Genes

Ever wondered what the baby would look like if you had one with your partner? Your gay partner? Or, indeed, any one else’s partner? Well, apparently there’s a machine that can tell you. It’s called The Gene Machine and it lives in Manhattan. You can find out more by clicking here. And when you’ve finished I recommend you click on “Return to Whitless” at the bottom of the page for more of this very funny site.

More about me

If you go to East of the Web, you’ll not only have a chance to read some wonderful stories by such fine writers as Kay Sexton, David Gaffney, Charlie Fish, Tim MacLean and, er, me. You’ll also be able to click on a banner ad for Little Monsters that will give you the chance to read the first chapter. Free! Take advantage!

REM Shock Announcement

I just saw this on Joe My God. Nice one, Michael.

Gay Bulgaria

http://www.harpercollins.com/services/browseinside/widget.aspx?hc.guid=b78be4a0-213a-40f2-9b11-303e45d861aa

David Giltinan, on Goodreads, has reviewed a book called Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities. It sounds fabulous. Here are some of the titles, with excerpts and/or comments, that David particularly enjoyed:

How to Draw a Straight Line, by Sir Alfred Bray Kempe
‘The Unexplored Fields are still vast.’

The Art of Faking Exhibition Poultry (1934), by George Ryley Scott.
The author treads an indistinct line between condemning this widespread and despicable practice, and telling the reader exactly how to do it.

Correctly English in Hundred Days (Shanghai Correctly English Society, 1934)
This book is prepared for the Chinese young man who wishes to served for the foreign firms. It divided nealy hundred and ninety pages. It contains full of ordinary speak and write language…..

Drummer Dick’s Discharge, by Beatrix M. DeBurgh (1902)

Penetrating Wagner’s Ring, by John DiGaetani (1978)

Handbook for the Limbless

Gay Bulgaria (‘once noted in a survey as the least borrowed book in British libraries’)

Was Oderic of Pordenone Ever in Tibet?

The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, by Wallace Irwin (1901)
‘Am I a turnip? On the strict Q.T.,
When do my Trilbys get so ossified?
Why am I minus when it’s up to me
To brace my Paris pansy for a glide?’

Truncheons: Their Romance and Reality, by Erland Fenn Clark (1935)
with over 100 plates illustrating more than 500 truncheons.

Disturbing stock

Leonie Jackson, of Waterstones Walsall, has this to say about Little Monsters:

I really enjoyed this book although it is slightly disturbing, particularly the relationship between the protagonist and her ‘uncle Joey’. The main story is set during the Second World War and the present day runs alongside this narrative. It explores issues of abandonment and the feeling of not belonging through the main character, Carol’s, own past as well as her work with refugees in present day Italy.
What you would expect to be the main thrust of the novel, the fact that Carol’s father killed her mother, is only lightly touched upon, which is a shame as I was hoping for this to be explored in more detail. Still, if you loved Atonement this is of similar stock.

Similar stock to Atonement? Hmm.

Conjugation

This is one of a collection of doctored electoral posters that you can find at the la Repubblica site. A lot of them are funny in a fairly heavy-handed way, though you’ll need Italian to appreciate them, but this one takes the piss out of Daniela Santanchè with a lighter touch, and nicely reflects not only the tendency of most politicians to behave in a schoolmarmish fashion, but also the sheer vacuity of political slogans.

Santanchè’s the improbable candidate for premier of the latest far right party, La Destra, though whether it’s farther right than Berlusconi’s PdL is a moot point. The dwarfish buffoon’s latest move is to select a newspaper tycoon, convicted fraud and unrepentant fascist called Giuseppe Ciarrapico as a candidate for the Senate. Why? Simple. Because he owns newspapers and that makes him valuable. Well, no one can accuse Berlusconi of trying to hide the shameful truth from us. It’s a miracle he doesn’t simply offer people brand new mobile phones if they vote for him, so long as they take a photo of the ballot paper with the X in the right box. Hang on a minute…

Monkey business

The logo of the brand (sic) new Democratic Party here in Italy has been reminding me of something for some time. I realised what it was today. As if that wasn’t enough, the woolly monkey now used to advertise PG Tips looks vaguely like the leader of the PD, Walter Veltroni. You don’t believe me? Take a look…

On the left, we have the lovable knitted monkey. On the right, we have the only man capable of saving us, maybe, from the fifth Berlusconi government. And it’ll take more than a nice hot cuppa to digest that. But both of them have that anxious, yearning look as though about to be deprived of something they deserve…

(And while I’m here, I suppose we now have the woolly chimp rather than the family of real ones that used to do the PG Tips ads when I was young to avoid accusations of cruelty to animals or, even worse, anthropomorphic exploitation of animals for advertising purposes. Or maybe we’re simply seen as more infantile than in the past, and being pandered to. Still, the PG Tips monkey is pretty sophisticated when compared with those other knitted things, practically limbless rectangles with crudely human features, that jump in and out of cars, dance, bounce up and down, have sex and keep shouting C’mon. And no, I don’t mean the Backstreet Boys.)

Little Monsters – review

My first customer review on Amazon, and it’s a good one. It begins:

Little Monsters starts off with a tremendous bang, grabbing the reader’s attention with its first sentence, and then manages somehow to maintain that effect on pretty much every page thereafter.

Thank you, NN Foster of Manchester!

Interview

John Self, the man behind the wonderful and highly regarded literary blog Asylum, recently interviewed me about Little Monsters and writing in general, which was both an honour and great fun. You can see what he asked, and how I replied, here.

Gloss on previous posts

The last three posts are fairly cryptic, I admit, and require some knowledge not only of Italian but also of the retailing practices of UK barbers in the 60s. The photographs were taken in the delightful town of Priverno, within yards of one another. And that’s all the help you’re getting. I’m very tired and I’m going to bed.