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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

APPEL

“After half a century this work's ‘transgressiveness’ makes every usage of that term in our etiolated English departments seem stale, pallid, and domesticated,” writes Christopher Hitchens about Lolita.

I get a frisson (Hitchens likes the word “frisson” as much as UD does) whenever Hitchens hammers English departments (as he did in a recent New York Times book review), and I share his love of Lolita, so I enjoyed this review.



Which is actually a review of the Annotated Lolita, annotated by Nabokov student and friend, and emeritus Northwestern University professor, Alfred Appel.

And since UD studied with Appel at NU, and recalls visiting his house and admiring the butterflies Nabokov had drawn on the first pages of various of Appel’s Nabokov editions, she is doubly pleased, for Hitchens has reminded her of the book as well as the professor.



Gore Vidal once wrote that he suspected “Alfred Appel” was the Nabokovian name of a Kinbote-type creature who’d been thought up by Lolita’s creator himself, as a kind of literary joke along the lines of Pale Fire. But UD can confirm, having sat decades ago in his smoke-filled classrooms (I’m pretty sure I’m remembering right that he smoked while lecturing), that Appel exists.

“Alfred Appel's most sage advice,” writes Hitchens, “is to make yourself slow down when reading Lolita, not be too swiftly ravished and caught up.”