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dolores :((((

#the multiple times he draws attention to how much it DELIGHTS him that shes a CHILD #its so sickening and part of what so many people get wrong wrt adaptations #he doesnt want dolly because shes a Small Sexy Woman #he wants a Child #dolores haze #humbert humbert #lolita novel

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Alisson Wood, Being Lolita: A Memoir

#Alisson wood #being lolita

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Nabokov's butterfly drawings 🦋

#i have a book of his scientific drawings #but the colourful ones are sooo cute #and him making up fake little names for them... #vladimir nabokov

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That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

Rereading Lolita and we don't talk about how fucking funny it is enough. "Four months later she died of typhus in Corfu", no indent, no period, nothing - just the smooth, transitional confidence of a fearless writer delivering his mocking sex to death twist.

#this is one thing every adaptation except the musical fails at tbh #humbert is funny as fuck and you cant be scared to include that #its so masterful how nabokov balances btwm comedy and (essentially) horror in lolita #lolita novel #humbert humbert #annabel lee

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Pin that says ‘If You Think I’m Weird And Intense Now Wait Til I Start Talking About The 1955 Novel Lolita, By Vladimir Nabokov”

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how i feel after hoes misinterpret and undermine the whole reason a book was written

#lolita novel

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#dolores haze #weirdly old girl in the pic but the quote is soooo #quotes #lolita novel

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Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

#quites #lolita novel #dolores haze

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RIP dolores haze you would've loved Grease,Mamma Mia and not washing your hands after eating

#finally some good fucking posts in this tag!!! #ure so right she would #also the greatest showman i think #dolores haze

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At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

#lolita novel #quotes

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It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

#lolita novel #quotes

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she’s dead and she’s seventeen. that’s all we know about her before and after him: dead, seventeen, killed on christmas day. she’s survived by a baby girl (similarly dead) and the story of the man who abused her. we feel bad but we open his book again and again and again to force her to die again and be born again and live again, splayed out in excruciating detail, a creature to marvel at and for the better of the readers, to pity, not to save. aged twelve to seventeen. that’s all that exists of her. that’s all she’ll ever be.

#:(((((((( #dolores haze

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the funny thing about lolita is that it's deftly written but it's not really subtle in its point, and in an ideal world anyone with a serviceable 10th grade education should be able to grasp it

#the scariest thing is that the pll loudest about not grasping it #have always been the ones with 3 lit degrees who are NOT lacking media literacy #its not the inability to grasp it thats the issue and what does that keave #*leave #lolita novel

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In 1958, Nabokov wrote to his new American publisher, Walter J. Minton at Putnam, about the cover for his forthcoming novel, Lolita. “What about the jacket?” he wrote.

After thinking it over, I would rather not involve butterflies. Do you think it could be possible to find today in New York an artist who would not be influenced in his work by the general cartoonesque and primitivist style jacket illustration? Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

#vladimir nabokov #lolita novel #cover designs

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oh i would actually be curious to hear your thoughts on lolita book covers in that case. i do get the sense that some of the covers are designed to uncritically titilate and seem to misunderstand the text, but that could obviously be an assumption on my part lol.

oh i agree that the cover designs tend to run counter to nabokov's intentions, both in the text and in the literal instructions he gave about covers lol. they pretty clearly rely on putting some young girl on display, which is exactly what nabokov did not want to do visually; they also tend to suggest dolores as some kind of seductress (sultry gazes, pouty lips, &c). clearly this is precisely the opposite of what the text tells us about her.

however when evaluating these visual choices i find that many people portray them as some kind of originary and culturally polluting act: that is, a narrative emerges that the problem here is people misinterpreting 'lolita', and then publishing it with covers that will do harm to young girls &c. i think this is lazy analysis and fundamentally makes idealist assumptions overestimating the effect of cultural products (books, book covers) on problems, like the sexualisation of children, that are in fact grounded in material relations, such as in this case the status of children as legal property and the total power granted to adults over them. that is to say, these broader conditions are at root the reason that cultural products like the cover of 'lolita' look the way they do, and chalking it up to individuals not understanding the book is never going to get us very far; and also, although some of these covers are pretty egregious, they are the reflection rather than the cause of the sexualisation of children, a problem that would continue to exist even if every edition of 'lolita' ever printed just said "humbert humbert is an unreliable narrator and dolores haze is a child he is preying on" on the cover.

fundamentally i also think this sort of conversation often elides some more interesting points about whom these covers communicate to and what they say. you suggest they are meant to "titillate"; although i would agree dolores is often shown as sexual, desirable, and seductive, i'm not sure that's the same as assuming the cover is trying to arouse the potential reader. for one thing, to put it bluntly, this style of cover tends to be associated more with books marketed to women than to heterosexual men. and more broadly, and this is something the lolita podcast really fails to understand imo, the phenomenon of people reading 'lolita' and relating themselves to dolores is not mutually exclusive with this type of rhetorical construction of dolores-through-humbert's-eyes. that is, often what appeals about dolores is, i think, precisely the fact that through her, people find a way of discoursing about or simply re-enacting the kind of sexualisation that they are already subjected to or have been in the past, whether or not at a level as explicit and extreme as what nabokov depicts.

i'm not really interested in a simple moral condemnation of the people who design these covers; that critique writes itself. they are obviously bad and facile, and reflective of precisely the culture of child sexual abuse that nabokov's text condemns. but if we are interested in the reception of these objects, or interrogating the cultural meaning and implications of their existence, i just think there's a lot more going on here than what the podcast portrays as a simple sort of 'broadcast' model of mass media wherein the 'lolita' book cover and trope is beamed out to unsuspecting innocents who are then exposed to its nefarious elements. dolores appeals to people for lots of reasons, some prurient, some pitying, some openly self-projective, and these are not mutually exclusive with one another nor are they mutually exclusive with readings that reproduce elements of the very lolita character that humbert creates and uses to silence and re-write dolores. we can be uncomfortable with that and refuse to talk about it but if that's the position someone wants to take then i'm not likely to be interested enough in their opinions to, like, listen to their podcast about this book lol.

#not sure i 110% agree but very interesting points being made #and i do think the podcast is overly simplifying on a lot of things and dead wrong on a few #cover designs #lolita novel

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I think the hot new trends for this summer should be reading comprehension and critical thinking skills

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exhausted of people saying nabokov was problematic for writing lolita. just say you piss on the poor and dont know how to read and did not understand the fucking book. boo.

#these ppl vs 'its a love story' ppl .. bite each others dicks off