Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0006291, Sat, 5 Jan 2002 10:25:55 -0800

Subject
Nabokov Sighting ("For PETA'S Sake") (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Jennifer Donna Parsons <jdparsons@shaw.ca>

Greetings to the List. Noted the following in Rex Murphy's Saturday,
January 5, 2002 column in the Globe and Mail:

"Cover up, woman, fur PETA's sake!
By REX MURPHY Saturday, January 5, 2002 – Page A13

'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta
. . ." On the principle that whenever one has an opportunity to quote
the finest stylist of our time, one is under a literary, and probably
moral, obligation to do so, I have cited the beginning of Lolita by
Vladimir Nabokov.

The opportunity in this case is provided by an actress named Dominique
Swain, who in the bleak chill of a January afternoon this week, unveiled
a picture of herself without a stitch of clothes on as a "protest"
against the wearing of furs. (So there is no confusion, it is Ms. Swain
in the picture who offers her bare pelt to the rude world, not a naked
Dominique who unveiled the picture.) Dominique Swain, you see, played
Lolita in the second, disappointing cinematic retelling of Nabokov's
immortal work...

I gather it was nothing more than a mischief of fate and good marketing
that Ms. Spears herself was not executing the PETA stunt in Toronto,
rather than the formidably less emphatic Ms. Swain. For some weeks, the
press was awash with reports that Britney was going to "bare all" for
PETA. For Britney to bare all would require a subtraction of clothing so
miniscule it might require physicists to register the change.

But I digress. To return to the central problem: What is the
connection between those who are already engaged with exhibiting
as much of their own pelts as the law will let them get away with
and discouraging the more modest portion of humanity from
exhibiting the pelts of other creatures?"

etc. etc.

Cheers!