My Buddy Quilty

The part where H.H. kills Quilty reminds me of the movie Fight Club--more specifically, at the end when Norton kills Brad Pitt, or however it went; it's been a while since I've seen it. The idea is that Pitt is Norman's alter ego, his confident, risky, unrestrained side. Pitt liked fast cars, photography, pets; Norland kept his desires restrained, and wore the mask of a simple office worker.

"because you took
because you took advantage of my disadvantage...

Thats good, you know. That's damn good." (Quilty)

Quilty's flippant attitude even when a gun is pointed at him is just like Pitt's; infact, I loved the interaction between the two, I was wishing Nabokav would have given us more of it, prhaps drawn it out more. One sentence threw me off:

"He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it."

What is that all about? Cigarette tobacco is disgusting, I've tried it one time (though I cannot remember why) and it threw me immediatly into a fit of gagging and coughing and puking. Why is Quilty munching a cigarette?

"The rich joy was waning. It was high time I destroyed him, but he must understand why he was being destroyed. His condition infected me, the weapon felt limp and clumsy in my hand."

Commonplace

Speak, Memory:

I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception. (125)

And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three buttons on the side, lowers itself warily; then, at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling. (96)

How small the cosmos (a kangeroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human conciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! (24)

So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow.

...The vibration in my ears is no longer their receding bells, but only my old blood singing. All is still, spellbound, enthralled by the moon, fancy's rearvision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers. (99-100)

How readily Mr. Cummings would sit down on a stool, part behind with both hands his--what? was he wearing a frock coat? I see only the gesture--and proceed to open the black tin paintbox.

At the top of the stairs, one's feet would be automatically lifted to the deceptive call of "Step", and then, with a momentary sense of exquisite panic, with a wild contraction of muscles, would sink into the phantasm of a step, padded, as it were, with the infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence. (84)

LOLITA:

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymetrical position-a knight's move from the top-always strangely disturbed me.

Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch.

But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate's formal handshake (as reproduced be Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury-I wept.

Beauty and the Beast

Humbert is a connoisseur of beauty. He sees things as Nabokav would have a genius see them; he flutters and settles and samples, taking time to notice and apprieciate the flowers of life. The paradox is in the evil nature of Humbert and the way he puts his gifts of style and taste to use. He appreciates God's glory to the point of destoying it.

"The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail utterly to do so. Why?"

hippie braids

This picture was taken during our move from Hanover St; I was vexed we had to leave behind the cumquat bushes cutting the sidewalk from lawn in our late residence.The pouty girl holding up the magical box is my cousin Lisa, four years my senior who suffered slight brain damage from being dropped as a child. She may have been annoyed to discover i was hiding under the box all along; perhaps the look was fleeting, an instant of passing feeling caught like a crook on film, a secret of time shouted out for all to hear. The carved wooden bowls my mother aquired during her many rambles to the farmers market in the precious 1980's, the chips we ate organic and healthy. My mother's burdensome bag, located five-eighths up the right hand side, is flung upen from her last attempt to locate a pen, maybe, or a brush to comb her long flowing hair. The summer sun, i remember, shone strong that day; we retreated inside to escape the heat. The red and white object is a kazoo, shaped in the spirit of the times. Though i did not want to come out of my beautiful box, this was the dawning of a new era for me. Many adventures lie in wait, many a game to be played. Eventually the sun called to me; i emerged from my lair to see what it was there was to discover.

one nice memory

My pond
Memory is a funny thing for me. It is like a deep pool which I dive into—sometimes it is murky and cold, and I get out fast to dry myself in the sun. Other times it is crystal clear and tropical warm, gentle current rolling, twisting to settle quietly down in the depths. At these times I float on my back and stare up into the blue, or I swim down and sift through the different colored pebbles at the bottom. These are my memories, and I leisurely pick out a beautiful one and hold it in my hand.
The memory I hold now is of a reservoir. It is located on top a rise of land which is nestled between soft sloped mountains and sheltered by a line of tall redwoods running up along the valley. In the winter the fog hung like a curtain between the mountains, providing Ben and I with our own private world. The ferns dripped dew and the pond filled to the brim with murky water and plants grew healthy from the bottom. We crept through rotting leaves and hid behind bushes and went rigid still to listen. The frogs would start up again and the turtles poked their heads from the water. Huge water moccasins glided end to end in search of food. I can see the white light filtered through the rooftop of leaves which was darkly mirrored in the dirty pond. I can see the big lilies sway and the water skeeters skimming trails of passage like jets in the sky.
In that world we were hunters, our objective to trap rather than kill. We filled boxes of frogs and sacks of turtles, jars full of insects and cartons of snakes. It is the path every boy must walk during the magical childhood years. Time was non existential, the world folded in, packed together to become as small as our pond. We hid behind a large fern as a turtle ate a lilly, and Ben, fat and happy, whispered, “you see that”? “Yeah”, I said, “I see it.”
In the summer the reservoir dried up and plates of mud cracked apart like a desert. As I crunched the plates beneath my feet I was a turtle, and this was my home. For that amount of time I lived at the bottom of the pond, swimming under the lilies, ignorant of any world past the walls of tree trunks and the roof of leaves. The sunlight streamed through the water in dancing patterns and the algae lit up and the tadpoles darted here and there. Time was measured only in terms of day and night, winter and summer. I am buoyant; I am quite simply pulled back and forth in the restless water.
I see an ant working hard along the rough terrain of cracked mud and all at once I am with him, sharp, giant cliffs looming overhead, deep caverns slicing jagged along different plateaus like a violent maze. I grow tired of finding my way and become a massive giant, smashing mountains in my path. It is ridiculous how large I am. I pull a mountainous bluff of rocky mud from the very roots of the earth and hurtle it hundreds of miles away, my war cry bellowing, reaching to the ends of the universe. I see Ben—he is with me, and together we destroy everything in our path.
I am sitting now on a soft sandy shoal near the edge of my pond. Sunlight winks on from the surface and dances in the branches of the surrounding trees. I am rubbing my pebble; it is green and smooth, worn down by the passage of water and time. I know that it used to be jagged and sharp, and perhaps looked much different. Maybe it was more beautiful then. I ponder this, and finally decide that it is more beautiful now, and for one reason: not only can I hold it as it is now, I can also imagine it as it was then.