monk222 | Oct. 8th, 2012

Oct. 8th, 2012

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote. By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”

-- Walt Whitman

Well, I doubt that such writing would make for a good novel, but it may serve for a good diary, or maybe for blog posts.

The primary text of “Lolita”, comprising around 99.9% of the novel is a first-person account by Humbert Humbert, which is sometimes said to be his legal defense for the trial he was to undergo, and other times taken to be more of a confession for his tormented soul, and perhaps sometimes just a bit of emotional prattling. The novel begins with a foreword consisting of a few pages by John Ray, Jr., Ph. D., which opens thus.

_ _ _

“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert”, their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use his discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses Make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

_ _ _

This beginning is not as artful as the one that kicks off the main narrative, but this suggestion of trials and perversions does pique the reader’s interest, no? And we now know going in that our narrator and protagonist is dead and was apparently in serious trouble. It is engaging.

“You talk to people in the movie business who have been doing this 40 years and they all say the difference is that, back in the day, you could go and have a drink in the bar, get drunk, fall over, have a good time, relax, whatever, and no one would know about it. But now everyone’s got a camera.”

-- Daniel Craig

Porn is about male fantasy. The fantasy is that women like everything you do to them, as man.

So how does this translate into real life? Women spend a lot of time and energy trying to please men. We learn early on that we are being looked at – that we are to be looked at. That we are performers. It took years before I actually started enjoying sex. YEARS. I think what I enjoyed most about sex, when I was younger, was the feeling of being desired. The actual sex part was super boring for the first while.

We learn, as girls and women, that the performance is more important than the actual feeling.

-- Facials, feminism, & performance: On f**king men in a patriarchy

A TSA agent convicted of stealing more than $800,000 worth of goods from travelers said this type of theft is “commonplace” among airport security. Almost 400 TSA officers have been fired for stealing from passengers since 2003.

Pythias Brown, a former Transportation Security Administration officer at Newark Liberty International Airport, spent four years stealing everything he could from luggage and security checkpoints, including clothing, laptops, cameras, Nintendo Wiis, video games and cash.

Speaking publicly for the first time after being released after three years in prison, Brown told ABC News that he used the X-ray scanners to locate the most valuable items to snatch.

-- News-LJ

Isn't that life all over? On the other hand, maybe I should have tried to be a TSA agent: you get to spend your days groping the babes and getting free stuff.

The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 - 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 - 45 lead. That's a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama's performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Romney's favorables are above Obama's now. Yes, you read that right. Romney's favorables are higher than Obama's right now. That gender gap that was Obama's firewall? Over in one night.

-- Andrew Sullivan, "Did Obama Just Throw the Entire Election Away?"

From what I have heard about all of the polls, it would be fair to say that it is a dead heat at this point. These Pew results are a bit further out than the others. Nevertheless, a big lead has been blown. Remember, aftr Romney's Boca moment, with that leaked tape about writing off the bottom 47%, it looked like the election and the vote counting was just going to be a formality for Obama's victory. No more.