Word: nabokovs
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...classic The White Goddess and the mythology-blender of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Calasso of Literature and the Gods is a little closer to Goddess than Hero, as he attempts to trace through all of Western literature, from Homer to Nabokov, a phenomenon that he defines called “absolute literature.” Absolute literature is literature inspired by some sort of force of divinity; or at least that’s my best guess. Calasso never seems to feel obligated to explain much about “absolute literature...
From the 1950s on, he was routinely compared to Vladimir Nabokov because he was fascinated by the uninnocent sexuality of young girls. How many times has one heard Balthus' familiar images of pubescent females, naked in bare rooms or stretched catlike in the firelight, called nymphets or Lolitas? For his part, Balthus insisted that his nudes had no element of sexual provocation. They were just form, color and glimpses of domesticity. This was quite unpersuasive. Balthus' interiors can have a chilly and highly stage-managed perverseness, as in The Room, 1952-54, where the young girl sprawls on a chair...
...liberation. Today, the Internet and DirecTV are normalizing everything, from group sex to bestiality to darker things that decency forbids mentioning. And as for pedophilia--why, any erotic website worth its salt promises links to images of the "barely legal," "young teen sluts," and all the rest. Today, Nabokov's Humbert would need not be a tragic figure; instead, he could have spent his years ensconced in front of a glowing computer screen, with a thousand Lolitas for his delectation...
DIED. WILLIAM MAXWELL, 91, author and New Yorker fixture who polished the prose of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike and J.D. Salinger, among other authors; in Manhattan. A 40-year veteran of the magazine, Maxwell wrote six novels as well as dozens of short stories, essays and reviews. Renowned for his tact and insight, he edited such writers as Eudora Welty and John O'Hara, and he once took a train to tell John Cheever that one of his stories had been rejected...
...their merit, but rather for their presumed appeal to gay and lesbian readers. That appeal, moreover, is calculated as narrowly as possible, so that the mere mention of gayness in a book's title qualifies it for admission. A reader's understanding of homosexuality might be profoundly influenced by Nabokov's Pale Fire or the tales of Henry James, or by Shakespeare's plays or Homer's epics; instead, the Hormel Center offers The Gay Book of Quotations...