Marilyn

We have a tender scene between Marilyn and Ted Kennedy, yes, the third Kennedy brother.

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At a secluded spot, he sat down with her on the sands, putting his arm around her. The night was warm, the ocean breezes refreshing. “So you decided to follow your brother into politics,” she said.

“It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “I didn’t want to run for the Senate. Actually, Joan and I were considering moving to Arizona to escape Dad’s trying to run my life. But he summoned me back. He said, ‘Jack is president and your brother is Attorney General. You’re going to get your fat ass in gear and run for the Senate. I paid for that damn seat. It belongs to the Kennedy family.’”

“Once you get there, do you plan to stay there forever?” she asked.

“No, Dad has other plans for me,” he said. “Jack will run for President again in 1964, Bobby in 1968 and 1972, and me in 1976 and 1980. I’ll be third in line, following in their footsteps.”

She giggled, “You’re certainly following in their footsteps with me.”

“I don’t like to think about that,” he said, rising to her feet and extending a hand. “Let’s go back to the house.”

-- Darwin Porter, “Marilyn at Rainbow’s End”

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( Pics )

Lo (N) Under Fire In Russia

Nabokov, in a sense, is being ousted from his birth country of Russia, again. The nation's rightward lurch under Putin has newly made "Lolita" an outcast, as the actor Leonid Mozgovoy and producer Anton Suslov can attest.

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And sometimes, in his natural hair, he becomes Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” a one-man show featuring Humbert reading his own story out loud, that has played in Saint Petersburg on and off over the last two decades. When it was first staged, the monologue had to pass muster with the khudsovet, a Soviet censorship organ. It did. “They said I perform it rather chastely,” Mozgovoy recalled in an interview.

On a snowy night in early 2013, “Lolita” went up once again, unchanged, but it had suddenly become the most scandalous show in town. The performance had been postponed since last October amid threats to Mozgovoy and others. In January, three men jumped the play’s twenty-four-year-old producer, Anton Suslov, giving him two black eyes and a concussion while calling him a “pedophile”; a murky video of the beating was posted online. The same libel was slashed in spray paint across the walls of the Nabokov museum in St. Petersburg and the writer’s ancestral estate in Rozhdestveno, about fifty miles from the city. Anonymous activists had petitioned to have the play banned, the museum closed, and Nabokov’s books purged from stores. The author, whose novels thrum with ironic recurrences, might have been perversely pleased with this: thirty-six years after his death and twenty-two years after the fall of the Soviet Union with all its khudsovets, Vladimir Nabokov is, once again, controversial.

-- Michael Idov at The New Yorker

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I rather dread this becoming true of America one day as well. One does not hear any rumblings as yet, but I imagine it is a contest between our First Amendment and our bruised sensitivity toward child abuse. Today the First Amendment prevails fairly uncontested, but when one considers the state of the Republican Party, who can be very confident over how matters will stand in even ten years?

Saturday, March 2, 2013

The day began congenially enough. A sort of perfect Saturday. I woke up a bit early. Almost a five o’clock morning. Since Pop was gone. I gave up on sleep at about six in favor of grabbing the laptop and bringing it to bed and spending close to two hours on xnxx.com, wanking to Japanese and Russian porn. I was due for a shower anyway, and it was good to discharge that sexual energy and free up my day and think about something besides sex.

A few notes.

First, I broke the cat plate. I was putting away some of the can goods from the groceries, and I dropped a can of sweet potatoes. I expected a mess, but I was surprised to see that it shattered the plate. A first. No biggie. A cheap plastic thingy. I got another yellow plate, one that is probably even a little better, with a rising outer ridge.

Second, I was excited when I saw that someone friended me. I assumed it was from all that action on my post on rape and guns, which finally settled off at 345 comments. That could be a record. Ms. Archivist even posted it on the “Stupid Free” community to give Jeff a few good kicks to the butt, which meant even more exposure for moi, though I did worry that I might end up getting some boots myself.

So, when I saw the ‘friend’ request in my inbox, I figured some people took a look at my journal and someone decided to join the party. A college girl maybe? Not even close. It’s not even a real person. It’s a spammer - the closest thing in e-life to a junk-mailer. Nada. Nothing. No Ms. Oleander Rue.

Maybe I should hide my age on my profile page, or maybe lie outright and say I am twenty-five. But why delay the reckoning, build up a flirtation and then watch it burn in flames? Besides, I should be resolved already on the cold reality that I am never going to have another good e-friend, much less a chance at real romance. A little topical chat at a few of LJ’s communities is pretty much all I’m good for now, and I should be glad to have that, with Facebook and Twitter sucking up just about all of that action.

Third, I did not feel like book-blogging “Hamlet” today, and I realized that it also has been a week since I have advanced the ball on my Three Journal. I am still in the middle of my “Pre-empting Jihad” debate. I just didn’t feel the creative vibe, if one may call it that.

I spent more time reading, and that should be fine. It is not like anyone is interested in my book-blogging, and nobody even knows about the Three Journal. I have no audience that I need to satisfy. I have to remind myself that these projects are just for me, something to have ready to go whenever I am feeling a little creatively restless and feel like spending some serious time working on my writing, when I feel like I am actually drowning in unstructured time and need to do something besides browse through Tumblr pictures, or when I feel a real bad need to re-live some of the good old e-times of times past, when I had something that was a lot like having friends. Other than that, yeah, reading good books works for me. If only one did not have to feel so damn sterile in it.