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My Dad Published Lolita

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Re: My Dad Published Lolita

#31

Post by Duennepaper »

throwaway4115 wrote: post #30
Duennepaper wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might sound like someone who doesn't understand 'freedom of speech'. This does not allow you to do whatever you want. In germany for example it is written like this: "These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour." And its not different in the USA, you have limitations as well as the general good is mo…

> [Freedom of speech] rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour. You seem to imply that controversial written erotica shouldn’t be covered by freedom of speech protections, as it would be in the name of protecting children. Do you think censoring it would reduce the incidence of child abuse? If so, would ban…

No, my argument is, that 'freedom of speech' doesn't allow everything as the author indicates. Thats not even something i have an opinion on, the law already defines that and i highly suspect that it falls under usa laws as it does for germany.

Like laws going in direction of 'proection of minors'.

I'm not sure if you are allowed to just put a website online which is advocating for pedophility (lets keep the extreme to simplify). But here is where youth laws require you to make sure kids can't access it.

Same goes for GTA, you also have youth laws protecting them.

The author is probably part of a subcultural group of people in their own bubble. I highly doubt that his experience is in any way ever statistically relevant enough and reaches any majority at all.

And just to clarify one thing: i don't care about known fetishes or weird erotica. Let people read and write what they want but its easy to cross lines in fiction you wouldn't dare in real life but starting to getting used to the thoughts, images and ideas.

How do you think would freely advocate that kids should express their sexuality as it is just 'normal'? Kids which are just playing and learning and perhaps lern to touch themselves as a normal growing up process or adults sexualising those kids? No kid needs an adult supporter to learn how to masturbate and there are 1000x more important things for people to learn like taxes before they should learn how to have a very diverse sex live in their adult life.

Don't get me wrong, we do put a lot of stigma on it as a society but its probably better to advocate to the adults and not to minors at all.

Clear line.

Re: My Dad Published Lolita

#34

Post by [deleted] »

buisi wrote: post #10
nanoscopic wrote: post #6

The actual article title is "How Would the Publishing World Respond to Lolita Today?" The title here is a small bit from the article. Unless the submitter here is the author I don't think it's appropriate to link this article under this title. The article consists of the story of how Lolita was published in the US mixed with background on the political setting of the era it was published in. The overall claim of the…

> the world has reached a point where it is broadly understood that written erotica is freedom of speech and trying to ban it or make it stop is pointless. Unfortunately, this isn't entirely true, even today. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3a8nv3/canadian-author-charg... This is the most famous recent one. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/man-convicted-multiple-obscen... There is also a Texas Man, by the name of Thoma…

[deleted]

Re: My Dad Published Lolita

#35

Post by [deleted] »

Duennepaper wrote: post #24
nanoscopic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. This is a fair point. I go way out of my way to discourage underage visitors to the erotica website I run, and I do agree that there is tremendous sensitivity in the current era towards the notion of anything sexual involving children. Despite that, I don't think such sensitivity is unreasonable. I do believe that children are sexual from quite an early age, and that that should be accepted and encouraged fr…

"I do believe that children are sexual from quite an early age, and that that should be accepted and encouraged from a sexual wellness perspective." wtf?

[deleted]

Re: My Dad Published Lolita

#36

Post by grey-area »

nanoscopic wrote: post #6

The actual article title is "How Would the Publishing World Respond to Lolita Today?" The title here is a small bit from the article. Unless the submitter here is the author I don't think it's appropriate to link this article under this title. The article consists of the story of how Lolita was published in the US mixed with background on the political setting of the era it was published in. The overall claim of the…

Lolita is not erotica

Re: My Dad Published Lolita

#37

Post by javajosh »

BayAreaEscapee wrote: post #28
grey-area wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a remarkable story on many levels. It's also very disturbing, as it manages to make you feel sympathy for an odious character. I did end up wondering how Nabokov could so completely imagine this world and this character, which was also troubling. I don't think anyone is ready to read this as a child, not because it is going to corrupt children (who are routinely exposed to exactly this sort of manipulation in t…

My father reads voraciously. Whenever we talked about a book I was assigned in high school, he would say, "Literature is wasted on the young." Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.

The median age of working adults is probably around 40 or so, including those who's job it is to evaluate literature for use in schools. So it makes sense that you'd appreciate their choices more when you turn 40 or so.

This is an interesting situation, because it creates a reading list that is a "projected aspiration". We hope, I guess, that kids will read precociously. Education is, after all, the teaching of civilization's most important messages compressed into a fixed, very short time-span. School gets kids "caught up" on the civilizational conversations about things. But so much of the art and literature of humanity is like Lolita, in that it requires lots of actual living to appreciate (unlike algebra), so its position is...odd.

I wonder if, by being exposed to these things at a young age, we give kids a "shared coordinate system" to interpret and express their world, and so shape their choices in it.

Re: My Dad Published Lolita

#38

Post by Bodell »

mordechai9000 wrote: post #8

I just reread Lolita at 45, for the first time since I was 14. I slogged through it the first time, and didn't particularly enjoy it. All I remember from the first reading is that HH seemed kind of icky. I was barely older than Delores was in the first half of the novel, and I didn't really understand all the implications. I probably skimmed a great deal of the book without paying attention to it. Much of the subtlet…

I too read this around 14 and have revisited recently at 30. I was most intrigued by the but I fully written sentences when I was younger but now I’m older see it in a much more complicated light. A good sort of complication.

I think of Lolita as a puzzle of a story. There are quite a few clues that lead to a metaphor that make since of HH’s proclamations at the end. I think Nabokov was satirizing himself as an artist through HH’s character. This view makes Delores the incarnation of “art” and HH the artist. The artist “loves” art as it affirms his whole life and reason for being. He seeks to control art, own it, and manipulate it for his own purposes. HH does not realize till the end that art/Delores lives and breaths on its/her own and that this autonomy outside of his control is truly what makes her her and art beautiful. Her struggle becomes real to him in the end, even if only a glimpse he does to me seem to actually recognize her as something separate not something he owns. He sees that seeking to calcify art only kills what was special about it in the first place; something like worshiping a corpse.

It reminded me of a statement David foster Wallace said once. (I’m paraphrasing heavily here) when I’m done with a book I’m dead and the book lives on through the readers. I think he was trying to say that he does not control the ultimate meaning of his own work and if he did it would be the other way around his book/art would be dead.

Amy Hungerford has 3 lectures on Lolita this is the 2nd one given by a guest speaker. I suggest all of them (Hungerford is a great literary analyst) but this one is a compelling argument for the above. https://youtu.be/QPnxLNFzA8s

Re: My Dad Published Lolita

#39

Post by [deleted] »

Duennepaper wrote: post #24
nanoscopic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. This is a fair point. I go way out of my way to discourage underage visitors to the erotica website I run, and I do agree that there is tremendous sensitivity in the current era towards the notion of anything sexual involving children. Despite that, I don't think such sensitivity is unreasonable. I do believe that children are sexual from quite an early age, and that that should be accepted and encouraged fr…

"I do believe that children are sexual from quite an early age, and that that should be accepted and encouraged from a sexual wellness perspective." wtf?

[deleted]

Re: My Dad Published Lolita

#40

Post by jfengel »

BayAreaEscapee wrote: post #28
grey-area wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a remarkable story on many levels. It's also very disturbing, as it manages to make you feel sympathy for an odious character. I did end up wondering how Nabokov could so completely imagine this world and this character, which was also troubling. I don't think anyone is ready to read this as a child, not because it is going to corrupt children (who are routinely exposed to exactly this sort of manipulation in t…

My father reads voraciously. Whenever we talked about a book I was assigned in high school, he would say, "Literature is wasted on the young." Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.

Literature, history, and math are all wasted on the young. We get exposed to a lot of things that we don't understand and can't appreciate, in the hopes that it will click for us later.

I honestly don't know if that really works, or if it's just cargo cult. I do know that I considered my English classes, and now I run a Shakespeare theater troupe. Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I can't tell if I'm here because, despite, or totally disconnected from my education.

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