I feel like watching About a Boy tonight. I'm not sure if I will, but I'd like to. I wanna see hugh grant sink a floating dead duck with a big loaf of bread. Call it a craving. =-)

So today was a nice day, even though I'm still suffering from terrible congestion and whatever else this cold is going to throw at me. I'd kinda like it to go away by saturday, but I am starting to think that might just be a lil too wishful for me.

Jim emailed me today, my friend Jim is making his way around europe for a while, currently in Italia hopefully sleeping. But with a guy like jim, you just never know. It is neat for me to send him emails because it feels odd to be the one emailing Italy, also it's nice because I'm incredibly bored sometimes.

I've been reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. It's taken me a while to make my way through it, it is not really light reading at all. It is very much about classroom dynamics and analyzing literature (two things I love, but are somewhat on the shelf when I'm in the summer mood).

So far the things that I like about the book are the typical things that charm me about books. I don't know diddly about Iran and so it really is a world ready to be shaped by her words. This is something I enjoyed about my Modern Lit of India class and my Memory and Modern Fiction/Hungarian lit class and so many others.

Another aspect of the book that I am enjoying is that concerns itself with the approach to literature, with the problem of loving literature that makes us uncomfortable or upset, and with the question of morality and/in literature.

Would you believe I'm not even half way through it? The problem of loving literature when it makes you feel terrible or when it is about terrible things is a big one. How can you like something that makes you feel awful? During my Memory and Modern Literature class I encountered this question in a big way when I absolutely loved a book about a Holocaust survivor. I was drawn into the pages and into the characters and although I felt awful and at times I disagreed and disliked the hero, I loved the book. When the professor asked the class if anyone liked the book, I was the only one to raise my hand and I did it without a second thought. Then he asked us if we were supposed to like the book. I felt that all of a sudden the common understanding of "to like something" was too ambiguous. Did I like the book, yes- did I like the way I felt, no. Did I feel like I understood on some level the pain that the hero was trying to condense onto the page? Yes. Did I find that amazingly rewarding? Yes. Did I like the book; yes.

There is a quote from the book that I'd like to share:

"Why is it that stories like Lolita and Madame Bovary- stories that are so sad, so tragic--make us happy? Is it not sinful to feel pleasure when reading about something so terrible? Would we feel this way if we were to read about it in the newspapers or if it happened to us? If we were to write about our lives here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, should we make our readers happy?...

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine."

-- Lolita in Tehran