StoogeNotes: Nabokov’s Lolita

I like to think that my posts are, in general, edumacational. I treat you to factoids you will likely not read anywhere else. Like, for instance, every second of every minute of every hour of every day, over 23,000 people in China take a shit. You won’t read that anywhere else and do you know why? Because I did the math myself.

Still, I suppose that most of what I write is soul-robbing mind candy. However, every now and then I like to make a real effort to inject some culture into the blogosphere with a look at fine literature or poetry. So, it’s time for another StoogeNotes™.

You’ll recall from last time that, because I am a Major Celebrity, I post StoogeNotes™ as a public service to give something back to you little, tiny, insignificant people who line up to give me blowjobs. StoogeNotes™ are ultra-condensed versions of classic literature. These summaries are more than enough to make you look really well-read at a dinner party or to get you through a class discussion. If you are creative, you can even use them to get through an exam or an essay. Meanwhile, unlike the actual stories, they leave out all the boring parts and take no time to read.

As before, remember that I have not read these stories in a while and I haven’t been sober in a longer while, so there may be insignificant minutiae missing or inconsequential mistakes in the details. But all the meaningful, thought-provoking, significant shit is here exactly as it was in the original story.

Today’s StoogeNotes™ selection is Nabokov’s Lolita.

Summary:

Questions your professor might ask: Do you know of any underage girls having sex with older dudes? Do you have their contact info?

Trivia to impress your professor, especially if she is a hot teaching assistant: Although Lolita sold very well, Nabakov could not get the prequels—Lolita versus the Rape Gang and Lolita in Prison—published. In Nabokov’s short story “Fuck Kitten,” a dumpy fortyish-year-old dude meets a fourteen-year-old girl in a chat room. The fortyish dude later discovers, however, that the fourteen-year-old is actually an Irish Setter. Upon being found out, the Irish Setter eats the dude and later poses as him in a chat room. Many consider this a precursor to Nabokov’s Lolita. This short story was later adapted into the movie, Must Love Dogs.

Seriously, if you have a final exam or something on Lolita and it’s an open book exam, you can just print out the StoogeNotes™ and you don’t even need to take the fucking book with you.

That’s all I have to say about StoogeNotes™ for now except that, if you were turned off by all the talk about banging twelve-year-olds, fuck you. This is classic literature here and it also happens to be scorchingly hot.

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Happy Biochemical Reaction Day

So, it’s Valentine’s Day as I write this. Or, more precisely, Saint Valentine’s Day.

Yeah, that’s right. This is a religious holiday.

Yep, this is a religious holiday, even though nobody knows who the fuck Saint Valentine was. In fact, there were numerous saints named “Valentine” and we don’t know shit about any of them. In 496 AD, when Pope Gelasius I first established the feast of Saint Valentine, he said that nobody knew one fucking thing about the dude. If the fucking pope didn’t know shit about a saint 1,500 years ago, you can be pretty sure that we are not in better shape today. Usually, all we know about saints are the lies told a couple of hundred years or so after they died.

I know that a lot of you say, “Whatev. Valentine’s Day ain’t no fucking religious holiday. It is all about just telling someone you love that you love them. What’s wrong with that?”

There’s nothing wrong with that. And all that Valentine’s Day stands for supports that very sentiment. Valentine’s Day may, for that very reason, be the most perfect holiday ever.

See, on President’s Day we get a fucking day off and we don’t do shit. What has being on vacation got to do with any president except George W. Bush? And on Christmas we exchange gifts and decorate trees that we chop down so that they can die in our living rooms. What has that got to do with Jesus or even with zombies in general? And on Thanksgiving we eat like disgusting fucking pigs and then nap and watch football all day. What has that got to do with being American? Okay, never mind that last one.

But on Valentine’s Day, we do lots of things that symbolize modern love. We exchange cards, which are mass-produced emotions we are supposed to feel. We go out to expensive restaurants that we can’t actually afford to eat at everyday, to get food and service we wish our spouses would provide for us. We exchange huge candy assortments knowing that we will only like maybe three or four of the fifty candy pieces, but we will suffer and eat the other 47 nasty candies because, well, they’re there. We give flowers that we will watch wither and die as they struggle to live and reproduce before death takes them and they are forgotten forever. What could better symbolize modern love and marriage than these things, and paying twice as much for them as at any other time of the year?

The things we do on Valentine’s Day are perfectly symbolic. Valentine’s Day is the most symbolically honest holiday ever!

I know that, in a country in which, by all accounts, the divorce rate for all marriages is close to fifty percent, it may be hard to get behind this whole Valentine’s Day thing. Maybe you even have a hard time getting your head wrapped around the whole idea of love.

But don’t let divorce rates hinder your appreciation of love. Divorce is complicated and really shouldn’t be used as a gauge. For instance, divorce is higher among conservative and born-again Christians than among any other group, including atheists and agnostics. And divorce is highest in Bible Belt states, with Florida number one in the nation followed closely by Texas. God is love? I don’t think so.

But here is the thing. You can excuse the bible thumpers for not knowing what love is. After all, Adam and Eve never fell in love. They just got stuck with one another. Maybe they spent their days fucking when God was not walking around the Garden of Eden naked talking to himself, but love is never mentioned in Genesis.

So the Christians have an excuse. You atheists, who are not stoopid, believe in evolution. You believe that humans, like other animals, have evolved with an optimal strategy for reproduction. Love has nothing to do with it and, in fact, to the extent love exists at all, it is biochemical.

Human behavior dictates that monogamy is social and not genetic. After all, the divorce rates aside, 50-60% of men and 45-55% of women have extramarital affairs. But, to the extent that we feel an attraction to another person, those of you who believe in evolution know this must be a biochemical response to an evolutionary need to reproduce. The same way you feel hunger and cravings rather than actually feeling the emptiness of your stomach or the need for particular nutrients, you feel love because you need to bust a nut. The same way you feel fear rather than actually hearing your blood pumping more quickly through your veins or adrenaline thrusting itself into your bloodstream, you feel love when you want to fuck. In fact, love feels a lot like hunger and fear.

And, of course, we know from history that humans were not monogamous. At the very least, they were polygynous, with one man having as many wives as he could afford. I’m sure those dudes loved each and every one of them, too.

That’s why women are so into wealthy men. Oh, I know you hate when people say shit like that. Well, I didn’t put Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire on TV. Also, when was the last time you dated a homeless dude? What, you’ve never dated a homeless dude? Isn’t that interesting? If love was truly blind, every now and then a woman would fall for someone entirely beneath them in social status. But that’s a real rarity, as it turns out.

Study after study confirms a few things. First, women look for signs of wealth in men as a first determinant of attractiveness. Men look for physical beauty first and, as a result, prefer younger women. Women are not so picky when it comes to age: status is key to them.

That’s what love is all about.

So, to all you lovers out there, happy biochemical reaction to environmental stimuli that maximizes your chances for reproduction and optimizes species survivability and adaptability! Or, put another way, Happy Saint Valentine’s Day!

Actually, I’m posting this so late that it won’t be Saint Valentine’s Day anymore by the time you read this.

But Valentine’s Day also happens to be stoogepie’s birthday. So happy fucking birthday to me.

That’s all I have to say about that.

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Trophy Wives

This is probably the last time that I mention my recent travels.  But on the flight to Miami, there was a couple behind me that I thought was a father and his adult daughter.  As the flight progressed, I was able to hear occasional snippets of conversation between the two of them.  I can best describe my overall impression as follows.

Now, the dude was maybe in his fifties, so he not forced-to-retire old.  But he was forced-to-retire ugly.  The woman was in her mid-twenties and was pretty damned alright, if you ask me.  Yes, it’s entirely possible that this was a match made in heaven, the only hitch being that he would return to the factory long before she did.  But a lot of their conversation argued against that conclusion.  For instance, the couple apparently lived in Florida but traveled often and, although the wife had shopped at fancy stores wherever they went, she thought New York’s Fifth Avenue shops were the nicest and couldn’t wait to raid them.  So she was very high maintenance and, in response, he was very Master Craftsman.  Besides, he dozed off once and I’m pretty sure that, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pick his pocket.

I am not against May-December romances.  Far from it.  I am all for May-December romances.  Hell, I condone February-October romances.  It’s safe to say that all of the months could hook up with one another and I would be totally fine with it.  In fact, if all the individual days of the year decided to join in the action and have a massive orgy with daisy chains and bukkake and swaps, I would buy the video.  I would find it perfectly acceptable if Easter fucked Christmas.  How is that for open-minded?

But this was a marriage.  She was his trophy wife.  If he were just fucking her, that would be just fine.  He wasn’t just fucking her.  He had married her.

If you don’t see how wrong this is, consider this scenario.  You are a middle-aged dude having a middle-aged crisis.  It sounds very Tolkienesque, and it’s just as serious.  One night you go bowling with your buddies and you kick their asses at bowling.  (You can substitute the word “golfing” for “bowling” if you want to bring class into this.)  That night, you are a bowling lunatic, a madman.  You have a great time but it’s just not enough, what with your hair falling out and your eyesight getting worse and your dick only getting semi-hard no matter how disgusting the porn is.  So, you go to a store and you buy yourself a bowling trophy to commemorate your victory.  And not just any bowling trophy, a platinum, diamond studded bowling trophy with an adjustable-rate mortgage that you will be paying for until you die.  When people stop by and ask you how you won the fabulous trophy on your mantle, you tell them that you don’t mean to brag but you kicked ass and wanted a permanent reminder, so you bought a trophy for yourself that you will be paying for forever.  Do you yet see how fucking pathetic this is?

You don’t buy yourself a trophy!  By the same token, you don’t buy yourself a trophy wife.  Old dudes, it’s great that you have some cash.  And you’re right that you can’t take it with you, so you might as well spend it on fast cars and loose women.  But don’t buy the women permanently. 

Do what any self-respecting younger person would do.  Win the woman for a little while and secretly videotape her having sex with you.  The video is then your trophy.  When you distribute it on the internet, you will gain the admiration of the world.  True, some of us might email you and say, “Rick, dude, it doesn’t even look like either one of you is having a good time fucking.  And is that her nose or is she wearing one of those DIY nose straighteners?  The footage is so grainy I can’t tell.”  We ask these questions not to berate your accomplishments, but rather because the video is just not enough.  We want all the nasty details.  Like, where was your camera when you were doing Shannen Doherty, dude?  And is it true that Pamela Anderson won’t eat anything that comes from an animal?  Yeah, we didn’t think so.

Anyway, I digress.  What was my point again?  Oh, yeah, this rent versus lease-to-replace versus lease-to-buy versus buy thing.  Are you getting it yet, old and not-so-wizened dudes?

I’ll write a little more about prostitution some other time.  Not because it is relevant to this topic (though it is), but because I simply can’t help myself.  It is in my thoughts far too often.  And, old dudes, it should be in yours, too.

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