Medium Is the Message

well, I thought this was an interesting book. So if I were to add another page, it would probably be a little bit more optimistic. And it would look something like this:

Thoughts on Lolita

Lolita is an interesting book because it deals with something that crosses far beyond the threshold of taboo, and yet it does it so skillfully and eloquently that the reader often forgets exactly what the book is about, which is a somewhat psychotic pedophile who is also a pathological liar. The only problem is, he’s really good at what he does—so good that the reader, if not primed to mistrust this man, may not realize that the contents of his “journal” are not coming from a trustworthy source. Of course, I’m talking about Humbert, in this case, not the author.

The narrator goes to such lengths to try to prove his innocence, but then he says things like, “I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous manner such as killing her by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial sherry or anything like that…” It completely throws the reader off and he’s slowly comes to realize that this narrator is either toying with us as he does with the psychiatrists, or he really does have a mental problem that can make him quite dangerous. It’s an amusing little dance he does between revealing what I imagine is his true self, and a masked version of his character that he uses to stay as presentable as possible for an audience that may be responsible for his fate.

What I really found quite unique to this book was that as I read it, I registered that the narrator was a little insane and had serious problems, but it was only when I started listening to the audiobook that I realized just how deep Humbert’s issues are. There was something about the way the voice actor talked that made it sound like he sincerely believed and agreed with the things he was saying—especially the parts where he laboriously pronounces Dolores’s pet name, “Lo-lee-ta.” I actually liked the story more when I was listening to it than when I was reading it. As I was reading, it just seemed like I was a passive observer—not even an observer, more like a secondhand listener being told a story from someone who heard it from someone else. When I listened to the audiobook, It felt like I was right there in the room with Humbert as he told me about his fetish for little girls and of his adopted daughter whom he has sex with repeatedly. It’s so much more visceral and it makes the detailed a thousand times more difficult to ignore.

            I like that Humbert really tries to justify his actions. He does not deny them. Instead, he reasons that he does not do any harm with his lust for nymphets. Also, according to Humbert, why does it even matter when the romans would molest twelve-year-old boys and holy figures would be wed to wives who had not even hit puberty yet? To him, there was nothing wrong with what he did, and that’s what made the book so interesting—it was from a perspective so utterly unlike my own, I have to suspend my disbelief to unprecedented levels just to get through it.

Conan the Warrior

Conan the Warrior

One thing I kept noticing was that Robert E. Howard went into very lengthy descriptions about the characters and the landscape he was introducing. Also, it seemed that he took every opportunity to make the characters as sexy as possible. When Conan laughs, he flexes his bicep for appeal. When he looks at Valeria, he pays particular attention to her large breasts and hips. You can just imagine how the scene would unfold in a movie—very little gets left to the imagination. The two main characters are beautiful beyond compare because they are the perfect man and woman (so it would seem) with no real flaws, except quickness to violence and occasional rash decision-making, both of which are still pretty attractive attributes. It seems that this short book was made the same way a sitcom would be made today—by which I mean it serves no real purpose but to entertain. No big ideas get thrown around, no morals are questions, and everything is pretty black and white. It’s just a book about two nearly superhuman characters messing around in a dangerous town and fighting off monsters and men alike with almost reckless abandon.

All in all, it certainly knows how to be entertaining. I completely understand the necessity for such literature. I also noticed that just about everything I’d consider cliché in today’s writing is a constant presence in Conan the Warrior: Women who move with the quickness of a cat and men who have bulging muscles just about everywhere. It’s one giant mixing pot of the things that gave birth to today’s genre literature.

Another thing I noticed was that Howard gives incredible details to little things like belts and clothes. He pays very close attention to how the clothes fall on the person wearing them—especially if the form underneath is still discernable through the clothes. This appears to be exactly the thing that many people would want to read about because such beautiful people simply don’t exist in real life and being able to get such an accurate description of what one looks like is just as good as seeing a celebrity or a 3d model of an incredibly attractive hero rendered on screen—and thousands of people pay to see that every day. Perhaps I'm over-simplifying it, but this is just how it seems to me.