I have bronchitis. And around here, sickness means reading really good books. Last time I got sick, I read Harry Potter. It may be a high water mark as far as fandom is concerned, but this round has introduced me to what must be one of the masterworks of American literature, Lolita. Published as it was in 1955, I’m surprised I haven’t read it yet. It’s in all the books I ever read about mid-century literature. I don’t even have a really good reason for not having read it. Not even anything as good as “it’s so cliche– everybody’s read it.” I just never did.

And now I want to read it over and over again. It is absolutely beautiful. Within ten pages I felt enthralled. I also felt sickened, but I was definitely enthralled. My copy, the Vintage Internatioal trade paperback, has on the cover a picture of a pair of little girl’s legs– short full skirt, white anklets (folded down) and saddle shoes, slightly knock-kneed, but in the way one shift of the hips would make a model stance. There’s a small quote– someone from Vanity Fair called the book, “The only convincing love story of our generation.” Ten pages in, I wondered how that could be. Having finished the book, I don’t wholly agree, but damn if it isn’t an amazing love story.

It’s amazing and beautiful and utterly depraved. Humbert Humbert is a sex addict par excellence his descriptions of his love made me ache. I was turning back to reread passages before I’d got halfway through the book. I know from some unresolved sexual tension and this is by far the best of its kind, ever, in the history of unresolved sexual tension. Even after they’ve become lovers, it remains, ever minute, because she is so fickle and he is so obsessed with her. You get the idea that he’s living interlude to interlude– the every bit of kissing or touching, every coupling of any kind, is the sweetest of his life because it could very well be their last. And juxtaposed with this is the idea that she’s really pretty bored by the whole thing. It’s heartwrenching and thrilling and magnificent and abominable.

There are a hundred thousand different passages I want to quote. I wanted to make a note of every time he used the word “delectation” which is the absolute perfect word for this book. Should’ve perhaps been the title. I was going to start underlining, but I realized quickly that I’d be underlining the whole thing. Every description of embrace, when he says he “kissed the yellow soles of her feet.” When he talks about the hair on her arms. Everything. And it only gets faster and more engrossing, until you’re in the last fifty pages, wanting desperately to know what happens and wanting desperately for it never to end.

So with that, I’ll just quote from H.H.’s poem– what he calls a “maniac’s masterpiece.” It rounds it all up for me and puts such a fine point on things that I want to weep for the perfection of it.

My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?

From The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon:

She had surrendered her futile and wrongheaded battle against the ample construction of her frame. The general expansion of her rosy flesh had softened the dramatic rake of her nose, the equine lenght of her jaw, the flare of her cheekbones. Her thighs had a grandeur, and her hips were capacious, and in those first few days, a great goad to his renascent love was the glimpse of her pale, freckled breasts, brimming from the cups of her brassiere with a tantalizing but fictitious threat of spilling over, that was afforded him by one of her housedresses, or by a chance late-night encounter outside the bathroom in the hall. He had thought of Rosa countless times over the years of his flight, but somehow courting or embracing her in his memory, he had neglected to dab in the freckles with whch she was so prodigiously stipled, and now he was startled by their profusion. They emerged and faded against her skin with the inscrutable cadence of stars on the night sky. They invited the touch of fingers as painfully as the nap of velvet or the shimmer of a piece of watered silk.

That is how to love a woman– fat and freckles and everything impossibly beautiful.

I love the 50s. A lot. We all know about my misbegotten and mercifully brief career as an academic. Really, I almost stuck around just so I could write a dissertation called 1957. 1957 was the most important year of the 20th century and I will have words with anyone who disagrees.

That said, one of the greatest things about the 50s and indeed, 1957, is the song “Whole Lotta Shakin” by Jerry Lee Lewis. I love Jerry Lee. So much. I love his music, his attitude, everything. So when “Whole Lotta Shakin” comes up on the Winamp (from my box set “All Killer No Filler”) I am driven, on a molecular level, to dance. And wow, do I dance.

Christopher just sits and watches, no matter how often I try to drag him out of his chair to Jitterbug or Shimmy (would that I could actually do the Shimmy!) with me. So this afternoon, I was trying my best to solo-Jitterbugshimmy and he decides to listen to the lyrics:

Come on over baby, we got a chicken in the barn.
I said come on over baby, we got a chicken in the barn
Whose barn? What barn? My barn?
Well I said come on ove baby, really got the bull by the horns…

And et cetera. And he says, “You know, that last verse is about how I got chicken!” And I have to remind myself that what’s it’s really about is humpin’, as the head of Sun Records once (according to apocrypha) said. It is not about Leeroy Jenkins and World of Fucking Warcraft.

There is only one sure means in life,” Deasy said, “of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusionment. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.”

– Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay