Sue Lyon, RIP

[dirac]

Kubrick's Lolita, Sue Lyon, has died at age 73.

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A photo of Lyon captured in the film’s iconic movie poster — a Bert Stern photograph featuring Lyon wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and consuming a red lollipop — didn’t even appear in Lolita, but remained a lasting image from the 1962 film. While Lolita toned down the novel’s more scandalous aspects due to the strict Motion Picture Production Code, including aging “Lolita” to 15 years old, the film and its subject matter divided critics of the era. Still, Lyon would go on to win a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer – Female for the film, which would become her defining role over an acting career that would last just two decades.

 

[pherank]

17 hours ago, dirac said:

"While Lolita toned down the novel’s more scandalous aspects due to the strict Motion Picture Production Code, including aging “Lolita” to 15 years old..."

 

Because 15 is better than 12? If we could go back to the 14th century, it wouldn't matter as much to people, but these days, most people find the implications troubling.

[dirac]

2 hours ago, pherank said:

Because 15 is better than 12? If we could go back to the 14th century, it wouldn't matter as much to people, but these days, most people find the implications troubling.

Yes -- relatively speaking. The implications were "troubling" back then, which is why Lolita's age was raised.

[pherank]

28 minutes ago, dirac said:

Yes -- relatively speaking. The implications were "troubling" back then, which is why Lolita's age was raised.

Indeed. I should have written, "most people find the implications troubling still". Just imagine if Kubrick was able to further explore the erotic nature of Lolita and Humbert's relationship, as he intended.

[Quiggin]

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Quoting the character Humbert Humbert in the novel, Nabakov described Lyon as “the perfect nymphet.”

: Nabokov's seal of approval. As time goes on, Lolita the novel seems to wear badly, serving mostly to whitewash one-sided Woody Allenish "may/december" relationships. Everyone always winks and then says HH got his comeuppance at the end, plus there's all the humiliating American vulgarity he has to tolerate, so it all works out. Also for me much of Nabokov's humor – his descriptions of some male's "mincing steps" and his general homophobia - quickly becomes tedious. Is Nabokov really a greater writer – or even an equal – of his Russian contemporaries, Andrei Platonov and Vassily Grossman?

Sue Lyon on the role via the Rolling Stone notice dirac linked above:

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Although Lolita was Lyon’s most enduring role, the actress seemed to regret her casting in the ensuing decades: In a rare statement, following the 1997 release of a Lolita remake starring Jeremy Irons, Lyon told Reuters, “I am appalled they should revive the film that caused my destruction as a person.”

 

Edited December 31, 2019 by Quiggin

[pherank]

4 hours ago, Quiggin said:

Is Nabokov really a greater writer – or even an equal – of his Russian contemporaries, Andrei Platonov and Vassily Grossman?

Lolita isn't one of my favorite books, in theme or style, but not all of them can be. ;)
However, his autobiography Speak, Memory is in my top 10 list of autobiographies (in any language).
The first edition was published in English, and has many, many examples of excellent written English:

[This section is a particular favorite of the poetry community]
 'On top of all this I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the color sensations seem to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and dipthongs do not have special colors unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh, a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation).

I hasten to complete this list before I am interrupted. In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e’s and i’s, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by “brassy with an olive sheen.” In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with “Rose Quartz” in Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color. The word for rainbow, a primary, but decidedly muddy, rainbow is in my private language  the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv. The first author to discuss audition coloreé was, as far as I know, an albino physician in 1812, in Erlangen.

The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are. To my mother, though, this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in my seventh year, as I was using a head of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that the colors were all wrong. We discovered that some of her letters had the same tint as mine, and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. These evoked no chromatisms in me whatsoever. Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more ore less irritating sounds. Under certain circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concern piano and wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in large ones...' 


"…I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."


"…I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery that had been found by her mother a hundred years ago—and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and now mended by these rivets of bronze."

  - Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

[Quiggin]

I should have said greatest novelist which are what Platonov and Grossman were, though Grossman was also a great journalist who covered the second world war in the Soviet Union.  

I read Speak Memory many years ago and found it charming. I wonder though if Rimbaud (whom Nabokov wittily wrote about in "The Forgotten Poet") got it better and more succinctly in the poem that begins "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue ..." Nabokov seems to be doing an extended riff on Rimbaud – overwhelming him in homage, as he did Pushkin with translation footnotes.

[pherank]

4 hours ago, Quiggin said:

I wonder though if Rimbaud (whom Nabokov wittily wrote about in "The Forgotten Poet") got it better and more succinctly in the poem that begins "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue ..." Nabokov seems to be doing an extended riff on Rimbaud – overwhelming him in homage, as he did Pushkin with translation footnotes.

Nabokov is talking about a condition known as synesthesia in the passage above, so there's not really a "better" to this. He just describing his own personal associations (and his mother's). There are quick references to synesthesia experience in many of Nabokov's books, but only in the autobiography does he go into real detail about what it was like for him. Rimbaud is one of a number of poets who likely "suffered" from Synesthesia. Or maybe it was just the Absinthe. Much of his poetry feels synesthetic to me (or psychedelic, depending on your perspective).

Here's an interview with Sue Lyon from back in the day (she's 16 years of age here):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bHz-N6bJ3I

There's also one from later in her life for French TV (Lyon speaks in English):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuyzSX4WpW0

[Quiggin]

Synesthesia and Nabokov’s old anxiety of influence about poets and poetry. Interestingly the classic book on synesthesia is by another Russian, Aleksandr Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist. It's the basis of some of Oliver Sacks' work. "What a yellow crumbly voice you have" the mnemonist says to Luria's colleague Lev Vygotsky when they first meet.

[dirac]

On 12/30/2019 at 6:29 PM, Quiggin said:

As time goes on, Lolita the novel seems to wear badly, serving mostly to whitewash one-sided Woody Allenish "may/december" relationships. Everyone always winks and then says HH got his comeuppance at the end, plus there's all the humiliating American vulgarity he has to tolerate, so it all works out. 

I must disagree, respectfully. That's not the critical reaction I remember - and certainly not the book I know.