ED SES :"As autumn settles in, I don my editorial hat (to my mind, a very rakish thing, with a feather that curls up and a brim that sweeps down) while my stalwart alter ego, Stephen Blackwell, gallantly doffs his own" ...."Happy fall" ( the subject of this message is "falling ahead")

Jansy Mello: Whenever the seasonal editorial change takes place I feel both happy and sad for getting an Ed and losing another! I suppose that a "Happy Fall" indicates both autumn (in the lands situated on the Northern hemisphere) and the Christian concept of a "Felix Culpa" ( is it stretching SES's intention too far?)

Anyway, when she started to describe her hat I had a vision of a "Gainsboroughian" lady*, as we find her in a reproduction at Kubrick's Pavor Manor (how amazing it is to learn that "Lolita" was filmed in England and not in the US). In one of Gainsborough paintings we find a lady with a very impressive, almost surrealistic hat, but she seems to lack the upright feather.

*- I checked it in only one site: "The clutter of Pavor Manor looks forward to the cultural staging house at the end of 2001 - with a little mystery as the key (the Gainsborough-type painting behind which Quilty crawls, and into which Humbert pumps his last bullets; though Nabokov's Lolita does contain a reference to Joshua Reynolds' portrait of a young girl, 'The Age of Innocence')...." (Cf. Monthly Film Bulletin - Aug 1984 - vol 51 no. 607 - by Richard Combs on " Lolita" - Great Britain, 1961by Director: Stanley Kubrick ). Nabokov seems to have admited, in Quilty, a special taste for Eighteenth Century English painters.