Amis on Nabokov

I had an absolutely gorgeous time reading this Guardian piece, by Martin Amis, on V.V. Nabokov. I admire both of these artists immensely, and have in common with Amis (if nothing else) a sort of unhealthy love for Sirin and his works.

Amis, for all his devotion, does not restrain himself in criticizing the master, or in discussing his creative decline in specific terms. To my delight, he addressed Nabokov’s seeming infatuation with child rape, especially as his career progressed, in detail adumbrated by Nabokovian tropes.

“For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime. The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age.”

DAMN shawty

The question of Nabokov’s predilections in and of themselves has been one that those who are even slightly familiar with his work often ask. Currently in the diaphanous process of re-reading Ada, one cannot help but recoil, if not at the incest and rape (almost exclusively of people in the lower classes), then at the least at the romanticization (?) of what Amis calls “nympholepsy.”

Lolita, as ambiguous as it may have seemed to those who censored it at its earliest publications, unequivocally condemns the Humberts, Quiltys (but no Ivors, of course), Demon Veens, Huberts, Gaston Grodins, and others who would prey on children. But in Ada, and in other pieces, like the recently published The Original of Laura, this condemnation of pederasty does not come so easily. Indeed, Amis explains that after Lolita, and The Enchanter, gemalate texts of varying notoriety came Nabokov’s “meltdown of artistic self-possession – tumultuously announced, in 1970, by the arrival of Ada. When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.”

college nickname: "The Nuclear Accident"

Not to put words in his mouth, but in a way, it seems almost as if Amis is equating Nabokov’s literary genius with his capacity for morality – and perhaps one is reliant on the other. In any case, this piece is definitely worth reading, if only because of the buck-bang you get with the authors involved.

Beyonce = Chiquita Banana Lady

Apropos of nothing, I think Beyonce looks gorgeous here. Vibrant bird colors paired with a serene face.

I like Anne Hathaway. I hate that women have this thing where they have to talk about how ugly they are but that they’re okay with it.

Alice in Wonderland, always weird.

Eating Tarantulas

Some people do.

Delightfully Tacky: The Daily Mail

i don't think it counts as posing "nude" if you aren't nude. god.

Katie Price wants mas chiddlers, but little outrage is summoned here.

Anne Hathaway’s color here is just divine. The texture is great, too.

I thought rouge was tacky now, or outdated?

Good news in the area of hospital gowns!

Maddow’s hot, Portia’s writing a book, FLOTUS gets educated

I wonder how expensive it is to have a committee brainstorm about making money for an underfunded, indebted public university system?

Despite my anger at Michelle Obama’s method of handling her latest do-good mission by fat-shaming her kid (s), I think that Dr. Susan Albers’ mature rundown of eating disorders, and disordered eating, in the United States was good to attempt to educate rather than blame.

Lindsay Funke (aka Portia De Rossi) is coming out with a book about her battle with her eating disorder. I don’t know how much I care to know about her life in particular, but adding context to her pretty public struggle should bring about awareness.

This title was counterintuitively lulz: “Rachel Maddow: I want Dick or Liz Cheney” (emphasis definitely mine). In other news, I want Rachel Maddow’s dick.

Midterm, schmidterm: Rachel Maddow update!

I have some Rachel Maddow news from two perspectives: liberal and conservative, because I believe in being fair, balanced, and attentive to the stupid corners of the internet.

(THIS IS A LIE THEY ARE BOTH CONSERVATIVE PERSPECTIVES)

From the liberal:

“FMR. REP. TOM TANCREDO (R-CO): Mostly because I think we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in the country, people who could not even spell the word, “vote,” or say it in English, put a committed, socialist ideologue in the White House. The name is Barack Hussein Obama.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Just for reference here, when Tom Tancredo talks about literacy tests, that`s what they used in the south to keep black people from voting before civil rights legislation and court rulings put a stop to that.

So the convention opened with a clarion call to bring back the literacy tests for voting. And as you could hear, the tea party convention crowd erupted in cheers at the suggestion, although, to be fair, it was sort of hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the crowd meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the white hoods.”

Oh, I guess Tancredo forgot that we have an amendment in the Constitution against testing people before they can exercise their right to vote as citizens.

From the conservative:

““People who could not even spell the word vote, or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama,” Tancredo said, to some applause.

The remarks left Maddow fuming for what she perceived as their apparent xenophobic racism. She went on to explain that the crowd’s reaction was barely audible not because some attendees didn’t laugh, but because their amusement was “sort of a little bit muffled by the white hoods.””

People are really fucking stupid.

J. Lo is awesome

but I still think this catsuit thing is super unflattering.

THIS IS REALLY COOL IF YOU LIKE FASHION, EMMA WATSON, TECHNOLOGY!

Yeah, I watched the Super Bowl. For the commercials.

I’m gonna come right out and say I was so distracted by the food my friends brought me that I actually missed the chance to get outraged about the anti-choice ad that’s been getting so much publicity lately. I even signed a petition about it, and I missed the thing! Jez will be, I’m sure, running all kinds of pieces and recaps on it, which everyone should keep abreast of.

Good thing I didn’t miss out on all the other misogynistic ads. I wasn’t the only one who was offended. A guy friend of mine felt insulted about the Budweiser ad that had a guy join a book club just for the beer. An illiterate horns in on the booze while the women around him talk about prissy bitch stuff like Louisa May Alcott and allow him to be an asshole. Our lesson: women are bitches, and men are fucking morons.

The choice issue is one fraught with so much emotion. I completely and truly understand that my father, who is vehemently anti-choice, believes what he says when he talks about the sanctity of live. “I held each one of you in my hands when you were born,” he once told me. “How could I think it would be okay to kill a baby?”

But I do know that I still feel choice is something everyone should have.

Paean to Four Loko

I feel pretty awful this morning, not in the least because I have two midterms that went unstudied for, and a hangover. Also, I’m fat, or I feel fat, and it’s driving me crazy.

i mean, check this guy out. he's awesome. four loko is awesome.

And it’s not like drinking Four Loko three days in a row helps. I’m not the guy who drinks all the time, so it’s wreaked havoc on my body. Also, I’m the guy who sucks, etc.

My boyfriend and I were discussing the ED phenomenon last night. He asked what it meant when I felt fat. I said I felt unwanted, or unwantable. But that’s not true, he said, because I had him, and all my friends. That’s true, I said. But I still feel fat. I still feel inadequate.

Everyone, as Abed says on Community, has some weird problem balled up inside them that would probably make them cry to talk about. I’ve talked about mine so many times, to so many people, through so many mediums, it seems about time to – you know – get over it.

no, dad, what about you?!?!

But some people like to carry stuff around all unproductively, for their entire lives. Even though they take out that balled up stuff to talk about it, they’re still butthurt. I think this phenomenon should be known as The Rush Limbaugh Syndrome. But that’s assigning it a hopelessness that not even I, the evil Fembot, can muster the ‘nads to do. Cynical as I am, I can’t believe things are all that bad.

Michella Obama strikes out by fat-shaming

Yeah, I went there. But so did Michelle. I understand that she is trying to relate to people by pointing out that even the President’s children were “chubby” at one point, but there is no excuse for making sure everyone in the nation knows that your kid was at one point less than “perfect.”

Fat is a sin in our culture and bringing the Obama girls down a peg for PR is sick and fucked up. Mentioning that even they needed to reform their lifestyles doesn’t “normalize” “obesity”; all it does it continue our weird witch-hunt fear of people who don’t conform, or try to conform, to an impossible standard.