Ageless Lolita

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.

My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.

- Humbert's poem (from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov)

Nabokov's beautiful, disturbing work stands as one of the most impressive displays of language in American literature, as well as an awesome dissection of the complex anatomy of love. The sheer joy of its sentences, the nuance of its evocations, are certainly the main reasons it has endured and why it seems assured of a readership another 50 years from now. But it is worth exploring another aspect of that masterpiece, a moral examination that would have prompted Nabokov, who championed aesthetics above all, to incinerate with a laser glare any fool who poked round such a topic. (...)

(there is an article here that Blogger won't show, for whatever reason. Click on the line to see the article.)

- From: San Francisco Chronicle

I would really like to get my hands on Kubric's 1962 adaptation of Lolita. The best I could do for now is the 1997 re-make which I enjoy even though Lo is too old.