Pretty Authors Make Graves
When people ask me how I came to write and why I write so much and why there’s such an embarrassing yearning for beauty in the shit I write, I often feel like telling them this story. Asking them: what would you do if you were The Boy Who Farted? Wouldn’t you want to convince the world to regard you in some more flattering light?
By Steve Almond.
Slimy Pope
I begin to understand the groin-tickling sensations that motivated John Paul–John Paul, that balding, husky darling of the airwaves. One of history’s greatest criminals, this guy donned his triple tiara, cross-dressed in his silks and satins, and flaunted himself in front of overcrowded, starving, AIDS-ravished communities, holding up two plump fingers in a meretricious salute, and announcing that simple cream-bags were mortal abominations.
By Tom Bradley.
Backpacker
Just thinking about what he must’ve done to her to inspire her to write this drivel made me fantastically jealous. I was tempted to call the number just to tell her that she had better erase whatever masturbatory fantasies she was harboring because he signed them over to me, but I resisted doing that. Let her remember whatever she wants to, I figured, it’ll be worse to never relive it.
An extract from Backpacker New York, Seoul, Phnom Penh, Sapporo, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Mexico City, Maputto, Tokyo, Mon Amour, by Hillary Raphael.
Metrodaddy v. Ubermummy
The double-standard here is remarkable. Can you imagine the furore if a man wrote a book called The Future of Women? One in which women were attacked for daring to appropriate characteristics traditionally associated with men to try and get ahead, or just survive? Compared to retrosexuals, metrosexuals, having imbibed the lessons of feminism in utero, don’t necessarily need women to dress them, feed them, tell them what they’re thinking or feeling — or what their future is. Some women find this a blessed relief. Others, such as UberMummy, seem to find it just another reason why they want him dead.
Mark Simpson interviews himself.