In which our Henry becomes besotted with liver, and the bromancer suffers a great disappointment ...

 

 

As usual, our hole in the bucket man manages to conflate and confuse right from the get go, and picks the wrong hill on which to make his stand ...

Even worse, he starts with the wrong date. Literary censorship came to an end effectively in 1965, when bans on Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita and Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy were lifted, though when the pond came to read about John Thomas and Lady Jane, the ban on D. H. Lawrence could have stayed, because the pond prefers more straightforward language of the fuck, cunt and cock kind ... 

Sorry, do go on, hole in the bucket man ...

 

But, butt, billy goat, literary and artistic works are routinely judged, if not on the moral quality of their authors, then certainly on their sex ...

 

 

Yes, that old warhorse, in full in the Independent here.

Sex always rears its ugly head when these discussions get going, but as to the rest of our Henry's opening thrust, it's impossible to resist the conflation of author and art, especially when the artist insists on it.

Does anybody take Norman Mailer seriously these days? The pond never much cared for him from the moment he accepted his publisher using "fug" instead of "fuck", and most of the rest of his life he was a self-advertising, self-promoting, deeply confused blowhard.

What about Hemingway and his style? Not really.

Can Pound escape the reality of being an indifferent wannabe modernist and a fascist? Is anyone interested in Celine? Should we somehow manage to admire Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will for its epic images and driving montage while ignoring its subject matter (or Olympia for that matter?) Can anyone look at Manhattan these days without thinking that the days of forty year old men drooling over young women - without it being noticed or commented on - have now gone?

Bailey himself isn't a particularly attractive figure, as noted in The New Yorker here ...

 

Of course it's what people are, it's what people do, but in the free market of ideas, some might think that an artist or a writer claiming the right to rape, while going on with the thinly disguised literary raping of feared and loathed targets (Claire Bloom say) might suggest that they get what they wish for ... a full-on ideological dispute.

It goes without saying that in the free market, publishers turn down works for all sorts of reasons at all times, or pulp them, or whatever, usually with commercial reasons foremost in mind, though frequently dressing up the commercial with high minded tosh.

It was, after all, only after Lolita reached the dubious Maurice Girodias that it was picked up for publication ... but then it turned out that Nabokov was a lot cleverer in how he went about his business of describing statutory rape than Woody Allen, or Philip Roth, or Blake Bailey ...

Sorry, another detour ... back to our Henry ...

 

Uh huh ...

 

 

Yes, free to fuck away, and if you happen to be twelve, where's the harm in doing a Polanski? (Yes, the pond still likes Chinatown, a truly sick film,  but so what? It doesn't stop Polanski from being a prick.)

That review in the New Republic is worth a read here ... here's how it began and ended ...

 

 

 Yes, Roth himself did to a biographer what our Henry decries ... but please, a little more ...

 

That's the trouble when given a job and finding a few turds, and then discovering that part of the brief is to polish the turds ...
 

 

Actually, it's sometimes a lot easier and simpler than that. Our Henry's righteous cry will in time - there no longer being fish and chips available for digital wrapping - disappear into the full to overflowing intertubes, much like this note on his notes. So it goes ... and so it went for pricks in the Bellow school of aggrandising ego ...

Was he a man or a jerk? Well it's possible to be both, and to write good novels and bad, and so it goes ...and anyone who thinks that history is just a matter of being in the right or the wrong is on a path to taking the moronic, because things are a little trickier than that ...

And to illustrate the point, the pond must turn from y'arts to the poor old bromancer  ... featured this day in the triptych of terror ...

It will be remembered that yesterday, the bromancer ran up the white flag, did a quisling, turned Vichy, and suggested that a big fuss not be made about Darwin, or at least the port therein. And what reward did he get?

A slap in the face, and a truly dire cartoon from the reptiles ...

Immediately, the pond had to reach for a Rowe, just to settle the nausea, with that remedy always available here ...

As for the poor old bromancer, it won't take long. The reptiles decided to stack the piece with clickbait videos, and shorn of them, the bromancer seemed at a loss for words ...

 

Yes, there was the poor bromancer suggesting we go easy on the Darwin lease, and now this slap in the face ...

Why, you'd expect an emperor to be more polite and civil in his ways, or at least you would if you're a deluded bromancer. And so to a stamping of the feet, and a warning to the emperor that the mutton Dutton will make a fierce stand ...

 

But as noted only yesterday the bromancer had sorted the matter, and with an exceptional generosity of spirit ...

 

 

Where's the gratitude, emperor? Of course we could shut down iron ore to teach them a lesson. Sure it'd mean the face might miss the nose, but what the heck, the bromancer is really suffering ...

 

Yesterday, there was no need to pick every fight going, and today, it seems we must pick every fight going ... and it's all their bloody fault.

This war on China is certainly a roller coaster, and the poor old bromancer doesn't have a clue as to whether he's coming or going, which is why the pond decided to end not with another image of a click-bait reptile video, but with an infallible Pope on an entirely different matter ...