Reading Lolita in Tehran

[abstroint]

The struggles not so obvious here in the good ol’ us of a. We can read all we want and we get to pretend we have organized rights…compared to “Reading Lolita In Tehran” we do seem to have many. The dream during waking hours is more a nightmare and just as chaotic as any other day anywhere else, the rules are different, same game. One uses oppression the other slight of hand. Suffering deep the Freudian slips in the land of unconsciousness and the home of the technologically advanced numbness. Oh but here I can wear my hair down so if you glance you will see every strand. It’s not a death sentence or an invitation for rape. I can let my finger nails grow out of control till they twist around each other if I choose. Unmarried? I don’t have to prove I’m still a virgin after I spent time with a man. I will rarely ever wear makeup but I’ll never have to concern myself with jail if I apply to bright a color, just taunting comments to concern me, like “Hey look! It’s Tammy Fay.” Anyway, it was a good read. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/037550 ... e&n=283155

[stilltrucking]

Reading Lolita In Tehran
stilltrucking Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 11:16 am
I tore through the first fifty pages in one sitting. I wonder if I will finish it. I start so many books and finish so few.
This one hits home because now I see that I have been solipsizing women. Or least my spiderlover.

"To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own, turning Lolita into a reincarnation of his lost, unfulfilled young love, Annabel Leigh. We know Lolita not directly but through Humbert, and not through her own past but through her narrator/molester's past or imaginary past. This what Humbert, a number of critics and in fact one of my students, Nima called Humbert's solipsization of Lolita"
http://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3951

She helped me understand how the mullahs in Iran solipsize women.
She is in Baltimore now. Teaching at The Hopkins I think. I never did finish it. I keep it out of the library for weeks. Finally had to take back.

She also helped me understand myself (the author of Reading Lolita...) Helped me realized how I created those barbie dolls in my mind from the faces of real women.
I wondered who her "magician" was. That guy who was a mentor to her. He was keeping a low profile in Tehran. I wondered if it could have been Rushdie living right under their noses.

I have never read Lolita, well about half of it. I carried it around so long the binding desintegrated and one day when I was reading outside the pages took flight in the wind.

I am happy she is here. It is our gain and their loss. How many women sitting in on her lectures? A lot I hope. A lot of bright shinning minds going out into the world to make it better for women and men.

[stilltrucking]

Just call me polyanna sunshine

I was looking for a kurt vonnegut thread and found this old moldy

I was thinking about K&D the other day
on a string about Karl Marx of all places
I think she was a high school kid when she started posting to litkicks,.
I think K&D would be a senior now if she stayed with it. But she was struggling with her dyslexia she said.

Just good to see ya around now and then.
A long time ago I heard a college girl call Sylvia Plath a proto-feminist.

That is about what I consider myself.