Forever Young

Yesterday's NYT has an op-ed piece on the 50 year anniversary of Lolita. Nabokov is one of the 20th century's finest writers, with a writing style that reveals the heart of a poet. The opening paragraphs:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lol-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 gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

It's enough to make a writer swoon.

I'm in the midst of reading The Annotated Lolita, mainly because I'm not astute enough to catch all the asides that are scattered through great literature, and also because I'm fascinated by the how of the story, as much as the story itself. Especially when it's something like Lolita, a book scorned by publishers the world over. So many people have scoffed at this book because it's a love story, featuring a pedophile, the most disgusting of all creatures of the world. Yet, like Hannibal Lector, Humbert captures our mind. He's a romantic fool, a poet, and he hates his forbidden feelings for Lolita.

I don't know how many of you watch Law & Order, but there's an episode called "Bodies" that deals with a serial killer, who's killed 14 teenage girls. When greeting the female assist district attorney says: "Serena. Sa. Re. Na."

When I watched that, I instantly thought, "that guy's read Lolita." I bet I'm right.

Lolita is a classic in literature, a book that nearly wasn't published. Yet as I swirl through the pages, lost in the hands of a master, I take my hat off to the French publisher who dared to defy the world.

In an unrelated note, US Weekly's "Hot Stuff" Editor, Timothy McDarrah was arrested for "soliciting a minor for sex on the internet." A 13 year old girl. An older man who welded his unctuous, celebrity-laced prose with grace and a certain "stalk her until she breaks" style. Theirs was a passion forbidden, even by the editors at US Weekly, and mostly by the United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York.

Coincidence? Or one man's desperate attempt to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Lolita in the only way he knew how?

You be the judge.