The writer's group did not meet.
I got word from the doctor that they moved my surgery and I need to be there at 5:30 Am. Not a problem if I had my own transportation. My sister was to take me, so I called her. The number I have is an old one and the right one was lost when my last phone died. Emails were sent without a reply. Grasping at straws right now.
I spent most of yesterday working on submissions, and not in the way I intended.
“The First Day of Feeling Free” - Strange Pilgrims - is actually a chapter from “Chasing Ashes”. I spent several working it around into more of a standalone piece. LibreOffice has taken to shutting down and I do not know why.
“The Unintended Consequences of Art” - The Submission Pit - was meant to go elsewhere only it had been previously submitted and the site would not let me use the same title. Witless, I decided to send it to this site with a change of the name of the aliens instead of changing the title.
A little less mopey. A nap in the evening. Email worked on. Some side reading, even if not of what I should be reading. I started a new short story just to get a paragraph out of my head. Not much of a day.
Being a Novelist Only Costs Romantic Compromises and Debilitating Debt (Electric Literature ) is a story I want to recommend.
I read Lolita in prison. Nabokov's writing was the best thing. Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes's The Spurious Perversity of Lolita (Book XI) does put some of the novel's problems in perspective.
In his essay, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Nabokov argues that, “if one begins with a ready made generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.” By the way, however, this doesn’t mean that anyone, including Nabokov, believes that the reader should be giving H.H. the benefit of the doubt or a charitable reading; the foreword to the novel is framed as an editorial note by a fictional psychologist, Dr. John Ray, Jr. who calls H.H. “horrible,” “abject,” and a “shining example of moral leprosy.” So, no one goes into Lolita thinking he’s the good guy––or at least they shouldn’t.
Professor Dwyer reconstructs her students’ claim that “by assigning Lolita I am perpetuating trauma and may even be perpetuating rape culture.” And retorts “this last suggestion runs so counter to my own beliefs about what literature does.” Because there’s an important distinction to be made, which nowadays seems to have become forgotten when it comes to works of literature: representation does not equal romanticization.
Nabokov goes on to say: “Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.” The tedious and benighted nature of this procession strikes a clear resonance with his own text. I had a wonderful literature professor who told us never to read the back of the novels we were reading in her class....
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And another thing, Lolita is more about America, postwar America—it’s temporal setting—and present-day America than anything else. Hand-in-hand with H.H. being the quintessentially unreliable narrator is the novel’s quintessentially Americanness presented in its tropes: the road trip he takes with Dolores, the life in suburbia in which he first encounters her, the U.S. popular culture allusions strewn throughout the novel, the fact that it begins with an extensive allusion to Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Just as we ought to be suspicious of H.H.’s nomial transfiguration of Dolores into Lolita, erasing the pain and replacing it with imposed seductive obsessions, so should we throw a scrutinizing eye on the narratives the U.S. was/is weaving about itself.
And this warning is more relevant than ever. As Professor Breen points out, we are living in a world where young girls are, and have been since before Nabokov’s novel, serially commodified. The darkest side of this perverse cultural valuation has been presented to us in its most bare-face cruelty in the release of the Epstein files. How Nabokov’s gripping, seductive prose hides within it profound violence teaches us to be disgusted with that behavior and that deliberate erasure, which stands in stark contrast to the way that the glorification of the modeling and beauty industries that incessantly and insidiously hide, suppress, and normalize the abuse and exploitation of the young and vulnerable. In the past five years, there has been a meteoric rise of young women commodifying their own bodies on platforms like OnlyFans. While it is not a larger institution, like in modeling, these platforms operate on a false sense of empowerment. While they purport to empower women by allowing them to take agency over their sexuality and monetize it on their own terms, the nature of this digital sexwork platform differs little from ages-long the capitalistic and patriarchal exploitation of young women. The narrative of self-empowerment that OnlyFans promotes can be much likened to the narrative that Humbert Humbert weaves of Dolores’ seduction of him: false, and created by the person in power who benefits from the vulnerable’s participation—which is never the vulnerable party herself.
The online morons hating The Odyssey movie have also attacked the translator Emily Wilson. From Emily Wilson on Porous Boundaries and the World of Homer (Los Angeles Review of Books), I think she sounds charming, well-intentioned, and competent.
CC and I were supposed to see a movie. Shew was too tired, it was too hot. Not that I really expected her to go along. Since I was waiting for a call from my sister, I stayed home wating for her call.
Reading around this morning, awakening before the alarm:
‘The China Question’ by Ho-fung Hung review (History Today)
Despite its historical focus, The China Question is not written for historians. It is very much a ‘Grand Theory’, supported by rich case studies drawn from a wide-ranging secondary literature. While its ambitiousness is laudable, it also opens up some pitfalls. An attempt to recount 800 years in 260 pages necessarily results in a loss of nuance. One of the more problematic aspects of Hung’s argument is its own replication of a binary view, much like the orientalism he critiques. His suggestion that for eight centuries almost all Western writings on China swung between two equally orientalist poles ends up overlooking the enormous ‘third space’ that has long existed in between. Martino Martini, for instance, wrote two extraordinarily erudite accounts of China’s chronology and geography in addition to his punchier account of the fall of the Ming, painting the empire and its history as connected to, but different from, Europe’s. Where Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault – earlier Jesuit missionaries in China – argued that the Chinese were peace-loving and thus ‘differ greatly from the nations of Europe’, Martini offered more nuance. In his lengthy Chinese history, Sinicae historiae decas prima (1659), he explained that, rather than being timeless and unchanging, Chinese wartime strategies depended on their particular contexts and often involved learning from their enemies. Many of Hung’s case studies contain complex perspectives which he overlooks. Indeed, his decision to see things as either Sinophilic or Sinophobic risks simplifying rather than critically probing the historical record. This is perhaps best captured by a table produced at the end of the book: ‘Eight hundred years of fantasy-fear cycles’, covering different ‘fields’ – from ‘Catholic scholarship’ in the 1240s to ‘Political discourses disguised as scholarship’ from the 1990s to the present – gives a binary overview of the evolution of attitudes towards China, tracking the pendulum swing from Sinophilia to Sinophobia.
“The Odyssey” Movie Review (The New Yorker): wanted more Bronze Age barbarity.
Strange Pilgrims (@strangepilgrims): "Albert Camus on life and freedom"
Counterbalancing the idiocy of Indiana Republicans (which is for another post):
Indy queer horror film 'Jodi' to premiere at Tibbs Drive-In
Off to Indy today for another visit to the law school library.
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