In response to The Rat and his Funny Games

James posted an interesting blog about Lolita and the film Funny Games. It got me thinking about pieces of fiction (be they novels or film or comics) that make you feel uncomfortable and sometimes outraged but are none the less intriguing and enjoyable.

What makes art really worth sitting through? Lolita is the perfect novel for this sort of question but there are others that are quite disturbing, Naked Lunch for instance, although i have never finished that book so I shall not discuss it further. However there is a disgusting, foul, vulgar book I have finished and thoroughly enjoyed. Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis is, like Lolita, a detective novel, about the search for the real constitution of the united states, a piece of writing so influential that simply hearing it read aloud will compel you to do whatever it tells you to do. Throughout the book the hero faces bestiality, public masturbation, sadistic ritualistic murder, and sexual threats from elderly senators (and thats just the first 50 pages). Now your average citizen reading this would throw it down at the first mention of people who have sexual fantasies about Godzilla, however I kept reading.

Why do people continue on adventures like these? Very few people are comfortable with pedophilia or pretty much anything in Crooked Little Vein, or Funny Games, yet people continue reading them, and in the case of Lolita and Funny Games proclaim them masterworks of there respective forms.

My belief is that intelligent people enjoy these works because they can see that the creators use the uncomfortableness to prove the point. The point of Lolita is not the pedophelia, thats just the Mcguffin.

P.S. For those of you who have read both books I am in no way putting Crooked Little Vein on the same intellectual level as Lolita

A Letter To Amanda on Literary Pedophilia

It seems to me that Nabokov simply wanted a literary challenge. To take a despicable child abusing murderer (well for most of the book simply self-proclaimed murderer) and make him likable and almost (ALMOST) forgivable. I think Nabokov, if this was his intention, succeeded quite well.

The problem of the 1st memory

This is my first blog entry, a little later than most but as I'm sure someone important has said in the past "Better late than never"!

I have been tasked with recalling a first memory, and I have dug and dredged through my mind for an earliest memory that I formed on my own. This has proven difficult to the point of impossibility. Luckily, the impossibility stems from something our mutual friend Nabokov was fascinated with PHOTOGRAPHY!! My parents, being card carrying members of the slowly aging Gen X, have been wielding video cameras since before I was born. The problem this causes in regards to my early childhood memories is one of "delayed memory formation" which is of course a term i have just made up.

I have been watching home movies of myself since I was old enough to speak which means i cannot vouch for any of my memories being actual memories or remembrances of a time that i watched a video of myself doing something. It's extremely complicated and more than a little bit ridiculous.

For instance, I have a memory of being 7 and watching a video of 2 year old Parker Connell playing with a set of plastic golf clubs. I remember these golfclubs very vividly not because I had fun with them, but because I had fun watching myself have fun with them. How messed up is that?

Thus concludes my first blog entry of the year.