Fifty years after that triple trip of the tongue, Nabokov's nymphet is as mesmerizing as ever

In the intervening years, Lolita has been read by millions and written about by thousands. Modern-dance pieces, operas, and pop songs have all found inspiration in it. Indie-rock bands have borrowed their names from both its hero and its villain (who are both villains).

The Iranian writer Azar Nafisi has credited it with helping her to teach women in her homeland to think more courageously about their world. The Oxford English Dictionary has incorporated its inventions and nearly every university in America offers classes teaching it.

And yet, scandal has continued to shadow Lolita's lovely steps. While Stanley Kubrick's daring film version of the novel made its way into the theaters in 1962 without incident, Adrian Lyne's carefully disturbing one from 1997 did not, falling victim to a U.S. public-obscenity law that kept it from U.S. theaters and sending its premiere to Italy.

Edward Albee adapted Lolita for the New York stage in 1981. Despite a stellar cast featuring Donald Sutherland, the play was an unconditional flop and closed nine merciful days later.

In the print world, the Italian novelist Pia Pera undertook a radical retelling of the story. The conceit of Lo's Diary, first published in Italian in 1995, was to tell Nabokov's story not from the perspective of the refined and rapacious Humbert Humbert, but instead from that of the young girl.   more »

The legislation adopted by the House of Representatives Wednesday and the Senate Thursday, legalizing the Bush administration’s policy of torture and indefinite detention without trial, as well as kangaroo-court procedures for Guantánamo detainees, marks a watershed for the United States.

For the first time in American history, Congress and the White House have agreed to set aside the provisions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and formally adopt methods traditionally identified with authoritarian states.

The battery of police state measures enacted by the Bush administration, without any serious opposition from within the political establishment, confirms the labelling of the Bush administration as an informal dictatorship.

The Military Commission Act of 2006 will do far more than set down the procedures to be used to rubber-stamp the incarceration of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other US-run detention camps throughout the world.

It attacks the rights of all American citizens as well as all legal residents and other immigrants, who will now be subject to the threat of arrest and imprisonment for life, on the order of the president alone, without judicial review.   more »

Despite a brief recording career that lasted only from the early ’50s to his death in 1967, Coltrane revolutionized jazz and continues to influence musicians today.

And as perhaps no other artist, Coltrane’s music came to articulate the struggle for Black liberation in the U.S., as his search to push the boundaries of jazz mirrored the increasingly revolutionary conclusions and aspirations of many involved in that struggle.

Born 80 years ago on September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, N.C., Coltrane and his family moved to Philadelphia in 1943--one of millions of Black families who moved to big cities in the North in search of jobs during the Second World War.

At the war’s end, however, most found their hopes dashed on the twin pillars of Jim Crow segregation in the South and de facto segregation, poverty and institutionalized racism in the North.   more »

In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic.

But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.

Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life...

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich - that is the democracy of capitalist society.   more »

"Once the corporate giants, the evangelicals and the cowardly warmongering neoconservatives had everything in place to seize power in this country and to move onto the world stage and the killing it would take to get the world population down to a manageable size so they could control its resources, they needed a front man -- a dispensable fool -- one of their own from which there would be no blowback.

"With Bush, they got a 'two-fer,' I told Bernie. "Bush was not only chillingly insensitive, morally vacant, mean-spirited and incapable of regret, but because of his grandoise visions, it was easy to convince him that he was called by God and history to save, or to rule, the world.

"Remember," I reminded Bernie, "as a kid, Bush was a stubborn, spoiled brat who got his jollies by ramming lighted firecrackers into frogs' mouths and watching them explode. In college, he showed his penchant for torture when he initiated guys into his fraternity by 'branding' them with red-hot irons made from metal clothes hangers.

"You take a mean-spirited bully who won't compromise, won't negotiate, has no experience, no curiousity, no ability to succeed at anything, and he suddenly discovers he's the most powerful man in the world -- what do you expect him to do?"   more »

The seven-minute standing ovation accorded Prime Minister Tony Blair’s last speech to the Labour Party conference shows two things:

That sycophants and careerists will reconcile themselves to anything, and that Blair did indeed administer the coup de grace to what used to be the Labour Party.

There is not another audience throughout the length and breadth of Britain that would have sat through Blair’s self-glorifying rationale for his government without protest.

Everything he had done, Blair declared, had to be done. In fact, Labour’s transformation into an avowed party of big business should have taken place in the 1960s.   more »