Welcome to the awards for 2021. The glittering celebrities have all arrived and are already sneering, the lights are dimmed so let’s crack on.
THE 2021Welcome to the awards for 2021. The glittering celebrities have all arrived and are already sneering, the lights are dimmed so let’s crack on.
THE 2021 AWARD FOR THE BOOK THAT STAYED ON MY ACTUAL BOOKSHELF IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD LONGEST BEFORE BEING READ
Middlemarch by George Eliot
NOVEL OF THE YEAR
Middlemarch by George Eliot
THE DON DELILLO AWARD FOR THE HIGHLY PRAISED NOVEL I SHOULD HAVE LIKED WAY MORE THAN I DID
Guest presenter : Karl Ove Knausgard
(Expect an excruciatingly detailed 400 page novel about presenting a literary prize from Karl in 2022)
The shortlist; Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai How it All Began by Penelope Lively Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G B Edwards
And the winner is :
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
(Applause – Anita Desai, the hot favourite, puts on a brave “I didn’t expect to win anyway” face for the cameras)
THE INTIMIDATING CLASSIC WHICH TURNED OUT TO BE GREAT AWARD
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
FAVOURITE TITLE OF THE YEAR
Things Have Gotten Worse Since we Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca
(it also had a great cover…pity about the book itself. But Eric is gonna do better, I think)
THE BITING-OFF-MORE-THAN-YOU-CAN-CHEW AWARD
This year the award is split between two biographies – I knew I wanted to know all about these two great personalities but I should never have read the enormous 900 page versions of their lives, it was ridiculous.
Dostoyevsky : A writer in his Time by Joseph Frank
(Could be you should steer clear of the ones with the “in his time” or “and his world” subtitles since it tells you the author is gonna write a history of the whole century his guy was born in)
Washington : Ron Chernow
(Ron was fascinated by every single pair of trousers and jacket and hat worn by George Washington, and luckily for Ron, George listed every single thing he ever wore.)
Runner-up : Second Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich
(This is obviously an enormously important oral history of the collapse of communism in Russia but after page 300 all the voices start to sound the same, telling very similar tales of woe.)
THE LEAST POPULAR BOOK I READ
Bob Dylan : Outlaw Blues by Spencer Leigh – shelved by a mere 17 people and read by an even merer 3. Its unpopularity is richly deserved.
Note : most popular book I read was The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling. Its popularity was not especially deserved.
ODDEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
The Spirit Catches you and You Fall Down : Anne Fadiman
(A great crazy read about the immigration of the Hmong people to the USA and the extreme culture clashes they experienced.)
BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR
Andrea Dworkin : The Feminist as Revolutionary by Martin Duberman
"The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other"
SPECIAL AWARD FOR THE MOST UNEXPECTED VICTORIAN DELIGHT
The Odd Women by George Gissing
Runner up : The Warden by Anthony Trollope
AWARD FOR THE NOVEL WITH THE MOST RIDICULOUSLY INFLATED REPUTATION
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
(insert eyeroll emoji here)
NOVELIST OF THE YEAR
Patrick Hamilton
(I read no less than four by him this year. That’s a lot!)
THE WHY DO I STILL BOTHER WITH THE BOOKER PRIZE AWARD
Guest presenter, one of our previous winners, Julian Barnes
This goes to 2020 winner
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
A finer slab of misery porn you cannot find.
TRUE CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR
Guest presenter : Jean-Claude Romand, filmed in his cell in the Benedictine monastery in Fontgombault
"Je suis très heureux de remettre ce prix le livre qui détaille mes propres crimes monstrueux."
Winner : The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrere
Runner-up : The Manson Women by Clara G Livsey
GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR
Going into Town by Roz Chast
Which isn’t actually a novel but a sort-of memoir about living in NYC
HEAVIEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Guest presenter : Tyson Fury
Winner : The Story of Film by Mark Cousins which tipped the scales at 160 g. This was nowhere near the all-time champion Century by Bernard Bruce, published in 1999 by Phaidon, which was a staggering 570 g.
THE BRETT EASTON ELLIS AWARD FOR MOST VIOLENT BOOK OF THE YEAR
The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim
(As I read I could hear BEE saying ”Damn, I wish I’d thought of that”)
(Announcer says something oily and simpering about the covid-stricken year of 2021 and how as we peer into an uncertain future great literature is the only thing that can get us through, although cute kitten videos on Youtube also help. Backstage Karl Ove Knausgard is fighting with Julian Barnes.)
Everyone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theoEveryone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theory but it won’t help at all when you’re pulled over for speeding. “I’m just a brain in a vat, officer”.
So that thing you have there draped round your soul, yes, your very body – did you know that it’s like an explosive device waiting to go off at the slightest movement? It’s so offensive! Depending on the context.
For instance, on p155 we read:
Jock Sturges has been photographing the same nudist families in France year after year, watching the children grow into young adults. Sally Mann photographs her own children negotiating the turbulent waters of childhood.
This book was published in 1994 and in the last 24 years we have had such a tsunami of revelations about the prevalence of paedophilia that the very young nudes in these two photographers’ works are now alarming and very unsettling. (But still on sale at Amazon.)
How’s this for a story about the offensive qualities of the human form. A modest form of swimwear was created for Muslim women which got called the burkini – actually it’s nothing to do with the burka as it does not cover the face, but it covers everything else.
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The burka had already been banned in France as you will know. But then the burkini was banned by various French resorts. What could possibly be the problem? The Independent newspaper explained:
The first city to announce the prohibition was Cannes, where mayor David Lisnard said he wanted to prohibit “beachwear ostentatiously showing a religious affiliation while France and places of religious significance are the target of terror attacks” to avoid “trouble to public order”.
So then you had the crazy sight of French policemen on the beach ordering Muslim women wearing the burkini to expose more of their bodies or face the judicial consequences. “You’re offending public decency by wearing too many clothes!”
This fits right into the chapter of this remarkable book called “Politic” – “the body as a site of contested meaning and value”. Boy, you can say that again.
*
So this book is stuffed full of 366 photos – “35 in colour, 331 in duotone” (yes, black & white) – of the human body in its many phases and attitudes, from the very gruesome
Felice Beato 1865 – Crucifixion of the Male Servant Sokichi who Killed the Son of his Boss and was Therefore Crucified. He Was 25 Years Old
to surrealistic fun in the 1930s and all the way to the pinnacle of straight and gay male and female beauty. It’s also stuffed with rather turgid and waffly prose consisting of statements of the obvious and statements of the indefinably abstruse with very little in between.
*
One of the most interesting chapters is called “Estrangement”, dealing with imperfect, disfigured, disabled, rejected, sick and dead human bodies. So here we have the bound Chinese foot, the Fijian cannibals with a fresh corpse, the hermaphrodite, elephantiasis due to scarlet fever, and a selecting of grossly deformed foetuses in big jars (always a crowd-pleaser). And let’s not forget
A Filipino Freak Of Seven Or Eight Years Old Having An Extra Pair Of Legs Protruding From The Pelvis, C 1900
We are then informed that
in the 19th century there was a brisk trade in such photographs of 'the other' : the circus freak, the bearded lady, Siamese twins, and so forth were popular subjects to be collected and traded
So all those sites on the internet specialising in the gross and the grotesque have a venerable pedigree.
A book like this demonstrates how our notions of what is decent and what is indecent mutate quite confusingly as the decades roll on by. I now think that the Victorian collectors of pornography would not be shocked by modern porn; instead they would be delighted at the quality of the images. We 21st century people, however, might well be shocked at some Victorian practices :
Dead babies were another popular subject. Although to our thinking there is something of the macabre in this practice, people in the 19th century seemed to find much solace in it, as they did also in the so-called spirit photograph, a portrait of the widow or widower with an image of the dearly departed (manufactured by double exposure) hovering reassuringly over the shoulder.
(If you’re interested, just google “Victorian babies in coffins”)
* In 2016 Lucy Martin became a weather presenter on the BBC – here she is
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I’m used to her now but at first she kind of shocked me. Okay, not kind of, she did shock me! I’m still trying to work out why....more
Paul Raymond, sultan of sleaze, crown prince of porn, the Soho-bestriding emperor of nakedness : confusingly, he came from a solid middle-class familyPaul Raymond, sultan of sleaze, crown prince of porn, the Soho-bestriding emperor of nakedness : confusingly, he came from a solid middle-class family, no oik was he, posh-toned suit-and-tie wearing rounded-voweled and Conservative to the very tip of his very member; and gifted by God with an unbreakable carapace of propriety which enabled him to wade through the oceans of filth with the bland equanimity of a drainage inspector in a municipal waterworks.
PAUL RAYMOND SPEAKS
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Really, you shouldn’t listen to all this nonsense, they’ve been saying all sorts of dreadful things about me since the 1950s. You see, what I have done is to give the public what it wants, not what it thinks it should have. The female form is one of God’s most beautiful creations. It is something to be admired to the point of worship. It has been an artistic inspiration throughout civilised history. I have used that inspiration to make myself a fortune. No, my shows are not obscene, crude or pornographic. They are artistic, erotic and tasteful. Indeed, they are family entertainment. I wouldn’t put on any show which I would be unhappy bringing my wife and children to see. Or indeed your wife. Actually, my wife choreographed the striptease acts in my shows for years. And let me tell you, at least half of the patrons at the Paul Raymond Revuebar are couples, of that you may be assured. I believe my nude acts may serve to rekindle their inner lives such that when they return to their homes, intercourse may follow. I hope I have served a laudable function. We do not get enough opportunities to observe naked ladies, their grace, their perfect proportionality, and alas, this appreciation is so often regarded as a matter of shame, something furtive and nasty. But it isn’t, it is glorious! And I mean to display its glory to the world. So long as the world will pay the membership fee and be confirmed by two existing club members. May I say that I have never put on an indecent show in my life. In fact, I won’t engage a girl with a bigger than 36 inch bust because I wouldn’t like to embarrass my customers.
[image]
MIXED MESSAGES FROM GOD
At one point, Raymond’s daughter’s boyfriend’s fiancée stabbed the boyfriend in the stomach (he recovered). At another point Raymond participated in a sting to catch two crooks who had been terrorizing his family with death threats for months (they pretended to be the IRA and had demanded £15,000 – they got jail). It was like that for years.
Raymond was very close to his daughter and they were both monstrous cokeheads, boozers and smokers. He had an 80 cigarettes a day habit. So it’s just not true what they say about alcohol, tobacco and cocaine – he died peacefully at the age of 82. Oh, wait – his daughter Debbie died at the age of 36 from a drug overdose. So yeah, it is true what they say. Sometimes.
[image]
PAUL RAYMOND IN HIS POMP
His dandified get-up confirmed his reputation as that comic stereotype of yesteryear, the oldest swinger in town. He still liked to wear a long black fur coat draped round the shoulders of an expensive handmade suit, the outfit accessorised these days by a gold bracelet, plus a diamond and gold pendant worn over his tie. As if that wasn’t noticeable enough he sported a pencil moustache and a deep tan that lent him the appearance of some leathery Hollywood actor made up to play a Mexican in an old western. The darkness of his skin emphasised the whiteness of his teeth and the pallor of his ever more elaborate scrape-over hairdo. Now dyed blonde, the colour giving it a strange acrylic sheen, it was sufficiently long at the back to form a valance round his neck.
IT WASN’T ALL WALL-TO-WALL 18 YEAR OLD BLONDES (ALTHOUGH MOSTLY IT WAS)
Paul Raymond got to be one of Britain’s richest people by exhibiting female flesh (strip clubs, mainly, then also rude stage shows like Oh! Calcutta! and nude magazines) and I wondered why every other material boy of the 60s and 70s didn’t do the same, so I read this after seeing the (mildly amusing) movie, and the answer was – tenacity. He was under constant attack from three directions for almost his whole career, and only his unflappable English-to-the-core urbanity got him through.
THE COPS
Subdivided into a) bent ones who wanted a backhander; b) worse, straight ones who were raiding his club all the time. The obscenity laws were whatever the judge thought on that day, so it wasn’t easy keeping out of jail or bankruptcy. On the other hand, it seemed to be pretty easy for this slippery eel.
Magistrate Reg Seaton :
(sung to the tune of “Love Is the Sweetest Thing”)
Your establishment and others have been vying with each other to see what degree of disgustingness they can introduce to attract members from all classes who are only too ready out of curiosity or lust to see filth portrayed in the establishment. Your show can only be characterised as filthy, disgusting and beastly.
(£5000 fine plus expenses – pocket change.)
THE GANGSTERS
Running protection rackets all over Soho (as were the bent cops) and cutting up rough if you didn’t pay up (“Mr Raymond, you wouldn’t want your strippers to get broken would you?”). Raymond seemed to be something of a magician, he never got duffed over. I assume he paid whoever had to be paid. They all had names like Jack the Hat or Jack the Gangster who’ll Rip your Arm Off.
THE ANTI-PORN CAMPAIGNERS
Trying to stem the tide of filth spewing forth in the “permissive society” of the 60s, they got Paul Raymond in their sights – he was the embodiment of all that was wrong! Mostly he got in front of their panels of inquiry and investigative probes and he charmed and smarmed ‘em. He told them “I’m with you! I hate obscenity!”
SOME RANDOM QUOTES
Hidden in the small print there’s an unsavoury announcement that dispels any doubts about the habits of the show’s audience. “In the interest of public health this theatre is disinfected throughout with Jeye’s Fluid.
In the early 50s New York burlesque shows were being staged with such wonderful titles as Anatomy and Cleopatra, Julius Teaser and Panties’ Inferno.
Pyjama Tops : The joy of it was that it was completely tasteless. For no particular reason all the girls leapt into the swimming pool in their pyjama tops. And then there was the ghastliness of all these tourists in raincoats wanking in the stalls.
In 1960 Raymond told the press his income was “in the region of £2000 a week” – this was more than ten times that of the then prime minister Harold Macmillan.
In those days Soho was synonymous not just with striptease but also with hot air : the serpentine hiss of the espresso machines, the fractious shushing of steam irons, the aromatic breath from restaurant doorways, and above all, the sound of conversation.
MONOTONOUS SUCCESS
Accompanied by clouds of naked young women, in and out of court, on yachts and helicopters, backstage, front of house, suavely parlaying with gangsters, the police, the judges, the reporters, the drag queens, rock bands, porn stars, with his entire private life an extended melodramatic soap opera, even so, Paul Raymond appears to have been a bit on the dull side, his life for decades at a time filled with monotonous success, money lashing down upon him in a continual monsoon, accompanied by heavy drifts of cocaine, storm surges of bodily fluid and multiple attacks of threesomes in giant mirrored beds. He proved that, should we have been in any doubt at all, the wages of sin are frankly astronomical.
According to this excellent book, PRB often stood for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but also stood for Please Ring Bell and occasionally Penis Rather BeAccording to this excellent book, PRB often stood for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but also stood for Please Ring Bell and occasionally Penis Rather Better.
But it could have stood for Painters Really Bonkers.
In the beginning there was a young art critic who had the ear of the cognoscenti called John Ruskin. Half of this book is about him. He was The Art Don. All the PRB thought he was like OMG I just saw John Ruskin walk by, I'm going to kiss the pavement whereupon he trod. But he was off the scale creepy. The Ruskin family were friends with the Grays and the Grays had a daughter. By the time she was 13 John was 22 and was writing fairy stories for her and thinking that she might be The One. She grew up to be a real drop-dead stunner. Her name was Euphemia and they called her Effie. I would have too. 90% of the interesting history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood followed from the curious fact that when 28 year old John Ruskin got to marry the 19 year old Effie in 1848 he declined to have sex with her. For six years*. Until she got so freaked out by this that she divorced him. Which was huge. In those days you actually had to get a separate Act of Parliament passed in the House of Commons to finalise your divorce. That would make you think twice.
A great number of the people in this book spent a large amount of the short time they were allotted on this Planet Earth thinking about what did not go on between John Ruskin's John Thomas and Effie Ruskin's lady bits, and how the wind blew and the tumbleweed rolled between those most public of private parts. It was the talk of the town. For six years.
Meanwhile, the actual PRB were gathering together. Actually, there were two brotherhoods. The line-up for the first one was
John Millais, bass William Holman Hunt, drums Dante Gabriel Rossetti, lead guitar, vocals Ford Madox Brown, rhythm (left after first album)
After Millais and Hunt went solo Rossetti reformed the band
William Morris, bass Edward Burne-Jones, drums Dante Gabriel Rossetti, lead guitar, keyboard, vocals
At first, PRB 1 was laughed at by the critics. But then Ruskin noticed them and decreed that they were brilliant. And so they were. And he became their great friend and supporter.
I liked this - John Millais was a boy genius and got on some people's nerves:
Once after winning a prestigious silver medal from the Society of Arts fellow pupils hung Millais head downwards out of a window and left him there, suspended over the pavement below, held only by the scarves and pieces of string that his peers had selected to attach him to the iron window guards until his precarious situation was noticed by passers-by
How to analyse a Millais painting
The subject is "Lorenzo and Isabella" (painted when Millais was 19)
[image]
The brother in the foreground is holding up a nutcracker in his right hand. While the cracking of a nut could well indicate his desire to emasculate poor Lorenzo, the shadow he himself casts is of a brooding sexuality directed at his own sister. The shadow of his forearm on the table looks like an erect penis, a mound of white ejaculate indicated by salt spilt on the cloth. The brother's foot points at his sister's lap.
The PRB were the first English bohemians. They broke various social taboos, they just couldn't care. The main thing they did was locate stunners on the London streets. They would go out as a group deliberately trawling for stunners (their word), and they would inveigle the girls to become models. The girls were shop assistants or prostitutes, because being an artist's model was the same as prostitution to the Victorians, no difference at all. Then the boys would get these working-class or even underclass girls to live with them, and – the ultimate shockingness – they occasionally married these girls, sometimes after paying for them to get trained up in the middle-class niceties of fashion and manners first. Then they would have affairs with each others' models and/or wives. And it was a whirligig ride for the girls. (For those interested, it turned out that Annie Miller was the Yoko Ono.)
Sometimes it turned out well – Millais got off with Effie – and sometimes it ended badly – Rossetti got off with Lizzie Siddall, shop assistant turned IT girl; he became besotted; promised to marry her; ten years later was still promising; by which time she was a junkie (laudanum) with mental health problems; then finally he did marry her, then he copped off with another woman; then she committed suicide, aged 29. Oh yes, and in his extravagant grief, as a grand gesture Rossetti cast a manuscript book of his own poetry into the coffin , and some months later regretted this rashness and got a special license to get the coffin exhumed to retrieve his bloody poetry, which he now wished to publish and dedicate to his new girlfriend, which, you know, was in poor taste, because she was another man's wife. And you have to laugh because there was a wormhole through his favourite poem. Literally. A hole made by a worm.
As for Ruskin, he survived the wagging tongues and in a truly gothic E A Poe-ish way he started to repeat the same Effie story again with another young girl, this one being ten when he met her aged 39. That wretched car crash takes up most of the last quarter of this book.
The PRB was a living museum of psychosexual morbidity which they then laid bare in their beautiful art. All that yearning, all that death, all that prettiness. All those flowers and fabrics and little mice and foliage and eyes like saucers and undraped flesh and knights and goats and doom.
And finally
Rossetti liked to keep inappropriately exotic pets in his garden. They all died of neglect. His favourite was a wombat.
The wombat did not last long in the Rossetti household. Anecdotally, its demise was as a result of eating a box of cigars.
* One theory about JR was that he had been so conditioned by his immersion in classical art that he was struck with repulsed horror at the sight of his new wife's pubic hair. (Could this happen to a young man of today, I wonder? I think it might, but it wouldn't have been classical art he had been immersed in.)
This book is at the same time the shortest, silliest and coolest book I own. I just read it yesterday.
Short? - some of my reviews are longer than thisThis book is at the same time the shortest, silliest and coolest book I own. I just read it yesterday.
Short? - some of my reviews are longer than this book. It says 74 pages but half of them are full page Este cartoons.
Silly? - Here's Lytton Strachey regaling us with a series of letters by two sexually curious 17 year old ladies from la belle epoque who refer to the male and female private parts in such coy terms that I could hear toes curling from a hundred yards away, and the toes were on feet belonging to people who weren't reading this book. It was like nuclear fallout. I have to visit a chiropodist now to get my own toes professionally uncurled.
Cool? - A first edition hardback from 1969 sent by a Goodreads friend from across the Atlantic with a handwritten note in it. I'll say cool! ...more
This is a very dodgy document. The first sentence is :
These are the sexual confessions of a southern Russian born about 1870, of good family, educatedThis is a very dodgy document. The first sentence is :
These are the sexual confessions of a southern Russian born about 1870, of good family, educated and capable, like many Russians, of psychological analysis; he prepared this confession in French in 1912.
Victor X is referring to himself in the third person here, by the way. It confused me at first. Anyway, the story is that the famous sex researcher Havelock Ellis was preparing yet another volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, and Victor wrote his confession for possible inclusion, as a case history. Mr Ellis' American editors told him not to publish it, in no uncertain terms. But the French edition's editors had no such qualms – mais naturellement – so it went in as a hardly-ever-read appendix, to be finally rendered into English in 1980 by Donald Rayfield, professor of Russian at the University of London. The professor stumbled over these confessions in the British Library in London and his brain exploded and he " translated them on the spot". So what's the big deal here?
Well, in the first 84 pages , Victor describes his early life around Kiev, Ukraine, between the ages of 3 and 19. So now imagine if you will an entire country where parents just don't care what their kids do. They're just not interested. As long as you don't cavort naked on the breakfast table, you can do what you please with whom. What about all the illegitimate babies which will inevitably result? Pshaw, in Russia these things are no problem – they do not go in for this Catholic guilt trip the rest of Europe likes to wallow in. Victor's family knows a woman who's had four children with four different men and is still unmarried. It is no problem. She is not shunned, she's just a little different than most. No problem. Another vodka. Thank you, yes please.
So Victor meets shagadelic babe after shagadelic babe and by the age of 19 there is little he hasn't done at least twice. Typical Victor description:
They were strong females, marvellously strapping, and exuded health and animal vitality. They had red cheeks, enormous behinds, firm jutting breasts, legs like Doric columns, muscular, powerful vulvas.
Powerful what??
So then, age 19, Victor goes to University in Milan, and the shutters – bang! – come dowm. No more rumpy pumpy for Victor.
From the moment I left Kiev I lived a life of abstinence. I still felt erotic urges but unlike what I expected, I could find no way of satisfying them… Generally, young girls are not so free to move about in Italy as in Russia; they only go out in their mother's company and never entertain gentlemen alone… I could pursue a girl only if I had "honourable intentions"…"And people say the Italians are so passionate!" I said to myself with astonishment
That being the case one may have thought Victor would have recourse to prostitutes but he was very afraid of venereal disease, and he didn't have the cash needed to keep a mistress, so he switched from promiscuity to celibacy.
I lived in absolute chastity from twenty to thirty-two. At first I found absitnence a burden; afterwards I got used to it and thought no more of women. My eleven years of chastity were the happiest, or rather the least unhappy, of my life.
Then things took a turn for the worse. He met a nice young lady of 27 and intended to marry her, and they were engaged. Now working as an engineer, he gets sent to Naples. Which, it turns out, was one giant brothel.
Families who are not badly off…traffic in their prepubescent girls…The Neapolotans are a very practical lot indeed : they make their money every way they can except by working.
A pimp offers him two girls, aged 15 and 11, at the same time. He's introduced to the girls' mother who agrees the price. He tells himself these girls have already been thoroughly corrupted. Two pages of description follows. Then he gets the taste for little girls.
I soon got to know other "honourable" families with little girls of ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen who were likewise virgins and as expert as the first two
The deal was that these children would do anything you like which didn't require penetration. You could (of course) buy their virginities but the price was sky high. In time he starts up with an adult prostitute, she gives him gonorrhoea, he has to keep putting off his marriage because of that, and his fiancee runs out of patience and dumps him. But alas, the sexual obsession with very young girls does not leave him. He moves to Spain, there are no further paedophilic episodes, he becomes a voyeur, just another dirty old man.
One may be forgiven in wondering if Victor was just making all this stuff up. Professor Rayfield did his homework and figured out who Victor was, and so verified at least the verifiable in his confession – that he did live here and there, and he did study at the University of Turin, not Milan, etc. Long story short, the professor believes Victor.
Vladimir Nobokov published Conclusive Evidence, his memoir, in 1951, and refers to Victor's confessions ruefully :
Our innocence now seems almost monstrous to me, in the light of various confessions for those years cited by Havelock Ellis… from [the Ukraine] there comes a particularly Babylonian contribution
Professor Rayfield discusses VN's story The Magician and comments
Victor's confessions provided the final push in the birth of Lolita's central theme
I can't say I'm convinced by this, but I'll give Prof Rayfield his say – admitting Victor's complete lack of any sense of humour or irony, yet he finds similarities between Victor and Humbert Humbert :
The immense culture and the exhibitionist pedantry, the fastidiousness and snobbery, the inability to align himself with any nationality – a fatal cosmopolitalism… an ability to watch himself in action, to record the minutest detail and to savour and dwell on until the recollection becomes more exciting than the act… Victor writing for Havelock Ellis, like Humbert Humbert writing for the gentlemen of the jury, relishes his superior intelligence, his self-assurance that what he has to tell his audience will surpass anything in their experience and leave them dumbfounded.
Yes, that I agree with. This book left me dumbfounded. ...more
** Warning – contains distasteful material, unfit for most people**
This is a very (very) silly torture-porn book which can only be recommened to fans ** Warning – contains distasteful material, unfit for most people**
This is a very (very) silly torture-porn book which can only be recommened to fans of Deathgasm (Jason Howden, 2015) or Centuries of Torment by the band Cannibal Corpse (2008). They would love it.
What was I doing reading it? Funny you should ask – I was asking myself the same question. I thought – you, yes, you - reader of Ulysses and Winnie the Pooh, are now reading Caligula Divine Carnage, subtitle : Atrocities of the Roman Emperors.
Explain!
Well, you see, I recently read My Lives by ubersophisticate man of the world Edmund White, a guy who knows how to string a sentence together. In that book he mentions that this other guy has written his biography and the other guy is Stephen Barber. When I checked out Stephen Barber on Goodreads I found he'd also written this one.
I was intrigued.
Of course it could be there's two Stephen Barbers. It wouldn't be the first time Goodreads has concertinered two people with the same name. (Or should that be concertina'd? But I don't like that apostrophe. It makes me uneasy.) Googling didn't help, so until I'm told otherwise I think this is the same Stephen Barber who wrote The Burning World, a biography of Edmund White.
In which case, I have a message for Edmund :
You really should read this one. Do you really want this guy writing your life? I think not!
In his note on sources Stephen dismisses the tedious standards to which historical works are held in a rather grand manner:
It would require the most omniscient oracle to say what was authentic
Meaning – for the purposes of this book I've decided to believe only the most insanely lurid fantasies spun around these mad Roman emperors by the sadistic pornographers of the last two thousand years.
I don't boggle easily but I was all a-boggle on the very first page of the foreword. We are discussing Tiberius, the emperor prior to Caligula :
Not content with enticing mullet to nibble his crumb-coated genitals as he reclined in the tepid rock pools
A mullet:
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Well, I tried this once and really the crumbs just dissolve in the water before the mullet get interested, so frankly I don't believe Emperor Tiberius did any such thing. More like he said he'd like to try it. Now, on the second page of the foreword we have this, an early description of the Brazilian wax :
Domitian meanwhile lusted after prostitutes and courtesans without surcease, and delighted in depilating their succulent pubic mounds by hand-held tweezers before penetration.
I don't believe this one either – it would take hours and I think one's ardour would be considerably diminished long before any serious depilation had been achieved.
I was glad to read that even Emperors didn't get everything they wished for:
Although Tiberius's last wish had been that one of his most well endowed slaves should bugger his corpse, nobody could be found who was prepared to do so, despite considerable financial incentives.
As you see, the torture porn is laced with a little understated wit on occasion.
So this book is a list of repetitive horrors and maimings and slaughterings inflicted on all and sundry by Caligula, Commodus and Heliogabalus, three of the the four truly crazy Emperors. But it's so over the top that not only can the top no longer be seen but it's now only a distant memory to this book. I just didn't believe any of it. E.g.
A special miniature amphitheatre was erected where the plebeian scum could for a small fee sit and watch their Emperor bugger his sister on a stage of solid gold.
Sorry, just no. No he didn't. Stop writing this stuff, Stephen Barber. Really. Even if it's just for money. Stop metaphorically buggering these corpses!
Okay - some light relief: which pop song not only uses the word plebeian but rhymes it too? (view spoiler)[Answer – Cry me a River
Told me love was too plebeian Told me you were through with me and Now you say you love me…(hide spoiler)]
****
Update :
Note on Stephen Barber : Googling now does help, and confirms that it's the same guy, who clearly is a professor of art history at Kingston School of Art in London by day, and a scurrilous compiler of pornohistory by night. Also, his Edmund White biography was published in 1999, two years before Caligula, and from what the Amazon reviews say it's a serious, sensible and excellent work....more
Ten ways to review Off Season, a book about cannibals!!
1. Let's go to the movies with Jack Ketchum
Some Like them Hot Stir the Right One In The Incr EdibTen ways to review Off Season, a book about cannibals!!
1. Let's go to the movies with Jack Ketchum
Some Like them Hot Stir the Right One In The Incr Edibles Bringing Up Baby Brainspotting The Best Ears of Our Lives Rashermum The Green Bile No Recipe for Old Men
(this could go on)
2. Off Season, the Musical
He Will Tear us Apart (sung by Laura) Everybody Spurts (sung by the chief cannibal) Stir it Up (sung by his female companion) Oops! I Did it Again! (sung by the chief cannibal) All I have to Eat is Spleen (an old Everly Brothers song, sung by the grumpy cannibal teenager) This Arm Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us (sung by the grumpy cannibal children)
(etc etc)
3. The Really Rough Guide to Maine
Off Season is The Rough Guide to Maine as written by Jeffrey Dahmer. It's a wild and gruesome envelope pushing ride, indeed, the envelope is pushed so far you can no longer see it, it's just a dim memory, er, was that thing an envelope? I can't remember, maybe there was an envelope once, but not any more (etc etc)
4. At the tutorial
I see by the amount of green in your faces that only some of you have made the time to read Off Season. This is of course the unexpurgated edition of a novel which has been heralded as er er er..a founding text of splatterpunk. So how, we may ask, hmm, does it stand up, post-Saw, post-Hostel, and post, indeed indeed, hmm hmm, yes, splatterpunk itself? (etc etc)
5. i don't know anymore
Think of Off Season as something Dr Hannibal Lecter would have woke up screaming from. Mainely because of the pedestrian writing, the dubious psychology, the atrocities-by-rote, and the desperate lack of any decent chianti.
6. Ah those fanboys
Strictly for gorehounds and unless they're as degenerate as the kutthroat krew of krazed kannibals with which we which who how, then their cup will be running over with human brains, ha ha ha! (Etc etc)
[sorry about that. I think I was drunk when I wrote that. i don't know what it means.]
7. on and on and on
Off Season is the 1980s version of the Sawney Bean legend or to put it another way a rewrite of The Hills Have Eyes (1977). You know the score, every other horror movie has the same plot. But this is not the right stick to beat them with. If you take blues or doo wop music, the same rigid structures are in place for every blues or doo wop song. A tiny variation here, a nuance there. This is genre, and the appreciation of genre lies in your relish of the variations and the nuances of the same thing endlessly cycling round. (Etc etc)
8. nearly over now
Off Season presents us with the very unlikely idea of a tribe of degenerate cannibals living undetected in the USA of the 1980s. Okay, they're descended from people who'd been trapped on an island, but anthropologically speaking this novel is all over the place, it has no theoretical underpinnings, Ketchum is clearly making it up as he goes along. He clearly knows nothing about clan structure and language patterns. The tribe is still in the hunter-gatherer stage and yet they have a fully formed English grammar. What Margaret Mead or Levi-Strauss would have made of Ketchum's cannibals one shudders to think. (Etc etc)
9. the personal note
I wonder why I read the occasional horror book & watch the occasional horror movie – what is it about these sadistic fantasies that draws me in – why only the other day I laid aside my copy of Edna O'Brien's delicate coming-of-age novel about two 14 years olds in rural Ireland in the 1950s to watch Shuttle, the critically reviled horror flick from 2008 (mumble mumble etc etc)
10. How very ironic!
Of course you could review this penny dreadful horror novel in a lightly humorous ten-different-ways-to-review-the-unreviewable way and then in the last section you could satirise your own desire to write wacky reviews, which would be the perfect way to end, don't you think? Chief cannibal : Not if I've got anything to do with it, mate! (Speaking bizarrely in perfect English even though in every other way he epitomises human degeneracy and extreme lack of manners).
Sound effect : Crunch! Munch!
P Bryant: Aaarh! arrgh! How can I write reviews without any fingers??
Chief cannibal (speaking with his mouth full, as usual) : You could dictate. ...more
I remembered I read this one when it came out and now looking at the GR reviews, I confess I'm a little surprised at all the high-fives proffered by tI remembered I read this one when it came out and now looking at the GR reviews, I confess I'm a little surprised at all the high-fives proffered by the female reviewers. Because Dirty Weekend is right there with I Spit on your Grave or Last House on the Left or Baise-Moi, all those rape revenge movies that got trashed by all the critics and are generally hated by women for pretty good reasons. So I wonder if the reviewers here like those movies. And I do think you can compare Dirty Weekend the book with those movies because Dirty Weekend is not to be described as literature in any way, shape or form, it's one of those books which say "Film Me Please" on every page.
(Which Michael Winner did. By a man's friends ye shall know him.)...more
Ech! Ew ew ew. Oh no.. no.. surely not. Ach - why am I reading this? In the spirit of pure research? Really? Pure? Is that the word you used? I don't Ech! Ew ew ew. Oh no.. no.. surely not. Ach - why am I reading this? In the spirit of pure research? Really? Pure? Is that the word you used? I don't guess that might be a word one might possibly use in the context in which we find ourselves. Barf barf. Gross. Oh God those Japanese ones. Ech. Ach. Uch. This surely must be illegal like everywhere. Huh? No - surely not - some of this stuff is on Amazon? What kind of a society are we living in? Blurch blech blech - no, the German ones are the worst. Oh, that's so sick. Sick sick. It's beyond beyond. Sewer is right. Surely this book and the movies it gleefully describes proves once and for all there is no God. Or, okay, if there is He's pretty hands-off. Eww ew, page 47. I did not know you could do that. It's kind of interesting in an abstract anatomical way, I suppose. But really. I think I'll save the rest for another day. It can't be healthy even reading descriptions of these movies, never mind actually seeing them. Although the descriptions do often make me guffaw out loud. It's the insane relish, you see. It's so unseemly. This Robin Bougie guy is one disgusting individual. Okay, with a somewhat wicked sense of humour. But no, he can't get round me like that. This stuff is appalling. Appalling. ...more
Sometimes we fish in murky waters. Here's a tiny fragment of a book about the weird and not wonderful Charles Hawtry, a hideous caricature of an actorSometimes we fish in murky waters. Here's a tiny fragment of a book about the weird and not wonderful Charles Hawtry, a hideous caricature of an actor remembered only for being one of the abased grotesques in the grim, revolting, bargain-basement, so bad it's just bad, not good-bad Carry On series, famous world-wide. To call the Carry Ons puerile would give a bad name to puers. I sometimes imagine a bunch of intellectuals in, say, Bombay, watching Carry On Up the Khyber and saying to each other - gor blimey o'reilly - these were our colonial masters! In the painful Carry On crew Charles Hawtrey was the perpetual schoolboy with the big glasses who would dress up as a woman quicker than you could say "in this scene you have to dress up as a woman". He was the very definition of what most men thought homosexuals were, even camper than Kenneth Williams, and that's saying a lot. Here’s Roger Lewis’s wonderful description of Kenneth Williams :
an appalling actor, affected, caustic, shrieking like a peacock and with no sense of dramatic rhythm. Sinuous, snaky, serpentine, his voice and body coil and writhe across the screen, his forked tongue flickering, his nostrils looming and threatening to engulf you like railway tunnels
Yes, don’t get on the wrong side of Roger Lewis. But he likes Hawtry. Here he is liking him :
he’s a manifestation. Everything about him – his bony witch’s fingers, his round spectacles, his skin which was like tracing paper, his coal-black lock of hair – was picturesque; it’s the stylization of a silent movie. He’s like a drawing by Beardsley or Cocteau, a sketch in pen and ink, a few contours and curlicues, held together by nervous tension…. in his work there is enjoyment, a winningness; in his life furtiveness, pride, cynicism, boredom and hatred, a strain of discord forever creaking and snapping beneath the surface
Why write a book, even such an afterthought of a book as this one, which is more of a long pamphlet, about such a benighted creature? But that’s the beauty of it – we’re human, and are therefore part Laurence Olivier and part Charles Hawtry, part Meryl Streep and part Paris Hilton, we dream among the stars and we smirk behind our hands. I think Shakespeare says something similar somewhere. And we can write about what we like. And sometimes we like very odd things.
Charles Hawtry’s life is not pleasant to contemplate – he wanted big ruff tuff masculine boyfriends but never got any unless money changed hands. He propositioned every taxi driver who took him home when he’d been slung out of a pub for propositioning every other man. He had no friends, he had a Psycho-style relationship with his mummy (talking to her aloud after she died). It seems he was never happier than when he was wearing female clothing. This is just the kind of screwed-up individual they had in mind when they tried (and still in some places try) to de-program gay people. You want your kid to be like Charles Hawtry? Huh? Well, no – I really don’t. The cross-dressing gender-bending aspect of gay culture has always given me the willies (oo-ah ducky). Firstly because it permeates British culture, particularly comedy, and is enshrined in the dame in the panto we all troop off to see every Christmas (note – girls dressed as boys is a whole other thing, I never mind that!). There's hardly a British comic who hasn't been a cock in a frock at some point in their career. And second because it gives me the pernicious idea that gay men are actually all just simply transgendered, they’re females born into the wrong body, that’s why they want to wear mascara and camp about. (And same goes for the masculine lesbians too). But I actually don’t believe that, I think that’s completely wrong-headed way to think about the whole thing. As I say, these are murky waters in which to fish.
One thing I learned in this book was that male homosexuals often had female travelling companions which they described as a “beard”. As in “Are you taking a beard?” This was (then) gay slang. Beard = false beard, as in acting a part. The female was acting the part of the gay man’s wife.
I admit to being embarrassed that this review is as long as some reviews of The Brothers Karamazov. ...more
“Roll up, roll up, step right this way” – hey, it’s that guy again! He keeps turning up in my reviews – he’s played by Tom Waits in a bowler hat – (me“Roll up, roll up, step right this way” – hey, it’s that guy again! He keeps turning up in my reviews – he’s played by Tom Waits in a bowler hat – (memo to finance department - please don't squander your entire budget hiring cool singer/songwriter/actors to do bit parts in these reviews, I hope they can stand up on their own without such indulgencies) - anyway, what's he saying this time?
“It’s a continuous show, you pays your money and you takes just as long as you likes inside, yes sir! We have everything for the connoisseur IF you know what I mean, I’m saying we don’t just have LIVE! NUDE! GIRLS! oh no, oh no, not at all, we have FOR your DELECTATION and your EDIFICATION we have at no expense spared ALL THE MAJOR PARAPHILIAS yes sir, right inside, right up there BANG smack on stage, in floodlights, and a few in some private booths for a modest extra fee – Here you look like a man of the world, a l’homme du monde as they say in Italy, you there –“
“Who, me?”
“Yes sir, you appear to me like a guy with an interest in things, if you catch my drift – I can see it in your expression, in the tilt of your trilby, that pique of curiosity – step right inside, that’s it, just twenty reasonable dollars, that’s let’s say fifteen of your English pounds, all major credit cards accepted, thank you, thank you sir, here’s the door, it’s a show you won’t forget…”
DIGRESSION ABOUT REALISM
Is fiction realistic? Another question : is fiction supposed to be realistic? Let’s imagine a sliding scale. Over here, on the extreme left, we have Lord of the Rings. Over there, on the far right, we have The Executioner’s Song. We can spread everything else out between these two poles. So what about genre fiction? That deals in agreed conventions, covenants between the author and the reader – in thrillers it will be like this (guns and gals and gore), in science fiction it will be like that (aliens and time travel and hardly any gals). Within genres, you get another sliding scale – in science fiction, for instance, between the long range abstractions of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series on the left hand, all the way over to Kim Stanley Robinson’s meticulous terraforming books about Mars. In the detective story/murder mystery genre, the scale would be from Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Marple on this side (no, that’s not how England EVER WAS) and all the way over to Richard Price’s forensically detailed procedurals Freedomland and Lush Life.
THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE!
This novel, High Life, is a genre exercise in "California noir", and comes at you like the younger snottier filthier even more nihilistic son of James Ellroy – a Trainspotting/Ellroy/Chandler mashup, almost. As such, that’s not a bad ambition. Unfortunately, High Life is a fairly lame way to do it.
One of the reasons why I’d quite like to live to be 200 years old is to find out what they’ll have left to gross each other out with in future decades. There are so many extreme films and books being produced in this line that we are surely now unshockable - I would have thought. Matthew Stokoe appears to have taken on the challenge of finding ways to shock and disturb even us terribly jaded types.
However I thought I'd rewrite this review and remove my previous description of Mr Stokoe's filthiness in an attempt to get an R rating and avoid the previous NC-17. But I'll give you a hint. In Mr Stokoe's view, there is definitely sex after death.
So there's that, and a stupid plot, and then there’s Mr Stokoe’s horrible stock characters, the main two of which are
- the bent copper who says stuff like
Now you wouldn’t wanna piss me off on such a nice day as this, would you, Jackie boy
I’m going to find out sooner or later so you may as well spare yourself some grief
with variations about a jillion times between pages 50 and 250 as he blackmails his way into Jack’s life. This kind of dialogue was much groaned at and mocked by viewers of The Sweeney, a British cop show, back in the 1970s.
and then (oh no, oh yes)
- the femme fatale, rich, beautiful, sexually voracious, any time, any where.
Mr Stokoe actually gets a whole lot of background detail and Los Angeles scene setting really spot on, with many nice touches which I enjoyed, but these characters, my God! They're all from the Planet dahmer.
And the plot is same old everything-points-to-this-person-being-the-killer-but-it’s-that-person-really. Surprise! Not!!
Then again, I finished it, I didn’t hurl it. Can't be denied, Matthew Stokoe has a kind of horrible unpleasant talent. This was the follow-up to Cows (also reviewed) which was not a genre exercise and was much more lunatic. I enjoyed that one a great deal more. It was about cows!
Was there ever an introduction to a book which tried to put you off reading it? Stan Lee, famous King of Marvel Comics, tells us in his foreword that Was there ever an introduction to a book which tried to put you off reading it? Stan Lee, famous King of Marvel Comics, tells us in his foreword that what you are about to see “caters to the basest of man’s character and morals” and is “the most sordid of projects”.
Superman was created by Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist) in 1932 when they were both 18. No one was interested. Finally they got Detective Comics Inc interested in 1938. DC Comics bought the rights to the character for the bizarro sum of $130 and put them both under contract to supply stories. So Jerry and Joe made the same deal as every teenage singer and rock band ever did, all of them being so grateful to be recognised by anyone that they signed the first contract that was shoved in front of them. And Jerry & Joe thereby lost millions. Superman was an immediate and colossal hit. After eight fat years, Jerry and Joe sued DC Comics for ownership of their creation and lost the case. DC fired them and took their credits off all Superman stories. Nice! That’ll teach these uppity creative types who’s boss. Ka-pow, guys! We’ll see you around! Don’t call us, we’ll call you! Except, we won’t! Ha ha!
So by 1947 Joe Shuster had lost the case, spent his money and had eyesight problems. He didn’t come up with anything much good after Superman. He was spiralling down and he was only 33 years old. By the early 50s he was freelancing for anyone who’d have him.
Enter stage left : a pornographer.
Yes, holy black leather kryptonite! It’s Superman In Bondage featuring Lois Lane (also in bondage) and Lana Lang (likewise)! Plus walk-on parts for Lex Luther and Jimmy Olson, cub reporter.
So, down on his luck, Joe Shuster, creator of the most emblematic of all superheroes, got to work in 1954 illustrating 16 flimsy booklets of BDSM tales called “Nights of Horror”.
For me, this is like finding out that my beloved Uncle Charles has been performing under the name Charlene at a tranny bar for the last ten years. It’s shocking.
Sample captions for the illustrations you will find herein:
I seemed to crave this treatment no matter how harsh or humiliating.
The red ants bit and nipped where the honey had been smeared.
Puff it in… in a few minutes you’ll feel wonderful.
“Implant upon my foot your most servile caresses,” he ordered.
I’ll teach you not to go out with someone else.
I’ll do anything you want.. if you let me have this job (The entire plot of Secretary)
Estelle led him further and further up the road to slavery.
He was not averse to having his plaything become the property of other seamen.
You get the idea. One final particularly outre one – a burly guy approaches a woman who has her arms tied behind her. He is waving a phallic cactus before him
I began to pat it on the naked skin of the lush beauty beneath me.
I mean, that’s just perverted. A cactus? Well, if there wasn’t so much whipping and threatening with red hot irons going on (mostly the victims are female, but not always) I might enjoy this stuff, because it’s beautifully drawn, and for anyone who remembers the mighty Man of Steel, it’s kind of a queasy pleasure seeing someone exactly like him being tied up and threatened by someone who looks exactly like Lois Lane only in her underwear. But there’s just a little too much whipping and beating and pain. Oh all right, it’s ALL whipping, apart from the ants literally in the pants, and the cactus.
footnote
I like it when books connect with each other. This one is like a large footnote to The Ten Cent Plague and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (reviewed elsewhere). I didn’t intend to read three books on early American comics all together but that’s how it turned out.
This novel is notoriously obscene. In 1970 copied were burned! With fire! Even in 1980 when it was reissued police raided the publishers and seized 30This novel is notoriously obscene. In 1970 copied were burned! With fire! Even in 1980 when it was reissued police raided the publishers and seized 3000 copies. Obscenity is sometimes said to be in the mind of the beholder, but I would suggest that if you don't think a lot of the sex & violence in this novel is obscene you might need to get help NOW. Therefore, those of a nervous disposition may wish to LOOK AWAY NOW as there may be some vulgar language ahead.
The blurb summarises the plot:
An accident at a secret germ-warfare laboratory allows an aphrodisiac vapor to infect all of Southern England, and within 24 hours the British countryside has exploded into an uncontrollable nightmare of lust, perversion, violence and insanity.
As Woody in Toy Story might say, "ah ha, ha ha ha, ha haaa. Nice one, Potato Head." So, let me give you a flavour of the cascading geyser of vari-coloured bodily fluids we find in here.
p70 : He was wasting time buggering an old insane priest
p109: The budgerigar had been silent during the last hour's fucking and sucking
p153 : Most girls in the pews were masturbating themselves and each other, caught up in a euphoria of blood lust and sex worship as they bounced up and down on the cassocks and hurled Bibles onto the stage.
p160: 'Cut the explanations,' said Vincent. 'There're a thousand sex-crazed girls in that church!'
Now maybe because they couldn't find any regular typesetters for this 166 page spurt of filth, so they had to get some stoned hippy typesetters, I dunno, but there are many delightful typos strewn throughout. Three which particularly appealed were:
p72 : he froamed in exasperation
p109 : "Oh! Oh! Ooooh! It's so food!"
p157: blood still spurted from his would
After all this insane stuffing of orifices I was left slightly reeling. But it was all done with such a kind of studentish obviousness, doggedness and gusto that it was hard to take offence, particulatly as the falt chracters and the craper-thin polt demonstrades that this was nought but a strenousu and imaginitinitive excercise in onamisn.
*****
Addendum :
I found a comment on a website, can't find it now, but anyway, Charles Platt explained that he wrote The Gas when he was about to emigrate to America & he wished to cast off his British reserve because he knew that Americans were extroverts! I mean, there's being an extrovert and there's having sex with animals, and the two should really never ever be confused....more
You know I read this once but I really shouldn't've and you shouldn't neither so, you know, like, just don't. Use the time you save in doing somethingYou know I read this once but I really shouldn't've and you shouldn't neither so, you know, like, just don't. Use the time you save in doing something better, like, you could hoover your cupboards or call your mother or you could marry someone or you could just read something better than this thing like say Lobster Boy or My Boyfriend Has Tentacles or really just about anything. I think I read it because I couldn't imagine anyone marrying Debbie Reynolds AND Elizabeth Taylor in one lifetime, never mind in one five year stretch. It beggars belief you know. Those two hotsy-totsies? Wow. Let's be clear about this: wow. But you know when you peer behind the glassy noses and the pompadour smiles you do find that (apart from Doris Day) these showbiz legends are mostly really creepy and they live in an equally creepy world where most everyone is like them, creepy. Except Doris Day. You know all those nice characters they appear to be in the movies? Well, here's something - THEY'RE NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL! Someone did tell me that once but I disregarded it as negative thinking - I told that person hey, look on the bright side for once. Maybe they are! But you know something, THEY'RE NOT. They're like mafia dons, they have people killed and everything. They could rub you out like an ant. It's true. Better not get on the wrong side of , say, Nicole Kidman. Yeah, you think Johnny Depp is so nice and sweet, giving all his vegetables to the less well-off and all, but he could have you taken out with ONE PHONE CALL. I'm not saying he would, you know, far be it from me to be libellous. But he could. One phone call.
Mind you, I would not say that grinding poverty and no talent makes you a better person. It doesn't. It has not made me a better person. Ask anyone. Also, I am not saying I would have been a better person had I had had the opportunity to marry either the late Debbie Reynolds or the late Elizabeth Taylor or both. I am just saying that I would have had a shot at it, which everyone should deserve in this life, don't you agree. I believe in a world where everybody should have the opportunity to marry Debbie Reynolds. Not just rich types. If that makes me a marxist then so be it.
If I had of married Debbie, I would hope that I would not of dumped her for Elizabeth, no matter how many come ons I got from those famous violet peepers.
Anyway, do not read this book.
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Who would not totally marry Debbie Reynolds? I am betting all men and most women would marry Debbie Reynolds. Wild animals would probably marry Debbie Reynolds, if they were allowed. (I think in the future wild animals will be allowed to marry people, the way things are going.)...more
To everything there is a time - a time to reap and a time to plant, a time to listen to Schoenberg and a time to listen to Lez Zeppeupdate...update...
To everything there is a time - a time to reap and a time to plant, a time to listen to Schoenberg and a time to listen to Lez Zeppelin, the all-girl tribute band, a time to read Marcel Proust and a time to read about zombie apocalypses. That time, for me, passed some years ago. I shouldn't've picked up this novel but I was seduced by shedloads of great reviews on this very site.
Although my copy has a front-cover blurb by Simon Pegg, it's his very own great little zom-romcom Shaun of the Dead, plus George Romero's splendid zombie trilogy which Shaun beautifully parodies, plus other movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend, and a thousand other post-apocalypse novels and B-movies, and plus NOW the fab series THE WALKING DEAD which I only just discovered, wow, I love it - it's all of these things which cumulatively undermine the not inconsiderable energy and sociopolitical insight of Max Brooks' own version of The War Against the People You Really Hoped You'd Never See Again. Every scene in this book we've seen or read several times before, and alas, mostly by less truthful writers. This is really an excellent novel, but for younger readers who haven't already slogged, as I have, through a lifetime of pulp.
Brooks's imagination is tough and unflinching, but you have to concede that zombie apocalypses bring out the macho in pretty much everybody. This really is a war book, chock full of pumped-up acronym-heavy military jargon. World War Z is mainly fought with TESTOSTERONE!!!
This book wanted to be for zombies what THE WIRE is for Baltimore, and for that I give it a crisp military salute and a bag of red tops. I think my 15 year old self would have rated this one four fat ones but that guy didn't have the best taste really.
**
That said, myself and daughter Georgia will be lurching, shambling and jerking our bodies towards the cinema when the Brad Pitt zombuster film-of-the-book is released soon. Me and Georgia love that stuff. Gwan, destroy the world again... and again......more
The subtitle of this heavenly concoction is: A celebration of American pop culture at its most joyfully outrageous.
This is not so much a book as an asThe subtitle of this heavenly concoction is: A celebration of American pop culture at its most joyfully outrageous.
This is not so much a book as an aspirin to banish gloom. Of course, America marches on and this book needs a major update to include such modern phenomena as Celebrity Rehab and Autobiographies by People who Aren't 25 Yet - still, it's a wonderful panorama of some truly ghastly shit. For instance
Aerosol cheese Boudoir photography (That special present for that special someone) Breasts, enormous (Can't mock Americans for that, we have this fetish over here too, but I liked that there was a page called "Breasts, enormous") Death cars Fingernail extremism ( I see that creeping in here - now there are entire salons springing up just for nails with slogans like "rake his back and make him howl with these razorsharp bejewelled babies" - no, I made that up. But nearly) Liberace (So many facelifts he couldn't shut his mouth) Meat snack foods
"Modern Americans buy meat snack food in shrink-fit plastic packages at the convenience store. They call the snacks Slim Jim, Chubby Sausage, the Big Jerk — manufacturers' words for sorbitol, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, monosodium glutamate, corn syrup, and lactic acid starter culture combined with chunked, ground, and formed beef and mechanically deboned poultry. The term "meat snack," like "cheese food" and "creme filling," is food-industry poetry, used to evoke thoughts of meat (or cheese or cream) about products that contain little or none of the substance in question."
- this quote should be written into the Constitution or something like that. Genius!
Mood rings Perky nuns Pet clothing Reclining chairs Waltzing waters Tammy Faye Bakker (Didja ever see a documentary called "The Eyes of Tammy Faye Bakker"? It's a bug-eyed must-see. The stuff that poor woman went through.) Baton twirling Children's names (Which have got immeasurably worse since this book came out - my daughter went to school with Bracken, Angel and DeQuayne) Cool Whip Dinosaur Parks Lawn ornaments Panty-hose Crafts Shag Rugs Sno-Globes (yes!) Unicorns and rainbows Velvet paintings White lipstick
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