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Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Books

Published: 13 March 2012

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"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

Finally finished. For some reason the second reading took far, far longer than the first - most probably the job. A masterpiece.

train into London

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Dreams

Published: 13 March 2012

Hits: 1410

Scratchy film reel, photoshop filters, buildings passing as seen from a train.

I'm coming into London, London not London, there's St. Pauls and the Opera House, great architecture writ large upon the landscape of childhood, buildings behind buildings, not London but the small town where I grew up, the prairie architecture replaced with grand old European architecture, recognizing both the buildings and the map upon which they stand, central park and the library, London not london...

Now I'm flying, swooping more, finding high buildings to leap off of, falling and then at the last moment swooping, someone is chasing me but I'm busy with this, fly up, find another perch, jump and swoop again...

Kamp Krusty

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 12 March 2012

Hits: 1653

Now the boy has finished his Kamp Krusty 3 day "Leadership Training Course". And it was pretty much what you'd expect, standard cult-indoctrination techniques, being shouted at, broken down, every free moment of every day filled with challenging "assignments" and "leadership" exercises, short sleeping patterns (5 hours a night), metrics that change from the beginning of the camp to the end, which culminates in the children accomplishing such great feats as breaking boards and such, (the boards weakened first in an oven), emotional and tear-jerking moments where they read their "love letters" from their parents...

If I was any other parent I'd be damned concerned, most of the exercises meaningless brainwashing techniques, unrelated in any meaningful way to the task at hand, the only reason in this instance I'd overlook it is that the boy is astute enough to see through most of it, describing it as being of "limited value" - which is probably fair. All life experience is of value. But he states that a lot of the other pupils rated it highly, thought it was a "life changing" experience, which worries me. And the other parents are the ones that are so indoctrinated and uninvolved they won't question it...

And so the madness continues.