Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

A Special Guest Column by Ron Rosenbaum

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Rosenbaum needed additional space to write about the Lolita scandal. We have given it to him.]

An intriguing new development on the Nabokov front. New to me, and therefore new to you. We here at the Observer pay no attention to these petty lit blogs, even if they've beaten this dead horse into the ground. And since it's very difficult for the Observer staff to compute the difference between Eastern Standard Time and German Time, basic math being one of their primary fallacies, it took some time for us to get in touch with Michael Maar. But the gist is this: It seems that Lolita is causing trouble again.

Now when I say "causing trouble," I wish to point out that no one has died. There have been no lawsuits yet, but a lot of bad blood. Certainly Vladimir's heirs are perturbed. Hopping mad, in fact. But last night, while sloshing Stoli around with some friends, it occurred to me that calling this thing a "scandal" would be too impolitic. I felt an overwhelming compunction to write 10,000 words about it, and to follow up with my findings somewhere else. The details after the drinking are quite hazy, but, needless to say, I woke up the next morning with my head perched on the compact edition of the OED. I don't remember when the dictionary had been removed from the stacks, and I was still trying to figure out the owner of the bra that was draped around my head. Since my eyes were close enough to the text, I didn't need the magnifying glass. But the first word I saw was "cryptomnesia."

Yes, cryptomnesia -- a silly word that no sensible person would use, nothing to do with that Neal Stephenson book or those crazy Slashdot kids -- is at the heart of my article, perhaps the solution, of netting another paycheck from the Observer offices. Cryptomnesia, in a larger sense, can serve as a word to launch a career, a buzzword to be recognized at some point by William Safire, but ignored by the world at large.

Let me start from the beginning