And I am a _lawyer_ for goddess's sake! :-) I hope the Washington and federal Courts appreciated it.

And I am a _lawyer_ for goddess's sake! :-) I hope the Washington and federal Courts appreciated it.

As for Nabokov, what about the original Lolita that Nabokov based his tale on? Even though Nabokov's plot is identical to the earlier writer's 1916 short story of the same name, it can't be considered plagiarism. Still interesting no?

Being a gay man I have to prefer Death in Venice by a writer who's Magic Mountain ranks as one of my favorite texts. It's especially poignant for a gay man to read Mann's tale of patients in a TB sanatorium just a decade after AIDs took so many gay lives in America. You'll have to convince me that Nabokov is even half as good as Mann. For this ignorant gay cracker, Magic Mountain (written about the decade before WWI) has strange parallels with America today.

Well it's been a few days since I posted for you. The power went out in my mobile home because my cousin used the $12.65 in electric bill money to by beer, so they shut off our power. No computer for a couple of days.

You of course being an important, well paid writer should never have to experience the sordid little dramas of the underclass. Unless it's to allow your readers the opportunity to vent their Red State fantasies.

So remember to let your readers know that I'm so stupid, uneducated, and pro Bush that I can't understand much besides another half rack of cheap beer. People like me and my friends are the reason things are so bad in America today. If only everyone were like you and your Blue State collegues, things would be so much better...

Vivian Darkbloom wrote many more books about little girls than Nabokov. The language in Lolita can't touch the reality of a little girl's desires that Darkbloom plumbs with such finesse.

“The cradle roxors above an abyss, an' common sense tells us dat our existence iz but uh brief crack o' light between two eternities o' darkness. Although da two iz identical twins, nig, as uh rule, views da prenatal abyss wiff mo' calm than da one he iz heading fo' (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

I know, however, o' uh young chronophobiac who experienced somethin' like panic when looking fo' da first tyme at homemade movies dat had been taken uh few weeks 'bfoe his birth. He seen uh world dat wuz practically unchanged — da same crib, da same peeps — an' then realized dat he did not exist dere at all an' dat nobody mourned his absence.

He caught uh glimpse o' his mudda waving from an upstairs window, an' dat unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it wuz some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him wuz da sight o' uh brand-new baby carriage standing dere on da porch, wiff da smug, encroaching air o' uh coffin; even dat wuz empty, as if, in da reverse course o' events, his very bones had disintegrated.” what 'chew trippin foo'

That passage captures the essence of motherhood, and the loss that is at the root of the human experience - beyond beautiful, it sears the heart.