Age of Consent: Miley CyrusIs it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace, and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon the haggard masturbator; Duncan the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing on a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys' eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita.

I find the budding scandal, as it were, of Ms. Miley Cyrus's photo spread in Vanity Fair to be as ridiculous as the fact that no one would touch V. Nabokov's manuscript in 1955 except The Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias's hothouse imprint located on the Isle of Wight, and future publisher of Valerie Solanas's S.C.U.M. manifesto, which would have made Humbert Humbert cackle. Now that the unfinished and malformed Original of Laura looks well on its way to being typeset, thanks to Ron Rosenbaum and Vladimir's spectral influence in his son Dmitri's decision-making, it seems as if the creator of Lolita is still needed to satirize American culture's titillated puritanism and faux outrage. A week ago I didn't know who Cyrus was ("Hannah Montana" sounds like an Orthodox right-wing militia), and now I know that she's three years too old to be ranked a proper nymphet but mature enough to milk an "I have sinned!" PR kerfuffle for all it's worth:

“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.”

As for those new fans in truck stop men's rooms and dentist's offices, Miley thinks this grape-juice tastes funny. What's more newsworthy, that Disney has some explaining to do to a phalanx of angry mommy bloggers or that the New York Times had to append this correction to its story about the whole pre-fab controversy?

A headline and an article on Monday about a Vanity Fair photograph showing the actress Miley Cyrus in a suggestive pose left the incorrect impression that she was bare-breasted. While the pose was indeed revealing, she was wrapped in what appeared to be a bedsheet; she was not topless.

Now how many eager beavers rushed right out and bought a copy of Graydon's glossy after running their eyes over the misleading headline?

Also, a word to the Cyrus household: Annie Leibovitz doesn't do wholesome.

The gorgeous Annie Leibovitz–shot cover of April’s Vanity Fair features Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler done up as ethereal Grecian goddesses. (Poehler keeps it real by copping a feel off Fey.) But not even that can compare with what Leibovitz delivers inside: Silverman done up to look like Amy Winehouse!

All the funnyladies profiled in the story, including Sandra Bernhard and Susie Essman, are styled as versions of familiar pop tarts like Paris and Britney. But a tattooed, behived, raccoon-eyed Sarah’s resemblance to the struggling Grammy winner is mind-blowing. Make that mind-blowingly AWESOME. Who knew cross-fertilizing our favorite lewd and crude Jewess with our beloved train wreck could be so hot!

Behold: Silverhouse

Check out the Vanity Fair slide show. Izzy wants to include the waxing sequence as collateral content for our "hairy men" lead story. I'll let her go ahead and do that. 

"Do you take coffee? / I take tea, my dear" always struck this Anglophone ear as one of the worst lyrics ever stamped onto vinyl. That it was written by Sting, who went on to give us "Desert Rose," fabled marathon sex sessions with a just-okay-looking wifey, and arrogance to beat the band (which was more talented, anyway) -- all that came screaming back to me upon reading A.A. Gill's hilarious essay in Vanity Fair about Englishmen in New York:

If it were just you that the Brits annoyed, I wouldn't really care. What I mind is that they've re-created this Disney, Dick Van Dyke, um-diddle-diddle-um-diddle-I, merry Britain of childish grub and movie clichés, this Jeeves-and-Wooster place of mockery and snobbery, and I'm implicated, by mouth. Made complicit in this hideous retro-vintage place of Spam, Jam lyrics, bow ties, and buggery. These ex-Brits who have settled in the rent-stabilized margins of Manhattan aren't our brightest and our best—they are our remittance men, paid to leave. Not like the other immigrants, who made it here as the cleverest, most adventurous in the village. What you get are our failures and fantasists. The freshly redundant. The exposed and embittered. No matter how long they stay here, they don't mellow, their consonants don't soften. They don't relax into being another local. They become ever more English. Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made, knowing English eccentric. Eccentricity is the last resort of the expat. The petit fou excuse for rudeness, hopelessness, self-obsession, failure, and never, ever picking up the check.

Then I remember all the rewarding chats I've had outside many a bar in Brooklyn Heights and Carroll Gardens with crumpled, be-jowled hacks who've told me to drink my beer before it got cold, and just like that -- whiff! -- my nativist pride is gone.