Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0018491, Mon, 3 Aug 2009 22:13:57 -0400

Subject
SIGHTINGS: youtube; song "Lolita"; Lolita reissue
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Subject:
Nabokov discusses "Lolita" ...
From:
"Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Date:
Sun, 2 Aug 2009 12:34:03 -0400
To:
"Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>


Vladimir Nabokov answering questions about his novel Lolita, circa 1950's.
Vladimir Nabokov discusses "Lolita" part 1 of 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA

Vladimir Nabokov discusses "Lolita" part 2 of 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-wcB4RPasE


Subject:
adapts Nabokov's text directly ...
From:
"Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Date:
Sun, 2 Aug 2009 13:26:59 -0400
To:
"Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>





http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-12-best-songs-by-seattle-band-throw-me-the-statue/Content?oid=1930645


July 28, 2009


Music


The 12 Best Songs by Seattle Band Throw Me the Statue
(Plus Five Songs About Which We Have Some Reservations—and By the Way,
They Only Have Two Albums)

by Christopher Frizzelle and Eric Grandy



Clayton Ryan

THROW ME THE STATUE

1. "Lolita"

Throw Me the Statue's most well-known song is a great example of what
the band does best: It's immediately a pop song, its melodies and
arrangements (heavy on strummed acoustic guitar and rolling,
hand-clap-happy backbeats) inviting and catchy, but it's also slightly
obscure. Those arrangements are deceptively crafted, from the first
drum-machine pattern to the final hectic chorus; its subject isn't so
much an object of infatuation (a girl) as it is the feeling of
infatuation itself ("the hunger"); and songwriter Scott Reitherman's
best lyrics are just slightly off ("I wanna make you lose your brain,"
"I got the bullets in my head/And she asks me why I came," "She was
19/And we all rearrange," the lonely, unlikely chorus "Every night I
pray/She comes around my house to stay").

Critical hyperbole aside, no song is perfect, and the small imperfection
in "Lolita" is its opening couplet: "Lolita/I gotta see ya." The rhyme
just rolls off as so easy, so pat, the literary reference just a little
too freshman year. The next line, "I got a fire/When she pulls me in"
adapts Nabokov's text directly (first sentence: "Lolita, light of my
life, fire of my loins"), and a colleague has suggested that there's
something fun and playful about the casualness of the first couplet
contrasted with the second's more literal borrowing, about the way
singer/guitarist Reitherman is sort of conversing with the book. I only
mention the obstacle of that first line because it highlights how nearly
flawless the song is as a whole. The clincher is the moment just after
the three-minute mark, where the song doubles back on itself, folding
into one last chorus with vocals and drums and glockenspiel all echoing
and tumbling over each other as the song rushes toward its too-soon end.
You find yourself skipping back to the start of the song to hear it
again. EG

[ ... ]




Complete article at following URL:
http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/books/article.html?Shelf_Space:_Reissues_To_Try&in_article_id=711337&in_page_id=28


Shelf Space: Reissues To Try
By CLAIRE ALLFREE - Thursday, July 30, 2009


Vladimir Nabokov penned Lolita
Who could resist a hardback copy of Lolita boasting a cheeky cut-out of
a pair of cherries on the front cover?

That the book should, in this instance, be as seductive as its eponymous
subject matter is clearly part of the plan behind Weidenfeld &
Nicolson's latest set of limited-edition hardback reissues, designed by
advertising firm Fallon to celebrate the company's 60th anniversary and
the latest example of publishers reviving interest in their back
catalogues by reissuing key books as covetable objects of desire.

The enduring classic (£12.99) by Vladimir Nabokov heads a diverse,
nine-strong list that includes Alice Walker's The Color Purple and
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, and
provides a truly alluring introduction to Nabokov's tragicomic
masterpiece of transgressive lust, in which wretched narrator Humbert
Humbert is semi-crippled by his obsession for 12-year-old Dolores.

[ ... ]

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