From: Gooch McCracken
Category: Amis
Date: 9/11/99
Time: 1:50:57 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.126.131
FROM *TIME'S ARROW*: "The German girl is a natural girl. She comes just as she is. With no makeup and hairy legs. This is okay by Odilo. In fact he forbids the use of cosmetics, even soap; and as for her hair and down, her crackling armpits, her upper locks and lower wreath---Herta, I suspect, could be woollier than any yak and still keep Odilo happy. He calls her his *Schimpanse*: his chimpanzee...Now that the wedding nears, Odilo is altogether gentler. He has stopped having tantrums. No longer is his chimpanzee required to do the housework naked, and on all fours."
FROM *LOLITA*: "A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups."
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FROM *TIME'S ARROW*: "When she weeps and sulks, he dries her tears with kisses, and not with a punch in the breasts."
FROM *LOLITA*: "Oh, I could visualize myself slapping Valeria's breasts out of alignment, or otherwise hurting her---and I could see myself, no less clearly, shooting her lover in the underbelly and making him say 'akh' and sit down."