Orpington to London Victoria #12 – George Berger Column
I’ve felt pride and shame, and also felt incredibly small when considering how many other people could — and should — write completely different stories with the same chapter titles. All those commuters, all those adventurers, all those rebels who burned brightly like Kerouac’s roman candles. The mad ones, the sane ones, the unhappy ones and the ones whose joy and purpose lit a flame that we all may see a little more clearly. The heroes and the villains. All with their own private stories, unrealised memoirs, crammed into those suburban cattle trucks as they rushed through the suburbs with varying degrees of purpose.
George Berger reaches the end of the line.
Strangely, Disturbingly, and Disgustingly Human
His head has been cropped out of the frame but we can see his skinny torso, the scar tissue from self-inflicted wounds on his chest, his tiny nipples, and his left arm with jutting veins. He wears a short black skirt hitched above a new and disturbing zone of an impossible erogeny, of supernumerary body parts, of polymelia and polyorchidism. This is the surface of Carter’s challenging and pathological eroticism and yet it is a construction of zones that produce an energy of depravity and disgust.
Steve Finbow reviews The Practitioner by Michael Carter.