Staff at Woolworths baffled by fuss over the little girl's bed called Lolita - Times Online So now we know that Woolworth's Senior Management don't read.
This bit was at the very end and it almost made snort out loud! (Prevented only by end-of-the-work-day mental coma) A POLE-DANCING KIT????? That one sentence made the whole article seem like a Monty Python-esque sketch! :lol: Just wondering... has anyone here read "Lolita"? I took a few peeks, after encountering it at my grandma's house, and found the narrator too annoying to care about. Should I give it a second try?
I found it to be one of the novels you could hardly *like* but you can see why it's world famous, and you can be fascinated. I read it when I was fairly young, and I was a little confused as to why a) the shere mentioning of the title was handled so frivolous, because it had some really chilling bits, and was, despite the sexual nature, depressing and read to me as meant to be just that, with its self-deceiting and obsessed main character and how the girl ended up. and b) why feminists of name read it to be pro pedophilia, as it was pretty clear that the protagonist's voice was not the author's voice, and I always wondered why otherwise well respected and literal people seemed never to have heard of *that*. Nabokov manages to write what is actually happening to the girl -or rather, different points of view on it- between the line, so the reader knows -or can guess- even though one's never actually confronted with another point of view than the main character's. He thinks himself a cultivated man, and the passive part in the affair, and still you catch, sooner or later, that what he does is monstrous (and he is also pretty ridicoulous at times). I have read the German translation, so I have to improvise here - there is this one line when Humbert tells Lolita, who has been living with him some years at that point, that once here legs start going bigger than that of a child's -it's 45 cm in the translation- he'll unfortunately have to kill her. Then he goes on how the girl started crying silently, and describes how enraged he was at this behaviour and that she couldn't see what a subtle joke it was, etc. (This double perspective is something I think the films can not transport. ) Another thing is the language. Mind you, I had a translation, but it was still wonderful language. Which is interesting, because Nabokov didn't write in his original first language, but in English. (He did the Russian translation himself, though.) I'd recommend it. It's nothing to read when you want to be cheered up, though - there are plenty of brilliant books who definitely don't do that and have to be kind of conquered, and this might be one of them. I think that to every reader, though, a book is different.
This is why naming things anything will get you in trouble I do know of the novel, but to me Lolita is more closely related to the way of clothing (started and made famous by Japanese singer Mana), rather than the novel. *shrug* some people will always find something to complain about. And by the way, isn't it a good thing that they haven't read it? Or?
I read the novel. It is considered a classic in the US, and is often taught in schools. There is a lot more depth to it than just "horny pre-teen gets off with middle-aged pervert". It is one of those books that requires you to think in order to get the most out of it. Edit: The above is why it is not a good thing that they haven't read it, or at least don't understand what it is about. It means that they are uneducated.
That is pretty much what I would have wanted to say to Mowgli. Unfortunately, I needed three times as much words for it. :redface:
Though not being familiar with the book does mark the good people at Woolworth's as lacking in education, it's not being familiar with the pop culture reference that they're really blamed here for. And frankly, that's a point in their favor. Seeing Lolita as "just a girl's name" (the isn't uncommon in Russia) is better by far than seeing it as the given label for a sexually-active pre-teen girl.
Tesco condemned for selling pole dancing toy | the Daily Mail Apparently, the real issue with Tesco is that someone who works on their website put the pole dancing kit in the "Toys and Games" section, so the Family Values police complained that they would be purchased for small children. It's still being sold as a fitness accessory, according to the article. The problem was with the way the website was designed - it should have distinguished between children's toys and adult toys.
