A while back, I read about a recall of beds called the "Lolita" marketed to young girls. The people in the company claimed never to have heard of, much less read Nabokov's Lolita, which happens to be one of my favorite books. This seemed absurd to me at the time, that not one person noticed that this just might be an inappropriate name for an 8 year old girl's bed. I'm guessing someone did and thought it was hilarious but opted not to say anything about it. This is my hope, anyway. Let's be honest, because of the book, the term "Lolita" crops up all the time in the media in reference to people like Britney Spears, characters in movies, etc. So I thought it completely ridiculous that they were so baffled.
Fast forward to Monday night exercise class. The class is held in a town about 5 miles away, but it may as well be 5 million. The women there are very, very nice but not very "with it." They know more about American Idol than I do (which isn't hard), but otherwise, they generally have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to culture, pop or otherwise. There is one woman in the class who I know reads a lot and based on our conversations I assumed that that meant quality as well as quantity. So, we're doing some evil leg lifts or something and she asks if I read a lot. My natural answer to this question feels like "no" because I'm lucky to finish a book a week, but knowing that is about 50 more books than the average person reads a year, I said "yes." So, she asked me what some of my favorites were so she could add them to her list of things to read. I said, "Well, I'm sure you've probably read most of my favorites." She asked again what they were. This was when I was shocked to discover that this college-educated woman not only hadn't read Lolita or My Antonia, but she had never even heard of the books or the authors. I was so saddened by this that I only suggested books that I imagined most people hadn't heard of, so I wouldn't be further disappointed. To her credit, she had read both Middlesex and The Namesake and thereby made me feel a little better about my original assessment of her.
What happened? I admit that most classics bore me to death, or at least tears, and not only have I not been able to finish a lot of them, but I've never even started most. But I still am aware that they exist and who wrote them and in which era they take place. Were these people never exposed to this information or did it matter so little to them at the time as to make absolutely no impression? Either option seems pretty disheartening to me.
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5 comments:
Plus, Lolita was made into 2 movies so even those with book aversions had a chance to hear about it that way. Plus it's Lolita! It's become a noun. Maybe that is the problem. Now that it's a catch all phrase for any young girl it seems removed from the literature that birthed it and the sexual and moral issues inherent in the term.
I run in to this frustration at work a lot. "Yo, that book is mad fat!" being the best example. But at least those were kids, not adults. Just face it, you're more well read than 95% of the general population, even if you stopped reading books today.
funny you should mention this because dust and i have been talking about making a "classics library". mahogany bookshelf so as to hold them all promanantly and alphabetically in the study. as of now it will include ALL of the classix as printed by cliff's notes. see, we read.
hey i'm part of that exercise class!
Yes, you are Ms. Q, but I am not lumping you in with the rest of the women who are from that town and who you believe never leave it.
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