Now, let’s see. Monday, light, Tuesday, space. No, wait a minute. Monday, light, Tuesday, the land and the sky and the oceans. Oh hell. (No, that was later.) And all the things that creep on the surface, etc. Wednesday? Thursday?
I wonder which day he made the gigantoraptor on.
PS The image is blurred because it’s a very old photograph.
Amnesty International’s recent advocacy of abortion in the case of rape, incest or risk to the woman’s health has inevitably got up some clerical noses. One of the largest belongs to cardinal Martino, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, who is quoted as follows:
“The inevitable consequence of this decision, according to the cardinal, will be the suspension of any financing to Amnesty on the part of Catholic organisations and also individual Catholics,”
Well, he can say all he likes about what the hierarchy is supposed to do with its fabulous, unaccounted for, wealth, but individual catholics may continue to feel that the work done by AI continues to deserve their support. Let’s hope so. It’s certainly persuaded me to join up, for the first time in years.
In the meantime, Eggs Benedict has returned to the dangers represented by television and the Internet. Right, like BBC documentaries, Eggs? Readily available on Google? Or maybe it isn’t that personal.
If he’s so against the commercialisation of human dignity why is he doing everything in his (considerable) power to ensure that Berlusconi takes over the reins of the Italian government again?
Am I the only one to have noticed just how appallingly written Blair’s whining attack on the press is? (Read it here, if you really must.) I’m not saying that grammatical manners maketh man, a la Lynne Truss, but should we really have put the fate of not just one country, but several, into the hands of someone who can’t punctuate, who can’t write a sentence in which the subject and verb concur, who can’t express a thought with clarity? Don’t these things matter? Doesn’t their absence suggest an alarming woolliness and confusion in the mind of the person responsible? If I’d been given this speech by a student, I’d have covered it with red ink.
The Pentagon was apparently working on a gay bomb, according to this article. A bomb that would release powerful aphrodisiacs, so powerful that previously heterosexual soldiers would drop their guns and dive into each other’s camouflage trousers, rip off those sweat-stained green tee-shirts, grind their heaving pecs against… (Calm down, Charles).
And we’re complaining?
The wackiest thing about the, er, thinking behind this idea (OK, we are talking Pentagon) is the assumption that the difference between straight men and gay men doesn’t lie in the nature of sexual desire but in its quantity. The more there is, the gayer it gets!
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall. And not only on Bush…
(Hi Dobby!!)
Once again, with thanks, from Bits and Pieces.
Two small footnotes to one aspect of Bush’s wasteful and unnecessary visit to Rome. The day before he arrived someone scrawled an anti-Bush message on a stone designed to commemorate the murder of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro and the five members of his escort by the Red Brigades, almost certainly with the connivance of some elements of the state. The message said Bush = Moro.
It would hard to imagine a more meaningless comparison. Moro was a master of the Byzantine art of Italian politics, the man who engineered the historic compromise between his own party and the Italian Communist Party, a man of culture and intellectual subtlety. I don’t need to explain how far removed from all this the swaggering nincompoop who currently runs America is.
If the intention was merely to suggest that Bush should meet a similar end to Moro, of course, it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for the mystery graffitist, though I’d have appreciated something more focused. Interpretation, as we know, is all.
The other interesting thing about the business is the use by the Italian media of the word profane. Newspapers and television reporters all agree that the stone was profaned. According to Merriam-Webster, to profane is “to treat (something sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt”. Moro’s death was a political crime of the worst kind, the slaughter of his escort both cruel and useless. But that doesn’t make him, or them, sacred. Moro wasn’t a saint and his death wasn’t the death of a martyr, apart from anything else because it wasn’t self-willed. Moro didn’t choose to die.
This inappropriate use of the word is just another example of the way the line between church and state is being blurred. As ever, to the benefit of the church.
This comes from a rusting metal door a few streets from where I live. I’ve no idea how it got there, though it has a Banksy sort of artiness about it. Zorro and X-Men seem to have been added at a later date and may have had no original connection with the central image (although, of course, they do now). The street, really no more than an alley, leads to the house of a local artist, notoriously shy and intolerant of praise. I’m sure there’s no connection between the two, or there wasn’t before this post. I wonder where the baby comes from and why he’s ringed in blue like this; if there’s any sense to it.
I‘ve just finished reading this novel by Michel Houellebecq and I’m disappointed. It has the same lazy, rather awkward style that’s characteristic of all his work and is intended, presumably, to show that he doesn’t have the time or energy for fine writing (he loves the use of italics to indicate clichés). It has the usual obsessions, familiar to reader of his earlier novels: a misanthropic take on the world, a loathing of political correctness and handed-down truths, a fascination with sex. Its motto could be, in the memorable phrase of Ed Dorn (with whom M.H. has nothing else in common): how really the world is shit/ and I mean all of it.
But, in this book, it doesn’t seem to work. Although M.H clearly regards intellectual pursuits as irredeemably bourgeois, the novel is full of intellectual pretension, quoting from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Woody Allen (though attributing the remark to someone else). It’s a nerdy book, and Houellebecq (or the protagonist in his novel) is a classic nerd; angry with a world that rewards him but fails to appreciate him, a sexual athlete in his imagination (i.e. the world of the book), attracted by the gadgetry of sci-fi, the nuts and bolts paraphernalia of cult worship (though not committing to it).
The novel is divided into three sections: the first and second are interleaved, the most consistent part being devoted to the autobiography of the usual M.H. alter ego; this time he’s a successful satirist, though the examples of his deliberately non-PC material (mostly sexist and anti-Arab) are unconvincing and recall the frisson of rag week bad taste more than cutting edge political satire. Having seen off a wife (divorced) and son (dead) without remorse, his first significant post-marital relationship ends when the woman he loves hits middle age and realises, with regret, that she’s no longer up to the hero’s demanding aesthetic standards. His second affair is with the kind of woman-cum-inflatable fuck doll that always tickles M.H.’s fancy. When she dumps him, because now it’s his turn to be over the hill, he falls into depression, etc. This all feels very familiar from his earlier work, though it’s done less well here, as though he can no longer quite be bothered to go through the ritual yet again.
The second section describes a world of post-humans and is standard sci-fi fare with little to recommend it. Like the first section, it contains some fairly dreadful verse, although I’m not sure that it’s meant to be. (On the cover, Houellebecq claims to be a poet and rapper, though this may be his little joke.)
The redeeming section of the book is the third part. I won’t say too much about it, but the sense of disgust, which is probably the strongest and most authentic arrow in H.’s moral quiver, is finely achieved and reminds me of no one so much as Swift, who is surely Houellebecq’s master, as many others have remarked before me. I almost gave up on the book a dozen times before getting this far, though, and I’m not sure the pleasure it affords – which is genuine – makes up for the tedium of what precedes it.
I wonder if Houellebecq has read Stewart Home. A book like 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, in terms of sheer offensiveness and subversion, knocks all his work into a cocked hat. It’s also, though Home won’t thank me for saying this, better written. Which is probably why Home is relatively unknown, and Houellebecq a tax exile in Ireland.
A Pentecostal teaching assistant in Croydon recently quit her job after refusing to listen to a seven-year-old girl read from a Harry Potter novel on the grounds that the book glorifies witchcraft, described in the Bible as an ‘abomination’. She is now seeking compensation for ‘religious discrimination’.
For more details, click here.
CHARLES LAMBERT 