More Rain

My god, more rain! I was hoping to let the cats out tomorrow. Sammy is going bonkers.

Maybe I should be more worried about my back. It's really acting up on me this morning. I think it's because of all the wanking - all that lower-spine curving and pumping. It's not like I slipped a disk; it's not that crippling, but it feels close to that, almost as bad. And I have worry if backs don't spring back as readily when one is older.

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0845

Fuck, it's turned into a whopping storm. Maybe I should be more worried about the house getting flooded. The water is now riding up on the patio, and the storm isn't getting any weaker.

Lolita

Saluting Nabokov’s disturbing but “irresistible” novel, Amis calls it a “tale of chronic molestation” that is at once “tragic” and “embarrassingly funny,” “perhaps the funniest novel in the language.”

-- Ellen Pifer, “Introduction” in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook ed. by Ellen Pifer

It is perhaps also the most perverted, lusty book to make its way into Main Street society. Ms. Pifer also gives us this quotation from Martin Amis, a sentiment that many of us can appreciate.

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“I have read Lolita eight or nine times, and not always in the same edition; but the margins of my staple hardback bear a Pompeiian litter of ticks, queries, exclamation marks, and lines straight and squiggly and doubled and tripled. My penciled comments, I realize, form a kind of surrealistic summary of the whole. … Clearly these are not a scholar’s notes, and they move toward no new edifice of understanding or completion. They are gasps of continually renewed surprise. I expect to read the novel many more times. And I am running out of white space.”

-- Martin Amis

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Amazon

My orders at Amazon are making my nose bleed. I saw Northrop Frye's book on William Blake, "Fearful Symmetry", and although I should know better than to venture so ambitiously, Frye's book looks so accessible and fascinating. At thirty dollars, it goes a long way toward clearing my little stash of cash. I also had to get Eric Bogosian's "Suburbia", which measures in at twelve dollars. I hope I haven't forgotten anything in my record-keeping, because I have not left myself a lot of slack.