October 9, 2009
Lolita
Audio books, I love them.
After reading so much about Polanski in the news, after wrestling with a bloated blogpost that tries to chain our latent suicidal tendency, the nature of art and its integral connection to freedom... I bought Jeremy Irons' rendition of Nabokov's Lolita to get a closer look at Humbert Humbert.
The language and construction is wonderful. Reflexively, I jotted down a phrase or two when I could, wanting to linger, wanting to savor Nabokov's art:
Look, at this tangle of thorns.
***
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
***
The beast and the beautiful merge at that point.
***
Oh, softly on go nightmares.
***
The heart is hysterical, unreliable organ.
***
The moral sense in mortals is the duty we have to pay on the mortal sense of beauty.
***
You have to be an artist and a mad man.
A creature of infinite melancholy
With a bubble of hot poison in your loins
And a super voluptuous flame
Permanently aglow in your supple (subtle?) spine.
Oh, how you have to cringe and hide
In order to discern at once by ineffable signs.
The subtle female outline of a cheekbone.
The slenderness of a downey limb.
And other indices which despair and shame
And tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate.
(With apologies for faults in transcription and willfully transforming the audio in the last entry familiar -to me- "poetic form", surely it is grotesque. Such are the excesses of fanhood.)
Posted by Dennis at October 9, 2009 10:41 AM
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