I’ve always had a healthy skepticism of words that real estate people use in their marketing. Hell, I’m skeptical of everything everyone uses in their marketing. It’s in my nature.
“It’s so cozy and rustic and modern!”
I don’t mean to denigrate the livelihoods of real estate agents. To paraphrase casual racists: Some of my best friends are real estate agents! And to them I say: please don’t take this as an affront. I love you guys. But you must admit there’s some chicanery going on in the estate of real.
Without further ado, here are some real estate weasel words and my cynical translations.
In 1968, a prosecution began in Brighton, England against a poet named Bill Butler. His crime: publishing poetry and literature. In a stunning turn of events, the poet was found guilty, publicly destroyed, and later died from his injuries.
Bill Butler
William Huxford Butler was born in Spokane, Washington in 1934. He moved to London, England in the early 1960’s. A bookish young man with an insatiable appetite for poetry and transgressive literature, he happily leapt into the waves of the cultural revolution and worked in a city bookstore.
In 1965 he pulled up stakes and moved to Brighton, England, where he opened the much-beloved Unicorn Bookshop at No 50 Gloucester Road. He painted the building in wild hippie colors and set about enlightening Brightonians with a vast stock of novels, essays, poetry, photographs, magazines, and pamphlets. There was nothing too weird, too sexually explicit, or too striking for Bill to carry.
The Unicorn Bookshop 1967
Passionate about free speech and alternative viewpoints, the tall, boisterous Butler became a much-admired personality in Brighton. He was popular with both hippies and academics who visited him for rare tracts or publishing services. If you were an aging beatnik or a flowering hippie, the Unicorn Bookshop was a one-stop shop for all your anti-establishment needs.
In 1968, Butler’s Unicorn Press published J.G. Ballard’s hilarious pamphlet Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. Written in the style of a scientific white paper, it discussed in agonizing detail the limits of the study subjects desire to engage in various sex acts with the conservative governor of California.
A quote: “Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with “Reagan” proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects. Axillary, buccal, navel, aural and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12 percent of cases, the simulated anus of post-colostomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98 percent of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of ‘Reagan’ in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one- and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.”
Not only was the pamphlet outrageously funny, it also exposed the peeling veneer of stodgy 1950’s moralism. The cultural revolution of the 1960’s embraced civil rights, sexual freedom, environmentalism, and free speech. But there were forces at work to hold back the tide…
While J.G. Ballard went on to become a famous author, the same fate did not fall upon Bill Butler. The Unicorn Bookshop was a big, immovable target and Bill Butler sat behind the register every day. It was inevitable that at some point the loaded gun of conservatism would swing in his direction.
The gunman in this case was Mervyn Griffith-Jones, an Eton-Cambridge man who served in the Coldstream Guards in WW2 and acted as junior counsel at the Nuremberg Trials. A fierce and humorless prosecutor, Griffith-Jones acted as assistant prosecutor in the murder trial of Ruth Ellis, a troubled woman who gunned down her lover David Blakely after months of physical abuse that had culminated in a miscarriage after he struck her in the belly during a drunken rage. Despite calls for mercy, Griffith-Jones pushed for her execution and she became the last woman hanged to death in the UK. She was 28 years old.
Mervyn Griffith-Jones: portrait of an asshole.
Not content with executing abused women, Griffith-Jones went on to attack every form of “indecency” he could find. In 1960, he led the prosecution of Penguin Books for the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Written in 1928, the book describes the desperation of a wealthy woman who engages in an affair with her gardener when her loveless husband returns from war impotent and broken. The book contained some explicit sexual passages (explicit for the time) which drove its popularity. The book’s themes of social class, sexual repression, and aesthetic sensibilities were carried aloft on wings of naughtiness.
The evil novel that must not be read.
Re-published as a paperback in 1960 by Penguin Books, the widespread acceptance of this unseemly smut drove Griffith-Jones to distraction. He invoked the UK’s Obscene Publications Act as a weapon against those dastardly pornographers at Penguin Books. During the trial, Griffith-Jones asked the jurors “…when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”
This equating of Lady Chatterly’s Lover with a dime shop porno centerfold did not go over well with the jurors. They found the condescending argument literally laughable. After a procession of established writers and academics tore apart the prosecution’s case, Penguin Books was acquitted.
But alas for Bill Butler, Mervyn Griffith-Jones was not done yet.
When Griffith-Jones got wind of Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, his rage would not be tempered despite his smarting loss against Penguin Books. If Lady Chatterly’s Lover was a hopeless cause, surely this outrageous tract will get some traction.
On January 16, 1968, police raided the Unicorn Bookstore at No 50 Gloucester Road, Brighton. They seized thousands of titles, including copies of the counter-culture literary magazine Evergreen Review, poetry by Alan Ginsburg, and books by surrealist William S. Burroughs. And of course the worst offender of them all, Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.
Open up! We know you have books in there!
Now armed with what he thought was unassailable evidence, Griffith-Jones charged Bill Butler with the heinous crime of “possessing obscene articles for publication for gain”. Upon review, the court threw out the vast majority of the seized evidence as it had no pornographic material whatsoever, but dozens of titles were retained as the court could not form a conclusion about them.
Trial started in August 1968. The prosecutor laid out his case before three magistrates. Despite the technicality that he could not prove Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan had actually been sold to the public, he argued that its inclusion of available titles was enough to meet the standard of “publication for gain”.
The defense produced expert witnesses who testified to the literary merit of not only Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, but all the other seized materials as well. In a twist that should surprise no one, prosecutor Griffith-Jones argued before the judges that the expert witnesses didn’t have the discerning legal wit to separate the literary wheat from the obscene chaff, as such skills were present only in the learned minds of legal experts like the magistrates themselves.
Good morning, Worm your honor The crown will plainly show The prisoner who now stands before you Was caught red-handed showing feelings! Showing feelings of an almost human nature! This will not do!
Properly emboldened by the prosecutor’s argument, the magistrates read the explicit materials and found against Bill Butler. His fines and legal fees amounted to £3000, or about USD $60,000 today. That was enough to shutter the Unicorn Bookstore and put Butler into unmanageable debt.
Broken and beaten, Bill Butler left Brighton and sequestered himself in a tiny hamlet in Wales. There, he tried to revive his publishing business and pay off his debts. The bright, bold poet was unable to dig himself free. A few years later he died of a drug overdose, deep in debt, poverty-stricken, forgotten. He was 44 years old.
Bill Butler would have remained just another anonymous casualty of censorious tyrants, but he had a good friend named Michael Moorcock. Moorcock was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy. He found in Bill Butler a kindred soul, a fearless defender of all that is weird and untouchable.
The immensely cool Michael Moorcock
Moorcock had formed a lyrical association with the American rock band Blue Öyster Cult. He had written several of the band’s songs, including “Veteran of Psychic Wars”, which was featured in the popular animation film Heavy Metal.
For Blue Öyster Cult’s 1979 album “Mirrors”, Moorcock penned the lyrics to the song The Great Sun Jester. The song was an ode to Bill Butler, a spark of light who was extinguished by dark forces. Sad yet celebratory and reaching to a soaring rock chorus, the song remains a permanent homage to a brilliant poet who was sacrificed on the altar of stupidity.
“And he took the stars in his hands And as he scattered them he’d shout ‘I’m the joker of the universe! I’m what it’s all about!’ Now he’s dying in his grief And the hard men dragged him down They’ve killed the wild-eyed jester They’ve killed the fire clown…”
During his trial, Bill Butler left us with one parting shot, and I sincerely hope that others will reflect on it when those nagging, millennia-old forces of censorious tyranny rise again from the misty grave where they belong: “You regard it as important that we tell the truth in your court, and you put us under oath to do so. When any poet writes or an artist paints, he is under oath to something inside himself to tell the truth and the whole truth. Not to tell just those parts of the truth which are palatable and pleasing but all that is true – the good and the bad parts. Until he does that, he is incomplete as an artist and a poet.”
I recently read Nabakov’s “Ada (or Ardor)” and I feel compelled to discuss it. I’m sure thousands of English lit students have dissected this dense cheesecake since its publication in 1969, making me a mere snowball in the avalanche. But since I’ve read a lot of Nabokov I wanted to place it in the hierarchy.
First, the overview: It’s about a wealthy family wherein kissing cousins do a lot more than kissing and are actually a lot more than cousins. Their summer tryst blooms from a reckless dalliance to an era-spanning romance that directs both their lives. Their story is told as an autobiography, albeit a disjointed and surreal autobiography.
The story takes place on an alternate Victorian-era Earth-like planet. On this planet called Antiterra, the late 19th century occurs in a near-parallel with our Earth (“Terra”), a planet which the Antiterrans consider a myth. Only weirdos believe Terra exists. On Antiterra, North America has a deep Russian and French influence. Advanced aircraft and automobiles exist in Antiterra in 1880. People use water-powered mechanical devices for communication, as electricity has been renounced as dangerous. Geographic places and names are often allegorical or altogether invented, but occasionally there are direct correlations.
North America as found on Antiterra.
Antiterra is so similar/dissimilar to Earth that discerning what is real on Antiterra and what might be mere flights of fancy in Nabokov’s mind becomes difficult. This makes things very confusing, and I wonder if Nabokov did this to purposefully unsettle us or simply as an amusement.
Regardless, Nabokov employs his signature style brilliantly. Endless wordplay, myriad puzzles (linguistic and otherwise), and piles of carefully encoded nods to literary works. As ever, he gives you the option of fretting over every fiendish bon mot or just letting it flow over you. I selected the latter.
(The title itself is the first of his little games; Ada is pronounced “Ah-dah”, which is a homonym for the British non-rhotic pronunciation of “Ardor”, which means devotion/passion. Such begins a veritable tidal wave of word play and double-meanings.)
“Ada” is difficult literature, and reading difficult literature is like having a printed word aperture open in your mind. You can only handle so much at any given moment and then only incorporate so much of it into short term memory. For instance, a pulp novel has a wide aperture where the reader easily digests entire chapters into one comprehensible event. Conversely, “Finnegan’s Wake” is such obscurantist gibberish that one’s aperture can only handle fractions of a paragraph at a time. “Ada” finds a mean to those extremes, though it does narrow my aperture quite a bit, causing me to take time when reading.
The first four chapters are extremely challenging as little of it makes sense. Everything seems off-kilter, misspelled, or nonsensical. I went into this book cold so I had no preparation or guide. I eventually read some background so I could fully understand what the hell was going on. (I’m not alone; most reviewers found the first four chapters bewildering.)
Most confounding of all, time seems to have slipped on Antiterra. We should be in the Victorian era, and while characters largely conform to Victorian mores in behavior, they are not bound by our understanding of the era. Nabokov gives them leeway to escape the droll and hopelessly small world of Emily Brontë. A 14-year-old boy can seamlessly expound on complex subjects in three languages with pithy (Nabokovian?) precision. Intercontinental air travel compresses events. It’s surreal yet historically familiar, like “Game of Thrones”. The straight-arrow of history is bent and re-imagined and sometimes wholly warped.
It can be discombobulating, but once you get it, you get it.
Our protagonist (Ivan “Van” Veen, aka V.V. – Vladimir Vladimirovich!) is one of the believers in Terra, which makes him a kook on Antiterra. In 1884, teenage Van falls in love with his pubescent cousin, and as summers become decades their secret romance ebbs and flows between torrid adoration and bitter heartbreak. The years become eras, which is something we can all relate to. We all look back with warm nostalgia or stinging regret all those moments we created in our years. We wonder how it all fits into the bigger picture, whether we’ve been pulled along by the current or whether we’ve stamped our initials on the Universe. One can go mad thinking about time and its succession of moments and chasms of centuries, just as one can go mad thinking about space with its inscrutable quarks and unimaginable stretches of blackness. Instead, we internalize and obfuscate to suit our own ends. The past becomes our non-threatening fable and the Universe is our city district.
From the novel:
“The direction of Time, the ardis of Time, one-way Time, here is something that looks useful to me one moment, but dwindles the next to the level of an illusion, obscurely related to the mysteries of growth and gravitation. The irreversibility of Time (which is not heading anywhere in the first place) is a very parochial affair: had our organs and orgitrons not been asymmetrical, our view of Time might have been amphitheatric and altogether grand, like ragged night and jagged mountains around a small, twinkling, satisfied hamlet. We are told that if a creature loses its teeth and becomes a bird, the best the latter can do when needing teeth again is to evolve a serrated beak, never the dentition it once possessed. The scene is Eocene and the actors are fossils. It is an amusing instance of the way nature cheats but it reveals little relation to essential Time, straight or round, as the fact of my writing from left to right does to the course of my thought.”
Which brings me to Nabokov’s greatest skill: mastery of the stream of consciousness. Once again, Nabokov nimbly explores thoughts, feelings, and motivations down to the smallest detail of how we experience a wall clock or a gnarled tree or a young man beholding the exposed shoulder of his true love. We delve miles deep into the human mind. When Van Veen’s mother becomes insane, the description of her internal schizophrenic dialog is absolutely heartbreaking. Taken out of context, it reads like Joyce-quality gibberish. But in the narrative it’s a punch to the gut. There is so much of this stuff in “Ada” and his other works that I can’t begin to express how talented he is at describing our thought processes, our perception of stimuli, and our reactions to events. At this Nabokov has no equal.
Sometimes, the skeptic in me sees Nabokov’s Antiterra as a convenient vehicle for the writer to describe once again his own life experiences and affection for language. We once again explore characters who have roots in Russian, French, and Anglo cultures, as Nabokov can only write about what he knows and that list pretty much describes his life. (His family were wealthy Russians who escaped the Bolshevik revolution and ran off to Switzerland. Nabokov then studied in France and England and eventually moved to the US. Thus he is fluent in Russian, German, French and English. And his novels often involve Russian emigres with troubled love lives.)
The author, looking very authoritative.
So in one sense, this is just more Nabokov. (Lukewarm fans of “Lolita” would probably agree.) But there’s a lot more to “Ada” than word games and taboo sex explorations. Like his other romantic novels, Nabokov scrutinizes those moments when flirtation gels into something infinitely greater, when the mind fixates on the mundane to the exclusion of all else, and the striking differences between a heart pounding from the joy of erotic love and a heart pounding from the agony of heartbreak.
Unlike most readers, I didn’t come to Nabokov via “Lolita”. One winter I got really sick and for some reason glommed onto a copy of “Glory” and read it, bed-ridden, in two days. It blew my mind. It was the first time I had read about unrequited love with such murderous detail. The prose wasn’t just good. It was luscious. I consumed that book between sneezes, my head in that weird fevered place, delirious with the flu.
When I eventually came around to reading “Lolita”, I was (like most readers) initially duped by Humbert Humbert’s passionate defense of his evil behavior. As the tragedy unfolds, we find his unreliable narration far worse than merely unreliable. He is, in fact, a monster.
In “Ada”, however, our much friendlier narrator seamlessly transforms between personalities. He is alternately an omniscient third person (Nabokov, who may or may not know the characters personally) and Van Veen himself speaking in the first person, writing aloud his autobiography. Ada herself sometimes pops in to add parenthetical comments (or to correct Van, who tends to remember things a bit too selfishly). These narrators seem to meld and swap effortlessly. At no point does Nabokov confuse you about who is who, and instead employs them as he sees fit with each one ultimately “him”, Nabokov himself. In the end, there’s no ambiguity that Nabokov is Veen, any less than he is Martin in “Glory” or Franz in “King, Queen, Knave”.
Ultimately, “Ada” is about how being alive (on Terra or Antiterra) is to experience time and how the events we create or endure add texture to that time. We have the emboldening thrill of it and the miserable tragedy of it. We love to dwell on our details but in doing so we re-paint them. The final product is the created world we acknowledge as true. That’s the nub of it. It’s what describes art and artists, politicians and history, academics and culture. We shake out the rug of existence, beat it with a tennis racket, then place it in the sitting room and call it good.
This is how 94-year-old Van Veen constructs his life story. Every second spent with his beloved Ada is a yawning century of joy, and every year without her is a dismal hour of pain. Van’s time is neither straight nor an arrow. It is a jumble of events that must be shuffled and sieved to be understood. His adoration of Ada is simultaneously unbreakable and marred with insecurity. That should sound familiar.
Nabokov liked to position himself among the pantheon of great writers. He makes no bones about writers he admires (Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust) and those he feels are beneath him (Conrad, Faulkner, Pasternak). A famously prickly critic, he admirably applies that laser-like reproof to his own writing. One is hard-pressed to find a single word misapplied, or “replaced by its first cousin”, as Twain would say. “Ada” is dense, lush, and strikingly beautiful, if sometimes self-indulgent and haughty.
If you choose to read “Ada”, don’t do it for the explicit eroticism. Do it to explore all those contradictions and moral ambiguities in yourself.
