(no subject)

[alexsarll]

The editor for my book reviews just deemed my last piece "very scathing, but elegantly written". It's always nice to produce the desired impact.

Now I'm to review


The only struggle will be to write something other than the word "yours".

Comments

[euphoricstimuli.livejournal.com]

cool!!!
who are you reviewing for?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

The Press Association, so it tends to appear in bizarre local papers, and on associated websites like This Is Wiltshire and Manchester Online. The results, many of them hideously butchered by parochial subeditors, can be found via Google.

[martylog.livejournal.com]

Crumbs! That looks creepy!

[666inmyheart.livejournal.com]

Ahhh mahhnn, that reminds me that I saw a man with the worst hair ever on the tube to Uni today. He had a shaved head with a really long, floppy, overgrown fin. Plus he looked hideous. I had to resist every known urge to nudge the person sat next to me and go "PSSSSST! YOURS!"


xx

[razorcheekbones.livejournal.com]

"Genetic Variety and the Human Body". Interesting. Do you get to keep these books once you're done with them?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yup. I'm currently trying to work out what to do with the last one, Henry Shukman's hotly-tipped yet dreadful debut novel.

[razorcheekbones.livejournal.com]

Anything on the human body, mutated or otherwise, is of interest to me. Oh, and did you ever finish that 'music and words' book?

If Shukman is so dreadful you could always cut out the middle of every page in the book and use it as a box, or an ashtray, or something similar. (à la the Matrix with Neo and his 'copy' of Baudrillard's Simulations, do you see what they did there?)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

My reverence for books is too great. I'm sure once the reviews that aren't by me come out someone or other will want to read it.

Words and Music is on the backburner; it's one of those books best appreciated by reading a chapter or two every few weeks.

[razorcheekbones.livejournal.com]

Come now, what's this talk of 'reverence'? There must be someone you would be willing to cut out? For me, Mary Fallon (as already discussed). I just wouldn't be bothered to do it because it would mean I would end up with an ugly box.

[razorcheekbones.livejournal.com]

it would mean I would end up with an ugly box

That didn't come out exactly as I'd intended.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

No. There are plenty of authors I could happily stab, but no books I'd burn. It's not something I can explain rationally. They're sacred.

[razorcheekbones.livejournal.com]

Insert "death of the author" jokes here.

Sorry. I'll stop now.

[martylog.livejournal.com]

I am having an absolutely horrendous time with that bloody book. I've been reading it for the past two months and am still only on page 65. Why are so many books by music journalists so bloody annoying? Yes Morley, so you like Can't Get You Out Of My Head, and you have heard of loads of bands which I haven't. The overriding message of the book is 'I am uniquely qualified to have an opinion on this matter and so you are not at liberty to engage because you're not me.' It's Being Paul Morley. It's bloody obnoxious.

Sorry.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Er...why are you reading it at all, Martin?

I mean, I could happily read a book in which Paul Morley talks about the contents of his fridge. Though again, I would need to do so in fairly small doses.

[martylog.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm an optimist and I'm hoping that the perserverance will pay off and it will get better, and that Morley will, in the remaining 300 pages, get to the point. It is possible that I am too stupid to appreciate whatever it is he is trying to say, but I've started so I'll finish, and at least have some kind of informed opinion rather than slag it off in ignorance (as I have done above!)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

TBH I think it's just that, like many of my favourite writers, he get right up some people's noses.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Paper mache is a popular pastime.

[johnnybrolly.livejournal.com]

You know there is some sort of flimsy, soap filled gossip magazine called Yours! I think this week it has a picture of Nigel Harman on the cover. Cuh! It's real dangerous venturing into the News Agent these days. F'rinstance I now know a future thing that I really did not want to know until it happened: Kat sleeps with Andy.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

See, following the geeky things I do, I just have to avoid certain websites, rather than whole newsagents.
I love the way the people on the cover of Yours! invariably are.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Well thanks!

GAH!

[johnnybrolly.livejournal.com]

Listen, right, they tell you all the things you don't want to hear, but none of the things that you might want to know. F'rinstance, I was away from televisions last Thursday and Friday and have no idea how Laura died. I am getting the impression that Janine wasn't directly responsible, and Laura accidentally fell dahn the stairs (guv), but I am thinking that I'll probably never find out, as it was in the past.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that is what asking people on the interweb is for, roight? Yes, Laura slipped on one of Bobby's toys and went flump flump flump all the way down the stairs - after earlier on in the evening getting into a right gurl scrap with Jannine, which involved hair pulling/threats of strangulation/my unsupressed larffter har har.

[johnnybrolly.livejournal.com]

Hahar har haaaaaaaaaarhhahahhahahahahahahhhhhhhhaaaahhahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Poor, snrf, Laura. Ahem

[wardytron.livejournal.com]

Yours! is a brilliant magazine - I bought a copy on the Monopocrawl last year. It's for people who are VERY OLD INDEED. All the adverts are for stairlifts and those things you wear round your neck that have a button you press when you fall over. There was a particularly poignant photo of an old man who'd fallen over in his garden. They have interviews with Bernie Clifton and the like, and a pullout of lyrics to songs like 'Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag'. I've never bought it since.

[dickon-edwards.livejournal.com]

I'd like to read your review of that bad novel. Is it online anywhere?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Not yet - the book's not out yet - but, through the magic of ctrlC, it is now:

Darien Dogs by Henry Shukman is published in hardback by Jonathan Cape priced £12.99. Available on May 20th.

Darien Dogs' dustcover makes grand claims for it; it claims that the book’s portrayal of washed-up Westerners adrift in the developing world has "echoes of Graham Greene - but Henry Shukman's writing has an imaginative depth, an erotic, muscular charge and a dark, compulsive energy all its own". A bold statement given few would claim Greene lacked any of these qualities and, alas, one Darien Dogs does little to justify. Protagonist Jim Rogers has made a mess of his life, and sees in a dubious Panamanian deal the chance to salvage it. In a sense this is a story about redemption, but without Greene's majestically spiritual conception of the world the potential redemption lacks grandeur, which also saps the story's more sordid elements of their savour. In place of any grand vision of virtue and vice, all that is offered are competent but unremarkable accounts of unspoilt tropical islands and greedy developers. Indeed, there is a tendency towards lazy stereotyping throughout which one assumes is the narrator's, but which is never adequately confronted. Of the Cuna people whom Rogers comes to admire, he writes "these people were hard to understand. They seemed both childlike and more mature than westerners". Perhaps this is intended as a parody of travellers' 'insight' but if so, that is never really signposted. Nor are any of the supporting characters ever more than cyphers; this might not matter if the writing was weighty enough to render them archetypal but it seems to have no aspirations beyond reading-fodder for the beach, or perhaps those who would rather be on the beach.
The other four stories included in this volume alongside the eponymous novella are further evidence that, while Shukman can write serviceable descriptions of exotic locations, and might succeed as a travel writer, his fiction lacks power.

[violentbec.livejournal.com]

my 500 word reviews are regularly cut to less than 100.
asshats.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

The published versions of my last one were butchered in a variety of interesting ways too, which is one reason I posted the full text to Dickon above.