The Natural World

Practice Swat! by Todd Ryburn on Flickr.

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Lo (1,11) Hummy the Spider

Hummy is still cribbing from his diary from that prelapsarian summer when he was living in the same house with Lolita but had yet to cross the carnal line, being content to live in longing.

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I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in the old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Just heard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato sound as it turned; and no footfalls has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to her room. Is she still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo performs with real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just slammed, so one has to feel elsewhere about the house for the beautiful warm-colored prey.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

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Joan Rivers, Dead at 81

Joan Rivers, the raspy loudmouth who pounced on America’s obsessions with flab, face-lifts, body hair and other blemishes of neurotic life, including her own, in five decades of caustic comedy that propelled her from nightclubs to television to international stardom, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 81.

-- New York Times

I was not a real fan, but it was hard not to notice her. I primarily remember her for the rupture in her professional relationship with Johnny Carson, when she accepted to host another chat show opposite his. Her passing is a cultural landmark. I suppose she was key in opening the way for women comics.

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