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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I’m still on Future Shock and The Cheese and the Worms. Also going through Sabatini’s Scaramouche, which seems considerably more interesting than the film.
Read “Earth” by John Boyne (author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) this weekend. Short novel, second in a series of interconnected “Elements” stories. (Water previously published, Fire and Air to come).
SPOILERS BELOW
Quick and easy read, 165 pages that zip along. Narrator is a young professional footballer in the UK who has been implicated in a high profile rape trial. (He’s charged with accessory to rape, his mate, a more high profile teammate, with rape.) The narrator is gay and came to football via an unconventional route, having previously worked as a rentboy for wealthy, sordid and powerful figures.
It has 1000s of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads at an average of 4.3, plus a lot of positive attention in mainstream media (at least in UK/Ireland, not sure about US etc), so you’d think it’s worth a couple of hours, right?
Yes. But not for the reasons you might think.
Almost all the characters are male (central and peripheral):
With the possible exception of the priest (a Stereotypical Man of Great Spiritual Understanding) and the barrister (a 2D legal eagle) all male characters are uniformly loathsome, lying, controlling, screening, misogynistic, raping pricks.
Those Amazon and Goodreads reviews are FULL of 5-star reviews from women. The media/newspaper reviews all seem to be left-leaning, virtue-signalling, vapid and vacuous.
Lots of reviewers called it “disturbing”. I think so too, but for very different reasons than they do.
It’s worth reading, and also disturbing, to see up close just how anti-man mainstream publishing has become.
I believe it’s one of the most dangerous books I’ve ever read, because it underscores something I’ve been observing in publishing.
Complex reality, including the inner world psychodrama of human beings, used to be the thing intelligent fiction did brilliantly. It is possible to learn as much about humanity from reading a handful of books by Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Hemingway as you’d get from a hundred lifetimes. Now, mainstream fiction is another front in the war against reality. Instead of learning about humanity you will more often fill yourself with disinformation, much of it from self-flagellating male authors keen to impress feminists and men who deny their own balls.
This book could easily have been called “All Men Really Are Bastards”.
I think the male exploitation/male victim and male perpetrator definitely has a female audience that is captivated by it. I think it's idealizing a sexuality and preference with an absence of pregnancy scares, where all activity exploitative or otherwise doesn't change a persons mental status, with characters not bogged down by the 'All Women are Wonderful' and allowed to villainous.
Several years ago I rented the film 'My private Idaho' from the library (awful even, with young Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix mixes Shakespeare prose and street urchins to ill effect) where the dvd jacket had a interview with the writer JT LeRoy (I believe pre-unmasking of the author) who gives fraudulent story about her watching the film while working as a male prostitute in the Castro district (what a bizarre cultural relic).
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