Below the Belt

"O glorious pubes! The ultimate triangle, whose angles delve to hell but point to paradise."

Not my words, you'll be relieved to know, but one of the contenders in this year's Bad Sex Writing competition. That one's from "Will" by Christopher Rush.

Other bad sexamples:


"She had on no knickers, and my heart went crash-bang-wallop and my eyes popped out. She hadn't shaved, and her fanny looked like a tropical fish or a bit of old carpet."
From Apples, by Richard Milward


"'You were built entirely for the space mission, right?' She nods and smiles. She is absurdly beautiful. I start to slip off my jeans and I feel her gaze as I stand in my bra and pants. Why am I embarrassed about taking off my clothes right in front of a robot? I pull the dress over my head like a schoolgirl, untie my hair, and sit down. She is smiling, just a little bit, as though she knows her effect.""
From The Stone Gods, by Jeanette Winterson


"That is to say, she rode me. It was all very classy and contemporary, like a modern-art survey course at NYU. I wanted to have the slogan I RODE MISHA VAINBERG imprinted on her T-shirt. "Yeah, do me," she kept saying, after issuing a few grunts so male and assertive they startled me into a brief homosexual fear, a fear compounded by one of her sharp nails digging into my tight rectum. "Do me, daddy," she said, her eyes closed, her thighs slapping against my upper and lower stomachs, my own tits making wet noises against my frame. "Just like that," she said, stealing a brief glance at me and then turning her head to the side so that I could lick her ear and plunge into her neck. "Just ... like ... that."
From Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart


"This is not pleasurable. How could anyone find having burning hot candle wax dripped onto the flesh of their belly pleasurable? But I don't want to tell her to stop cos the last time I told her to stop I got belted in the mouth. She wears an average of three rings on each finger. God, Mum was right, this lousy settee does stink. No wonder Dad's in hospital. I might well be joining him by the end of the night. I think I'm still inside her but, quite honestly, it's difficult to tell ..."
From The Late Hector Kipling, by David Thewlis"


But only one writer can cum first, and this year's winner is.....


Norman Mailer for this intimate moment from The Castle in the Forest:

"Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before."

Screen Queen

Last night, the most talked about television programme of the year finally hit the screens. Even before airing, “Monarchy: the Royal Family at Work” had already hit the headlines and resulted in the controller of BBC One losing his job. It was all because an out-of-sequence preview appeared to show the Queen storming out of a photo-shoot with Annie Leibovitz. In fact, the scene showed Her Majesty on the way into the session.

So, after all the fuss, we finally got to see the finished product. Overall, it was entertaining and interesting, although at an hour-and-a-half, a bit too long. Much of the focus was on the state visit by the Queen and Prince Philip to the United States, earlier this year. The Leibovitz session was arranged to provide the official pre-trip photographs, and appeared at the top of the show. The monarchical strop at being asked to remove her tiara to make the shot “less dressy” was the nearest we came to fireworks, but Leibovitz took it all in her stride. No doubt, she’s had more troublesome subjects than Her Majesty.

The rest of the programme showed the preparations for the state visit. Everyone, from the First Lady to the flower girls wanted to make sure everything was just perfect. At the Williamsburg Inn, where the Queen had stayed 50 years before, the chief housekeeper personally attended to the Egyptian cotton sheets, and rather unnecessarily pointed out that a new lavatory seat had been bought to accompany the royal flush.

George W. Bush was almost childlike in his anticipation of the visit, and hoped Her Majesty would ask to meet his mad Scottish terrier. Meanwhile, Laura Bush came across as an engaging, intelligent woman, concerned above all that her visitors should have time to relax and enjoy their time in the White House.

The most annoying aspect of the programme was the frequent references to Her Majesty’s realm. Or, as the Americans constantly called it: “England.” “It’s not every day you get to see the Queen of England”, gushed one woman, “I mean, dinner with the Queen of England has a certain ring to it”, burbled the President.

Meanwhile I’m throwing pop tarts at the screen and screeching “Britain, you cretins, it’s Britain!” Yes, yes, I know that England is often used as a shorthand term for Great Britain, and I also know that many Brits don’t know the difference between Washington, DC and Washington state. But for those of us living beyond the boundaries of perfidious Albion, every mention of the “E” word is like a mass scraping of nails across a blackboard. Even the woman at the bloody British Embassy coo-ed about creating a little bit of England in Washington. Everyone was at it, with one exception.

Along among all the characters great and small appearing in the programme, only Laura Bush referred to “Great Britain”. Laura, we love ya!

Trouble in the Troposphere

Heatwaves, hurricanes, flooding, drought, extinction. No-one can accuse Tim Flannery of understating the effects of global warming. And there's no doubting his passion for the subject. Once sceptical about climate change, he's now a fully-paid up member of the global warming warning brigade. His chapter headings alone - "Peril at the Poles", "The Carbon Dictatorship", "Boiling the Abyss" - signal that he's nailed his colours to the mast. And those colours are all green.

Not so long ago, climate change was confined to the inner reaches of scientific journals. Now it’s front page news. Hardly a day passes without another instance of wild weather being blamed on global warming. Flannery believes the changes we’ve seen in weather patterns, seasons, biodiversity and, above all, rising global temperatures have a single, man-made cause. Fossil-fuelled industrial development is the villain of the piece - from coal-fired power stations to the infernal combustion engine. So busy have we been in pillaging the Earth‘s resources that it’s only when the planet started fighting back that we woke up to the terrible consequences.

Of course, he’s aware that not all agree with this argument, and so he sets out to support it with an avalanche of evidence. At times, the reader risks being engulfed by statistics, and some of the scientific vocabulary requires both a deep breath and a running jump. Even so, Flannery’s genuine concern for all forms of life on the planet shines through.

But he has to tread carefully. Scary talk about runaway warming, may lead his readers to conclude that it's too late to do anything. Or, as Irving Berlin didn't write: there may be trouble ahead, but let's face the music and turn up the heating. Flannery insists the problem is still soluble, but tackling it will take action by every government, every business and every gas-guzzling, trash-tipping, pollution-pumping one of us.

After braving 200 pages of bleak prognostications, it’s a relief to reach an environmental success story. Flannery calls the 1987 Montreal Protocol the world’s first victory over a global pollution problem, and without it life on Earth would have been in deep trouble. A hole in the planet’s ozone layer risked exposing us to dangerous ultra-violet rays from the sun. The Montreal agreement banned the fluorocarbons that were eating away at this layer, and there are now hopeful signs that the hole is healing.

Despite this good news, Flannery insists prevention is always better than cure, a view that’s reinforced when turning his fire on the energy sector. Just as the tobacco industry spent many decades in denial about the link between smoking and lung cancer, he says, energy companies have been similarly sluggish in facing up to the impact of fossil fuels on the environment. But while he’s scathing about the automobile, Flannery appears resigned to the increasing volume of air traffic and believes aircraft will continue to spew carbon into the atmosphere long after other forms of transport have gone green.

At one point in this book, Flannery speculates that researchers investigating the impact of climate change on mountain regions may have given up because it was all too depressing. It's an odd observation, but if true, who could blame them? Global warming may be a hot topic, but talk of imminent catastrophe is enough to send anyone running for the prozac.

Yet, far from being alarmist or defeatist, Flannery is a convincing advocate of the need for urgent action. Perhaps, if enough of us heed his warning, a Tim Flannery of the future might be able to write a book telling the story of how we saved the planet.

Title: The Weather Makers
Author: Tim Flannery
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New Ed edition (3 May 2007)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0141026278
ISBN-13: 978-0141026275

Pointless Pursuits

To its aficionados, the annual Eurovision Song Contest is a marvellous melange that blends pop and politics, fashion faux pas and flag-waving. To everyone else, it's a showcase for shite.

Polarising it may be, but Eurovision has no shortage of performers beating a path to its tinsel-decked door. And although only ABBA and Celine Dion have achieved post-Eurovision mega-stardom, nearly every entrant sees the contest as a springboard to the stratosphere.

For most, barely have their feet left that springboard than they find themselves plummeting, belly-first towards the sea of oblivion. As Europe delivers its verdict, dreams of greatness are quietly snuffed out. But for an unlucky few, each set of results painfully and publicly signals that they’ll be ending the contest as they began: with no points. Rejected and dejected, they can only limp home to rebuild the wreckage of their career and hope that the worst night of their lives will soon be forgotten.

Fat chance. Not with Tim Moore shining his gazillion watt spotlight on their misfortunes. In Nul Points, Moore sets out to uncover the underachievers who went to Eurovision with the highest of hopes and returned with the lowest of scores.

Since 1975, the Eurovision voting system has made it harder to score zero. But it didn’t take long for Jahn Teigen to make it look easy. Representing Norway in 1978, Teigen assaulted an unsuspecting song and strangled it with his vocal cords before dealing the fatal blow from a shocking, splay-legged leap. Europe’s response was sadly predictable.

But, as Moore finds when he visits Teigen in Oslo, the reaction in his homeland was rather different. Norway put out the red carpet for its zero hero, and he went on to enjoy if not public adulation then certainly the affection of a loyal fan base. After a rough patch in the eighties, Teigen is still performing and still submitting entries for Eurovision.

But while Jahn Teigen merrily wears his zero as a halo, others see their nil as a noose. After Finn Kalvik failed to score for Norway in 1981, his countrymen, perhaps thinking the joke had been stretched to its outer limits, sent his career into meltdown. But worse was to come.

Targeted by Norwegian satirists, Kalvik was subjected to ridicule every week on national television. His response -- part Heather Mills, part Howard Hughes -- only exasperated the situation, driving him to the brink of suicide. Moore’s encounter with Kalvik on a sun-kissed beach in Thailand suggests the Norwegian is still running to escape his past.

At this point what Moore might have intended as a jolly jaunt through la-la-la land becomes something more of an exploration of the human psyche. Realising that he’s confronting human beings with their own failings, he abandons the idea of inviting them to reprise their losing songs. There’s only so much knife-turning a wound can take.

Initially, his subjects adopt an air of carefree insousiance. In Helsinki he meets an upbeat Kojo, who scored zero for Finland at the 1982 contest. These days Kojo manages a successful sports development company. But when the subject turns to that fateful night in Harrogate, storm clouds gather across Kojo’s face. “You know a sports match that finishes with no goals? You know what they call such a match here? A 'Kojo-Kojo'. This is what people say, even today, twenty-some years after."

No doubt, Gunvor Guggisberg harbours similar bitterness. In a classic tale of poppy-cropping, Moore charts Guggisberg's path from golden girl to national pariah. Even as it celebrated her selection as Switzerland’s 1998 Eurovision entrant, an unwholesome Swiss tabloid was preparing to dish the dirt on the singer’s past as a sex worker. A dismal result at Eurovision released a reservoir of revulsion, and subsequent attempts to rescue her sinking career have come to nothing.

Unsurprisingly, Guggisberg turns down Moore’s invitation to revisit her painful past. But even the no-shows can’t escape his Google-powered searchlight, and some thorough detective work reveals much about the post-zero lives of performers from Austria and Spain. There’s also the troubling suggestion that a Turkish singer’s failure to come to terms with failure may have led to his sudden death.

And so it continues: from Lisbon to Lithuania, Moore finds that scoring zero in Eurovision is rarely taken lightly. Even in the UK, which reserves special derision for Eurovision, Jemini’s point-less performance in 2003 provoked agonised hand-wringing. Meeting the likeable Liverpudlians, Moore learns that false economy, coupled with an anti-British backlash against the bombing of Iraq, sowed the seeds of a barren crop.

It’s not all gloom. Some artists, such as Iceland’s Daníel Ágúst and Tor Endresen from Norway (yes, again), have managed to airbrush Eurovision out of their biographies or to transcend defeat.

But for the most part, Nul Points is a catalogue of shattered dreams, failed relationships, boozing, bankruptcy and brothels. Amidst such a grim landscape, it’s a relief to find Moore’s customary sense of humour shining through, harnessed to his astounding way with words.

Towards the end, however, he does falter, inversing the running order of the UK and Icelandic entries in 1997 and incorrectly asserting that Switzerland have failed to qualify for every Eurovision final since 1998. But such lapses are not to be too harshly treated. After all, the oxygen-depleting experience of immersion in 50 years of Eurovision is enough to drain the most agile of brains.

Full marks for Nul Points.

Title: Nul Points
Author: Tim Moore
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Vintage Books; New Ed edition (June 5, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0099492970
ISBN-13: 978-0099492979

This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com.

Lists to Read Before You Die

Charlie Brooker is The Guardian's very own grumpy old man. He's not very old, but he's very, very grumpy. This week's target is lists, especially those Lists of Things to Do Before You Die.

"The worst "before you die" lists, though, are the ones aimed at middle-class traveller types. These are infuriating for several reasons. First, the writers use them as an excuse to show off about how cultured and well-travelled they are, so there you get lots of entries like: "No 23: Eat Spicy Malaysian Street Food While Watching the Sun Set Over Tioman Island in the Company of Some of Your Brilliantly Successful Novelist Friends." The conceited worms are simply recounting incidents from their own cosseted, hateful little lives and holding them up as aspirational examples for us all. At first this strikes you as smug. Then you realise it's merely desperate. Who are they trying to impress, precisely? The Joneses? They're prancing around in front of an invisible mass of readers, nonchalantly cooing about how wonderful they are. It's 50 times more snivelling and undignified than any Z-list celebrity you care to mention stripping naked and inseminating a cow on a Bravo reality show. At least that's unpretentious."

I'm sure he feels the better for being able to offload his über-rants, and to be fair he does it really well. The feedback from his readers can be just as entertaining:

"So it's 'travellers' that get it on today's blog - Good!! What really narks me is when these people go on holiday (for a year) 'travelling' they come back like they are now a full Jedi Knight and they have seen things that only a few mere mortals get to see. My arguement is always the same - I HAVE A TELEVISION, I'VE SEEN THE PYRAMIDS, AND WITHOUT THE SMELL. I always ask whether they have been to Norwich, invariably they haven't, i then say well i've seen inside Norwich cathedral AND i've seen the pyramids on TV, so actually that makes me twice as cultured as you."

By coincidence, in Borders last night, I saw a book with a variation on this theme. With a cuddly panda and a majestic tiger on its cover, it's dedicated to endangered species. The title: 100 Animals To See Before They Die

Hard Times for the Hardback

Picador has caused what some are calling a seismic change in the world of books. From next year, the UK's 8th largest book publisher will by-pass hardbacks and launch almost all of its new novels in paperback. Other publishers are expected to follow, although some aren't so sure:

"Kirsty Dunseath, publishing director of Weidenfield & Nicholson, said the move could lessen the prestige of the novels. "Coming out in hardback is a statement of confidence in a novel and gets the reviews," she said. "It doesn't say much for your confidence coming out in paperback. Anyway, £12.99 isn't such a high price to pay - you'd happily pay that for a CD."

My experience is that hardbacks are bulky, while paperbacks are a lot easier to carry round and to read on the move. And Dunseath's comment about price doesn't ring true with me. Most of the hardbacks I'd like to read are priced in the £15 - £20 range, and I'm usually happy to wait until the paperback version appears.

Of course, money is behind the move. Although booksellers have been discounting hardbacks, sales are still falling, while paperbacks continue to be best-sellers.

Dome Raider

A much-hyped exhibition - Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs - opened this week at The O2 (formerly the ill-starred Millennium Dome) in London. But papier mache pillars and imposing muzak made Jonathan Jones wish he'd never bothered turning up.

This is a simulacrum of a serious exhibition. It makes real objects look and feel like fakes. It is artful in its meanness: there is just enough to silence complaint. There's an excellent choice of King Tut's jewellery, for example. But this is still just the garnish on the food. The food is not here. Art, as Ruskin said, should not be approached in dumb wonder - it is a human expression. The beauty of Tutankhamun's tomb does not consist in the sheer quantity of priceless items. It is about communicating with someone who died more than three millennia ago. The sadness, the loss of a young life, is so immediate. But here he becomes a lifeless nothing, a famous name. From his wooden statue you can almost hear him cry: "I'm the world's oldest celebrity -
get me out of here!"

Boris: Not Good Enough

Boris Johnson has a new book of poetry out - The Perils of the Pushy Parents. I'd no intention of reading it, even before seeing this review by Stuart Jeffries.

The book concerns the Albacores, a family whose parents insist son and daughter should not watch telly. The da d, especially, is a crackpot who teaches his toddlers Zeno's paradox when they should be eating dirt and shanking each other with plastic cutlery. When Mr Albacore sees the pair watching TV, he takes action rendered thus by Johnson: "He'd zap the programme off and holler/ 'Go and read some Emile Zola.'" As you will notice, Johnson has a gift for assonance not heard since Alexander Pope wrote the Rape of the Lock (this will be the quote they use on the paperback edition - just see if it isn't). By which I mean, there are lots of duff rhymes.

And there's more:

You might well think I am being unfair and that, like Gordon Brown's loathing for David Cameron, there is an element of class hatred behind my bile. You got the second part right. I refuse to be charmed by this gaffe-prone berk (he lost his wedding ring within an hour of getting married), this inventor of quotations (for which he was fired from the Times), this witless calumniser of scousers, witless calumniser of Papua New Guineans, this bad novelist, this brazenly buffoonish poetic dabbler. It is important, as Byron recognised when he wrote English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (now that was a vibrant piece of satirical verse), that we castigate rubbish: "Degenerate Britons! Are ye dead to shame,/ Or, kind to dulness, do you fear to blame?" We deserve better than Johnson, certainly better than Johnson the oompa loompa, pouring his chocolatey goo into our Christmas stockings.

Norman Mailer: 1923-2007

"He was a great American voice"
Joan Didion.

"He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions of everything there was to have an opinion on and everything he said was so original."
William Kennedy

"He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He'd go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully confident, with a great sense of optimism."
Gay Talese

"Each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”
Gore Vidal

Mailer's greatest risk was to presume that writing — and writers — mattered. To argue with him was good sport. To dismiss him was to dismiss literature itself.
Hillel Italie, Associated Press.

Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With a Matching Ego, Dies at 84
New York Times

Katrina Recalled

I haven't read any of James Lee Burke's books, yet. But I might take a look at his latest - The Tin Roof Blowdown, which is set in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina batters into the city.

On BBC Radio 4 this morning, Burke described Katrina as

"the worst scandal in American history....people drowned for three days while the most powerful men in this country were fishing." "There is no mystery to the human personality. Forget Freudian analysis, people are either what they do or what they don't do."

Burke's books reflect his native Louisiana,littered with corruption and
organised crime and set in its fevered climate and swamps. The state, he says, is a gift from God for a writer because the American past is replicated there as a microcosm.

"Look for the larger story in the smaller. Study one grain of sand to discover the nature of the coastline."

Banville as Black

Interesting piece in today's Metro about John Banville's new novel. The Silver Swan is a break from his usual literary output. It's a thriller, based on something that happened in his local Dublin neighbourhood. Writing as Benjamin Black, Banville has set the novel in the 1950s, exposing the dark side of Ireland, where church and state ruled with a grimness rivalling regimes behind the Iron Curtain. Says Banville,

"Up until the mid-1950s, Ireland was absolutely lost in permafrost. We were ruled by an iron ideology and there were some utterly dreadful people in charge."

Adopting a different style seems to have helped Banville get back on track with the style which won him the Booker in 2005 for The Sea.

"...I wrote the Black books, which are all about character and plot, to give myself a bit of a kick. "

It seems to have worked - he's 6000 words into a new Banville novel, although he says that, for a writer, all that matters is writing the perfect line:

"Each time I sit down to write, I think of Bart Simpson inscribing on the blackboard "I must write a better sentence." And I'd sacrifice anything to get a sentence right."