Men Explain Lolita To Me

[John Bailey]

I think she made some remarks somewhere about how Lolita is a pretty
disturbing novel if you empathise with Lolita, and some blokes chimed
in to inform her how she was reading it all wrong if she did that.

Solnit was the writer to first identify mansplaining and I think it's
a great concept. There's certainly a previously unlabeled rhetorical
arrogance that to me isn't biologically linked to sex but definitely
has ties to gender and power and language. I also like that the P-list
is kinda absent of that, and that we understand you don't go round
telling someone they're reading Pynchon wrong, actually, and here's a
list of reasons why.

Also dig her argument against defending art from all criticism because
ART, GUYS, IT'S ART. I've had the same thought for years but never
read it: if you think art is automatically immune from critique then
you're saying it has no impact, no real effect, it exists in a
hermetic bubble that admits no exchanges with our profane world. I
think the most interesting art can have huge and reckonable effects
and yes, governments and other authorities recognise this and can be
troubled by it.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 9:43 AM, Perry Noid <coolwithdoc at gmail.com> wrote:
> She is definitely not going to win any of the people who were criticizing
> her over whatever it was she wrote before with this piece. I can say that
> much at least.
>
> On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Curiously uneven if you ask me...salient, brilliant points mixed with
>> the easiest (therefore worst) ways to make her case...
>> people posting on Facebook???...My gawd....I could do this constantly.
>>  People, men or women, misreading a great work.....
>>    Nabokov had HH come to a moral epiphany....seems this must be said
>> and wasn't. Unless Ms Nabokov quote is to be equivalent.
>>
>> we have to identify with Lolita because common human morality....to
>> read it right....
>> Does she read it aright even w identification?
>> That she framed this around mansplaining....seems too of the moment...
>> And that many women do not have their explanations and want you to know
>> it?
>> but, yes, more men 'splain than women in the America I know...
>> I think she 'projects' her feminism world too much sometimes...
>>
>> More talk around me I don't really 'get".
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 3:50 PM, Matthew Taylor
>> <matthew.taylor923 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Thoughts on Rebecca Solnit's latest?
>> >
>> > http://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l