Somewhere in the Annotated Lolita we're told that Nabokov mentions 342 motels in the course of the novel--- presumably places where young Miss Haze and her Gentleman Admirer spend time on their great roadtrip across America. 342 is also the street address of Charlotte Haze's house on Lawn Street...and of a certain room at the Enchanted Hunter Hotel.

Nabokov called the America of "Lolita" a "lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country". I hope that Ginny at ginny_mccoo can live out a dream of her own, even in the days of five-dollar gasoline: taking a huge old car and driving back roads and lost highways across New England and the Upper Midwest, driving down from Canuckia and crossing out to the West. With or without an Older Gentleman Admirer of her own.

John Leonard once wrote about Nabokov that it was hard to like a man who didn't like Turgenev. Not so very hard, really, even though I'm a fan of "Spring Torrents". Still, I'll forgive Leonard a lot. He once wrote an essay expressing contempt for lit crit and crit theory types who "look at literary texts only to find them guilty of something". And Leonard wrote the "Private Lives" column in the New York Times back in the mid-1970s. I ran across the collected columns when I was at New Haven, and sent a copy to a New Orleans girl named Jamie Leonhard--- wonderful coincidence. Jamie was lovely and a History major and wanted to write a novel about Catherine de Medici. She looked a bit like Julia Allison, and she once had sex on an Amtrak going up from NYC to Buffalo. Ms. Leonhard went Missing long ago. I remember her voice--- cigarettes and Old New Orleans, which is close enough to Brooklyn. The book I sent her was called "Private Lives in the Imperial City". I bought it at...Atticus Books, there on Chapel St.

"Private Lives in the Imperial City"--- no one remembers the book now, let alone the column. It wasn't a new book when I book it at the sale annex at Atticus. I bought two--- one to send Jamie Leonhard, one for me. The book was $8.95 new; I bought two at $1.25 each. John Leonard calls his stand-in character in the book Dmitri. I still have mine. I suspect Jamie's copy is long gone--- gone missing somewhere in the Garden District. If anyone ever sees it--- Lissy at emigree, Alessandra at bel_ebat, Umi at ivich, certainly Ginny at ginny_mccoo ---I do hope they'll read it. It's like Fernanda Eberstadt's "Low Tide"--- a book worth finding at libraries or on line.

Make note: Fernanda Eberstadt, "Low Tide"... vur' much something to recommend to lost_ligeia and Alessandra at bel_ebat. I gave a copy of it to Ms. Chang long ago; I'm glad that she fell in love with it.

"Private Lives in the Imperial City"... I wish I could have been living in NYC when the "Private Lives" columns appeared--- or that I could go back and step through the time portal and be someone studying at New Haven and going back to family in NYC in the era when Leonard was writing the columns. Part of me believes that NYC in those years was the nightmare city from "Taxi Driver". Part of me wants to see the NYC of "The Last Days of Disco" and the heyday of CBGB. But I do wish I could see the world Leonard wrote about in the columns.

And I do wonder how the "Private Lives" columns would work today--- whether they could fit into a blog world, whether they could be filmed.

Bryan Ferry's "Mamouna" is playing behind me. I'm drinking vodka-and-lime. I told Krystina at yes_please about Bryan Ferry--- she and I share a taste for Roxy Music. Listening to Bryan Ferry makes me want to be on a dance floor. It makes me want to be in black blazer and black silk tie. It reminds me of clubland nights, of dreams of elegance and seduction and Ecstasy and romance. It reminds me of being able to kiss girls, of tasting vodka on girls' lips and bare shoulders.

I keep thinking of Julia Allison asking her readers to define "overshare" and all the attacks on her and Lena Chen and Emily Gould. I find it disheartening that far too many people in the blog world attack writers like Lena Chen or Emily Gould for writing at all, that the pack of commenters at Gawker and Jezebel attack them both for writing and for being hurt by personal attacks on line. And it's even more disheartening that there's no sentiment out there that finds discourtesy and personal viciousness unacceptable. I take certain things for granted--- e. g., that the severed heads of Noam Chomsky and Ann Coulter should be launched skyward from trebuchets, or that Tom the Default MySpace Friend is having an affair with Jaap van Ballegooijen. But I can't possibly imagine commenting at someone's blog entry to make personal attacks.

I remember the old WorldCrossing message boards as being reasonably civil, but I recall the Nerve.com and Salon.com boards as making me angry at the level of rudeness. I didn't like it nine or ten years ago, and I despise the usual run of commenters at places like Jezebel or Gawker now. I never thought "snarky" was a compliment. And it strikes me as appalling that anyone would spend his days leaving personal attacks in Comment areas. Argument is one thing--- I despise a range of political and social and religious views, and I disagree with lots o' people's views on books and events and films. Wrong and stupid are things that can least be debated. I was brought up to believe that one simply ignores--- passes over ---things that can't be debated intelligently or are just...silly. It shouldn't be personal. If you don't have anything either pleasant or at least intelligent to say about something, just ignore it. It's rude and unacceptable to make personal attacks--- e.g., "slut", "paedophile", "loser".

I suppose I dislike sites like Gawker or Jezebel because they embody a kind of populist/moralising envy. I for one don't care what might be the "truth" behind the image that publicists present of their clients. I rather like the crafted image. If, let's say, Rachel Bilson or Blake Lively is photographed climbing panty-free out of a limo, I don't snarl in contempt. They're both attractive and young and hot; I'd just find the photo sexy. Wicked, beautiful, panty-free party girls make the world a better place--- a place that's more fun. The same is true about Lena Chen writing about sex at Harvard or Julia Allison writing about being at parties with the wealthy and famous. They're fun--- they make my world more enjoyable.

I'm listening to Stars of the Lid, "And Their Refinement of The Decline"... I do like ambient music. That's something that's been with me since I discovered Brian Eno half a lifetime ago. I was vur' glad that Lissy at emigree took up ambient and trance music. Just as I like it that lost_ligeia is a fan of Diamanda Galas.

Lindsay at onfrowning writes that she hates it when she's in a stranger's bed for no-strings-no-names sex and he insists on asking her how she'll want her coffee in the morning and wanting to spoon. All she wants to do, she writes, is get dressed as soon as they're done and leave. I understand her irritation. Far too many people say Oh, I'm not looking for a relationship or No strings, this is just purely physical for tonight and then import all the images of romance. (Ms. Chang, I know, was furious at how few boys at Rochester understood what "one night stand" was supposed to mean) Still, I suspect that I'd be guilty of the coffee thing myself. Politeness is key. Politeness is always key. I'd ask how the girl wants her coffee in the morning--- I'd ask that because I was brought up to be polite. If the girl did climb out of bed at 0430 and pull on her hiphuggers (panty-free, of course) to go home, all she'd need to do would be to be equally polite: press a finger to her lips and say, Ssshhh... I have to go now. That's all she'd need to do. Lindsay at onfrowning is Quebecoise; she could even say that in French. I'd say Thanks, girl... and watch her leave. I would say that, though--- Thanks, girl.... Always. All the way back to high school, I've said thank you to every girl I've been with. Politeness is key. Ever and always.

If Ginny at ginny_mccoo does take a long road trip into the high desert with a copy of the Annotated Lolita with her, I hope she'll make a point of stopping not just at motels, but at diners. I want her to sit at dusk over coffee in the roadside diner from the video for Beth Orton's "Anywhere". The video is brilliant; the song is one of my favourites.

Stella at stelladellasera writes about summer and Colorado and more Incestuous Sibling Stories of her own. And Stella remembers the old b/w "Outer Limits" episodes. I wrote her to say that I grew up watching those episodes in re-run--- "The Forms of Things Unknown", "Demon With A Glass Hand", "The Production and Decay of Strange Particles", "Cry of Silence", "The Inheritors", "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork", "Controlled Experiment". I wrote Stella to say that her "Outer Limits" reference in giving a blowjob to her handcuffed younger brother ("we control the vertical!") was...brilliant. And somehow it's sexier that she knows "The Forms of Things Unknown" even than imagining her doing Incestuous Sibling things with her gay younger brother. Which raises a question, of course: will Caitlin at kissmecaitlin ever have her own Incestuous Sibling stories about her newly-lesbian younger sister?

One day, of course--- one day, when she's ready, I do hope to hear Caitlin's vur' serious story about the doomed and disastrous affair she had with her friend Lizzie. Caitlin came back from Lizzie's funeral in Alaska this spring and had a long reflection about what had happened when she and Lizzie and all the Island Girls were at Bi Slut High together. I would like to know more. I hope one day Caitlin will be able to write about that.

There should be an Enchanted Hunter Hotel out there somewhere. There should be a lovely, lithe, wicked girl naked on fresh, crisp sheets in a room there, looking over her glasses at me while she reads on the bed. There should be. Tonight, though, and for any future that I can imagine, there'll only be me here in my flat, listening to ambient music and looking at a copy of "Private Lives in the Imperial City"--- one more memory from the Land of Lost Content.