LOLITA, BED OF MY LIFE, DESK OF MY LOINS


put it right next to the humbert humbert night stand.

Here's a great item, emailed to my attention from one of TWM's most faithful and favorite readers -- we'll call him Mr. R. -- about the inverse relationship between marketing strategy and cultural literacy:

LONDON (Reuters) - A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the web site selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In "Lolita," a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter -- but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it.

Hence they saw nothing wrong with advertising the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six until a concerned mother raised the alarm on a parenting website.

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told British newspapers.

"We had to look it up on (online encyclopedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

Woolworths said the product had now been dropped.

I would comment on this, but I fear that, beyond what Mr. R. already noted in his email...

Chad -- Consider the implications here: nobody at a major company appears to be aware of Vladimir Nabokov or his signature novel. Nobody. And they're in Britain, a place once so educated I wouldn't be surprised if kidnappers sent ransom notes in classical Greek. So where do they get their ultimate answer? From Wikipedia, the online source for information that comes from we know not where.

...I could add only redundancy. So I'll just stop here, as we all scramble to our bookshelves and our retail catalogs and eagerly await the rollouts of the Jay Gatsby roadster and the Willy Loman briefcase.

Posted: Thu - February 7, 2008 at 04:44 AM          

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