, but at the same time we are drawn to the incredible power.

In horror there is often a moment in which the protagonist will encounter the sublime, but unlike the natural forces many people would understand the sublime that works in the aesthetic of writers like Poe, Bradbury, Lovecraft, and King, there is an entirely different experience and that is with a force that is apathetic or oblivious to the life of man.  My friend Michael explained this to me, in one of those moments that later become a kind of epiphany, that in fact some critics and readers have now argued that Poe’s work explores a unique philosophy: the world without man.clarke-telltaleheart

This can be a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around because human beings are, by design, a narcissistic species that look at themselves as the center of creation.  The geocentric model of the universe that came to prominence during the Classical period in Greece, and was perpetuated by the Catholic church during middle Ages, certainly demonstrates this because in that model Earth is the center of the known universe.  Plenty of examples could be thrown out here to further demonstrate this idea, but I prefer those that reference Superhero’s.  In the film Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice Neil deGrasee Tyson has a small cameo where he’s on news panel discussing Superman and he makes a revealing comment about the human species:

Neil deGrasse Tyson: We’re talking about a being whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the universe. And you go back to Copernicus where he restored the sun in the center of the known universe, displacing Earth, and you get to Darwinian evolution and you find out we’re not special on this earth; we’re just one among other lifeforms. And now we learn that we’re not even special in the entire universe because there is Superman. There he is, an alien among us. We’re not alone.

While this scene is a positive moment in the film, when looking back to Poe’s short story there is in fact an element of horror in it for human beings can’t really perceive a universe in which they play no part.  Some might be able to wrap their head around sucn a universe, but most are unwilling because it would mean they would sever their connections to this reality and world and spin hopelessly into madness.  Which leads me to the fitting conclusion of The Tell-Tale Heart.090427_r18408_p646-816x1200-1460744885

While Poe’s story is just about a madman who is driven to murder because he is paranoid that the Old Man is watching him through his cloudy eye, the beating heart is a sublime supernatural element in a story that is otherwise mundane.  For a moment madness becomes an ability to observe that other world where the supernatural forces and creature’s humans normally don’t perceive, or are unable or unwilling to see.  The beating heart becomes not just the guilt plaguing this ill-man, it becomes the gate to another realm where perhaps that beating is not a heart, but the flap of a beast of the old gods and the ravenous beasts.  His madness opens his mind to that other world, for while reason is a great boon to humanity, it is still limited by humanity, while madness is unfettered and free to explore regions beyond the normal comprehension.

The final cry of the narrator seems to support this idea:style-dark_eye_1440x900

“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! –tear up the planks! here, here! –It is the beating of his hideous heart!”  (559).

What is not spoken in the horror of the narrator’s voice is just as important as what is spoken.  The final lines certainly lend great weight and support to the idea that the narrator is plagued with guilt, specifically “the urge to confess,” but I do believe the argument could be made that there’s another element that has largely been unexplored, and that is the idea that the narrator shouts out the confession to prove to the police, but more importantly to himself, that all he is hearing is the beating and nothing else.    The desperation prove to himself that it is the beating of the Old Man’s heart that he hears reveals that the narrator has allowed his mind to enter into territories that reveal a reality where man is no longer the center of creation.  In fact, it is a world that doesn’t even care if he exists.

Madness in The Tell-Tale Heart is more than just a plot device, it’s an opportunity for Poe to suggest that madness might in fact be the conduit to that other world, that other reality, where the beating of a heart may not belong to men at all.  That thought, as the narrator demonstrates, may just be too much to bear.

tumblr_nqvgvzdeov1qg4kx9o1_1280

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

I noted in this essay that only teenage fuck-ups enjoy Poe and this may be unfair of me to suggest.  Puberty wasn’t a great time in my life, and habit has led me to distrust the impulse to forgive my former self of selfishness or shallowness.  Being a teenager who felt isolated and misunderstood by his peers I gravitated towards Darkness, mostly to Heavy Metal bands like Slipknot, Rob Zombie, SLAYER, KORN, and Disturbed.  It was fun enjoying digging into the darkness, because it fostered that mental state and protected you from the jerks and assholes you normally had to be around.

If I may shed a protective layer of vanity, Poe inspired me at a young age to, and I shit you not this is real, “invent a new mode of sonnets.”  There was the Petrarchan and Shakespearian sonnet models, but I decided I would create the “Raven” model of sonnets in honor of Poe.  This eventually failed when it became clear I was just writing shitty poems about black birds trying to look cool.

Perhaps the “fuck-up” classification isn’t so damning after all.

 

**Writer’s Note**

All passages from The Tell-Tale Heart were taken from Poe: Poetry and Tales, published by The Library of America.  However, while researching for this essay I also found a pdf with the entire short story completely free and unabridged.  If you want to read the story in its entirety you can do so by following the link below:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/telltale.html

9780940450189

 

***Writer’s Note***

My thanks to TJ and Michael for their helpful suggestions for this essay.  Thanks guys!

 

****Writer’s FINAL Note****

The narrator tells the tale of the heart…oh my god I just got that.

 

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

I Am…Nowhere Near as Cool as Malala

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Biography, Book Review, Comics/Graphic Novels, Education, Feminism, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Au Revoir Mes Enfants, Ayatollah Khomeini, Azar Nafisi, biography, Book Review, Breaking Bad, Comics, Education, Feminism, Girls Education, Islam, Lolita, Malala Yousafzai, Marjane Satrapi, Muslim Women, Pakistan, Persepolis, Politics, Public Education, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, The Girl Who Was Shot by the Taliban, The Washington Post, Ziauddin Yousafzai

 win_20160908_15_22_01_pro

Two of my co-workers in the Writing Center had a code.  I use the word code because the English language is poor and I don’t have any other word for inside reference between two people who share a friendship or relationship.  The code was simple.  B would usually complain that she was tired or anxious and didn’t feel up to going to class that day, and so she thought about going out to grab some food instead.  S, her friend, would look at her and utter one word: Malala.  Upon utterance of said word B would groan and usually say “you’re right, you’re right.”  At this point S didn’t necessary have to continue for often girls-malalathe code word Malala would be enough to remind B or her responsibility as a student, but on occasion she would follow the code with “what would Malala do B?  Malala wanted to go to school.”  B would usually tell S to shut the fuck up, but she would still smile, nod, and eventually go ahead and go to class.

This may at first sound like a bad parody of stereotypical white women or a sketch you might see on Amy Schumer, but my co-workers were genuine in their affection and adoration of Malala, and this affection demonstrated the influence of the woman who, while I had yet to actually read her book, I still respected tremendously for her passion and mission in life which was to help girls all across the world receive access to an education.  My little sister, who happened to be friends with B and S, which I just realized makes my entire opening sound like a bluff, would usually do nothing but sing Malala’s praises and often point to her copy of I am Malala and utter the same phrase over and over again: “you need to read that book.”  Much like people who told me that I needed to watch Breaking Bad, I trusted them and fully recognized that the book was not only worth my time but would be enormously satisfying, but for whatever reason I decided to hold off.  Hype can be a deterrent as much as it can be a help and so I waited till sometime after finishing Breaking Bad before I actually picked up Malala’s book and read it.breaking-bad-heisenberg

I’ll begin by noting that there was a pronounced lack of meth, but I suppose that was the post-afterglow of finishing Breaking Bad, and now I’ll shut the hell up about Breaking Bad and give Malala the attention she deserves.  Though you should definitely get around to watching Breaking Bad when you get the chance.

Malala Yousafzai was fifteen when she was shot in the head by a member of the Taliban.  She and a group of students were on their way to school when a squad stopped the truck, demanded to see her, and when she openly admitted to her identity she was shot.  She managed to receive proper medical care before she and her family received political asylum in England where she was given expert medical aid and from there began a new career as quite possibly the most important feminists since Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan.  Men, women, and children the world over flocked to her giving up their prayers, thoughts, money, and time so that she might become well, and in the mass rhetoric which surrounded the story of Malala an important figure was largely cut out of the picture: her father.malala-obama

I Am Malala is a book about Yousafzai’s life, but I was surprised when I was reading the book to discover how much of the actual memoir was not actually about Malala but about her father Ziauddin Yousafzai.

She describes in one passage her villages reaction to The Satanic Verses and the Fatwah.

My father’s college held a heated debate in a packed room.  Many students argued that the book should be banned and burned and the fatwa upheld.  My father also saw the book as offensive to Islam but believes strongly in freedom of speech.  “First, let’s read the book and then why not respond with our own book,” he suggested.  He ended by asking in a thundering voice my grandfather would have been proud of, “Is Islam such a weak religion that it cannot tolerate a book written against it?  Not my Islam!”  (46).

This passage immediately struck me because I have just such a parent.  It’s almost malala2laughable now that people were, and still are in some small pockets of the United States, outraged by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  As the series was continually published this fervor over young children performing magic in a seemingly religious-absent world only grew and book burnings were a popular spectacle on the evening news.  In my own state and county, I remember hearing whispers of this mysterious book Harry Potter, and one evening the local news even interviewed a man who spoke to a reporter honestly when he said he would refuse to let his children read the book lest they become enticed by devil worship and witchcraft.  There was passion all over Texas about Harry Potter and in the midst of the ballyhoo my mother, being the amazing woman that she is, looked at me and said, “Why don’t we actually buy the book, read it, and then decide for ourselves whether the book is evil or not?”

Like Malala, I was blessed with a rational level headed parent who taught me the most important lesson of my life, and from there every summer until The Deathly Hallows was published, my mother would buy the new Harry Potter book and read it to us.  Malala’s story is often the story of her father, for while Malala i-am-malalaspends time narrating the details of her life, the dramas that take place between her and her school chums and family and friends, there is a great deal of attention payed to her father, specifically his efforts to build a girl’s school.

While Yousafzai’s struggles tend to occupy a significant amount of the book, Malala’s memoir is just as much a reflection on her cultures, sometimes noting the detrimental aspects it had on its people particularly women:

I am very proud to be a Pashtun, but sometimes I think out code of conduct has a lot to answer for, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned.  A woman named Shahida who worked for us ad had three small daughters told me that when she was only ten years old her father had sold her to an old man who already had a wife but wanted a younger one.  When girls disappeared it was not always because they had been married off.  (66).

She goes on to note:

We have another custom called swara by which a girl can be given to another tribe to resolve a feud.  It is officially banned but still continues.  In our village there was a widow called Soraya who married a widower from another clan which had a feud with her family.  Nobody can marry a widow without the permission of her family.  When Soraya’s family found out about the union they were furious.  121109041309-02-malala-1109-horizontal-large-galleryThey threatened the widower’s family until a Jirga of village elders was called to resolve the dispute.  The jirge decided that the widower’s family should be punished by handing over their most beautiful girl to be married to the least eligible man of the rival clan.  The boy was a good-for-nothing, so poor that the girl’s father had to pay all their expenses.  Why should a girl’s life be ruined to settle a dispute she had nothing to do with?  (67).

A fair question, though I note the irony in the sentence for in a few years Malala herself would become just such a victim, not in a local domestic dispute, but in fact a philosophical and multi-national conflict.  Since September 11th, an event which she actually describes the perspective in her home country, the United States has undergone a profound paradigm shift in terms of foreign policy and this has influenced seemingly every aspect of society.  Looking over just a few recent contemporary events is enough to see this, though perhaps the best example is the Muhammed Cartoon contest that took place in Garland, Texas last year.  The coordinator of the events, a abc_malala_robach_interview_1_jtm_140815_4x3_992woman by the name of Pamella Geller, continues to defend her position and action of hosting such an event because for her it was a reaffirmation of American civil liberties, rather than a baiting action against Muslims.  I wish I could say events like this were few and far between, but since that wretched day(and even before it) this has only been the most recent and most publicized example.  It’s not uncommon to read or hear of Church gatherings in the United States where copies of the Quran are burned to mass applause.  Baiting and protests of Mosques is not uncommon, and the other day I even read of an instructional comic strip about helping people suffering from public instances of racism.  It’s telling that the young woman in the cartoon who plays the recipient of the abused is in fact a Muslim woman.  While this obvious reactionary behavior has manifested in my country, a nation that prides itself in its rhetoric of being open minded and accepting of all people, I’ve observed as well a pernicious rhetoric:

Muslim women and girls need to be saved from the despicable society and culture which persecutes them without impunity.persepolis

The Reader may object instantly, wondering if I am about to negate the testimony and actual film evidence that women in Muslim societies tend to suffer under patriarchy and bullshit sexism.  I am not.  Malala herself notes in the book that young women in her society tend to suffer greatly from fundamentalist Islam, and she’s not the only one.

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis came into my life when my little sister showed me the film Au Revoir Mes Enfants.  It’s a French film; a period piece about a boy’s school operated by priests during World War II where two young boys meet and become friends before it’s discovered that one of them is Jewish.  Before the film even began a black and white advertisement came on in which a woman was singing along to the song Eye of the Tiger in Arabic, and when the title Persepolis followed I knew that I had to see it.  The film in turn eventually led me to the graphic novel.  Persepolis as a book is not just an autobiography of a woman living during 1979, for it moves past this period into the reverberations of the war and way life changed for individual people living in Iran at this time.

Perhaps the best panel, in my estimation, is the one that explains the rise of “the veil” and Satrapi’s attitude towards it:

freedom

Like Satrapi’s memoir, the book Reading Lolita in Tehran explores this repressive environment.  I discovered this book about the same time that I found Persepolis, though to be honest, I can’t remember how that book came into my life.  All at once it was there and I was reading the book and enjoying it tremendously and not only for the fact that it gave me yet another argument to employ when defending the novel Lolita from half-assed critics.  The book is written as a kind of memoir by Azar Nafisi about a 7603secret book club she formed with a group of students that she taught at Tehran university.  The book is divided into four main chapters with smaller sub-chapters, each main chapter is centralized around one particular author.  This division, which I note follows the same rhetorical pattern as Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, allows for Nafisi to construct her own personal narrative of the events around her while she and the group of all female students discuss the works.  The first chapter begins after the new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini has assumed power and Nafisi notes her personal reaction:

Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules.  Always, the joy of teaching was marred by diversions and considerations forced on us by the regime—how well could one teach when the main concern of university officials was not the quality of one’s work but the color of one’s lips, the subversive potential of a single strand of hair?  Could one really concentrate on one’s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Bronte because she appeared to condone adultery.  (10-11).

The idea that totalitarian repression dwells on the superficial rather than the substantial isn’t anything new and Satrapi herself presents just such a moment of this idiocy:

bxurycoiuaa8smy

Both of these books provide enough first hand testimony to make the argument that fundamentalist Islam, when combined with unfettered political power, is nothing but a repressive totalitarian madhouse where murder, rape, sexism, and torture are allowed free reign, but it’s important to recognize that these elements are only one element in these women’s lives.  True they may steer the direction their lives and mundane actions take, but in the second half of Persepolis Satrapi notes that really is but one answer to this oppression of the individual:

education

All of these books speak to the fact that Muslim women don’t need to be “saved,” they need to be afforded opportunity to make their life whatever they want it to be.  The attitude that Westerners can “save” Muslim women from their homelands reeks of White Savior Complex and a desire to appear morally and intellectually superior, when the evidence is clear that Muslim women can stand as intellectual equals alongside Western women.

Malala herself says this outright when she writes:

But I said, “Education is education.  We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow.”  Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.  (162).malala-yousafzai1

Human is a nice touch there.  I wish I had written that sentence.  My admiration for Malala’s diction here is really just to point out the most important facet of I am Malala, for while the world took comfort in the fact that Malala had survived the ruthlessness of the Taliban and enjoyed telling her story to show everyone that terrorism is bad, the real woman Malala appeared in the pages she had written I came to know.

I am Malala is not just a book about damning terrorism because the book is about more than that.  It’s about demonstrating the idea that education is fundamental to the success and health of civilization.  After Malala is shot, and 4315096-3x2-940x627she describes the political drama that created a conflict in ensuring she survived, she talks about her attacker in such a way that is admirable and almost unbelievable:

I felt nothing, maybe just a bit satisfied.  “So they did it.”  My only regret was that I hadn’t had a chance to speak to them before they shot me.  Now they’d never hear what I had to say.  I didn’t even think a single bad thought about the man who shot me—I had no thoughts of revenge—I just wanted to go back to Swat.  I wanted to go home.  (282).

Revenge is rooted in impulse in the human species and so when we are slighted, offended, hurt, or damaged by others there is an initial impulse to bring harm to someone else, to validate the pain one has experienced.  That’s why Malala’s reaction to be shot in the head is almost unbelievable.  But in fact it demonstrates the very idea that courses its way through the body of this memoir and that is that education can lift people from the base impulse and remind them of their own humanity and find reason.  Education is what can alter the course of a life, and looking to my own experience I know this is just the case.  My parents reading to me every night before bed, buying me books, paying for my education; it was these gifts that helped me become the person I am.girls_in_school_in_khyber_pakhtunkhwa_pakistan_7295675962

Education also reminds me of the dangers of stereotyping.  About a year ago the graphic novel book club I’m a part of read the new Ms. Marvel comic book in which the main character was a young Muslim woman.  The series was beautifully drawn, and the characters were fun to read and learn about.  When it came time to give our opinions most everyone at the table agreed the book was charming and enjoyable, but one of my friends explained that he couldn’t enjoy it.  His argument was that the characters were Muslims, people like ISIS who were killing Americans and from there the people at the table began either to stare at the table or try to mumble under their breath.  I interrupted him, asking about the character’s costume and the scene was averted, but that moment lives on.  Terrorists like the Talbian, and ISIS, and Hezbollah, have come to be the faces of Islam rather than the exceptions, and this is conflict because this creates the idea that all Muslims are despicable repressed psychopaths.large_mfwrddsmko7n1cjj9bhs_gui5xz4vmywndzlez007js

I am Malala challenges this position.  Evil individuals will always exist in human society, and while some will seek educations and use what they learn to harm their fellow human beings, most will spurn the idea of learning because it is far easier to squeeze a trigger and kill someone.  Likewise, the survivors of evil run the similar trap of becoming the very forces they despise, for revenge, or the desire for it, is an easy impulse that can story good people.  Malala Yousafzai is an extraordinary young woman because she has faced such a force, suffered for her bravery and integrity, and written her narrative to inspire others.  Education is a powerful institution because it can revolutionize the way people live their life.

In a later passage, before her family leaves Pakistan, there is a brief moment that reveals the character of Malala:ht_malala_yousafzai_karachi_school_ll_131004_16x9_608

When I heard they would be in Birmingham in two days, I had only one request.  “Bring my school bag,” I pleaded to my father.  “If you can’t go to Swat to fetch it, no matter—buy new books for me, because in March it’s my board examination.”  Of course I wanted to come first in class.  I especially wanted my physics book because physics is difficult for me, and I needed to practice numericals, as my math is not so good and they are hard for me to solve.

I thought I’d be back home by November.  (285).

There is a sweet charm in this, but there’s also room for inspiration.  Malala is a girl, not an idealistic hero, just a girl who wants to learn.  Some would try to make her into some kind of icon, and in many ways she is, but her memoir serves the function of balancing this public icon with the real living breathing young woman who is driven by a passion to discover, succeed, and learn and in turn take what she has acquired in knowledge and ensure that other young women have the same opportunity.  Too often the stories of the Middle East are tragedies, but in the case of I am Malala, there is a narrative of hope and determination.

A book of this caliber is sure to leave its mark on society.  B. and S. being my first and final example it’s clear already that I am Malala has done just that.

malala

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

I’ve mentioned Breaking Bad throughout this essay but only because it became a running gag and also because I really haven’t seen a television show that has left me so satisfied apart maybe from Stranger Things on Netflix.  My constant reference to it is in some small way a subconscious effort to indicate that Malala’s book is tied to greatness.  One final Breaking Bad reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIom3LSbB0I

 

**Writer’s Note**

I like moments in which personality of people appears, rather than the ideals people want them to be.  This can manifest sometimes in character failings, and other times as little eccentricities.  Whether it’s her love of the TV show Ugly betty or her loves of books, Malala appears throughout her memoir as a real human being and one passage which I didn’t get a chance to incorporate reveals this:i-am-malala

I liked doing my hair in different styles and would spend ages in the bathroom in front of the mirror trying out looks I had seen in movies.  Until I was eight or nine my mother used to cut my hair short like my brothers’ because of lice and also make it easier to wash and brush, as it would get messed up under my shawl.  But finally, I had persuaded her to let me grow it to my shoulders.  Unlike Moniba’s, which is straight, my hair is wavy, and I liked to twist it into curls or tie it into plaits.  “What are you doing in there pisho? my mother would shout.  “Out guests need the bathroom and everyone is having to wait for you.”  (145).

 

 

***Writer’s Note***

While I was touching up this essay I found this article from The Washington Post about I Am Malala.  Hope you enjoy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2015/10/08/what-were-reading-i-am-malala/

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Two Iron Wills Joined at the White Heat: A White Tower Review

11 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Biography, Book Review, Christopher Hitchens, History, Literature

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

A Queer History of the United States, American Radical, Arguably Essays, Author Vs Voice Vs Persona, biography, Book Review, Brenda Wineapple, Christopher Hitchens, Creative Writing, Ellen Page, Emily Dickinson, Fred Kaplan, If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome, Lesbianism, Literature, Lolita, Michael Bronski, Operation, The Singular Mark Twain, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Vladimir Nabokov, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Writers

 

wineapple

The literary biography is a careful dance and many authors who attempt it have two left feet.

This is a conflict for me as a writer and reviewer of great works because I have yet to really stumble across a biography that is truly atrocious, well, okay, I have but the one I’m thinking about I haven’t finished yet and I plan to review it after finishing this essay.  While I have read numerous biographies, some interesting but not great and some that defy the laws of conventions and seal their enormity and wonder upon the psyche of the writer’s mind, because I have yet to read one that is utter garbage I feel that calling a book a “great biography” places myself in a dangerous ethical position.  I’m also struggling against the fact that I’m still learning the biography game, having read only a few in my lifetime, and for the fact that Hasbro didn’t include the instructions or batteries in the box.

Bobby’s dad down the street can afford a new Operation but I have play with hand-me-downs.  It’s lame man.

Operation-KO

A biography compels the writer to write or else it doesn’t, and unless the book has some merit or relevance there isn’t much of a point bothering writing anything at all.  Having said that, Grad School works wonders for motivations and this semester I have been put through the ringer.  This semester I signed up for a course covering the entire works of Emily Dickinson, and while I cannot say it has made me an expert on the subject, Dickinson as a woman and writer have taken on new meanings in no small part because of the work I have put, the brilliance of my professor, and of course the endless series of reading and writing I have had that is currently sending me into a spiral of madness.  Two of the books this semester have been biographies of Dickinson, and while one has sent me reeling in horror and disgust, the other one, which happens to be the subject of this review, has left me deeply impressed of Emily Dickinson but also of a man I had never known or heard of before.

Before I get to Brenda Wineapple though I need to briefly clarify the idea of biography and for hitchens_1587756cthat I’ll need Christopher Hitchens.  In the November 2003 edition of The Atlantic Hitchens published a scathing review of an unfortunate biography about Mark Twain entitled American Radical.  The biography in question was The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan and I rediscovered this essay in my copy of Arguably Essays two semesters back when researching for information about Twain’s life.  Hitchens could be a mean bastard and this essay stands as one of his most brutal, relentless assaults that I have ever read.  The relevance though to the issue of biographies is that in American Radical Hitchens lays out the scope and purpose of a biography in fine detail and slamming Kaplan while doing so:

There are four rules governing literary art in the domain of biography—some say five. In The Singular Mark Twain, Fred Kaplan violates all five of them. These five require:

1) That a biography shall cause us to wish we had known its subject in person, and inspire in us a desire to improve on such vicarious acquaintance as we possess. The Singular Mark Twain arouses in the reader an urgently fugitive instinct, as at the approach of an unpolished yet tenacious raconteur.

2) That the elements of biography make a distinction between the essential and the inessential, winnowing the quotidian and burnishing those moments of glory and elevation that place a human life in the first rank. The Singular Mark Twain puts all events and conversations on the same footing, and fails to enforce any distinction between wood and trees.

3) That a biographer furnish something by way of context, so that the place of the subject within history and society is illuminated, and his progress through life made intelligible by reference to his times. This condition is by no means met in The Singular 278683Mark Twain.

4) That the private person be allowed to appear in all his idiosyncrasy, and not as a mere reflection of the correspondence or reminiscences of others, or as a subjective projection of the mind of the biographer. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in The Singular Mark Twain.

5) That a biographer have some conception of his subject, which he wishes to advance or defend against prevailing or even erroneous interpretations. This detail, too, has been overlooked in The Singular Mark Twain.

One wonders when the referee finally pulled Hitchens off Kaplan and how long the medical examiner waited before declaring Kaplan dead before he even hit the floor.  These five “rules” have often been my approach to determining whether or not a biography has succeeded in its task and looking at Brenda Wineapple’s book White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, I’m happy to say all five rules are satisfied.  This is ironic seeing as how Wineapple is honest about her position of the book:

this book is not a biography of Emily Dickinson, of whom biography gets us nowhere, even though her poems seem to cry out for one.  Nor is it a biography of Colonel Higginson.  (13)

This would seemingly make all this build up an anti-climax were it not for the following section in which Wineapple clarifies her purpose:

3361966And by providing a context for particular poems, this book attempts to throw a small, considered beam onto the lifework of these two unusual, seemingly incompatible friends.  It also suggests, however lightly, how this recluse and this activist bear a fraught, collaborative, unbalanced, and impossible relation to each other, a relation as symbolic and real in our culture as it was special to them.  After all, who they were—the issues they grappled with—shapes the rhetoric of our art and politics: a country alone, exceptional, at least in its own romantic mythology—even warned by its first president to steer clear of permanent alliances—that regularly intervenes on behalf, or at the expense, of others.  The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all.  (13).

This proposition floored me the first time I read, however at the same time there was a part of me that called bullshit.  The reason for this was ignorance of Higginson as a man.  I had no conception of him other than as an editor who gave less-than-constructive criticism of some of her poems.  Higginson as a man had no meaning and so the idea that his friendship with Dickinson was something worth writing a book about seemed absurd…until I began to read the book and discover that Higginson in his own right, was a bonafide badass.  Apart from commanding the first all African American infantry unit during the Civil War, he was a staunch abolitionist, outdone in his zeal for black rights only by John Brown, whom he apparently almost joined.  A Minister, writer, political higginosn-and-black-veteransactivist, lecturer, and part-time poet, Higginson’s life was often one of constant activity and in one instance that reads more like an action film than contemporary imaginings of the Pre-Civil War era, Wineapple describes an attempt to liberate run-away slave Anthony Burns:

Posted near the court Hourse, Stowell began to hammer its heavy oak door with one of the axes.  Several men threw bricks.  Several other men—Higginson at the front—hoisted a fourteen foot wooden beam.  […]  Higginson, at the head of the beam, elbowed his way into the room, but Lewis Hayden pressed ahead of him.  Unarmed, Higginson fought bare-handed.  The police were swinging swords and billy clubs, and Higginson received a cut, nothing sever, on his chin.  […]  For many years afterward Higginson supposed, or wanted to believe, the sheriff’s deputies would carelessly or drunkenly murder their own.  (82-3).

Higginson’s steadfast political activism may be in no small part due to complications with his marriage.  Wineapple notes that his wife suffered a severe medical condition which left her constantly in pain, in need of attendance, and sexually impaired.  Though this last note should not send the reader scurrying to the bookshelves for Wineapple’s biography spurns salacious details.  Instead she places these figures in the midst of their time.  Higginson would, in his lifetime, encounter great authors like Walt Whitman, Herman wineapple_dickinsonMelville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and even Nathaniel Hawthorn.

Speaking of which I suppose I should get back to Dickinson:

For like Hawthorne, whom she greatly admired, Dickinson spurned the overtly topical; he sneered at what he called the “damned mob of scribbling women” who wrote of social issues, not timeless truths of the human heart, and Dickinson, who shares his sense of literature’s incomparable and universal mission, took literature even further from recognizable person, place, or event.  (101).

Dickinson as an author tends to be surrounded by a golden areole of mystery and speculation, for while there are only one or two photographs of the actual woman, a cartoon reproduction has surfaced in relation to her name that tends to dominate the public consciousness.  The image is either a heavily repressed hermit living in her parents home looking out the window to write poems about butterflies, or, in more recent time, the image of a closeted lesbian using flower imagery, like Georgia O’Keefe did apparently, to express her closeted sexual longings.  The conflict I have with both of these Wine 11interpretations is they both reek of failure to dig deeper into Dickinson as a woman as well as a figure of history.  In one earlier passage Wineapple gives us a brief glimpse into Dickinson’s behavior:

Deliberate, gracious, and self-depreciating.  Dickinson filed her renunciatory rhetoric to a razor’s edge, her weapon, words, charming and implacable.  Otherwise, she darkly hinted, there were consequences.  Going to church by herself, she had to rush to her seat and, terrified, wondered why she trembled so, why the aisle seemed so wide and broad, why it took almost half an hour afterward to catch her breath.  Yet knowing when and how to protect herself, she managed her fear, and evidently her family cosseted her.  When her father suggested they come to Washington in 1853, he did not insist that Emily join them.  Instead, she stayed at home with Sue and a cousin, John Graves, who later remembered Emily improvising on the piano late at night: he was invited to sit in the next room while she mesmerizingly played.  (64).

It may seem that Dickinson as a hermit is validated in this passage however to classify Dickinson with that term is impractical and unfair to her as a person.  While Dickinson did actively avoid leaving the territory of her family’s property she was not the Howard-Hughs-Mason-Jar-Hermit that many of the popular critics like to classify her as.  In this a65728e99d1127e95ae45ee4a4142418passage Wineapple shows a real woman who, while not much of a social creature who was probably suffering from social anxiety or a mild case of agoraphobia, was still a complex individual with depth of soul.

The reader may then wonder about the lesbianism, a thought process which tends to be justified by a fair amount of criticism and recitation by queer theorists and even queer historians.  Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States has an entire page dedicated to this topic, and Bronski argues:

Emily Dickinson, who wrote explicitly about intimacy between women in the mid-nineteenth century, showed her large body of work to a handful of people and published fewer than a dozen poems.  A member of a well-to-do Amherst, Massachusetts, family, she was unmarried, lived a reclusive life, and was passionately devoted to her friend Sue Gilbert (who later married Dickinson’s brother Austin).  The homoerotic content in Dickinson’s poetry is notable for its time.  (53).

The conflict of Bronski’s argument here is his heresay evidence which is rather weak for a declaration of lesbianism or at least same-sex desire.  Part of his problem is that he’s writing a summary history of queer sexualities in all of American history in only 242 pages when really he should have written it in at least 500, but I’m forgiving on that front.  ellen-page-hair-2-500x750While I, and numerous Dickinson scholars, have observed some queer persona operating in Dickinson’s poetry I believe it’s dangerous to call her a lesbian and leave it at that.  The conflict is that the identity of “lesbian” is a political one that really began in the American Civil rights movements in the 1960s.  Now before the reader throws their computer out the window remember that it cost a lot of money.

There has always been same-sex activity between women as far back as there were people walking this earth, and as long as this activity has occurred there have been some women who are more than happy to exist in single-sex exclusive behavior whether it be purely sexual, purely emotional, or else a lovely combination of both.  The conflict is the contemporary identity of “lesbian” is so wrapped up in Post-modern political and psychological philosophies and paradigms that trying to call Emily Dickinson a lesbian in the same way Ellen Page (Quite possibly one of the most awesome people in the history of awesomeness) is a lesbian is not only irresponsible it’s shaky at best.  Many of the critics arguing for this behavior look to her poetry and there lies the great conflict.  There is difference between a writer, an author, and a creative voice.  If you don’t believe me look at that great nightmare of Lolita.

Nabokhov wrote the book through the first person narration of the character of Humbert Humbert, and so many people have mistaken the man as a pedophile.  What they fail to book-cover-lolita1recognize, or perhaps they just don’t want to is that as the writer Nabokhov is acting through the creative voice of his author who in turn is creating the character Humbert Humbert.  If I sound testy about this it’s because I’ve had to teach poetry and the first lesson that seems to be forgotten over and over again is that Byron, Browning, Whitman, Auden, Shakespeare, Ginsberg are never the speaker of a poem unless otherwise specified.  Critics who look at Dickinson’s poetry and immediately argue that the woman is a lesbian do a disservice to Dickinson as an individual as well as an artist (and also to real lesbians who already struggle getting their voices fully understood in the discourse).

Wineapple does not assert anything that cannot be observed either in hard historical record, letters, diaries, personal correspondence, reporting’s, the collections of books and articles read by the authors at this time, and what emerges from such an effort are more than two authors who wrote letters back and forth, what emerges are two people who tried in their time to contribute something to the efforts of humanity.

It is a book about friendship however, and since both Higginson and Dickinson had processed the identity of writer to their own egos their friendship assumes the real higginson-Dickinsonsignificance.  The friendship that exists between writers, real writers, is more than just having someone to look over your work and suggest a better word here and there.  It is an energy relationship in which the figures sharing the bond feed off of one another’s encouragement and competition.  In one passage Wineapple discusses the friendship, describing its significance to the authors themselves:

It was Higginson’s writing she complimented most often, and he in turn wanted to know what she thought of it.  When she failed to comment on his Atlantic piece “A Shadow,” he prodded her, or so we can gather from her somewhat noncommittal reply: “I thought I spoke to you of the Shadow—it affects me.” Yet his new collection, Atlantic Essays, which included “A Letter to a Young Contributor,” prompted Emily to ask him again to guide her.  Even if he could offer her nothing but encouragement and, those few grammatical touch-ups certain only to tickle her, she desired his opinion, perhaps more than ever.

higginson_nov_2011_0That opinion was far higher than his critics have guessed.  Frequently he praised her poems to friends in Newport […].  (185).

In my own life I have met personally at most three or four writers who I have considered truly great and it’s been an honor to discover they feel likewise.  The relationship that followed was a careful balance of submitting work to one another, trying to out compete each other, and often telling others new to our creative circle about each other’s talent.  This relationship was a solace as well as a parasitic relationship and I imagine that is the sentiment expressed by many creative people who form similar clicks.  Artists require such company to keep them sharp and Dickinson and Higginson follow this path.

There’s so much more to Wineapple’s biography but alas I feel that gushing at the expense of honest sentiment is a waste of time and writing.  Allow me two more quotes and then I’ll finish.

Wineapple steals into Dickinson’s room to give a vital element in her life story because it is demonstrates the choice that continues to elude and inspire scholars and Dickinson fans.

By 1858, Dickinson was fastening groups of her poems together into small hand-sewn Wine 27packets, each of which contained as many as twenty poems.  She sent a number of these poems to friends; others she kept and reworked.  And even after she entered them into booklets, she continued to alter them, dividing long stanzas, for instance, into quatrains, or shifting some of the punctuation, or substituting words.  Later called fascicles by one of her first editors, these packets survive, all forty of them, and though they cannot be dated with precision, they reveal a self-conscious poet, never satisfied with the work at hand.  “ ‘It is finished,’ “ she would say, “can never be said of us.”  (74).

I understand Dickinson painfully in this last sentiment, for it is the condition of the honest writer.  I have never in my life been completely satisfied with a work of writing, whether it be for school, for personal creative writing, or whether it even be the published work either on this blog or other websites.  I have kept well over three books worth of writing hidden away in drawers or computer files because there was one sentence, one paragraph, one word wanting that needed something more that language could not supply or my ability lacked.  Because of that desire I can understand Dickinson as a writer.  But Dickinson and Higginsonlikewise I understand Higginson:

Like Dickinson, Higginson never stopped writing.  Seated either in his cozy book-lined study, his desk near a window, or in the larger room on the second floor where he installed a typewriter, he flooded newspapers and magazines with essays and reviews.  He opposed all proposals to restrict immigration, he advocated religious tolerance—including toleration for atheism—and woman suffrage.  (315).

Side by side the authors seem mirrors of one another answering for something lacking in themselves.  Higginson as a writer has largely been ignored or forgotten by the mass consciousness and honestly I have never read the man’s work myself.  I knew the name of Dickinson and had read one or two poems before opening Wineapple’s biography and this in the end seems the real power of her work.  Wineapple does not want her reader to find one author superior than the other, rather as she said at the start this literary friendship author-photo_Seibert2013comes to stand as something relevant to any and all who approach the task of writing and reading.  Action and careful reflection are not anti-thesis of each other, for both Dickinson and Higginson in their own way contributed great artifacts and actions to and for their culture.  Higginson in his life tried his best to make American letters and culture something as significant as the Europeans masters, and Dickinson, trying ever to reach that space of the immortal poets, did just this by producing a body of work in-line with her creative will.

Wineapple’s biography is not just an impressive work of outstanding scholarship, it’s a careful dance designed to chronicle two people who come to exemplify the greatness of intellectual capacity and humanity that existed during the period of the American Civil War.  Even if the reader is not American, or even a fan of poetry, they will walk away from this book rewarded for knowing these two writers.

And at the end of the day that’s all that you should ask from a biography.

twhigginson

 

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold…you should also try A LIBRARY because those still exist you know…Todd.

3361966

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

In Defence of Mr. Byron

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Film Review, Literature, Poetry, ReBlogged Articles, The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Author Vs Voice Vs Persona, Bisexuality, Childe Harold, Dead Poet's Society, Don Juan, Film, George Gordon Lord Byron, Gothic, Literature, Lolita, Love Poetry, Poetry, Public Persona, Sexuality, She Walks in Beauty Like the Night, The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Writers, Writing

This essay was originally published on The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism’s blog.  The full essay can be read on their home page by accessing the link at the end.

DPS-Girls-300x178

The boys of the newly formed Dead Poets’ Society are holding one of their weekly meetings (except Knox Overstreet, who’s at a party trying to talk to the girl of his dreams) when there’s a sound—the likes of which strikes terror into the hearts of teenage boys: a girl’s laughter.  Charlie leads them in, offers them cigarettes, while the rest of the group stares on in silence, not sure what to say, what to think, or even whether or not they’re allowed to speak.  The boys eventually try to talk, though it’s Charlie who eventually succeeds in properly “wooing” the girls by of course reciting poetry: first a poem by Elizabeth Barret Browning, and then a second one by George Gordon, Lord Byron.

She Walks in Beauty is the standard by which “romantic” poetry is often measured, and this is an issue of some annoyance to me, George_Gordon_Byron,_6th_Baron_Byron_by_Richard_Westall_(2)because I had a wonderful teacher who taught me the proper context of the work.  Byron’s poem has often been employed as Charlie so confidently used it, and it made me hate Byron as a young man myself who couldn’t talk to girls—it was a poem of “romance” designed to woo one’s beloved into a state of emotional ecstasy.  As I would mature, and my ability to talk to women developed from inane mumbling to a more mature inane combination of smoke signals and interpretive dance, I began to see more and more how that poem was mis-employed, and finally Dr. Catherine Ross helped me figure out why.

I’ll provide the poem here before I continue:

She walks in beauty, like the night

     Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright AAA 3

     Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

 

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impaired the nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress,

     Or softly lightens o’er her face;

Where thoughts serenely sweet express,

     How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

 

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

     So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

     But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

     A heart whose love is innocent!

 

Now right away, I recognize that many might protest and argue that surely Byron is describing a beautiful woman, but I would remind them that they clearly have forgotten that the poet is never the speaker, unless otherwise specified.  This approach is easy to forget once one has become a seasoned reader of poetry, yet time and time again I have writing_18-300x234experienced and read writing by undergraduates—and this part kills me—as well as graduate students of English proclaiming that the writer is the same as the speaker.  This can be quite frustrating as a teacher, though nowhere near the headache of trying to teach Lolita in East Texas.  I haven’t suffered that headache personally, but a friend of mine has and usually relates it to me as he sits quietly by himself in the corner of the bar with his bottle of Wild Turkey.  Even graduate level students in my Emily Dickinson course need to be reminded almost weekly that the poet is never the speaker unless specified and this lesson seems to be the Sisyphean task of the professor of poetry.

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON THE NASSR BLOG FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW:

In Defense of Mr. Byron

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Dr. Strangelove or: A Very Odd Film About How We All Will Die Over Sex

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Film Review, History, Sexuality

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Abuse of Military authority, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Full Metal Jacket, George C. Scott, Last Week Tonight, Lolita, merkin, Mutually Assured Destruction, nuclear annihilation, Nuclear War, Peter Sellers, phallus worship, sex, Sexual Rhetoric, Stanley Kubrick, The Cold War, The Shining

51QVEFEEWGL

You would never think a film about nuclear annihilation would actually be nothing but sexual tension and imagery, but Dr. Strangelove most certainly is. Technically the full title is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but for the sake of simplicity, and what is left of my own mental state, let’s keep it simply Dr. Strangelove for now.

I was aware of the film since, in my late teens, I went through what could only be referred to as a Kubrick-krush (get it, I replaced the “k” with a “c,” it’s a joke, get it…We never talk anymore). I think it was the fascination with Tarantino that originally did it for me. There were so many names entering into my consciousness that were an indication of genius: kubrickScorsese, Allen, Coopola(Francis and Sophia), Spielberg, Hopper, and Fincher to name a few, but the name Kubrick was spoken with a kind of reverence I didn’t fully understand until I’d watched a few of his films. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey (the parts I watched while I wasn’t asleep were sublime), The Shining (which still gives me panic attacks), A Clockwork Orange (the first half hour kept me interested, I should probably re-watch it now), Full Metal Jacket (which remains my favorite), and Eyes Wide Shut (I was a teenage boy, nuff said).   Now at some point I also watched Lolita and was fascinated by it, but that’s for another post. The point is I became aware of Kubrick and I was able to see why so many people praised his work. Simply put the man creates paintings and then films the human beings that interact within them. Visually his work was always distinct, and to this day I try in my own creative efforts to follow the approach of never making the same work twice (and I fail miserably I might add). I dove into Kubrick until I began to realize I would never be a director (this was about the same time I recognized I would never be a rock star either since I could not actually play the guitar or sing, I can sing now but I realize that’s immaterial for this discussion). Kubrick remains one of the most important film-makers in my mind because of his ability to play with narrative and form.

Looking at this then I have no idea why I avoided Dr. Strangelove like the plague. My best guess is that it was the Breaking Bad effect. I knew it was good, but I wanted to see if it would out survive the hype. One day when my wife and brother-in-law were out of the house, I hooked up my DVD port, watched it, I fell in love…and for some reason I decided to wait two months before actually reviewing it. I knew I had made the right decision not long after hearing this line:Dr-Strangelove-quotes-4

President Merkin Muffley: Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.

If you’ve never seen the film, a General Jack D. Ripper sends out “Wing attack Plan R” to a squadron of planes in the areas surrounding the Russian border. The plan in effect is a first strike against the U.S.S.R. using nuclear missiles at tactical locations to prevent, or at least delay, retaliation on the Russian’s part. He then orders the entire base of high alert telling his men that Russian’s will invade the base dressed as American military. The reason for this decision, well it’s quite lovely in fact, why don’t I let you read it yourself:

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: [very nervous] Lord, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I… no, no. I don’t, Jack. main__0006_drStrangelove_0

General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen… tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first… become… well, develop this theory?

General Jack D. Ripper: [somewhat embarassed] Well, I, uh… I… I… first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.

General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue… a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I… I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm. giphy

General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh… women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh… I do not avoid women, Mandrake.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No.

General Jack D. Ripper: But I… I do deny them my essence.

Believe it or not this is not actually the speech that lets you realize that general Jack. D. Ripper is a goofy as a goose, that scene is far more chilling and a lot less funny when you recognize that threat of nuclear annihilation is far less likely to come in the form of a terrorist organization, it’s often from within. Observe:

Ripper, through an almost inconceivable chain of command and bureaucracy is able to set this plot into motion and then when the President, one President Merkin Muffley tries to stop it discovers he can’t because it’s against the code that’s allowed the code to exist in the first place. “Plan R” sets the wheels in motion for what is without a doubt the most watchable parody of government bullshit you will probably find in your life.

The reader may object to the setup of the film suggesting that it could easily be solved by simply calling the planes back. Well…

President Merkin Muffley: And why haven’t you radioed the plans countermanding the go-code?

General “Buck” Turgidson: Well, I’m afraid we’re unable to communicate with any of the aircraft.

President Merkin Muffley: Why? dr_strangelove_STILL_2_610_407shar_s_c1

General “Buck” Turgidson: As you may recall, sir, one of the provisions of Plan ‘R’ provides that once the go-code is received, the normal SSB Radios in the aircraft are switched into a special coded device which I believe is designated as CRM-114. Now, in order to prevent the enemy from issuing fake or confusing orders, CRM-114 is designed not to receive at all – unless the message is preceded by the correct three-letter recall code group prefix.

President Merkin Muffley: Then do you mean to tell me, General Turgidson, that you will be unable to recall the aircraft?

General “Buck” Turgidson: That’s about the size of it. However, we are plowing through every possible three-letter combination of the code. But since there are 17,000 permutations… it’s going to take us about two-and-a-half days to transmit them all.

President Merkin Muffley: How soon did you say our planes will be entering Russian radar cover?

General “Buck” Turgidson: About 18 minutes from now, sir.

But I told you this film is really about sex so I supposed I should stick to that theme before exploring the political implications. Immediately one is struck by the sexual subtext of the film since the beginning of the film is nothing but stock footage of plane’s refueling. My reader may object and ask, “What’s so sexual about plane’s refueling?” Well, yet again…

In case you missed it there was the shot of the plane’s phallic tube bobbing in and out of the other plane filling the plane with its “Fluids” which brings me right back to General Jack D. Ripper. Ignore the immediate internet lingo of Ripper giving communists giving the “D” and instead remember his concern for fluids. Throughout the film Kubrick creates a kind of sexual tension that exists between Americans and the Communist. Ripper is05376c8649e86053f09f62a866930718 afraid of penetration and vulnerability because he believes it will weaken him as a man and more importantly as an American. There’s only one woman in the entirety of the film, she’s on screen for only a few moments, and as the picture to the left clearly demonstrates it’s not necessarily that of a, to quote my lovely-lady-wife, Headstrong independent wo-man. To be honest I don’t even remember her name, she contributes very little to the plot, or to her love interest General “Buck” Turgidson played by the brilliant George C. Scott. Speaking of his name I should probably mention plants. You see when plant cells are full of water they enter a state known as “Turgid” which is the ideal state because the plant is engorged with fluids. You’re beginning to see it now I trust, but looking past Turgidson’s name there is also the President, Merkin Muffley.   Now normally Urban dictionary would do all the work for me but I have to assume my reader hasn’t seen the film or is NOT a seven year old boy with a working vocabulary. A “merkin” is a pubic wig, or a pair of underwear designed usually to demonstrate the appearance that the wearer has pubic hair. It’s often used by women in cinema when they have to film nude scene but don’t feel like showing off their vagina. As for “muffley” there is the term “muff” which is a euphemism for vagina, and, I kid you not I discovered this while researching for this essay, it is also a tube made of fur in which to warm the hands…let that sink in for a moment.

Well so what, my reader protests, so what is the film is really just a veiled metaphor for sex, why should I give a damn about this weird movie?

The reason you should care dear reader is because of this video.

In case you didn’t actually follow the link, and shame on you for not taking a few moments to improve your life with knowledge, the gist of it is across the United States there are at least 1000 nuclear warheads being contained and held, but not maintained. Along with this is the conflict that much of the technology required to actually launch these missiles is older than your grandfather and he owns a goddamn iPhone. The threat of nuclear annihilation is today an abstract concept, but barely twenty years ago it was a tangible reality. DrStrangelove060PyxurzWe taught children in schools how to prepare for a nuclear blast because the Communists were a real threat and they didn’t like us much. America for fifty years fought ideological and physical battles in order to stop the spread of Communism spawning a cultural reaction that still lingers. There’s a reason why the bad guys in Die Hard were East Germans rather than Middle Eastern terrorists. There’s a reason why Rocky 4 is so littered with pathos. Mankind had created the perfect means of erasing itself off the planet, and about the same time two factions discovered they really didn’t like each other.

This mutual distrust eventually merged into a kind of veiled sexual tension that culminates in Major T. J. “King” Kong riding a nuclear warhead, conveniently placed between his crotch all the way down upon his target before blowing up in a massive penis shaped, excuse me, mushroom shaped cloud of an orgasm, excuse me, explosion.

I won’t lie Dr. Strangelove is a weird fucking movie, but despite its oddity it is quite possibly one of the few successful slapstick satires of its kind. There’s the physical humor, but far more important are the one liners that are simply unforgettable:

Major T. J. “King” Kong: Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of5drs chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings.

Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.

This is only one out of the many small gems that pop out to the viewer if they’re clever enough to catch them, and even if they aren’t, the sheer absurdity of the characters as they try to prevent their own established system of Mutually Assured Destruction is sure to provide a few laughs. Dr. Strangelove is first and foremost a comedy, and that by itself works for a larger design. Kubrick’s film can be understood as a kind of catharsis, an emotional release of a buildup of repressed emotions. Most human beings already suffer from some form of existential panic, but in the Cold War American society, at least, suffered a regular understanding that they’re way of life could end at any time through absolute destruction or slow infiltration. Ripper’s “Fluid” theory is borderline bonkers, but it catches the repressed sexual tension that was in the minds of many in the 1950s. We were all terrified of being replaced by the communist, infiltrated, penetrated, and impregnated with his ideological “fluids” just as he was terrified of similar fate. That’s why, near the end, as the men in the War Room are huddled together trying to formulate some strategy to combat the “Doomsday machine,” there exists what is quite possibly the most disturbing moment of the whole film. Dr. Strangelove, played by the brilliant Peter Sellers who also plays President Merkin and Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, explains a plan to make a new society in abandoned mine shafts:Nuclear-Warheads-Hi-There-and-Dear-John

[Strangelove’s plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]

General “Buck” Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

I’ll end my review with this note: In the face of the denigration and annihilation of the species, the one thing that can unite humanity is male bullshit and their obsession with their own dicks.

strange15

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Blog Stats

  • 75,025 hits

Categories

  • Academic Books (42)
  • Art (190)
  • Atheism (29)
  • Biography (43)
  • Bisexuality (23)
  • Blade Runner (4)
  • Blurb (8)
  • Book Review (74)
  • Christopher Hitchens (27)
  • Comics/Graphic Novels (73)
  • Creative Writing (19)
  • David Foster Wallace (10)
  • David Lynch (6)
  • Edgar Allen Poe (7)
  • Education (8)
  • Essay (67)
  • existentialism (6)
  • fantasy (10)
  • Feminism (38)
  • Film Review (69)
  • FrameRate (1)
  • Fun Home/Alison Bechdel (9)
  • Guest Authors (13)
  • Happy Birthday (5)
  • History (100)
  • horror (22)
  • How People Become Atheists (8)
  • J.R.R. Tolkien (9)
  • Jammer Talks (9)
  • Jammer's Books (5)
  • Libraries (9)
  • Literature (197)
  • Masculinity Studies (61)
  • music (9)
  • mythology (23)
  • Neil Gaiman (11)
  • Novels (77)
  • Philosophy (53)
  • Play (9)
  • Poetry (27)
  • Politics (71)
  • Prime Numbers (9)
  • Queer Theory (36)
  • Race (27)
  • ReBlogged Articles (16)
  • Satire/Humor (51)
  • Science (25)
  • science fiction (37)
  • Sexuality (106)
  • Short Story (10)
  • Speech (17)
  • Still Life (100)
  • Swanky Panky (2)
  • television (14)
  • The Comics Classroom (4)
  • The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (8)
  • Tom of Finland (3)
  • TOOL (5)
  • Ulysses (7)
  • Uncategorized (5)
  • White Tower Musings (14)
  • Writing (76)

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 516 other followers

Follow White Tower Musings on WordPress.com

RSS Jammer Talks About

  • Henry of Huntington and the Necessity of NOT Devouring Eels: The History of the English People 1000-1154
  • The Battle of Salamis by Barry Strauss
  • What’s Up in the Air with Anomolisa?—Loneliness, Hotel Rooms, And Trying to Find “Someone Else”
  • The Man Who Japed by Philip K Dick
  • Being Strong of Body Brave and Noble…And SUPER Complicated: Bouchard and Chivalry and Incorrect History
  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
  • Righteous Anger, Royals with Cheese, and Decent Folk: Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction
  • The Age of Vikings by Anders Winroth
  • Knights and Dragons and Historical Inaccurate Presentations, Oh MY!: The Knight in History by Frances Gies
  • Making Comics by Scott McCloud
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

The Work Thus Far

Tags: Hope You Find Something You Like

"+ and -" "All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy" "And Knowing is Half the Battle!" "arrow of time" "A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman" "Bah Humbug" "Black Mass" "Butt-Piracy" "Chillin" means orgasm "D'Artagnan Motherfucker!" "Dark Continent" "Deplorable Cultus" "Elder Gay" "Fire Walk With Me" "fuck-fest" "Gay Shit" "God is Dead" "Go Get Your Fuckin' Shinebox" "Greed is Good" "Hall Metaphor" "He wishees to think!" "House Metaphor" "How Did They Ever Make a Movie Out of Lolita?" "How fucked up are you?" "I'm here to recruit you" "I'm not Racist but..." "I am no Man!" "If these shadows have offended" "I Got a Rock" "I like the way you die boy" "I like this job I like it" "In Heaven Everything is Fine" "Innocence of Childhood" Myth "Is this a dagger I see before me" "Jammer Moments" "Knowledge is Power" "La Parilla" "Legal" Lolitas "Lost Generation" "Love that dare not speak its name" "Maggot" "Magic Wand" "More Human than Human" "mountain of knowledge" "My name is Harvey Milk and I'm here to recruit you!" "New World" vs "Old World" "Nice Guy" Complex "Nymphet" "Once a day everyday give yourself a present" "Orwellian Nightmare" "PC Police" "Philosopher King" "potent female sexuality" "pride goeth before the fall" "Prufrock Moment" "Reality distortion field" "replicants" "Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication" "Some men just want to watch the world burn" "Strange women lying in ponds" "Sucking the Marrow" "Swimming Beside a Blue Whale" "The Cave" "The Evil Empire" "The Old Professor" "There's this old joke" "the sunken place" "Think Different" "This is America" "Under God" "Vietnam War Movie" "Wanna know how I got these scars" "War on Christmas" "We all go a little mad sometimes" "Well... I shoveled shit in Louisiana." "Well I'm Back" "What knockers!" "Why so Serious" "Will They?/Won't They?" "wiseguys" "World Without Man" "wrackers" "You're one ugly motherfucker" "You Gotta Give 'em Hope" #43 #53 #buylocal #NOLIVESMATTER #TomCanSuckIt $3.01 'Merica 8 words 9/11 12 Years A Slave 38th Parallel 42 Nipple Options 75 Arguments 80s 95 Theses 100 300 Spartans 300 words a day 1000 Page Novel 1066 1408 1453 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West 1492 1901 1960s 1973 1984 2001: A Space Odyssey 2008 Financial Crisis A.N. Wilson AA Aaron Sorkin About Betty's Boob Abram Adams A Brief History of Time A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes Absalom, Absalom abscence of evidence for god's existence Abscence of god abstinence and why it's shit abuse abuse of authority Abuse of Military authority abyss Academia Academic Book Academic Libraries Academic Writing Acadmic writing A Chilean Dictator's Dark Legacy Achilles A Christmas Carol A Clash of Kings A Clockwork Orange action Action Comics Action Films Action from Principle Activism Adam & Eve Adam Kesher Adam Piore Adam Smith Addiction ADHD Adolf Hitler A Doll's House Adrian Brody Adrian Cronauer adultery Adventure Fiction advertising advertizing A Dying Tiger—moaned for Drink— Aenema Aerosmith A Farewell to Arms Africa African History Afterlife A Game of Thrones Agency Agent Dale Cooper aging agriculture A Happy Death A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson A History of the Breast A History of the World Part 1 A House Divided AIDS Airspeed Velocity of Swallows Aislinn Emirzion Alana Alan Berube Alan Cumming Alan Dean Foster Alan Ginsberg Alan Moore Alan Turing Albatross Albert Bigelow Paine Albert Camus Alberto Giocometti Alchemy Aldis Hodge Alec Baldwin Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump's Skin A Letter to a Royal Academy Alex + Ada Alexander Dumas Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff Alexandra Socarides Alfred Habegger Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Pennyworth Alfred Tennyson Alice in Wonderland Alice Walker alien alien-human sexuality Alien: A Film Franchise Based Entirely On Rape Alienation of Affection Alien Covenant aliens Alison Bechdel Allegory Allen Ginsberg Allison Pill Allison Williams All Star Superman All the President's Men Al Madrigal Almonds in Bloom Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace Alton Sterling Alvy Singer Amanda Palmer A Matter of Life Amazon Amelia Airheart America American Civil War American Creative Landscape American Dream American Empire American Exceptionalism American Flag American Gods American Horror Story American Horror Story: Freak Show American Landscape American literary Canon American Literature American Politics American Radical American Revolution American Soldiers American Territory A Midsummer Night's Dream A Mind of It's Own: A Cultural History of the Penis Amira Casar Ammon Shea A Modest Proposal Amon Hen A Moveable Feast A Muppet Christmas Carol Amuro Amy Holt Amy Poehler An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub anal penetration Anal Sex Ananssi Boys An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child Anatomy Anchors Aweigh Ancient Egypt Ancient Greece Ancient History Anderson Cooper 360 Anders Winroth Andre Aciman Andre Maurois Andres Serrano And Tango Makes Three And Yet... Andy Kubert Andy Warhol Andy Weir An Ent is Not a Tree A New Hope Ang Lee An Ideal Husband animal cruelty Animal Farm Animal House Animal Reproduction Animals animation An Indian’s Views of Indian Affairs Anita Bryant Anita Pallenberg ankh Anna Karenina Anna Kendrick Anne Kronenberg Annie Hall Annie Proulx A Noiseless Patient Spider Anomolisa Anthem Anthony Bertrand Anthony Bourdain Anthony Comstock Anthony Everitt Anthony Perkins anthropology Anti-Bullshit Anti-Hero Anti-psychotics Anti-Semitism Anti-theism Anti-War Novel Antoine de Saint-Exupery Anya Taylor-Joy Any Human Heart Apartheid apathy Aplasia Apocalypse Apocalypse Now Apollyon Appalachia apple Apple Inc. Apple Logo apples apples & peanut butter Aquaman A Queer History of the United States Arches Archibald Cox Are You My Mother? Arguably Arguably Essays Argument Ariel Aristophanes Aristotle Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth Arkham Knight Armie Hammer Armitage Family Arnold Swarzenegger A Room of One's Own A Rose for Emily Art Art Commentary Art Culture arthropoda Arthropododa Arthropods Arthur C. Clark Arthurian Romances Artificial Intelligence Artificial Landscape Artillery artist artistic integrity artist models Art Spiegleman Arundhati Roy A Separate Peace As I Lay Dying A spider sewed at night Assassin's Creed Assassin's Creed 2 Assassin's Creed Odyssey Assassin's Creed Revelations Assassination of Julius Caesar Assault on Precinct 13 astronaut astrophysics Astrophysics for People in a Hurry A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again A Tale of Two Cities Atheism atheism identity Atheism is NOT a religion it's important to remember that Atheists: Inside the World of Non-Believers Athens Atmosphere in Science Fiction A Tolkien Bestiary Atom Bombs Atomic Library atronomy Atticus Finch Attraction audience Audubon Society Book of Insects and Arachnids Augusto Pinochet Au Revoir Les Enfants Au Revoir Mes Enfants Austin Dickinson Author's Social role authorial freedom Authorial Integrity Author of the Century Author Vs Voice Vs Persona avant garde Ave Maria Avengers 2 Ayatollah Khomeini Ayn Rand Azar Nafisi B.J. Novak babboon Babel Fish Baby babysitter Back to the Future bacon is amazing and if you disagree you're a goddamn communist Bag End baking Ballyhoo Balrog Banalization of Corporate Aesthetic banalization of homosexuality Band of Brothers BANKSY Banned Books Banned Book Week Bara Barack Obama Barbara Love Barbara Streisand Barista Barn Burning Barnes& Noble Barracoon Barry Levinson Barry Strauss Basic Writings of Existentialism basket Bassem Youssef Batman Batman: The Animated Series Batman: The Court of Owls Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Batman: Year One Batman Arkham Asylum A serious House on Serious Earth Batman Forever Batman Pajama Pants Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice battle Beads Beast Beat Poetry Beauty and the Beast Beaver Dams Beavers Because I Could not Stop for Death Bechdel Test Bedknobs and Broomsticks Bee Bee Documentaries Bee Hives Bee Keepers beer Bees Beetle Bee Wilson bell belles lettres Ben Bradlee Bender Bender's Big Score Benedict Cumberbatch Benedict Cumberbatch naked sunbathing Benjamin Alire Sáenz Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Benjamin Netanyahu Benjamin Walfisch Beowulf Berlin Wall Bernard Heine Best of Enemies Bettie Boop Betty Elms Betty Friedan Betty Gabriel Between the World and Me Be Wherever You Are Bi Any Other Name Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out bias bibliophilia Biblophilia Big Bang Theory Big Bird big black dicks Big Daddy big dicks Big Game Hunting Big Jake Big Mac Big M Burgers Bikini Babes Bilbo Bilbo Baggins bildungsroman Bile Bill Duke Bill Maher Bill Murray Bill O'Reilly Bill Schutt Billy Conolly Bind Crosby Bing Bong Bing Crosby Biographia Literaria biography Biography as Craft biological arguments biology Biopic Birdbox is about Birds in Boxes...I'm sure it is birds Birthdays Bisexuality bite my shoulder Black-face Black and Tans Black Body Black Colleges Blackface Black Friday Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays Black Humor Black Klansman Black Lives in Media Black Lives Matter Black Male Body as commodity Black Men black men in porn Black Sabbath Black Sexuality Black Woman Sexuality Black Women Black women's narratives Blade Runner Blade Runner 2049 Blade Runner Threeway Blaise Pascal Blasphemy Blasphemy for the Sake of Blasphemy Blogging Blogs and Ethos Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies Blood Meridian Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West Bloody Kansas Bloody Sunday blowjob Blue Blues Blue Shell blue shoes Blue Velvet Blue Whale Metaphor Blurb Bob Bob's Burgers Boba-Loompia Bob Cratchit Bob Dylan Bob Hope Bob Hoskins Bob Woodward body body humor body image body issues body objectification Bohemian Rhapsody Boiling Lobsters Bolo Ties Bonnie Hunt Boobs Boogeyman book burning Book Club Book Covers Book Covers and why the Matter Book List Book Review books Books about Sex Toys Books about Writing Books by Jammer booooooooooobs Bootsy Barker Bites Borderlands Born a Crime Born a Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood Born in Dixie Born in Dixie: The History of Smith County Texas Boston bottlecaps bow-ties bow tie boy's club Boyd McDonald brackets Brad Douglas Bradley Pierce Bradley Whitford Breaking Bad Breast Cancer Breast Feeding Breast Milk Breast Milk as Menstrual Blood Breasts Breasts and Fruit Breasts Vs Boobs Brendan Gleeson Brenda Wineapple Bret Easton Ellis Brett Brett Witter Brian and Stewie Brian Jay Jones Brian K. Vaughn Bridge to Terabithia Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Bright Noa British Aristocracy British Empire Brokeback Mountain Broomhilda Bruce Cabot Brás de Oliva Domingos Bubbles Buckley VS. Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABS News Debates Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie Bugonia Bugs Bunny Buildungsroman Bullet Vibrator bullshit-ocracy Bullshit Is Everywhere Bullshit is Everywhere: Full Transcript Bulls On Parade Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion Burt Renyolds Burying Fletcher Bush Administration Buster Keaton Butch Butcher Knife Butch Lesbian butterknife button Buzz Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy BWS Johnson Byzantine Empire C-3PO C.S. Lewis Cait Murphey Calaban Caleb Landry Jones Call Me By Your Name Call of Duty Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Calvin and Hobbes Calvin C. Hernton Calvin Candie Calypso Campaign Finance Laws Camp Climax Can't You Hear Me Knocking Cancer Candide Candle Candy Candy Land Cannibalism Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History Canon Capitalism capitalism and Christianity Captain Genderfuck Caravan of Death Carinval Carl Bernstein Carl Japikse Carl Jung Carl Malden Carlo Ginzburg Carl Sagan Carl Weathers Carnival Carrie Cartoons Cartoons and Romantic studies Casper the Friendly Ghost Cassie Phillips Castle Anthrax Castro Street Catalyst Academy Catalyst University Catch-22 Catching the Big Fish Catching the Big Fish: Meditation Consciousness and Creativity Catharsis Catherine Keener Catherine Scorsese Cat on a Hot Tin Roof cats CBS News CCTV Celie and Shug censorship Cetology Chadwick Boseman chainsaw Challenging Faith Chamelion Champion of Unreason Chandalier Changes chaos chaos theory Char Character Study Charles Darwin Charles Dickens Charles II Charleston Charlie Brown Reference I Hope You Get Charlie Chaplin Charlie Glickman Charlie Kaufman Charlie Rose Charlize Theron Charlotte Haze Chaucer Chauvanism Che: A Revolutionary Life cheating Cheese Che Guevara Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life Che Guevara t-shirts Chemical Bonds Chernobyl Chernobyl Diaries Chernobyl Ferris Wheel Cherry Darling chess Chessboard Chester Benington Chicago Chief Joseph child developement Childe Harold Childhood Childish Gambino Children's Book Children's Entertainment children's fiction Chile China China church protests Chip Zdarsky Chivalry Chivalry is NOT a thing chocolate Choice Cholera Chorus Chris Chris Jones Chris Packard Christian Christianity Christian Rhetoric Christina Chaney Christine Christmas Christmas Songs Christoph Bode Christopher Hitchens Christopher Lloyd Christopher Nolan Christopher Stahl Chuck Palahniuk Churchillian cicada cicada shells Cicero Cinnamon cake Circles circumcision Circus Cirith Gorgor C is for Cookie cisgender men Citizen Kane Citizenship City Civic Duty Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice Civil Disobedience Civil War Claire Quilty clam Clappy the Sad Clown with Clap Clarence Clare Virginia Eby Clarissa Explains It All class Classical Hero Classic Literature Cleopatra Cleopatra's sexuality Cleopatra: A Life Cleopatra VII Clerks II Cleve Jones Clifton Pollard climate Clint Eastwood clitoris Cloche Hat clocks Clopin Clown Clumsy CNN Coagula COBRA coffee coffee mug coffeeshop Coffee With Jammer cognition coins Cold War Colin Firth Colonel Cathcart Colonel Korn colonialism color Color in Art Color in Literature comedy Comicosity Comic relief Comics Comic Shop Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks WHo Gave Us a New Geek Culture Comic Shops Coming out Coming out Narratives Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two Comix Commandments Commando Commerce commodifying the female body Common Sense Commune Communism Composition studies Conan the Barbarian Confederate Flag Confession confidence Conformity Consider the Lobster Constance Brittain Bouchard Constantine Constantine XI Constantinople Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories contrarian Control Conversation Cookie Monster cookies Coon and Friends Cop Movies Coraline Cordelia Corey Taylor corgi Cormac McCarthy Cornetto Trilogy Corporate Influence corporate product Corporations corpse Corruption Corruption of Small Town America Cosmic Treadmill Cosmos Counterfeit Lesbian country couple Courtly-Love Courtroom Narrative Cow & Chicken Cowboys coxcomb Cracked.com Crazy Harry Crazy Wisdom creation Creative Crisis creative genius Creative Non-Fiction creative space Creative Writing Creators Creators and Creations Creator Vs. Creation Creature of Frankenstein Crime Crime and Punishment Crime Cinema Crime Films Crisco Criss Cross Criterion Cronkite Cross Dressing crossed legs Cruising the Movies Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV Crusades Crying babies crystal Crystal Gems Cthulhu Cuba Cube Cujo Cullen Bunn Cult of Hemingway Cultural Compulsion culture Cunnilingus Cyber-Punk D'Artagnan D.A. Powell D.B.A.A.: Don't Be An Asshole D.T. Max Dafne Keen dagger Daily Show Globe is Going the Wrong Way Dale Cooper Dale Peck Dallas Shooting DAMN Damon Brown Dan Dietle Dan Gearino Dangerous Board Games that can Kill You Daniel Chaudhry Daniel Clowes Daniel Kaluuya Daniel Radcliffe Danny Kaye Dan O'Bannon Dan Rather Dan Vega Dan White Darjeeling Dark Knight Returns Darkness Darren D’Addario Darryl W. Bullock Darth Vader's Little Princess Darth Vader and Son Daryl Hannah data Dave Archambault II Dave Gibbons Dave McKean David David Bowie David Bowie Made Me Gay David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music David Copperfield David Day David Foster Wallace David in the Orrery David L. Ulin David Lipksy David Lipsky David Lynch David Lynch Keeps His Head David M. Friedman David Sedaris David Silverman David Simon David Thewlis David Yates Dav Pilkey Day-O Days of Our Lives Daytripper Dead Babies Dead Baby Tree Deadlands Dead Poet's Society Deadpool Deadpool Killustrated death Deathclaw Death Proof Deborah Tannen decanter deception Deckard Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire deep time degeneration Degredation dehumanization Deirdre Donahue Deliverance Delores Haze Delorez Haxe is Lolita's Real Name Democracy Democrat Demons Denis Villeneuve Dennis was right denominational differences depression Depression is an illness Derek Thompson Derrida Description of the Female Body desert Desert Hearts desire Destiny Detail in comics Dewey Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World Dewey Readmore Books Dewey the library cat Diamond “Lavish” Renyold Diana Cage Diana Greenway Diane Keaton Diane Selwyn Diary Dice Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics Dick McDonald Dick York Dictatorship Dictionary Die Hard diffusion dildo Dildos Dimebag Darrell Dio Dionysus Director's Style Dirty Pictures Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland Masculinity and Homosexuality Disasterpeice Discipline and Punish Discourse Disney Dissociative Identity Disorder dithyramb Divinity Django Unchained DK Books Documentary Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore? Doge Domestcity Domestic Abuse domestic affection Domino Effect Don't eat Eels...That is All Donald Duck Donald Pleasence Donald Regan Donald Trump Donald Trump Alec Baldwin Don DeLillo Don Juan Don Juan de Marco Donna Anderson Donna Deitch Don Quixote Don Shewey Doris Kearns Goodwin Dorling Kindersley Handbook Dory Dostoyevsky Doug Douglas Adams Douglas Brinkley Douglas Sadownick Dr. Eldon Tyrell Dr. King Schultz Dr. Manhattan Dr. Rockso Dr. Salvador Allende Dr. Sam Loomis Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Draft Drag Kings dragonfly Drama Dream Dream Country Dreams Drugs Drunk DSM Duke Johnson Duma Key Duncan Duracell Durin's Bane Dustin Hoffman Dyke dysfunctional relationship dystopia East Texas Ebony Clock Eccentricity economic disparity economic disparity between blacks and whites economics Eddie Marsan Eddie Valiant Edgar Allen Poe Edgar Wright Edith Hamilton Edith Hamilton's Mythology Editorial Edmund Burke Edmund Wilson Ed Skrein Educated Women Education Edward Gibbon Edward Muir Edward Norton Effect of AIDS on Gay Male Sexual Identity and Perception eggs Ego Egypt Egyptian Empire Egyption Revolution Elaine Noble Elbert "Bo" Smith Elder elderberries Eldon Tyrell Eleanor Roosevelt electricity El Gigante Elie Wiesel Elio and Oliver elitism Ellen Montgomery Ellen Page Ellen Page is awesome just in case you didn't know and if you didn't know you really need to know because seriously she's fucking cool as fuck Elliot Kirschner Elliot Richardson Elmo Saves Christmas elocution Elsa Martinelli Elves Elvis Emerson and Antislavery Emerson’s ‘Moral Sentiment’ and Poe’s ‘Poetic Sentiment’ A Reconsideration Emile Hirsch Emily Dickinson Emily Dikinson emotion empathy Empire empiricism encomium Endless Nights Endnotes enema Engineer English-Irish relationship English 1301 English History English Romanticism Ent-Wives Entertainment Entmoot Entomophobia Ents enviornmentalism Eowyn Epic Epic Novels Epilepsy Episcopal Episcopal Church Epistemology of the Closet Epistolary Novel Eraserhead Eraserhead Baby erectile dysfunction Eric Idle Erika Moen Ernest Hemingway Ernie and Bert Ernle Bradford erotic fantasy Erwin Rommel Escape from New York Esquire Essais Essay Essay Collection Essential Dykes to Watch Out For Esther Garrel Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell Eternal Recurrence Ethan Hawke ethics ethos Et Tu Brute? Eugenics E Unibus Pluram E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction Eurocentrism Europe European "Discovery" fallacy European exploration European History Eva Green Eve's Garden Eve Arnold Even Stevens Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises Everybody looks better than I do in heels and I can't stand it Everyday is Exactly the Same Everyday Use Evil Evil as a Force Evil as Force Evil Bear Man Evil Dead Evil is abscence evolution Evolution is not JUST a theory excrement exile existentialism Existentialism and Human Emotions Exit Through the Gift Shop Experimental Essay Expose Eye Imagery in Blade Runner eye liner Eyes eye shadow Eyes Wide Shut Orgies are actually a pain to schedule Ezekiel 25:17 Ezra Pound F. Murray Abraham F. Scott Fitzgerald F. Valentine Hooven III Faber Fabio Moon fable Facebook Activism facebook arguments Faeries Faggot Faggots Fahrenheit 451 failed environment Failed Hero Failed Writer failure Fairy Tale Faith Fallacy Fall of Constantinople Fall Out 4 Fallout 4 Familial exile family Family Guy Family Guy Ipecac Fan Culture Fans fantasy Farcical Aquatic Ceremonies are not the basis for a system of government Fareed Zakaria Farley Granger Farm-Aid Farm Crisis 1980s farting fart jokes Fart Proudly Fast Food Fastfood Nation Father-Son Relationship fathers fatwah Fat Woman Stereotype fear fear of death Fear of Laughter feces Federal Housing Administration Federation Federico Infante Tutt'Art felching fellare Female Masculinity Female Masturbation Female Orgasm Female Poets Female Sexuality Feminimity feminine energy Feminism femnism fencing Ferguson fertility festival Feudalism Feudalism is also NOT a thing Fiction Fidel Castro fidger spinner Fidget Spinner Fievel Goes West Fight Club Film Film Noire Film Presentations of Gay Men film review Finding Dory Finding Nemo Finnegan's Wake Fiona Staples fire Fire Demons Firehose Firehouse Shining fireworks First Lady First Love Fish Fisherman fish sex Five reasons 'Gatsby' is the great American novel flags Flannery O'Conner Flashpoint Flawed hero flowers fly fishing Folk Hero folklore Fondation of Reality Fonts food chain For Argument’s Sake: Why Do We Feel Compelled to Fight About Everything? Forgetting Sarah Marshall Forrest Forrest Gump For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports fossils foundation of reality Founding Father Founding Fathers Founding Fathers Purity Myth Fourteen Stories None of Them are yours Fourth Dimension Fox News Fozzy Bear Fraggle Rock frame narrative FrameRate France Frances Gies Francis Dolarhyde Francis Ford Coppola Francois Rabelias Frank Frankenstein Frankenstein 200th anniversary Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus Franklin J. Schaffner Frank Miller Frank Oz Franz Xaver Kappus François Rabelais Frasier Fraw Freddy Mercury Freddy Mercury is GOD Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings Frederic March Frederico Infante Fred Hembree Fred Kaplan Freedom freedom of information freeing the figure from the marrble free speech Free the Breast free will Freewill Free Working Press French Press French Revolution Freshman Year Composition Course Freud Freya's Unusual Wedding Frida Friday the 13th Friedrich Nietzsche friendship Frodo Frodo Baggins From Hell fruit juice fuck Fuck-ups fucking Full Frontal Full Metal Jacket Fumi Miyabi funeral Fun Home Fusion Futurama G.I. Joe Gabriel Ba Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal Gai Mizuki Gaius Cassius Longinus Gal Gadot gambling Game of Thrones Gandalf Gangs of New York Gangsters garden Garden of Eden Garnet Garth Ennis Gary Collison Gary K. Wolfe Gary King Gauntlets Gay Gay Asian Art Gay Batman Sex Fantasy Gay Comics Gay Erotic Comics Gay Leather Fetish Gay Literature Gay Macho Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone Gay Male Butt Cheek Gay Male Identity Gay Manga Gay Masculinity Gay Men Gay Men Comics Gay Movie Night Gay people in politics Gay Porn Gay Pornographic Comics Gay Sex Gays in Politics Gaza Wall gender Gender Expectations GenderFluid Gender Fluid GenderFuck Gender Identification Gender Identity Gender Inversion GenderQueer Gender Studies Gender Trouble Gene Kelly General George Patton General Omar Bradley generational gap generational trauma Genetically Modified Organisms Gengar Gengorah Tagame genocide Genre Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Geocentric Universe Geoff Johns Geoffrey Rush geometry George C. McGavin George C. Scott George Clooney George Gordon Lord Byron George Lucas George Orwell George Owell: A Collection of Essays George Takei George W. Bush George Washington Gerald M. Garmon Gerald of Wales German Legend Gertrude Stein Get Out Get your credit score and work on gathering reliable assets Ghassan Massoud Ghostbusters Ghost of Christmas Present Ghosts Ghost World Ghus giant cocks Giant Robots Giant Robots Fighting Giant Spider and Me Giant Spider and Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale 1 GI Bill gif/jif? Gilgamesh Gimme Shelter Gina Sheridan Giraffe Girl in the Radiator Girls Girls Education Girl Up Gladiator glasses Glen Quagmire Gloria Steinem Goals Goat-Demon Imagery Goats Shit...A LOT god God's Little Acre God...I am really Gay god is not Great gods Godwin's Law Goethe Gollum Gollum/Smeagol Gonzo Good and Evil Goodfellas Good Morning Vietnam GoodReads GoodReads Reviews Good Vibrations Good vs Evil Goofy GOP Gordon Gecko Gore Vidal Go Set A Watchman Gotham Gothic Gourmet government acountability GPS Gracie and Frankie Graduate School Graduate Student graduation graffiti Graham Chapman grammar grandchildren grandma Grandparents Grant Morrison Grant Morrison may be nuts but damn if he doesn't deliver grapes graphic novel Grave Robbers graveyard Gravity Great Courses Great Expectations Great Hookers I Have Known Great Speeches by Native Americans Great White Sharks Grecian Urn Greece Greece History Greek Greek Drama Greek Fire Green Tea grieving Grinch Grocery Shopping Grotesque Groucho Marx Grouchy Old People growing Guest Author Guitar gum Gun-Violence Gundam Gun Powder Guys H.D.F. Kitto H.G. Wells H.P. Lovecraft H.R. Haldeman Halcyon Haleth son of Hama Hal Halbrook Hal Incandenza Hallie Lieberman Halloween Hamburger hammer Hammond Typewriter Hamnet Shakespeare hamsters Hands Up Don't Shoot Hank Williams Sr. Hannah and Her Sisters Hannibal Hannibal Lecter References Hans Zimmer Happiness Happy Birthday Harbinger Vol. 1 Harlem Renaissance Harmony Harmony the Sex Robot Harold and George Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle Harold Bloom Harper Lee Harpers Harrisson Ford Harry Belafonte Harry Morgan Harry Potter Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry Potter getting fucked in the ass Harvey Keitel Harvey Milk Harvey Milk gives me hope Hastings Hatari Having erotic dreams/fantasies about sailors and whales is perfectly normal...Todd Hayao Miazaki Hays Code Hazel headband headphones Heart Beating Heart Shaped Box Heath Ledger Heavy Metal Hector He did it with a bucket Heimdall Heinrich Brunner Helena Bonham Carter Hell Helter Skelter henge Henry David Thoreau Henry Drummond Henry Ford Henry Hill Henry I Henry Killinger Henry Kissinger Henry Louis Gates Jr Henry Miller Henry of Huntington he Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants Here's Johnney! Herman Melville Hermoine Didn't Masturbate and Neither Did Jane Eyre Hero Herodotus heroes Heroes of the Homosexual community heteronormativity Heterosexuality High Anxiety Hillary Chute Hillbillies Hippie Historical Accuracy Historical Discourse history History Book History of Comics History of Smith County History of the English People Hitcahi Wand Hitch-22 Hitchcock-Truffault Hitchhiker's Guide Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Hitler Fetish Hobbits Hocus Pocus Holden Caulfield Holidays Hollywood Holt/Cold Home Owner’s Loan Corporation Homo-Social Relationships Homoeroticism Homophobia Homos Homosexual Clone Homosexuality Homosexuality as mental illness Homosexuality History Homosexuality in 1950s Homosexual seduction Honda P2 Robot Honest Trailers Honesty of the Artist about the Creative Process honey Hook hooker Hookers Hooker with a Penis Hope Hope Speech Horace Smith Horns horror Horror Comics Horror Fiction Horror Movies Hostel hot alien babe Hotel Rooms Hot Fuzz Hot Gates Houen Matsuri housewives Howard Hawks Howard K. Smith How Hiram Really Died and What Came After HOWL How People Become Atheists How to Make Love like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale How To Talk to Girls At Parties How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Eliot HR 40 Hubris Huckleberry Hound Hugh Hefner Hugh Jackman Human/Robot Love Story Human Beings Perception of Reality Human Body Human connection Human Developement Human evolution human exploration Human Ideas are Grander than any Religion humanity Human Memory Human Narcissim Humbert Humbert Humor humors Hunger Games Hunter S. Thompson Hurricane Lolita husbands and wives Hyena Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Hypersexualization of Female Breasts I'm almost positive the song Tribute is the song they couldn't remember but I realize that's a controversial position I'm Going to Go Back There Someday I'm Not a Racist But... I'm Tired I've Been Down That Road Before I, Claudius Icarian Games Icarus Ice Cream that ISN'T Ice Cream Ida Tarbell Idealism identification Identity Identity Crisis Idris Elba If a woman is upset it's not because she's on her period it's because you're being a dick If they ask if you want Pepsi throw over the table throat punch the shit out of them and then proceed to burn that motherf@#$er down If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome ignorance I have Measured Out My Life in Coffee Spoons and K Cups I know too many Michaels I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I Like It Like That I Like it Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire Illuminated Manuscripts illusion Illusion of choice I Love Lucy I Love Lucy Mug I Love Penis...Mug iMac Imaginary Time imagination Immanuel Kant immigrants imperialism Imposter Complex Impressionists In Bed with David amd Jonathan incest Incorporation of images in Pedagogy Independence Day Independent Comics Indie Fiction Individual Initiative Individual Will Industrial Nightmare industry infidelity Infinite Jest Infinite Jest Blogs Infinite Possibility Infinity Informed Democracy Inherit the Wind Injustice innocence vs ignorance In One Person Inquisition insanity Insects Inside Out inspiration integrity intellectual Intellectual Declaration of Independance Intellectual masculinity Intellectual Parent Inter Library Loan internet interracial relationships Interview Inu Yoshi invert Invisible Man Invitation to a Beheading Ion IOWA iPad Ipecac iPhone ipod IRA I Racist Iran-Contra Irish Breakfast Tea Irish history Irish Writers I Ruck, Therefore I Am Isaac Asmiov Isaac Deutscher Isabel Allende Isabella St. James Ishmael Islam isolation Israel Issa Rae It It's an Honor It's illegal in the state of Texas to own more than six "realistic" vibrators It's time to adopt the Metric System in America for crying out loud It's truly truly difficult to find good coffee and by good coffee I mean the type that leaves you feeling as if you've actually tasted something beyond human understanding close to the furnace of all Italy Ivory Tower of Academia ivy I wandered lonely as a cloud I Want a Wife I Was a Playboy Bunny I Will Fight No More Forever I work at a Public Library J.D. Rockefeller J.D. Salinger J.K. Rowling J.R.R. Tolkien J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century J. Robert Oppenheimer J.Y. Smith Jack-O Lantern Jack Halberstam Jack Lemmon Jack Nicholson Jacob Marley Jacques Tardi Jaimee Fox Jake Gyllenhaal James A. Berlin James Franco James Garner James Joyce James Mason James Smallwood James Walker Jamie Lee Curtis Jammer Jammer's Books Jammer Talks Jammer Talks About Janelle Asselin Janet Leigh Jane Tompkins Janissaries Janitor Jared Leto Jason Momoa Jason Reitman Jason Robards Jason Segel Jason Starr Jason Walker Jasper Fforde JAWS Jazz Jealousy between Writers Jean-Baptiste Clamence Jean-Paul Sartre Jean Fouquet Jeffrey Brown jem Jenna Jameson Jennifer Jason Leigh Jennings Jenny Kleeman Jeremy Irons Jerome Lawrence Jerry A. Coyne Jerusalem Jesse Ventura Jessica Rabbit Jessica Roake Jesus Jewish men Jewish mother Jim Crow Laws Jim Gaffigan McDonalds Jim Gordon Jim Henson Jim Henson: A Life Jim Henson: The Biography Jimmy Breslin Jimmy Conway Jimmy Stewart Jim Woodring Jiraiya Joanne Webb Joan Quigley Joe Hill Joel Myerson Joe Pesci Johann Sebastian Bach Johnathan Franzen Johnathan Hyde John Bernard Books John Bunyan John Carpenter John Carroll Lynch John Cleese John Colapinto John F. Kennedy John Gavin John Goodfellow John Harvey Kellogg John Irving John Keating John Keats John Knowles John le Carre John Lee Hancock John Lennon John Lennon Vs Harry Potter John McCain Puppet John McTernan John Metta John Milton John N. Mitchel John Oliver John O’Meara John Quinn John Steinbeck John Thomas Scopes John Travolta John Wayne John Wayne Westerns Joker Joker's Scars Jonathan Kemp Jonathan Luna Jon Lee Anderson Jon Stewart Jon Stewart if you're reading this please come back we miss you Jordan Peele Joseph Burgo Joseph Cohen Joseph Heller Joseph Stalin Joshua Jammer Smith Josiah Bartlet journalism Journalistic Credibility Journalistic Integrity Joyce in Bloom Judaism Judge Doom Judge John M. Woolsey Judi Dench Judith Judith "Jack" Halberstam Judith Butler Judy Brady juggler Jules Julie Andrews Julie Andrews in Drag Julie Roucheleau Julius Caesar July 4th Jumanji Jumpin Jack Flash Jump in the Line Junji Ito Jurassic Park Just for the record Henry Kissinger is a collossal asshat and is perhaps the most revolting human being that has walked this earth and I just wanted to remind you of that fact along with the fact that Justice Justin Hall Just Say No Kake Kansas Kapital Karl Marx Kate Kate Dickie Kate McKinnon Kate Spade Katharine Graham Katherine V. Forrest Katy Perry Katy Perry's Boobs Katy Perry Elmo Katy Perry Wearing Red Velvet Kazuhide Ichikawa Keep it Gay Keira Knightly Keith Haring Keith Houston Keith Richards Keith Richards's Hands Kelsy Grammar was a GREAT Beast Kendrick Lamar Kenneth Clark Kermit the Frog Kevin Birmingham Kevin J. Hayes Kevin Spacey Key & Peele Kikori Morino Kill Bill killing animals for food Killing in the Name Kill Your Darlings King King Auberon King Baldwin IV King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem Kingdom of Heaven King George VI Kinght King James Bible King Lear Kingsman-The Secret Service Kinsey Kirk Douglass Kirsten Dunst Kissing Ass Kissinger Kissinger: A Touch of Evil Kitty Fane KKK Knight Armor Knights Knights in culture Knockers knots knowledge Korean War Kouri Kristina McKenna Kristin Wiig Krysten Ritter Ku-Klux-Klan Kubla Khan Kumada Poohsuke Kunio-Awara Kurtis J. Wiebe Kyle MacLachlan labia majora labia minora Labyrinth Lady Gaga Lady Kluck Lamprey Landfall landscape Langston Hughes Language Language of Cinema Language of Lord of the Rings Lani Kaahumanu La Republica de la Serrenissima de Venetzia Larry Kramer Larry Wilmore Last Week Tonight Lateralus Laughter Laughter in the Dark Laura Laura Bates Laura Dern Laura Herring Laura Palmer Laurel and Hardy Lauren Bacall Lawrence of Arabia leaf leather Leather Daddy Leatherface Leather Straps Leaves of Grass lecture Lee Harvy Oswald Left Behind Legend of Zelda Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Leley M.M. Blume Lemon & Ginger Le Morte d’Arthur Lenore Leo Bersani Leonard Mlodinow Leonard Nemoy Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo DiCaprio Leonidas Leon Kennedy Leon Trotsky Leopardon Leopold Bloom Leopold in Bloom Leo Tolstoy Lesbian Flamingos Lesbian Gym Lesbianism Lesbian Porn Lesbian Pulp Fiction Lesbian sex Lesbian sexuality Lesbians in White Leslie Jones Les Miserables Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls letter Letter from Birmingham Jail letters to a young contrarian Letters to a Young Poet Letter to a Christian Nation Let women breast feed in public damn it! Lev Davidovich Bronstein Lewis Carroll Lex Luthor LGBT History LGBTQ Fiction LGBTQ Suicide Rate Liam Neeson Liberalism and Homosexuality Liberating Masturbation Liberty Libraries Library Library's Social Function Library: An Unquiet History Library as Civic Center library card Library History Library of Alexandria Library Philosophy Library Podcast Life life drawing light light-bulb Lighthouse of Alexandria Light in August Light vs Dark Liking Sex Toys Just Means You Know How to Have Fun When You're Alone LilRel Howery Lincoln Linda Cardellini Lindy West Lines Composed in a Downtown Jazz Bar linguistics Link Link SNES lintel Lionel Logue lips Lipstick L is for Lesbian literacy Literary and Philosophical Essays Literary Canon Literary Criticism literary education Literary Fiction Literary Rivalry Literary Theory Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edition Literature Little Red Book Little Red Riding Hood Little Richards Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds Livy Llamas are Awesome Lobster Lobsters Lobsters are Bugs Local History Lock & Key Logan logos Loki Lolita Lolita Garden Scene Lollipop Chicken Long Read Long term effects of radiation Longview Pride 2018 lonliness Loony Tunes Loraine Hutchins Lord's Prayer Lord of the Flies Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings Lorne Michaels Lorraine Bracco Los Angeles Los Angeles culture Love Love isn't about ALWAYS agreeing Love Poetry Love Story LSD Luca Guadagnino Luce Irigaray Lucky Buddha lufthansa heist Lugene Tucker Luke Goebel Luna Lovegood lust Lymericks Lynchian Lyndall Gordon Lyndon Johnson M.E. Smith M.M. Bakhtin Mabel Loomis Todd Macbeth MacBook Pro Machismo Mackintosh Mac McDonald Madam Xanadu Mad Max Fury Road Madness as Sublime Madonna Mafia magic Maiar Maine Lobster Maine Loster Festival Making Comics Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics Manga and Graphic Novels Malala Yousafzai Male Body Male Persona Male Sexuality Man-Stache Mandingo Fighting Mandingo myth Manga Manhood in America: A Cultural history Manifest Destiny Manipulation of men Manipulation of women Manolin Man the Reformer Man Thinking manuscript Mao-Zedong Maps Marco Babarigo Marcus Antonius Marcus Aurelius Marcus Henderson Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap Margot Robbie Maria T. Accardi Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe: The Woman Who Died Too Soon Marilyn Yalom Mario Kart Marion Crane marionette marital rape Marjane Satrapi Mark Antony Mark Bingham Mark Frost Mark Hamil Mark Hamill Mark Millar Marko Marko and Alana Mark Twain Mark Twain: American Radical Mark Twain Annual Mark Wahlberg Marlin Marlon Brando Marrakech Marriage Marriage of the Sea Marshall McLuhan Marshall Plan Marshal McLuhan Mars Symbol Martin Freeman Martin Luther Martin Luther King Jr. Martin P. Levine Martin Scorsese Martin Sheen Marton Csokas Marvel Marxism Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft masculinity Masculinity: Identity conflict and Transformation Masculinity Studies Mason Crumpacker Mason Crumpacker and the Hitchens reading list mason jar Masque of the Red Death Mass consumerism Massive Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men WHo Make It Mass Shooting Master Nicolas Masterpiece Theater Masturbation Math mathmatics Matilda Matt Damon Matt Fraction Matthew Battles Matthew Shepard Maurice Keen MAUS Max Hastings Maximus Maya Angelou Maynard James Keenan Maynard Keenan May Sarton McClure's McDonalds McDonalds Brothers meat mechanical pencil mechanical pencils Medea Medical abnormality Medieval Christianity Medieval England Medieval Europe Medieval France Medieval History Medieval Knights Medieval Philosophy Medieval Physiology Medieval Romances Mehmed II Mein Kampf Mel Brooks Melissa McCarthy Melkor Memento Mori Memes memoir memory Meno Menocchio Meow merchendise Mere Christianity merkin Merle Miller Merrium-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Merry Meta metacognition Metamorphosis metaphors Metopia Metric System Meursault Mexican American War Michael Berryman Michael Bronski Michael Brown Michael D.C. Drout Michael Fassbender Michael Greenhale Michael Keaton Michael Kimmel Michael Myers Michael Palin Michael Ryan Greenhale Michael Stuhlbarg Micha Ramakers Michel de Montaigne Michel Foucault Mickey Mouse Mick Jagger Microfiction Monday Magazine Mid-Life Crisis Middle Ages Middle Earth Middle East Middlesex Mighty Max Miguel de Cervantes Mikhail Gorbachev Mila Kunis Miley Cyrus Miley Cyrus's Tongue military Military history military hospital military industrial complex Milk millenarianism Millenial Millenials Minstrel Show Mirai Miranda Otto mir