AP literature exam is tomorrow

a lesson in style:

"Collections of frontier lore.  Antebellum homes with iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked stairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor, holding up the fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way, and the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing.  The Menninger Foundation, a psuchiatric clinic, just for the heck of it.  A patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping white flies.  Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo.  Distant mountains.  Near mountains.  More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhavited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, "too prehistoric for words (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, thier heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountains with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot."

-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

image by phil elvrum