This file contains a bunch of notes I made while reading Lolita. These are all things that I had to or decided to look up while reading the novel.
Phocine (Chapter 1.11, Paragraph 7):
Used to describe Charlotte.
Perhaps a typo of "porcine"?
DEFINED!
Seal-like
SEAL[2] (seel) n
--n. 1. Any of various aquatic, carnivorous mammals of the
families Phocidae and Otariidae, having a sleek,
torpedo-shaped body and limbs that are modified
into paddlelike flippers.
Olisbos-like (Chapter 1.22, Paragraph 2):
Used to describe a flashlight.
Obelisklike?
DEFINED!
Phallic
An olisbos was a leather phallus worn by
Greek revellers.
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 1998 13:38:33 -0800
From: Research & Information Unit
Subject: olisbos
olisbos is literally a 'slipper', can also be made of wood.
Referred to also in Sappho, although the context is uncertain.
an olisbokollix is a loaf of bread shaped like the same.
Edusively (Chapter 2.15, Paragraph 2):
"Effusively. Edusively. (placed!)"
Used to describe Edusa Gold (drama coach).
Possibly just a pun on her name.
Flavid (Chapter 2.35, The Poem):
"ripping his flavid toga"
Flavius? Assassinated Roman Generals...
DEFINED!
Yellow.
FLAVIN (FLAY'vin) n.
--n. 1. Any of various water-soluble *yellow* pigments, including
riboflavin, found in plant and animal tissue as coenzymes of
flavoprotein.
Text The Latin poet Gaius Valerius CATULLUS, c.84-54 BC, is known
chiefly for his poems to his mistress Lesbia, which since the
16th century have been widely imitated by English poets. They
include poems of infatuation, of despair, and of obscene
vituperation.
Little is known about the life of CATULLUS except what can be
reconstructed from his poems. Only one copy of his works
survived the Middle Ages; it was discovered in his birthplace,
Verona, early in the 14th century. In all, CATULLUS left a
small but spirited collection of 116 poems written in various
meters. His verse includes longer poems in the learned Greek
style, erotic verse to a boy named Juventius, and occasional
poems on subjects ranging from the bad manners of dinner
companions to the sexual excesses of Julius Caesar.
CATULLUS virtually made a religion of his love for Lesbia--in
reality, Clodia, sister of Cicero's arch enemy, Clodius
Pulcher. For him she was almost a divinity, someone in whose
service, or servitude, a life could be well spent. In this
respect, CATULLUS was the precursor of the love poets of the
next generation--OVID, PROPERTIUS, and TIBULLUS--as well as of
the medieval tradition of COURTLY LOVE. His poetry is widely
considered the epitome of lyricism, of direct and impassioned
sincerity; yet his verse is also learned and allusive. Its
union of passion and elegance suggests that CATULLUS wrote with
one eye on his mistress and the other on the Greek poets,
especially Callimachus and Sappho. STEELE COMMAGER
Biblio. Bibliography: Ferguson, J., CATULLUS (1985); Havelock, Eric
A., The Lyric Genius of CATULLUS (1939; repr. 1967); Quinn,
Kenneth, ed., CATULLUS, Poems (1970), Approaches to CATULLUS
(1972), and CATULLUS (1973); Ross, David O., Jr., Style and
Tradition in CATULLUS (1969); Wigham, Peter, Poems of CATULLUS
(1966); Wiseman, T. P., CATULLUS and His World (1985).
Text Phineas Parkhurst QUIMBY, b. Lebanon, N.H., Feb. 16, 1802, d.
Jan. 16, 1866, developed a philosophy of mental healing that
laid the foundation for NEW THOUGHT. At first a hypnotist, he
turned to mental healing in the belief that he had rediscovered
the secret of Jesus' healing ministry. He held that all disease
is an error of the mind and could be cured by a proper
understanding of the relation between the divine and the human.
One of QUIMBY's patients was Mary Baker EDDY, who may have
derived from him the inspiration for CHRISTIAN SCIENCE; she
denied this, however. The New Thought movement grew out of the
"mental science" of another QUIMBY patient, Warren Felt Evans.
Biblio. Bibliography: Dresser, H. W., ed., The QUIMBY Manuscripts
(1921); Hawkins, Ann B., Phineas Parkhurst QUIMBY (1970).
Article Number
0240520-0
Text {nah-baw'-kawv, vlah-dee'-mir}
One of the 20th century's master craftsmen of fiction, Vladimir
Vladimirovich NABOKOV, b. Saint Petersburg, Apr. 23, 1899, d.
Montreux, Switzerland, July 2, 1977, was born into a family of
cosmopolitan Russian aristocrats. At a very early age he
learned English and French, becoming in his words, "a perfectly
normal trilingual child." He settled on a literary career while
still in his teens, publishing his first two volumes of Russian
verse in 1914 and 1918. He also won recognition as an expert
on butterflies, an interest that proved lifelong. He was
educated at the Tenishev Academy in Saint Petersburg, and after
the Russian Revolution continued his studies at Cambridge
University, where he earned a B.A. in Slavic and Romance
languages in 1922.
The years NABOKOV spent among Russian emigre circles in Berlin
(1922-37) and Paris (1937-40) constituted the first mature
phase of his writing career. There, in addition to a quantity
of poems, plays, and short stories, he published nine complete
Russian novels under the pseudonym V. Sirin. Brilliantly
playful and inventive in style, tone, and point of view, these
works--notably Laughter in the Dark (1932; Eng. trans.,
1938), Despair (1936; Eng. trans., 1937), and Invitation to a
Beheading (1938; Eng. trans., 1959)--revealed NABOKOV's
affinities with those writers, from Laurence Sterne to James
Joyce, who had treated fiction as in part a game.
Before moving with his wife and son to the United States in
1940, NABOKOV tested his skill as an English-language novelist
by writing The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Although
somewhat uncertain in its final effect, the book showed a high
level of verbal and narrative proficiency and--along with a
stronger second English novel, Bend Sinister (1947)--brought
him both recognition (Guggenheim grants for writing in 1943 and
1952) and academic employment, first at Stanford, then at
Wellesley, and finally at Cornell (1948-59). The latter
university provided the background for his satirical portrait
of a bumbling Russian emigre professor, Pnin (1957).
NABOKOV became famous in 1958 upon publication of the American
edition of his wildly amusing, highly idiosyncratic
masterpiece, Lolita (first published in Paris, 1955). This
success gave him financial independence--he abandoned his
teaching career for full-time writing and moved to Switzerland
in 1959--and provided him with an opportunity to prepare
English-language versions of his Russian novels.
NABOKOV's reputation reached a peak with the appearance of
still later novels in English. Pale Fire (1962) proved to be
NABOKOV's most elaborate "game." Consisting of a 999-line poem,
supposedly written by a recently deceased American poet, and an
extensive commentary, supposedly written by one of the poet's
university colleagues, the novel becomes at another level the
confession of a mad king exiled from a country much like
Russia.
The idea of obsession with forbidden erotic pleasures, which
accounted for so much of the success and controversy
surrounding Lolita, was explored even more fully in Ada (1969).
The text is a fictional narrator's memoir, written when he is
in his 90s, memorializing his long love affair with his sister,
the title character. Although engaging, the last novels,
Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins] (1974),
were not as powerful as their forerunners.
Because he so passionately rejected the idea of fiction as a
vehicle for social and moral messages, and so thoroughly
adopted the aesthetic point of view, NABOKOV alienated a large
group of readers. Nevertheless, few writers have matched the
precision and vividness of his images, the lyricism of his
sentences, or the complexity and richness of formal patterning
in his fictional worlds. DONALD E. MORTON
Biblio. Bibliography: Appel, Alfred, Jr., NABOKOV's Dark Cinema
(1974); Bader, Julia, Crystal Land: Artifice in NABOKOV's
English Novels (1972); Boyd, Brian, Vladimir NABOKOV: The
Russian Years (1990); Dembo, L. S., ed., NABOKOV: The Man
and His Work (1967); Field, Andrew, NABOKOV: His Life in Art
(1967) and NABOKOV: His Life in Part (1977); Fowler, Douglas,
Reading NABOKOV (1974); Lee, Lawrence L., Vladimir NABOKOV
(1976); Morton, Donald E., Vladimir NABOKOV (1974); NABOKOV,
Vladimir, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, rev. ed.
(1966) and Selected Letters, 1940-1977, edited by Dmitri
NABOKOV and Matthew J. Bruccoli (1989); Stegner, Page, Escape
Into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir NABOKOV (1966); Stuart,
Dabney, NABOKOV: The Dimensions of Parody (1978).
Article Number
0202840-0
Text MELANIE Klein, b. Vienna, Mar. 30, 1882, d. London, Sept. 24,
1960, pioneered in the psychoanalysis of children and invented
play therapy. Klein's analyses of infantile and child
development have been of key importance to psychoanalytic
theory on personality development. In particular, she studied
the earliest beginnings of the Oedipus complex and superego and
analyzed personality origins in terms of paranoid- schizoid and
depressive patterns.
Biblio. Bibliography: Segal, Hanna, Introduction to the Work of MELANIE
Klein, 2d ed. (1974).
Text {vys}
A German playwright and novelist who has helped develop the
concept of documentary drama, Peter WEISS, b. Nov. 8, 1916, is
most famous for his play Marat/Sade, which uses the French
insane asylum of Charenton in 1808 as a metaphorical image of
contemporary society. After being forced to leave Germany in
1934, WEISS eventually settled in Sweden, where he established
himself as a painter and as a director of avant-garde films.
His first three plays--The Tower (1948; Eng. trans., 1966), Die
Versicherung (Insurance, 1952), and Night with Guests (1963;
Eng. trans., 1968)--show the influence of Kafka and the French
THEATER OF THE ABSURD. With Marat/Sade (1963; Eng. trans.,
1965; film, 1966), WEISS's political perspective changed, and
in his next three plays, all experiments in documentary
theater--The Investigation (1965; Eng. trans., 1966), Song of
the Lusitanian Bogey (1965; Eng. trans., 1970), and Vietnam
Discourse (1968; Eng. trans., 1970)--he employed the alienation
techniques developed by Bertolt BRECHT to raise the audience's
social consciousness to explore different kinds of political
and racial oppression. WEISS has also published a series of
autobiographical novels and stories, notably Leavetaking (1961;
Eng. trans., 1962) and Vanishing Point (1962; Eng. trans.,
1966). JACK ZIPES
Biblio. Bibliography: Best, Otto F., Peter WEISS, trans. by Ursule
Molinaro (1976); Hilton, Ian, Peter WEISS: A Search for
Affinities (1970).
Article Number
0309800-0
Word VAIR (var) n.
Definition --n. 1. A fur, probably squirrel, much used in medieval times
to line and trim robes. 2. A heraldic representation of fur.
Etymology ME vaire < OFr. VAIR < Lat. varius, variegated.
Domain Art, Politics
Word CANTRIP (KAN'trip) n.
Definition --n. 1. A magic spell; a witch's trick. 2. A mischievous
trick; prank.
Usage Scot.
Etymology Orig. unknown.
Domain British
Word PROCRUSTEAN also PROCRUSTEAN (proh-KRUHS'tee-uhn) adj.
Definition --adj. 1. Producing or designed to produce conformity by
ruthless or arbitrary means. 2. Having merciless disregard
for individual differences or special circumstances.
Etymology After Procrustes, a mythical Greek giant who stretched or
shortened captives to make them fit his beds < prokrouein, to
stretch out : pro-, forth + krouein, to beat.
Word PROCRUSTEAN bed also PROCRUSTEAN bed n.
Word PROCRUSTEAN bed also PROCRUSTEAN bed n.
Definition --n. An arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.
[The Grafted Branch]
[