Journal Entry No 5: "Lolita, My Mother-in-law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flint"

      Thoughts were spiraling in my head . I could  not contain them even if I wanted to. The essay, "Lolita, My Mother-in-law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flint" by Norman Podhoretz,  in itself was really interesting and I say this with the utmost sincerity. The author mentions his mother in law and her denial of the truth. He talks of her like a benign stranger with a distant aloofness. The fact that she denies the sinfulness in the Mid-west annoys the author who is a Native New Yorker. He mentions coming across this article about a pedophile and in the process ends up venting about his mother in law.
    Personally, I feel like denial is the best form of protection from the outside world. I live in Bensonhurst and growing up it was an Italian dominated neighborhood. At this point and time it's predominantly Asian and heavily diversified. Italians still live here and yet they are horrified with the change in the ethnicity in the neighborhood. I was walking on the sidewalk the other day and an Italian individual mumbles "I don't like change"  while looking dead at me. I presume he wanted a confrontation of some sort and I refuse to cave in to such patronizing conversation. My amazement was in the fact that he did not notice that the majority of people around him were not Italian. This kind of behavior, in New York, would be astonishing for some but it still does occur.
     The author mentions a book that was banned called the "Last Exit in Brooklyn" by Selby Jr. The fact that the book was banned made my mind question with all caps "WHY"! I was so curious that I had to stop reading the article and find the book. With the self imposed intermission, I ended up reading the short story "Tralala" that mentioned a gang rape of a prostitute with the frank clarity that was horrific. Yet, I wanted to understand, my questions were stark and demanded an answer. Common questions would be "Where is the mother of this minor?" "How did she come to be in such a predicament?" When Tralala is offered love she does not understand and just trashes the letter like the trashy lifestyle that she embraces.
        This scene was considered pornography and was an issue in a courtroom. There was  much outrage over the graphic undertones of the novel and local shop owners were taken to court for selling them. Today, Lindsay Lohans' mother considers it "classy" if her daughter poses nude for the Playboy magazine. Nude magazines are highly accessible and religions seems to have no influence. The costliness of maintaining censorship overrides the stance that certain local communities would like to take. The stance that needs money to stand on is that really a true outcry of morality? Shouldn't communities consider the protection that they wish to engulf their children in?
          The author is very contrite when he defends pornography with the defense that all books cause emotion and pornography should be considered another extension of that very emotion. He mentions that Nabokovs' wordplay has no regard for the reader which I do agree with. I found while reading "Lolita" the fact that I had to constantly flip pages annoying. The annotation made it seem like I was reading a textbook. I do concede that the prose and puns, once understood, were remarkable in understanding Humbert Humberts' character but the length of time that it took to read and decipher this puzzle of Lolita was quite lengthy and frustrating.
       Regardless, I have waded through the thorns of puns and prose of "Lolita" and  came to appreciate the love of words that Nabokov does convey. This is a book that I truly believe came into existence to quench his love of the interplay of words in a language.