Shade = Hades

I find it very interesting to note that if one removes the S in Shade and tacks it on to the end of the name, one ends up with Hades.

Hades, Grecian god and king of the underworld.

In the image below, Hades abducts Demeter's daughter Persephone.
Sculpture by Bernini. I believe the sculpture is called "The Rape of Proserpina" as Bernini was Italian.

6 Reasons I Deplore Charles Kinbote

1. He misspells and misquotes.
2. He speaks of himself in both first and third person.
3. He stalks and spies.
4. He dislikes cats.
5. He breaks Disa's heart.
6. He lives vicariously through John Shade.

Bombycilla cedrorum

I didn't notice the masked eyes painted on the waxwing's face until Dr. Sexton mentioned it in class last week. Rather, I was primarily taken by the waxwing's crown as well as it's tail as it appears to have been dipped in a bucket of yellow paint. They also appear to absolutely love berries.

My Favorite Short Paper by Emma Sily

Because I could not set one above the other, and because I have been requested to select only one short paper, I must inform you that my favorite from the selection of pieces that I read was written by the wise young author in our class Emma Sily. She wrote her paper on waterproof mirrors.
I like her paper because glass and mirrors operate like the reflecting reflections in the waters of Hourglass Lake while the word Waterproof echoes in your mind. The lake is the mirror.
On a more serious and coherent note, I love that Waterproof implies "something airtight and sealed." Mirrors create a double. These two things compose the heart of the story of Lolita because the mystery is impeccably woven and reversed in words and allusions in a way that only the most careful reader can solve.

The Blue Hotel (short paper)

While I did see the streaks of red riddled through Lolita, I saw equal streaks of blue. Typically I might consider themes of color in literature as semi-interesting or semi-significant. However, in dealing with Nabokov and his gift of a disease, I consider color highly important and the ultimate opposite of an accident. In Lolita, red alludes to everything Quilty, everything unhappy; blue to everything happy, everything Lolita.
Humbert Humbert’s first spotting of Lolita sends a thrill of blue through his body. He explains, “ . . . and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses” (39). There she was. Lolita. The blue sea-wave knocks his heart so far off balance that the only words Humbert Humbert manages to sputter are: “Yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” (40). He is talking about lilies, and yet he is talking about Lo. He is beyond elated and on the near brink of speechlessness. His heart is washed over by blue, and Humbert Humbert is happy.
Lolita wears blue jeans often. I realize that jeans are common casual wear and that they are normally blue in color, but Humbert Humbert assigns Lolita’s jeans a blue with a very different feeling. He writes about the time when “she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her shirt unfastened,” (92). In this scene, the blue smells sweet and worldly, of a land he has invented. Again, Humbert Humbert is happy.
When on the brink of finally seducing his sweet Lo, Humbert Humbert brandishes his purpills (Papa’s Purple Pills.) Nabokov creates a great alliteration with purple, but then goes on to show their blue side as well. Upon acquiring the pills, Humbert Humbert says, “Everything was somehow so right that day. So blue and green,” (95). Later in the story when Lolita eyes the pills, she exclaims, “Blue! Violet blue. What are they made of?” Humbert Humbert replies, “Summer skies and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of emperors,” (122). Such a beautiful pill! When the world is blue for Humbert Humbert, all is well.
After the acquisition of the purpills, Humbert Humbert and Lo finally reach the Enchanted Hunters Hotel and come upon a cocker spaniel. When Lolita sinks down to pet the dog, it becomes “a pale-faced, blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet,” (117). Humbert Humbert writes in beautiful blue language whenever Lolita is near and safe. Conversely, when he has lost his “Lo! Lola! Lolita!,” he comes upon her playing with Quilty’s cocker spaniel. Describing what he sees, Humbert Humbert writes, “There she was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was losing and snapping up again and adjusting between his jaws a wet little red ball,” (236). The red language of the ball is fierce and dry, unhappy when juxtaposed with the smooth floaty blue language.
In his French ballad for Rita, Humbert Humbert sings of the Enchanted Hunters as “the blue hotel.” Rita asks him, “Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?” (263). It is blue because the first wave that Lolita swells in Humbert Humbert's heart is blue; it is blue because Humbert Humbert’s heart is a “blue block of ice” without Lolita (268). Everything Lolita is blue.

Names

Anna
Annabel
Annalee
Annabel Leigh
Anna Liffey
Anna Livia
Anna Livia Plurabelle
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker
Humphrey
Humbert
Humbert Humbert
Humbly Dumbly
Dumbly Dolly
Dolly
Dolores
Lolita
Lo
LoLeeTa
LOLITA

My Discovery

I do not profess to have read the whole of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. However, I have been lightly paging through it and, in this manner, happened upon my discovery.

On pages 226 and 227 of Finnegans Wake, I found the following:

"...she'll stay daughter of Clare. Bring tansy, throw myrtle, strew rue, rue, rue. She is fading out like Journee's clothes so you can't see her now. Still we know how Day the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and darks. And among the shades that Eve's now wearing she'll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow. Mammy was, Mimmy is, Minuscoline's to be. In the Dee dips a dame and the dame desires a demselle but the demselle dresses dolly and the dolly does a dulcydamble."

Though I cannot directly relate the above to a passage in Lolita, I feel that this may be where Nabokov found interest in the word and concept of Dolly. Clare. Rue rue rue (cue cue cue.)

Further down the page:

"So and so, toe by toe, to and fro they go round, for they are the ingelles, scattering nods as girls who may, for they are an angel's garland."

"Catchmire stockings, libertyed garters, shoddyshoes, quicked out with selver . . . And they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light. And they lookk so loovely, loovelit, noosed in a nuptious light. Withasly glints in. Andecoy glants out. They ramp it a little, a lessle, a lissle. Then rompride round in rout."

"Say them all but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance. Though they're all but merely a schoolgirl yet these way went they. I' th' view o' th'avignue dancing goes entrancing roundly."

"He was feeling so funny and floored for the cue, all over which girls as he don't know whose hue."

I noticed the RAYNBOW and thought of the day in Lolita when HH and Lo attended a summer theatre production in Wace where the gauze-draped pubescent girls danced as a rainbow. I reread Nabokov's scene finding it to entirely echo Joyce's.

Here is Nabokov's scene found on pages 220 and 221 of Lolita:

"I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, bare-limbed--seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that . . . were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely--Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector."

Oddly enough, it took me several readings of this short passage to notice the fact that Nabokov entirely admits lifting this passage from James Joyce via his anagrammatical name Vivian Darkbloom.
Bloomdark.
Bloodmark.

Also on page 227 of Finnegans Wake:

"He dove his head into Wat Murrey, gave Stewart Ryall a puck on the plexus, wrestled a hurry-come-union with the Gillie Beg, wiped all his sinses, martial and menial, out of Shrove Sundy MacFearsome, excremuncted as freely as any frothblower into MacIsaac, had a belting bout, chaste to chaste, with McAdoo about nothing and, childhood's age being aya the shameleast . . ."

The only reason I note this passage is Joyce's invention of MacFearsome, dreadfully similar to McFate.