The Lovers’ Chronicle 22 April – clingin’ – photography by Laura Gilpin & Max Dupain – birth of Vladimir Nabokov

The Lovers’ Chronicle 22 April – clingin’ – photography by Laura Gilpin & Max Dupain – birth of Vladimir Nabokov – birth of Bettie Page

22 April 2024 By Rhett 0 In Random

Dear Zazie,

Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

from a 2016 poem
a micro-story
about the one not found
“Oh, I thought you said,
just a swinging”
ha, that is a good song though
no, the same ol’ tune
and where i took it
from there to here
what i knew could be
but from so far away
from the verse to you
just a clingin’

one of the reasons i come here
is for the spontaneity

structured and rigid
in day-to-day activities
but here
go whichever way the Muse goes
let the words and rhythms
do the work, carry me
from one moment
to the next
no thinkin’
no decisions
just blue on white
me and you

half pleasure, half-pain, whenever in this ecstasy, to kiss, with a soft movement almost woeful, caught and slackened again, quiverin’ mouth, with a sibilant intake of breath come near, lips pressed, then again, ready to offer everything, mutual, at once, crept into waitin’ arms

another struggle

pushin’ through

there is nothin’ else

crept into waitin’ arms,

in the cloud, radiant,

relaxed, caressin’

tender, give and give

some more, never tire,

pure, no expectations,

this moment only,

’round midnight

while the wind

moans and sighs

through the trees

light, fire, sin, soul
tip of the tongue
takin’ a trip

in the mornin’,
in my arms,
usually
a precursor

there might have,
had it been at all

one thing remains
you can count on

what some never see
cling to this

the dance has hold
and time is turnin’
and the future
is possible

thanks Bret

Soy yo. Me sientes?

seriously y’all
trust me on this one
every sign leads
to not meant to be

mention trenchancy,
came across more than one
what stood in my way
with nothin’ to say
so give over to my
callin’ it done
i have come about
found my lines
slogged the reasons
borne the time
and we are even
and i am leavin’
meant to be behind

then… silence
lookin’ at each other,
thoughts, minglin’ together,
same anguish of mind…
cling close to one another

Today is the birthday of Laura Gilpin (Austin Bluffs, Colorado April 22, 1891 – November 30, 1979 Santa Fe); American photographer. She is known for her photographs of American Indians, (particularly the Navajo and Pueblo), and southwestern landscapes. Gilpin began taking photographs as a child in Colorado, and formally studied photography in New York in 1916-1917 before returning to her home in Colorado to begin her career as a professional photographer.

Gallery

Georgia O’Keeffe

The prelude

Francis Nakai & Family

Georgia O’Keeffe

Footprints in the Sand

Rancho de Taos Mission, New Mexico

Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov in Montreux, 1973

Today is the birthday of Vladimir Nabokov (Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov; Saint Petersburg; 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899 – 2 July 1977 Montreux); novelist, translator and entomologist. His first nine novels were in Russian, but he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose.

Perhaps best known for his novel Lolita (1955). Other notable works include, his novel Pale Fire (1962) and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951). He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times.

In 1922, Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert; she broke off the engagement in early 1923, her parents worrying that he could not provide for her. In May 1923, he met a Russian-Jewish woman, Véra Evseyevna Slonim, at a charity ball in Berlin and married her in April 1925.

Nabokov wrote Lolita while travelling on butterfly-collection trips in the western United States that he undertook every summer. Véra acted as “secretary, typist, editor, proofreader, translator and bibliographer; his agent, business manager, legal counsel and chauffeur; his research assistant, teaching assistant and professorial understudy”; when Nabokov attempted to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita, it was Véra who stopped him. He called her the best-humored woman he had ever known.

grave at Cimetière de Clarens near Montreux, Switzerland

After the financial success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to return to Europe and devote himself exclusively to writing. On 1 October 1961, he and Véra moved to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland. From his sixth-floor quarters he conducted his business and took tours to the Alps, Corsica, and Sicily to hunt butterflies. In 1976 he was hospitalised with a fever doctors were unable to diagnose. He was rehospitalised in Lausanne in 1977 suffering from severe bronchial congestion. He died on 2 July in Montreux surrounded by his family. His remains were cremated and are buried at the Clarens cemetery in Montreux.

in the 1960s

in 1973

Monument in Montreux

Lolita

Part One

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.
- Opening lines, Ch. 1

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the deadly little demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.
- Ch. 1

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set…
- Ch. 2

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
- Ch. 3

I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!
- Ch. 4

I have reserved for the conclusion of my “Annabel” phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards-presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
- Ch. 4

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.
- Ch.4

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”
- Ch. 5

Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine.
- Ch. 5

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
- Ch. 8

All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that ‘princedom by the sea’ in my tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy.
- Ch. 10

Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes–for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate–while we moan and die.
- Ch. 27

While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid’s life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way — at least while I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called “sex” at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.
- Ch. 29

Part Two

Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had.
- Ch. 1

And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad’s, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.
- Ch. 3

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
- Ch. 25

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Profession: none, or “starlet”.
- Ch. 25

Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse, I’m dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying.
- Ch. 25

In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easelled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the moustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years.
- p. 215

All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.
- Ch. 35

The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
- Ch. 36

And today is the birthday of Bettie Page (Betttie Mae Page; Nashville; April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008 Los Angeles); model who gained notoriety in the 1950s for her pin-up photos. She was often referred to as the “Queen of Pinups”: her long jet-black hair, blue eyes, and trademark bangs have influenced artists for generations. After her death, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner called her “a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact on our society”.

Page lived in California in her early adult years before moving to New York City to pursue work as an actress. There, she found work as a pin-up model, and she posed for several photographers throughout the 1950s. Page was “Miss January 1955”, one of the earliest Playmates of the Month for Playboy magazine. After years in obscurity, she experienced a resurgence of popularity in the 1980s.

In 1959, Page converted to evangelical Christianity and worked for Billy Graham, studying at Bible colleges in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, with the intent of becoming a missionary. The latter part of Page’s life was marked by depression, mood swings, and several years in a state psychiatric hospital with paranoid schizophrenia.

Gallery

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