[lbo-talk] light of my life, maybe not the fire of my loins

[Carl Remick]

>From: paul childs <npchilds at shaw.ca>
>
> >Some Japanese students of youth culture see the Lolita look as a sign
> >of anxieties resulting from growing up in a nation beset by economic
> >insecurities since the early 1990s.
>
>How about that it's yet another sign that Japan is a fucked up, sexist, 
>class ridden, racist, society with dangerously bizarre notions of how 
>female sexuality is expressed? Occam's razor and all.
>
>I read this and got the same chill I get when I read anything about Woody 
>Allen.
>
>PC

Watch it, you can get a nasty cut waving Occam's razor around.  What's 
amusing, though, is that the original Lolita was very much a European 
archetype -- Humbert Humbert and his creator Vladimir Nabokov are about as 
Old World cosmopolitan as you can get.   E.g., Humbert on his family 
background:  "I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, 
easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French 
and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins."  Humbert is a 
creepy character but very funny, especially in his acerbic comments on the 
vapidity of US culture.

Carl