This is the greatest village fete bookstall anywhere ever. Captions are welcome, but this time there is a point. Note that a book called Spicy Sex is on top of the pile. This should bring in the punters, we thought. But SS didn't sell. Books, I concluded, can no longer be convincingly dirty. Of course, there's chick lit, but that's not really dirty. The really dirty book is one read by boys with torches under the bedclothes. The Passion Flower Hotel springs to mind. Real, furtive dirt, I suppose, has fled to the internet. Everything else is just sex.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Dirty Book?
This is the greatest village fete bookstall anywhere ever. Captions are welcome, but this time there is a point. Note that a book called Spicy Sex is on top of the pile. This should bring in the punters, we thought. But SS didn't sell. Books, I concluded, can no longer be convincingly dirty. Of course, there's chick lit, but that's not really dirty. The really dirty book is one read by boys with torches under the bedclothes. The Passion Flower Hotel springs to mind. Real, furtive dirt, I suppose, has fled to the internet. Everything else is just sex.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I must have gone blind ... I can't see it.
ReplyDeleteScrunch your eyes, travel up the table, past Pete Doherty's bloodstained ramblings (another book we nearly didn't sell, until Thumper did what Thumpers do to hesitant purchasers), until you alight upon a pair of pink lips pouting up into a sunny Sunday afternoon. That's Spicy Sex. To you, £5.00, and all in good cause.
ReplyDelete£5.00! That's pretty steep if it really was the price. 99p would have been more like it, with a free torch if the purchaser looked of tender years. We just used to nick Penthouse from an old lady's shop in the nearest village. Teenagers can be such charmers.
ReplyDeleteNice-looking Jack Russell there.
Yes I had a job spotting it too. Fruit of a misspent youth with torch and book no doubt. Very much like the look of that one above Epileptic, with no dust wrapper - is that a cat on the cover, posed provocatively, or are the eyes playing up again?
ReplyDelete'Norfolk fete, 6.00pm Sunday; Thumper's temper frays as takings stagnate at £1.85. He tells local dog walker to "get out of the fucking shot!" as he searches for the 'picture with a point' for Friday's caption contest'
ReplyDeleteWhat's more, we only had twenty books when we started out.
ReplyDeleteHere's a contest for you: Using only the visible words on all of those fete books, write a poem.
ReplyDeleteEvolution,
history's Epileptic impulse.
Hitler's Other Spicy Error:
Sex.
I'm at work, so can't really focus on this, but I'm sure Johntyh and Ian could have a field day.
Spicy Sex, if memory serves, is some psychologist's recipes for various ways, presumably imaginative, to do what Alex would call the old in-and-out. Too antiseptic to be dirty, I fear. (How would I know? I'm a book review editor!) I'm also actually old enough to remember when the damn things were banned. It was the banning, in fact, that gave most of them their spice.
ReplyDeleteSusan, there is no way I could have a field day; the most profound poetry I know is the tale of a Doctor Foster who went to Gloucester in a shower of rain, and then only because I used to read it to my daughters at bedtime. Anyway, for what it's worth, and as a one-off venture:
ReplyDeleteDarwin's box, black, of origin, of evolution,
Of sex, impulse, the host of humankind.
Error: Hitler, thing, the other book.
What did I tell you ?
Exactly, Frank, only the forbidden is really fun
ReplyDelete