Christopher Kane

Every now and then I peruse Style.com. I found it comical that the very first featured article tonight began, "Pretty yet perverted, innocent yet disturbing..." I was stunned. I thought of Lolita, and Lo and behold, it was. Unfortunately, Kane sites the movie (rather than the novel) as his inspiration.
If your curious, check out Kane's interpretation of Lolita in fashion.

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Humbert Humbert

Curious to know the exact definition of the brown color that Nabokov assigns to Humbert's name, I looked up umber in the dictionary. The first entry reads, "a natural pigment resembling but darker than ocher, normally dark yellowish-brown in color (raw umber) or dark brown when roasted (burnt umber). The second entry reads, "a brownish-gray moth with coloring that resembles tree bark." Lepidoptera. I only should have expected this.

H=drab shoelace brown.
UMBER=moth.
T=pistachio green.
Umber sandwiched by the colors of birth and death.

So here is the Umber Moth (a drab shoelace brown).


And here is the Umber Moth caterpillar (arching it's back in search of prey on a pistachio green leaf).

To Amanda:

I found an interesting abstract for an article on Nabokov suggesting strong evidence that he, himself, was molested at a young age by his uncle. The abstract also mentions that, in later years, Nabokov may have become a pedophile who unleashed his thoughts onto the page. The writer of the abstract sites pedophilia as a behavioral defense to oedipal anxiety. (Unfortunately I cannot access the entire article, but follow the link below to read the very brief abstract.)

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=paq.064.0203b

sorry it's not a hyperlink. i can't get the hyperlink to work.

My Family Photo

Whitefish Lake Family Photograph

Though I painted a sadly superficial smile on my face for the black point-and-shoot Olympus camera timer as my dad jogged down the dock to join my mom, Heather, my sister, Lauren, and I, I was unbelievably upset to be required in this photograph. Having had a terrible morning, I just wanted to mope around in the moist grass and read my mystery novel. I had checked out ten mystery novels from the Livingston Library for each of the ten days my family was lake lounging up in the northern part of Montana. I remember that the librarian behind the desk with her short gray bob had laughed lightly. I remember my obsession with this woman's hair. I cannot remember what the pin on her blouse said under the all-caps LIBRARIAN, or what I called her, but I used to visit her every two weeks when my books were due. While she would scan the barcodes of my newly selected books with her red-light pen, I watched the perfection of the silver strings that hung around her face reflecting sunlight, and I felt obligated to count every single strand.

Back to the photograph...
My dad, just barely crouched down behind me in time for the flash flash flash of the camera warning the onset of the shutter, is smiling, pleased to have wrangled me down to the end of the dock to appease my mom's desire for a family photograph. My sister holds her chin in her palm in almost the same manner as me. Hers however displays her face a bit more. I remember attempting to cover my face to mask my displeasure. Later my dad apologized to me for forcing me to be in the photograph.

You may have noticed my sister's shortly cropped hair and her lack of a top or female bathing suit for that matter. Lauren spent several years of her childhood in this manner until she couldn't get away with it anymore. She was the most radical tomboy I knew. She howled at dresses and relished romping with boys. On the day that we were flower girls for a wedding she kindly informed my mom that she would not wear a dress again until the day she was married.

My swimsuit in the photo is, however, a full one-piece. The material had the pattern of red, orange, pink, and purple flames. The fabric of the red flames were more dense than that of the orange flames, the orange fabric more dense than the pink, the pink more than the purple. The varying densities of the fabrics caused exciting tan lines on my torso. I loved being painted by flames every summer. I hated the day that I no longer fit into that swimsuit.

My mom bought her black two-piece swimsuit at Bob Wards before they moved out to 19th. She was self conscious of her body, worried about how her stomach hung out over the bottoms (comical to me now, knowing that she had been a professional ballerina at the Portland Ballet Company for eight years). She is quite thin in the photo.

My dad still owns the black trunks he is sporting in the photo. I believe he purchased both his necklace and sunglasses while on a trip to Colorado with his buddies. He has one arm on each of us. His left arm rests on Lauren, the younger by two years.

Note the tilt of the horizon. The water is not completely calm. The sun is high, and the towels are from New Mexico. My hair is likely more than ten times as long as Lauren's.

Commonplace Book of Claws (Speak, Memory)

"Legend and logic, a rare but strong partnership." (62)

"My mother was at her bedside, and Aunt Pasha's last words were: 'That's interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo-voda.'" (68)

"I remember him as a slender, neat little man with a dusky complexion, gray-green eyes flecked with rust, a dark, bushy mustache, and a mobile Adam's apple bobbing conspicuously above the opal and gold snake ring that held the knot of his tie. He also wore opals on his fingers and in his cuff links. A gold chainlet encircled his frail hairy wrist, and there was usually a carnation in the buttonhole of his dove-gray, mouse-gray or silver-gray summer suit." (69)

"That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." (77)

"My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar -Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts-'Who is Ben?' 'He is Dan,' 'Sam is in bed,' and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ-for the initial lessions, at least- words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools ('Ben has an axe'), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory; and, akin to the mad alphabet of an optician's chart, the grammar-book lettering looms again before me." (79-80)

". . . words are meant to mean what they mean." (81)

My weekend in details

This weekend I attended 4 weddings. I spent 9 hours in the car. I spent 25.5 hours with my face smashed into the back of my camera.

The brides' names were Catherine, Cali, Stephanie, and Angie (in that order). Their maiden names were Lemoine, Frankovic, Johnson, and Quesenberry respectively. Currently their names are Catherine Luth, Cali Sparing, Stephanie Turner, and Angela Conlan. CLCSSTAC.

Catherine was a blonde lawyer from Nebraska with an accent. Cali was a beautiful, red-headed Wyoming girl. Stephanie was the long-legged brunette who towered at least six inches over her husband (without pumps). Angela was the Nabokovian bride.

My first memory

I had been in my car-seat for hours and hours that dragged on to the kindly rhythmic noises of our old Scout on the highway. My mom sat directly in front of me in the passenger seat; I remember watching her curls move as we grumbled along. My dad drove. I'm not sure exactly how old I was, but definitely somewhere between the ages of 1 and 2. The reason I know at least this is that my sister was in mom's tummy at the time. We, my sister and I, are a week and a half apart - both pisces.

The sky outside my window consumed us in blackness and yet I watched and waited. I don't remember seeing any stars, just one solitary porch light as the Scout finally came to a stop outside my grandma's house in the City of Fountains. I remember feeling heavy in my car-seat, my face pressed against the strangely comfortable blue fabric whose nap ran determinately in one direction. My dad opened his door to hop out and the sticky air seeped into my lungs. I drifted deeper into my car-seat and fell asleep.

That's all I can remember. Though I don't know why, this has always been a very vivid memory for me. I do question it's actuality when I consider that we aren't supposed to be able to form long term memories until the age of 5 or 6. It seems too real to have been pieced together, but memory is strange like this.

If you imagine yourself to be swimming, close your eyes and imagine the activity in your mind, your brain reacts exactly as if you were truly swimming. Having such strength, our imaginations and experiences really paint our memories as we wish them to be painted. I find it wild to consider this and reality.

I found a blog posting entitled "A part(ment)" by Stephen Dinehart regarding reality that is really interesting:

"What is reality but a series of unfolding narratives occurring in a polyrythmic order over time? An infinite amount of stories exist at any given moment, some are starting, ending, just reaching climax, others still not even a dream. What if you were to take reality and cut a cross section of it? What would it look like?

I believe our present perception of being is actually a wave moving up the hyperstring which is our four-dimensional being. We live in a brane world, as in a membrane moving through the bulk of time.

A part(ment) is a exploration into the moment. The positions of various membranes frozen in the bulk of time will be examined."