I’ve been working on “blackout poems” using Nabokov’s Lolita as a source text…so the serendipity of today’s connection was impossible to pass up. If you haven’t read Lolita, need I say you should? It’s an insanely beautiful grotesque full of wordplay by one of the greatest writers ever.

WORK

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.

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 Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

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.

—Vladimir Nabokov
—from Lolita

Bonus: Tom O’Bedlam reading this section.

WORD(S)

azure. noun or adjective or verb. The precious stone lapis lazuli. A bright blue color, pigment or dye; the clear blue color of the cloudless sky; the blue color in a coat of arms. To color, paint or dye using such a color. From the Old French azur, which is from a false separation of Arabic (al)-lazaward (lapis lazulie) as though the l were the French article l’.

“A broche of golde and asure.” (Chaucer)

“…and would under-peep her lids, To see the enclosed lights, now canopied Under these windows, white and azure laced With blue of heaven’s own tinct.” (William Shakespeare)

“She saffrons the hills, and azures the mountains.” (Blackwood’s Magazine)

“…and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background.” (Vladimir Nabokov)

“A stork flew through the azure air high over the village drama, bearing in its beak a baby. Wafted by a slight wind, the leaves whispered. Like an etching it all looked, anything but natural.” (Robert Walser)

WEB

1. Mmuseumm is “dedicated to the exploration of the proof of our existence.” You really just have to explore it to understand. Hat-Tip: Reader T.

2. The description of Hookers or Cake was almost enough to force my wallet open…the comments put me over the top.

3. Today happens to be World Post Day (established by the Universal Postal Union in 1969 “to create awareness of the role of the postal sector in people’s and businesses’ everyday lives”). They (the UPU) have a cool monument in Bern. Also: check out some cool vintage postcards in this story about the day by CNN.

4. Patrick Modiano has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Based on my reading of one novel, the “postmodern mystery” Missing Persons, not a bad choice…even if Horace Engdahl, one of the judges, just outed himself as a bit of an ass. Let the arguments begin.

5. Today in 1849, two days after his death, Edgar Allan Poe’s last complete poem, “Annabel Lee,” is published in the New York Daily Tribune. The poem was a central inspiration for Nabokov’s Lolita (originally titled The Kingdom by the Sea), whose narrator, Humbert Humbert, falls in love with the terminally-ill Annabel Leigh when they are both young teens and never recovers from her death. Enjoy the poem for yourself: read the text, look at a fair copy in Poe’s own hand, browse the comic version, listen to Tom O’Bedlam’s reading, listen to Marianne Faithfull’s reading and laugh (maybe) at the 1883 parody “Camomile Tea”.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader P., former classmate, reminisces: “Do you remember Dr. K’s practically incomprehensible lectures on Böhme?” — I do. I know we loved Dr. K. and I still remember how he pronounced Böhme’s name and wish I could notate it somehow for readers.

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