Word: seriousness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reached the pitch of last week's affair when James Roosevelt, 61, was stabbed in the back by his wife Gladys, 52, at their home in Geneva, Switzerland. F.D.R.'s eldest son was rushed to a nearby hospital for emergency surgery, but the wound was apparently not serious...
...member of Roosevelt's investment firm would say only that the stabbing was "a personal matter," which turned out to include the divorce proceedings that James had initiated earlier in the week. Swiss police said that the incident "was not likely to have serious judicial consequences." Meanwhile, Gladys, James' wife for 13 years, was taken to a psychiatric clinic...
Entomologists still credit Nabokov as a serious lepidopterist. He described a dozen new variations of butterfly (mainly in the broad-ranging subfamily of blues), including the Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov. His reports were models of precision, experts recall. But, in a prose necessarily dense with taxonomical terms, a few refreshing poetic riffs occurred: "From the opposite side of the distally twinned uncus," Nabokov wrote in a 1944 report describing genus Lycaeides, "and facing each other in the manner of the stolidly raised fists of two pugilists (of the old school) with the uncus hoods lending a Ku Klux Klan touch...
...went off in the U.S. of the late '50s like a shot in church. At first, U.S. publishers were afraid to touch it. Vera was afraid Nabokov might lose his job at Cornell if they did. When it finally came out, reviewers, not yet used to such material in "serious literature," flew into rages of indignation and feigned boredom. New York Times Critic Orville Prescott, in particular, earned a gargoyle's niche in literary history by exclaiming, "Dull, dull, dull." But Lolita in due course was recognized as the masterpiece it is, and it made Nabokov rich, setting him free...
Today, Nabokov is a distant and revered personage safe in Switzerland; his judgments and comments are no less candid than ever. Along with a great many writers (see box p. 82), the informal list of his jocular pet hates includes such things as: progressive education; "serious" writers; confessions in the Dostoevskian manner; book reviewers, most of whom, Nabokov contends, "move their lips when reading"; people who say "excuse me" when they belch. Clearly, in an age practiced in the smooth piety of mock humility and slackly trained to believe that sincerity is an excuse for nearly everything, the public Nabokov...