GTA

I am returning to my reading and blogging life, instead of immersing myself back in the GTA world. My hopes were really jacked up too, especially when I got the option to take a stripper home. Might it not be at least as fun as picking up a whore? It isn't. It is largely just another driving exercise, as the two characters walk into a building together, with the guy coming out happy. You have to imagine the rest on your own. I did not pay sixty dollars to have to use my imagination. That took the air out of my balloon.

I still want to see what the game has to offer, but there is no joyful expectancy in it. I will presumably make the time, but I am not sure how. I'll just pick a morning or afternoon session here and there. If time were infinite, or even if I had only a few hundred years to fiddle around with, I would gladly take a little video-game vacation now and again. But my time is not that open-ended, and it feels like tough choices have to be made. My books are a lot more satisfying.

Kay

And Kay is here. She did not come in her white truck, but in Pop's car. Yesterday, Pop did some serious housecleaning, even mopping up the floors, and without getting on my case. She will be here for more than a couple of days this time. On the other hand, they will leave for Shiner this weekend, leaving on Saturday morning and returning on Sunday, probably until noon.

Lo (N) Christopher Hitchens on "Lolita"

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Is there anything more tragic than the last leave-taking between between Humbert-Humbert and Dolores Haze (his very own “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins”)? They meet in the dreary shack where she has removed herself to become a ground-down baby machine for some prole. Not only does she tell Humbert that she will never see him again, but she also maddens him by describing the “weird, filthy, fancy things” to which she was exposed by his hated rival, Quilty. “What things exactly?” he asks, in a calm voice where the word “exactly” makes us hear his almost unutterably low growl of misery and rage. “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to (she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler) your beastly boys…”

Souffler is the verb “to blow.” In its past participle, it can describe a light but delicious dessert that, well, melts on the tongue. It has often been said, slightly suggestively, that “you cannot make a soufflé rise twice.” Vladimir Nabokov spoke perfect Russian and French before he became the unrivaled master of English prose, and his 1955 masterpiece, Lolita, was considered the most transgressive book ever published. (It may still be.) Why, then, could he not bring himself to write the words “blow” or “blowjob”?

-- Christopher Hitchens, “As American as Apple Pie” in Arguably

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For being as nasty as the book was, about men having their way with junior-high girls, it was important to keep the level of discourse on a more gentlemanly plane. I also think it became a joke for Nabokov: to be so clean and refined of speech while being so full and foul of sexual misdeeds.

Cats and the Weather

I decided to let the cats go outside. I don't know if this is the smartest thing I've ever done. The sky looks a little iffy, but they are only forecasting a 30% chance of rain for midnight, and I know that Coco and Sammy are hurting to run wild. I decided to take my chances.

Surprisingly, Ash does not want to go outside. She runs away from me when I try to grab her. I know she knows what this is about, and she simply doesn't want to leave, at least not yet. That's great by me. I wish they all preferred the comforts of home all the time. You just cannot beat this air-conditioning.