Whether you are a professional designer, illustrator, a Nabokov nut—or even none of the above—there is much to like about Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl, a fascinating new book edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving. At the center of their project is the problem Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious 1955 novel of sexual obsession, pedophilia and quasi-incest has posed for over half a century of book jacket designers.

First consider the creative brief as laid out by Nabokov himself, a man who liked to be in firm control of how his work, and his own public image, were represented:

“I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.”

You hear that? Let me turn it up a little bit louder for you:

“Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.”

The image most closely associated with the novel today, of course, is the misleadingly “sexy” image of Sue Lyon, who played “Lolita” in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, wearing the heart-shaped sunglasses and lasciviously licking a lollipop. This is not even a still from the film, it was a publicity photograph taken by Burt Stern. [In Kubrick’s film, Lyon, who was fourteen when it was shot, is meant to be sixteen to soften the situation for movie audiences (and censorship boards). I found it fascinating to learn that Nabokov would later remark that Catherine Demongeot, who played the title character in Louis Malle’s 1960 film Zazie dans le métro, was in fact closer to his own image of young Delores Haze!]

How do you solve a creative conundrum like Lolita? Not only is the subject matter uniquely problematic, you have its author, a towering genius of 20th century literature, telling you emphatically: “NO GIRLS.”

The genesis of the book began in 2009 when Bertram discovered Dieter Zimmer’s Covering Lolita, an online collection of nearly 200 Lolita covers from around the world and decided to sponsor a book cover competition for a new cover for Lolita. There were 155 entries from 34 countries. After the contest, Bertram was approached by Yuri Leving, the editor of the Nabokov Online Journal about writing an essay on the results. When his paper was published there, Bertram sensed there was more to say on the subject and the result is Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl, which he co-edited with Leving.

Several of the entries are seen in the book. You can see them online, too, at Bertram’s Venus febriculosa website, where he has also held a contest for “cover versions” of Brian Eno’s decidedly minimalist Music for Films album art.

Today in Los Angeles at Skylight Books in Los Feliz at 5pm, Bertram will lead a discussion regarding the art and design of Nabokov’s novel over the decades. On the panel will be Johanna Drucker, Leland De La Durantaye and Mary Gaitskill.

First prize winner by Lyuba Haleva

Design by Rachel Berger (I especially liked this one. Subtle, but powerful)

Design by Derek McCalla

Design by Aleksander Bak

Design by Barbara Bloom

 
The verdict on Norman Mailer is swayed too easily by a revulsion to his private behavior, rather than by any examination in the quality of his writing. The problem stems from Mailer himself, whose need to impose his personality and his opinions, on anyone who would listen, placed his private life on center stage. This he did without thought to the damage it would cause his literary reputation.

While his opinions were sometimes daft and offensive, it did not mean Mailer couldn’t be original and vital.

Much of his essays and journalism, which he fired off like some revolutionary pamphleteer, are crucial to an understanding of recent American history. His non-fiction books were ground-breaking, in particular his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song, which are two classics of New Journalism.

This is all well and good, but Mailer considered himself a novelist first, with ambitions to write “The Great American Novel.” This never happened. Indeed, his fiction never achieved the critical and popular success of his first novel, The Naked and The Dead, which says much.

There’s a truth in John Updike’s observation that Mailer had once the potential to be the greatest American writer of the twentieth century—if only he hadn’t squandered his talent on a desire to being a respected public figure. Writers write, they don’t run for office, or make unwatchable movies, or compensate for their own insecurity by turning everything into a fistfight.

With all this in mind, it is perhaps time for Mailer’s reputation to be reassessed. This week sees a new volume of his essays, Mind of an Outlaw (with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem)  and a new biography, Norman Mailer: A Double LIfe by Peter Lennon. Both will be published on October 15th. A book dealing with the infamous Norman Mailer/Gore Vidal spat, will be published in December. Sales of these books should give a good idea of Mailer’s current standing and relevance.

In 1966, Norman Mailer was interviewed in a documentary for Swedish television. It contains what was good and bad about Mailer—an overweening need to push his ordinary ideas (today’s word Norman is “totalitarianism”), with those occasional sparks of brilliance. It can be summed up by the know-it-all-booze-in-one-hand-Mailer versus Norman-being-a-father-and-husband, who is willing to admit he sometimes doesn’t know the answer.

(As a footnote: Nice juxtaposition to all of the above with the freeze frame below…)
 

 
What do you get the Beat-lit enthusiast who has everything? How about one of William S Burroughs’ prescription methadone bottles, filled with rocks from his grave and a shell fired from one of his guns? No lie, this is a thing you can actually obtain. San Francisco’s PBA Galleries are auctioning a MASSIVE collection of books and memorabilia, including, among many wonderful books, a first edition hardcover of Dune, a signed 1959 copy of Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island Of The Mind, a complete run of all 14 issues of Avant Garde magazine, an original drawing by Charles Bukowski, a collection of Henry Miller vinyl records, and a William Burroughs grocery list, disappointingly bereft of ammunition or narcotics. Plenty of marvelous old comics and pulp mags, as well, but nothing else in the auction even comes close to the methadone bottle in terms of sheer what-the-fuckness. Bidding opens on Thursday, October 10, at 11 AM Pacific Time.

While you’re browsing the lots and drooling over the temptations contained therein, enjoy Destroy All Rational Thought, the Burroughs/ Bryon Gysin documentary that includes one of Burroughs’ final interviews.
 

 
Who wouldn’t have wanted a postcard from Malcolm Lowry? The old sot who wrote the marvelous Under the Volcano and Lunar Caustic. And of course, apart from its literary worth, the receipt of said postcard from Malc, off boozing in some foreign clime, would reassure the recipient that there was no need to lock up the whisky, the after shave or the hair tonic.

Lowry, you see, drank anything—including all of the aforementioned. How he ever managed to get his books written, only gives evidence to his desire to write, and write well, everyday. Writing was the only thing more important than boozing.

Lowry wrote everything down in small pocket books, which provided much of the content for his novels and stories. Alas, only two of novels were published during his lifetime the semi-autobiographical Ultramarine, and the excellent Under the Volcano. The rest appeared after his untimely death by suicide, or possible murder, in 1957. Lowry ingested a large quantity of alcohol and barbiturates, the latter had been prescribed to his wife Margerie. Gordon Bowker suggests in his excellent biography Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry (1993), that an exasperated Margerie may have fed Lowry handfuls of the pills in his alcoholic stupor. It sounds possible, for who could live with such a relentless drunk? Also, Lowry would not have gone gently into that good night, without filling a notebook or two with his thoughts and feelings, and last farewells.

Since we never received that decorative missive from Mr. Lowry (“Wish you were here!” lost in the post), here is the next best thing a Tumblr site dedicated to imaginary Postcards from Malc, in which vintage postcards are tied together by Lowry’s life, letters and books.
 

 

Bowen Island, Canada December 1953

You’ve me caught me at a bad time to write a letter like because I have to catch a boat to an island whence the posts are few and far between. In fact a December Ferry to Bowen Island.

          - Letter to Albert Erskine 27/12/1953

Milan 1954

In Milan I met the translator of the Volcano and worked on it with him for a couple of weeks. It is scheduled for March publication and I understand they are going to launch it with much fanfare and publicity.

          - Letter to Harold Matson 20/11/1954

 
More postcards from Malc, after the jump…
 
Via Postcards from Malc
 

 
As I was saying earlier, I wish I had a wall of video screens so as not to miss a single second of the insanity going on in Washington, DC today. It’s such an incredible spectacle to witness. The ultimate reality show and it’s on thousands of channels at once. It’s hard for me to do anything else other than just gawk at it slack-jawed and scour the Internet for new news. I’ve been called “perpetually amused” and that description more fits me to a tee, but never have I been more amused than I have been in the past few days. Today especially.

Shit is getting GOOD. The DC follies is the greatest show on Earth now that Breaking Bad is over.

I feel like we’re just about three-quarters of the way through a movie where the bad guys are about to get their asses handed to them, but then again, maybe not. The end of this one hasn’t been written yet, so there’s genuine suspense. From where I’m sitting, it does look like the Republicans have overplayed their hand, yes, and I think the outcome to all of this self-inflicted damage is all but assured, yes to that as well, but it also seems certain that we’re going to see at least a few more twists, turns and moments of high drama—and low humor—along the way.

Anyway, in my voracious appetite for vacuuming up and processing every bit of information I can about the government shutdown and the lunatics who are at present in charge of the asylum, nowhere have I seen it put better than by THE GREATEST AMERICAN WRITER OF OUR TIME, CHARLES P. PIERCE, writing at Esquire. This is required reading:

Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress—or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress—a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn’t seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation’s insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson’s account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do—to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

Read more…

Charles P. Pierce. He’s the best of the best, right? He’s also one of the last sane men left in America. Miss his wisdom at your peril. He’s good. Mark Twain good. Hunter S. Thompson good. Joe Bageant good. Jon Stewart good. He’s damned good!

Read Charles P. Pierce daily at the Esquire Politics blog

“Peace is Tough,” Jamie Reid

And the University of Toronto R.J. Gumby Chair in Literature goes to…..

Canadian novelist David Gilmour (author of Sparrow Nights, The Perfect Order of Things) teaches a literature class at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Note that he is not Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, although you have to wonder if he has ever used a fake British accent and pretended to be the other David Gilmour (like this guy) just to get laid, taking into consideration his rather low opinion of women (see below).

Gilmour teaches a class about only authors he personally enjoys and knows well. Fair enough. That’s what happens in academia. I should know, since I have to regularly endure unavoidable social events where I hear about this or that academic’s pet mania ad nauseum to the point where I consider committing homicide with flatware.

So I’m used to hearing about entire centuries of writers or historical events written off as meaningless if they do not fall into a professor or adjunct’s personal expertise. But I hadn’t heard about an entire gender (well, except for radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly’s classes at Boston College that men weren’t allowed to take) and an array of sexual orientations written off completely in one class until yesterday.

Dammit, David Gilmour doesn’t like female writers… with the kind of condescending exception of Virginia Woolf.

He told Random House Canada’s Hazlitt magazine:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

“What Would John Wayne Read?”

Okay, so no women of any sexual orientation whatsoever. And specifically no bisexual or gay men (but maybe, just maybe, ones who look, sound, and act like “guy-guys”). 

But what about manly gay writers? Where do they fit into the curriculum? Walt Whitman, Gore Vidal, Robert Bly, Thom Gunn, or Augusten Burroughs? Does Jack Kerouac get excluded because, although he played football, he had a fling with Gore Vidal? Do butch lesbians (like Gertrude Stein) count? What about transgender writers like Leslie Feinberg?

What if a woman is straight but presents as masculine and likes guns, booze, and fishing like Hemingway did? Or does bro-ishness not save us? What if, say, a gay writer is not yet officially “out” but is posting personals ads looking for DL anonymous sex with other married men in the Lowe’s Home Improvement men’s bathroom? Does he qualify as an acceptable writer, if everyone who knows him thinks he is heterosexual??? Which basically means, you can be a passably straight gay but not a “fag”? (Sorry, Quentin.)

Novelist David Gilmour busily crushing the literary career dreams of several vagina owners—who appear to be the majority of students—in his class in 2011

In all seriousness, Gilmour can still be a good novelist while having obnoxious opinions and saying things in interviews that make him come off as ridiculous and petty. He doesn’t have to be a likeable guy to have talent. I still wouldn’t want to have a beer with him.

Maureen Johnson wrote in response to Gilmour’s doozy of an interview:

Literature is kind of full of assholes.

And that is okay. Some great books have been written by assholes. I am looking at my shelf and it is full of beloved books by known assholes, and that’s fine. Assholism is one of the most common afflictions of literature. Certainly literature and writing programs are full of them. They are like wildlife refuges for assholes.

—snip—

I will continue to read the works of assholes. I do not discriminate. We all have our faults, and there is good in everyone. And you can be an asshole in life and somehow distill something good and pure by pushing it through the grit in your system.

Below, “man” of the hour, David Gilmour, not exactly oozing machismo, with his son, discussing The Film Club:

“Bill Burrough’s Recurring Dream,” David Wojnarowicz, 1978

I think it’s safe to say that many, many more people have heard William Burroughs’ 1990 Dead City Radio album than have ever picked up one of his books and read it from cover to cover. I don’t feel this way at all, but I’ve heard from a lot of people that they think it’s the best thing Burroughs ever did.

Ignoring that uniformed sentiment and moving on, for most people, seeing the “A Thanksgiving Prayer” video every year on bOING bOING is practically the only exposure to Burroughs they’ll ever get and so therefore Dead City Radio assumes an unwarranted, out-sized importance in his body of work. (Personally I don’t find it that satisfying. Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, a selection from Burroughs’ archive of his occult reel-to-reel tape-recorder experiments, is 100x more interesting, but would be of no use whatsoever to most people who might profess to like “weird” stuff and just sound like someone messing around. That’s the material they should’ve slapped the Sonic Youth music over.)

Ultimately what can be gleamed from this is that it’s more Burroughs’ “image” than anything else about him that has so much continuing—and even widespread—iconic currency in popular culture.

Timothy Leary? Abbie Hoffman? Younger people hardly have any idea of who they were or what they were all about. William S. Burroughs on the other hand? Well, do a search for his name on Tumblr and you’ll see.

He’s well on his way to becoming as iconic as Che Guevara, James Dean or Marilyn Monroe. Give it more time, he’s only been dead since 1997. In terms of ready-made rebellious iconography for the Facebook generation, William Burroughs is the ultimate semiotic symbol for a truly dangerous mind.

So let’s celebrate him today, with a selection of lesser heard Burroughs-related musical material that’s not from Dead City Radio:
 

 
“T’aint No Sin” from The Black Rider
 

 
“Sharkey’s Night” from Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak album
 

 
Burroughs reads poetry by Jim Morrison over music by The Doors on “Is Everybody In?”
 

 
Guesting with Ministry on “Just One Fix.”
 

 
“Star Me Kitten” William Burroughs and R.E.M. (This comes from the Songs in the Key of X-Files album. It’s terrible. Loutallica terrible!)
 

 
“What Keeps Mankind Alive?” from Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, as heard on September Songs

 
In 1966 Thomas Pynchon published The Crying of Lot 49 to moderate acclaim. Groovy and jazzy, the novel, which centers on Oedipa Maas’ wiggy uncovering of the machinations, if such they be, of the malign Thurn und Taxis postal network, has proven over the years to be one of Pynchon’s most accessible and popular works. (It’s the one to start with, if you haven’t read any Pynchon.)

A year earlier, a Lithuanian-French writer named Romain Gary, known to me exclusively as the author of the source material upon which Sam Fuller’s late masterpiece White Dog was based, published a book called The Ski Bum. Gary noticed a discomfiting synchronicity: one of the characters in The Crying of Lot 49 had the same name as one of the characters in The Ski Bum.

This annoyed Gary, so he wrote to The New York Times to complain about it.
 

To the Editor:

With reference to Thomas Pynchon’s book “The Crying of Lot 49” I feel obliged to point out that the name “Genghis Cohn” has been borrowed by this author from my novel “The Ski Bum,” published one year ago. The name appears also in the title of my forthcoming novel “The Dance of Genghis Cohn.”

ROMAIN GARY

Paris.

 
On July 17, 1966, Pynchon’s reply appeared as follows:
 

To the Editor:

In a recent letter to the editor, Romain Gary asserts that I took the name “Genghis Cohn” from a novel of his to use in a novel of mine, “The Crying of Lot 49.” Mr. Gary is totally in error. I have never read, skimmed, or otherwise seen any of his novels. I took the name Genghis Cohen from the name of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the well-known Mongol warrior and statesman. If Mr. Gary really believes himself to be the only writer at present able to arrive at a play on words this trivial, that is another problem entirely, perhaps more psychiatric than literary, and I certainly hope he works it out.

THOMAS PYNCHON

New York City.

 

The 1966 exchange in The New York Times

 
A new ad for Dewar’s Scotch whiskey uses Charles Bukowski’s famous poem, “So You Want to Be a Writer,” to hawk their booze. The reading is quite beautiful, the kind of pathos-rendering performance one wishes they had first heard outside of an advertisement. Now, I’m way past caring about hearing my favorite song in a commercial. First of all, no one is dumb enough to think the artist or band is actually endorsing a project. Secondly, making money off of music is really difficult, so I’m pretty sympathetic to whatever artists or their surviving family have to do to make ends meet. This Dewar’s ad however, rubs me the wrong way, and I can’t quite figure out why it’s so different.

Maybe it’s because music is capable of being such a passive experience, while this kind of poetry requires a more focused engagement. Yes, we’ve all gotten wasted, put on the headphones, and listened to ABBA with a fevered intensity (or maybe that’s just me?), but most of the time, we have music playing while we commute, clean the house, type away at work, take care of the kids, or do whatever mundane task the day requires of us. Most music is art that we can fit into the nooks and crannies of our lives—a soundtrack—but this kind of poetry requires a bit of space, and a bit of time.

Or maybe It’s because this poem has always rubbed me the wrong way, as an anthem of creative onus. I’ve always felt it odd that someone would list off the many “wrong” ways to make art, as if it’s some sort of orthodox religion. And the idea that art should only be produced in a flash of inspiration or passion has been argued against by so many artists. Sometimes things take time, first drafts, second drafts, 134th drafts. Sometimes the failures and near-misses of creation are what’s necessary to really transform a project into something great. Sometimes creation is a schlep. Sometimes ideas and work needs to age (like a good whiskey!).

Or maybe I just don’t like the ad because I think Dewar’s is terrible Scotch?
 

 
Via Open Culture

Image via OzHouse

Novelist, essayist, spiritual seeker, intellectual, humanist, and advocate for careful experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

Aldous Huxley loved California.

He enjoyed the open-mindedness, interest in Eastern religions, and cultural curiosity he encountered in America, along with the companionship of colleagues like Alan Watts, Christopher Wood, and Esalen founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Alan Watts and Felix Greene called Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Christopher Isherwood – all passionately interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Swami Prabhavananda – “the British mystical expatriates of southern California.”

On March 20, 1962 Huxley gave a lecture, “The Ultimate Revolution,” at the University of California at Berkeley. He warned his listeners about totalitarianism and how future oligarchs will ensure that people enjoy their servitude. Maybe we should add “prophet” to his list of accomplishments.

Huxley, “The Ultimate Revolution,” full lecture: