Word: reade
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Then I decided to start a paper, in March of '38. I had been in court, I had listened to several cases, I thought some of the stuff was very humorous. When you read it in the daily papers they seemed to take the whole thing serious. It didn't appear very serious to me, if a man was chasing a prostitute through an alley, a policeman chasing a prostitute through an alley, or two or three of them, jumping over barrels and she climbing over fences, trying to capture a girl for soliciting or something like that, I thought...
...Orpheum on a Sunday, you couldn't do any dancing on a Sunday, so they put acrobats in for a Sunday. It was against the law to have any dancing, you couldn't even walk to music. It was a peculiar law, but that's the way the law read. They'd have spotters out there watching, in case they did. So if you walked across the stage when the music was playing you had to walk offbeat. You couldn't walk in time with the music, which is ridiculous, I know that. Today when you see them out there...
...headlines that they claimed were double entendres. I remember one particular headline "Two in Bed, Tangle Lasses." If you read it fast it sounded peculiar. Another one was "Big Balls Win Gal Prize." Of course, it was nothing more than a girl attending a drinking party, and wound up in court, she won the prize for large highballs, though she never collected it. You couldn't put down large highballs, you didn't have room enough, you only had a certain amount of type, you only had 21 units that you could use, and you had to write the whole...
...Catholic League of Decency, established in Chicago at the time, they put the paper on the list. They were self-appointed censors, you know, they told people what they could read and what they couldn't read. Although there was nothing in the paper that could be called obscene, none of the four letter words that's permissible today ever appeared in the paper. They just didn't like it, that's all. It's just one of those things. You just can't figure them out, that's all. There was nothing I could do about...
Nabokov's prose is elegant and lucid, easy to read, and amusing. He is one of the few writers who can make a reader laugh out loud, even with "serious criticism" like his delightful essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita." In that essay he says, "After all we are not children, .not illiterate juvenile delinquents..."And that is one of the best reasons for liking Nabokov--he treats the reader as a sensitive, literate person. He sets out to tell amusing and moving stories, and this he does. He says, "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar...