Nabokov and the Moment of Truth. VN talks about metaphors of time, great books, and reads the first line of Lolita. [more inside]
posted by mattbucher on Nov 14, 2008 - 18 comments

Vladimir Nabokov discusses Lolita with Lionel Trilling. [more inside]
posted by mattbucher on Apr 3, 2008 - 23 comments

Buying a new bed for your daughter?. How about this little number, with a cheeky, precocious, contemporary culture-aware name. And pull-out desk, did I mention the built-in cupboard?
Mothers aren't concerned about the pull-out desk; they're concerned about the young girls' bed being called "Lolita". [more inside]
posted by NinjaTadpole on Feb 1, 2008 - 72 comments

The cover of 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' symbolises the way anti-Iranian propaganda in the U.S. works:

The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.

The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are "Reading Lolita"--with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of "in Tehran." In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem.

Read Hamid Dabashi's full essay 'Native informers and the making of the American empire.'
posted by hoder on Feb 22, 2007 - 67 comments

The appeal of Gothic Lolita fashion continues to grow and evolve. Originally seen in Japan, it has spread worldwide and into the toy shops. Potentially NSFW
posted by bigmusic on Jun 19, 2006 - 68 comments

Christopher Hitchens, grumpy political type, on the blow job.
posted by Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson on Jun 7, 2006 - 64 comments

Every Sunday, it's Halloween in Harajuku. Hanging out by the train station at Tokyo's most fashionable district are young women dressed as nurses, but with white faces and a trickle of painted blood dripping from a lip. Men in their late teens or early twenties fidget under huge manes of spiky green hair and layers of black leather.
Some really amazing costumes can be seen here. And by amazing I mean interesting, and by interesting I mean freaky.
posted by Jase_B on Jul 19, 2004 - 30 comments