The first page of Lolita translated into 14 year old girl AOL speak: Ladies and Gentlebeans, I give you, LOLita.
LOLITA LIGHT OF MAH LIEF FIER OF MAH LOINS!!1!!!!! WTF LOL MAH SIN MAH SU!1!!1 WTF LO-LE-TA TEH TIP OF TEH 2NGUE TAKNG A TRIP OF THRE STEPS DOWN DA PALAET 2 TAP AT THRE ON DA TETH!111!! LO!1111! LE!11!!!!1 OMG WTF LOL TA
SHE11!1 WAS LO PLANE LO IN TEH MORNNG STANDNG FOUR FET TEN IN ONE SOK!11! OMG WTF LOL SH3 WAS LOLA IN SLAKS!!1111!1 WTF LOL SHA WAS DOLY AT SKOOL111111 WTF LOL SH3 WAS DOLORES ON TEH DOT3D LIEN1111 WTF BUT IN MAH ARMS SH3 WAS ALWAYS LOLITA
DID111!1! SHE HAEV A PRACURSOR?!!??!? OMG WTF LOL SHE DID INDED SH3 DID11!!111! LOL IN POINT OF FACT THEYRE MIGHT HAEV B3N NO LOLITA AT AL HAD I NOT LOVED ONA SUM3R A CARTANE INITIAL GIRL-CHILD!!!11 OMG WTF LOL IN A PRINCEDOM BY DA S3A!!1!! LOL O WH3N?!?!! WTF LOL ABOUT AS MANY Y3ARS BFOR3 LOLITA WAS BORN AS MAH AEG WAS TAHT SUM3R1111!1!1 OMG WTF U CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON A MURDERAR FOR A FANCY PROSA STYL3
LADEIS!1!!!!! WTF LOL AND G3NTLAMAN OF TEH JURY AXHIBIT NUMBR ONE IS WT S3RAPHS TEH MISINFORMAD SIMPLE NOBLA-WNGAD SERAPHS ANVEID!!!1 OMG LOL LOK AT THIS TANGL3 OF THORNS1!!1!111 WTF LOL
This week’s (or maybe last week’s?) New Yorker contains a previously unpublished story by my favorite author, Vladimir Nabokov. The story is pretty remarkable for an unpublished work, and it makes me think that perhaps Nabokov was incapable of writing anything bad. The ghostly undertones of the story seem incredibly appropriate in light of the somewhat recent events surrounding Nabokov’s last, unfinished work, “The Original of Laura”.
The story is as follows: V.N. decided that his last book was not quite finished and requested that his wife burn it. If I remember correctly, she didn’t have the heart to do it. After all, Vera is the one who once prevented our famously picky author from burning a manuscript of Lolita. Upon her death, the onus was passed to V.N.’s son, Dmitri, now the Nabokov with the power to publish or burn the manuscript. Everyone weighed in, from Brian Boyd, the foremost Nabokovian scholar (and this is a group that takes themselves very seriously), to John Banville and even Tom Stoppard (who, as you might remember, is very responsible for both Brazil AND Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead). Burn it! Some say. Save it! Say others. Some suggest that we keep it and make it available only to scholars.
Can we forget that he himself almost burned Lolita? On one hand, we might respect his wishes not to have an incomplete work published. On the other, some call it his finest work. Remember, he almost burned Lolita.
According to the Slate article — and its copious linking — Dmitri has made a decision. The decision has made in light of an imagined conversation with his father’s ghost. How appropriate! Nabokov’s last publication is accompanied by literary intrigue and a ghost story. What could be more appropriate for an author who places his own person into his stories than to become one of his stories posthumously? With a rich history of stories about the influence of the dead upon the living (Pale Fire; “The Weird Sisters”; Speak, Memory; even Lolita), Nabokov’s story could not have been resolved in a better manner.
I believe the novel will be even better for its circumstances; it will be seen as his last masterpiece, the final enrichment of his already complex and wonderful mythology. This is the last chapter in the marriage of a man with his own myth. Now we see how completely his life and death have intertwined with his stories.
Reading the first essay — the customary “note from the editor”, done in a slightly more editorial manner by Sven — in the recent issue of AGNI, (full disclosure: I am an editorial assistant at this particular magazine) I noticed that Sven had seen something in Cormac McCarthy that I had seen in my favorite author, Vladimir Nabokov. In relating his experience watching a youtube video of McCarthy speaking to Oprah, he explains that he wonders why McCarthy seems to lack something of the sturm and drang he expected in the interview. I once noticed this in Nabokov in the one taped interview I am aware of him allowing.
As a side note, I would suggest that you just take a moment to imagine a famously technophobic literary critic watching Oprah interview a reclusive genius on television for her polarizing book club. (more…)
Filed under: book, postmodernism | Tags: ellroy, gravity's rainbow, paranoia, postmodernism, pynchon, rockets
Today while reading a collection of James Ellroy short pieces (a bunch of crime articles for GQ and a few novellas) entitled Destination: Morgue!, I started to think about how obsessive great artists tend to be. Ellroy, for example, is obsessed with boxing and the murder of his mother, echoing certain obsessions that Raymond Chandler had. Essentially, the reason that they write about obsession so well is that the act of writing is the channeling of that obsession, not the release from it, but the distillation of it. Simply put, they obsess through their writing, and the obsessions of the characters become that much more real for it.
Now, Thomas Pynchon is an altogether different beast. I have been attempting to read Gravity’s Rainbow, but I am finding it so dense and evocative that I can only manage to bust my way through ten pages at a time. When describing a desk, he describes each thing on that desk with the precision and thought generally reserved for a short story writer charged with writing a story-long description of the desk. (more…)
Filed under: book, human, technology | Tags: cyberpunk, ghosts, neuromancer, william gibson
Neuromancer is one of the few books I can think of that manages to blend such a wide variety of styles and themes together so successfully. Drawing on or recalling anything from Blade Runner to the dirty underbelly noir of Raymond Chandler. Frankly, the book is kind of haunting.
Gibson is entirely graceful about the way he pieces his work together, but I found it particularly impressive the way he manages to balance the technology and the humanity in the novel. This does not mean that there is not an obvious fascination with technology, but he does avoid writing a fetish piece for the electronic, or a techno-porn. This is also not to say that there aren’t some seriously pyschosexually charged bits, but that his explorations of technology and humanity never feel cheap.
There are some especially gorgeous and lonely scenes that touch on the inter-relationship of death and technology, or the way that far from only redefining our waking lives, the technology we create begins to redefine their context, being our birth and death. So it seems that Neuromancer is becoming especially salient now that we are gaining control over the engineering of our next generation, and even more so since we are now at some risk of prolonging a semblance of self-aware life indefinitely.
He explores in a very evocative manner the way we have begun to haunt our own technology. The dead in the story live on in simulation and when we meet these characters, we are forced to ask how they are any different to us (or more importantly, themselves) than they used to be. This elegantly gets to the center of a very important issue regarding where the human ends and the technological begins. This serves the narrative, as well, as one of the greatest reasons Gibsons writing resonates with such depth is because he writes people’s ghosts into his machines, which makes a pretty powerful statement about technology all by itself.
Basically, Neuromancer has probably started to read less like a brave new world in science fiction and more like a simple, not so outlandish anymore suggestion of where we might be headed. When the imaginations of our most gifted writers are hardly (if any) stranger than what we are actually capable of, we have officially reached a strange new epoch.
