After I lost my academic job back in 2020, I wondered if I’d ever teach again. Part of me wanted to; part of me didn’t. And with the passage of time, part wondered whether I still even knew how to teach. Is teaching like riding a bike? Or like remembering an old password? Or like getting married for the nth time?

I don’t know, but I’ve decided to do it. Not at a conventional academic institution, or in a conventional classroom, but like everything nowadays, online. I’m teaching a twelve-week course on Nabokov’s Lolita for The Symposium Great Books Institute, with whom I myself have taken valuable courses on Islamic literature, Cardinal Newman, and Thucydides.

The course starts in October; I’m not yet sure of the dates or times, but I’m hoping for late Sunday mornings (Eastern Standard Time). The tuition is $200. I don’t know if anyone would pay $200 to sit through a class with a middle-aged widower on a middle aged pedophile, but I guess we’ll see.

I actually have very mixed feelings about Lolita as a novel, which is why it’s the perfect thing for me to teach: I can see both sides of almost any claim anyone makes about it, including that it’s a work of genius and that it sucks. I think of it fundamentally as a novel of bereavement. I also have this elaborate view that it works out some of the problematics of Epicureanism. But I’m not so much the instructor of the course as the leader of a grand symposium on it, so there’s no telling whether my own views will find their way into the class or not. Details to follow.