Scroll of Shame

Embarrassing moments in prose

There once was a saucy young dame Who burned with a singular flame.

Lying down on her cot She'd say, "Bother me not—

I'm unrollin' the Scroll of Shame."

Oh we know why you teach—we just wonder when your wife's gonna brain you one.

I stare at this comely young woman, so angelic-looking and so wicked, another man's daughter. And you wonder why I teach. —John Leonard in Newsday

Every Father's Day they pet my scales.

Mostly I liked the iguanas that come out of the sea and bask on shore, totally magnificent in their squashnosed ugliness, with faces that only children could love, and other marine lizards of course.

Could be genetic, this lizard loving, come to think of it; my sons are all very pro-lizard too. —A. M. Rosenthal

in the New York Times

Next month: Mengele on Mona Simpson.

As everyone knows, Lolita enjoyed a tremendous succes du scandale. Although, as Nabokov is quick to point out, the novel's language is, technically, pure—that is, no four-letter words: the author preferred forty-letter ones—its depiction of rape, pedophilia, and nearincest branded it a work of pornography. It is. (In one electrifying passage of his biography, [Andrew] Field informs us that Adolf Eichmann read Lolita in prison in Jerusalem and declared, "Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch." ["That is quite an offensive book."] Just because Eichmann said it doesn't mean it's not so.)

—Fernanda Eberstadt in The New Criterion

James Wolcott

"Making his second appearance in "Scroll of Shame."