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"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
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 
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 as
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 
borrow 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. 
It’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.” 
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 
after 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.
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.
*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.
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.
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.
trying 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.
recollections 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).
sketch 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.
butterflies 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.
from 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.
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.
about 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:
for 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).
In 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.
good 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).
always 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.
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.
We 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).
not 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).
Googled 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.
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.
old 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.
with 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.
could 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! 
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.
these 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.
the 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.
laughable 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?”
spends 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.
They 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).
woman 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:
secret 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:
she 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:
that 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:
Mark Twain.
And 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).
activist, 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:
Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and even Nathaniel Hawthorn.
interpretations 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:
passage 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.
While 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.
recognize, 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).
significance. 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:
That opinion was far higher than his critics have guessed. Frequently he praised her poems to friends in Newport […]. (185).
packets, 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).
likewise I understand Higginson:
comes 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.
experienced 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.
Scorsese, 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.
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.
We 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.
chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. 
