Monday, 12 May 2008
CULT FUCKTION!
Still stuck on Cult Fiction. I've spent a small fortune on e-bay buying jewellery because of how stuck I am on Cult Fiction. I've read about films and dead babies in boxes and listened to narcissist (I'm finding them everywhere – that's focus for you) Austrians who keep their daughters locked up in basements because "she was enjoying herself too much" and "was not obedient". I could just about grasp that one, but not why he'd then fathered 7 children by her. Perhaps it was a punishment. "I'll show you you can't go out partying, my girl. Have some children – that will smarten your ideas up."
But I digress.
I think it would be fair to say that never in the history of my own writing have I ever had problems like this before.
It's tempting to believe it's just the old pointlessness thing. You know, the negative swamp of 'everybody hates me, think I'll go eat worms'. But, hell, I've experienced that before, time without number. You go into the slump, you mope about, you get grumpy, then angry, then you face up to the fact that no-one owes you anything and you stop feeling sorry for yourself, get the work done and move on.
But this motherfucker. Jesus, it's like drawing teeth, only not as much fun.
What I'm experiencing is an odd combination of having nothing I want to say along with a bad-tempered 'Oh fuck off and die.'
I had a glimpse of insight a couple of weeks back, when we went to see Nicholas Roeg (film director, for those not conversant) talking with his long-time screenwriter.
It wasn't exactly disappointing but, as Max said today, I didn't feel as if I actually learned anything.
Roeg was defensive answering his questions, old friend or no, and we didn't really get much out of him. Paradoxically, he was better with questions from the audience, but there wasn't really enough of them to draw him out. I think maybe if the evening had been allowed to run a while longer we might have hit more pay dirt.
But it did make me wonder what exactly was making him so defensive and eventually I came to the conclusion that he was probably just plain sick of 'justifying' his work.
It's not that his friend was asking him difficult questions, but I think he really didn't want to be boxed in by how people liked to categorise him, and he markedly didn't want to tell people what to think about his work. In short, he made the films and it was up to you what you got from them.
I feel that something similar is happening with me and DANNY.
I'm getting sick of writing clumsy big clues to nudge people in the right direction, and I'm absolutely sick to death of trying to give people a 'handle' on it so they won't be scared away or completely baffled by what they're (not) seeing.
This is the real root of my disgruntlement. Why the fuck am I spending all my time trying to make my work look non-threatening and more 'normal' (read mediocre) when the very last thing I want my work to be is non-threatening and mediocre? I suddenly feel very bolshie about having to explain everything all the time: You don't get it? You can't be bothered taking a risk on something unknown? Fine, then fuck off and buy something from the New Age section.
See? This is not good. This is what is called a conflict of interest. I'm supposed to sit down and write something that every fibre of my being is crying out 'No, no, NO' to.
Which is why I'm getting nowhere. And why I should give this to Max to do. But I despair at the copy he writes for DANNY. He makes fabulous visuals, but when he's writing copy the man can't leave hyperbole alone. He loves to smack 'em between the eyes, and he is positively cruel to adjectives. It always comes out sounding like a trailer for a Joel Silver movie but with more sex. Either that or it's full of punning humour. Christ, it's not a fucking Carry On movie, you know.
I know I'm being beyond difficult here, downright bloody-minded and ungrateful, but I just can't seem to resolve this. I think I'm hanging onto too many things. I want to write the copy, but I don't. I want him to write the copy, but I don't.
Result? No copy.
Won't do. Will not do.
I'm only writing this blog because I'm sitting staring at the computer (forcefully stopped myself from doing anything else) and getting nowhere. I've written loads of stuff – and I don't like any of it. I figured if I wrote this blog it might crystallize something, clear my mind, and I might see a chink of what to do with this.
I'm beginning to think something drastic is called for. Certainly if I don't get something soon DANNY 1's launch in the U.S. is going to go seriously over schedule.
I think maybe I need to stop thinking of how to 'sell' it. It's obviously gone past the point of no return for me. Just done too much of it. If they don't get it by now, they ain't gonna get it and, frankly, I am obviously well beyond caring.
I think it's that that's making me feel like I'm being 'forced' to write yet another school essay on The Subversion of Genre in Chancery Stone's DANNY, or Why DANNY is Not a Sex Novel – You Thick Shit.
I think maybe in order to get me interested I need to give myself something challenging to do with it. It may not be recognisable as "An introduction to The DANNY Quadrilogy" when it's finished but at least it will be finished.
So (sighs heavily), anyone up for the all-new Cult Fucktion – Seven Steps to Screwing Six-year-olds?
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
23:38 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 07 May 2008
Deprestrogen - and How You Cunts Can Cure It
Between Taschen catalogues crammed full of tits & ass – and one book on penises – magazine supplements pointing out how my 'female brain' can't 'understand' men, and various films and TV where my sex gets to strip and scream, sometimes together, I seem to be surrounded – sunk in – just how irrelevant I am.
Then this afternoon I come across this article headlining on IMDB Is There a Real Woman In This Multiplex?
And a very good article it is too. A woman after my own heart.
But, there's no doubt about it, besides me and her, there seems to be precious few of us yelling about the sheer misogyny of who we are 'supposed' to be.
With the exception of getting to fend for ourselves – albeit for less money – women's lives have definitely got worse. The suffragettes could have saved themselves a lot of hunger-striking, and the women's libbers a lot of underwear. They did fuck all in the long run.
Sure, they don't marry us off to old men these days (unless you're a royal or from a fundamentalist religion), but otherwise women's lot is definitely worse than it was in your mother's day – or your grandmother's.
Think about it. We get to work, but we don't get to have a career. Some women try it, and even pull it off up to a point, but they pay a price for it that men never do.
Career women are selfish, unfeminine, ball-breakers. Even other women don't like them. They're hard, unfeminine (can't stress that often enough), cold, mean, heartless, greedy, ambitious, warped, unnatural. They treat their families appallingly, depriving their husbands of masculinity, belittling them by association. (How can a man be a man if his wife earns more, works harder, and commands more respect?) They neglect their children, putting their four-wheel drives and blackberries before everything else. They produce narcissistic, neurotic, driven children and mincing, suicidal homosexuals. Even delinquents. And serial killers.
Career women have broken down the very fabric of society, producing a generation of latch-key kids who don't know how to cook and who smoke crack.
This, of course, is because it is all women's fault. No matter what it is, it's women's fault. No matter what's gone wrong with the world – we done it.
I'd like to believe this was a new thing, part of the general malaise of modern life, because it would make my argument look so very shiny, but actually it's a very old thing; it's just got more comprehensive, that's all.
This is the list of the things that used to be women's fault:-
1. Infidelity. If he did it, it was because he was bored (because she didn't make enough effort), or because she'd 'let herself go' (his beer belly/baldness is never an issue), or she was a shrew (you don't pick fault with men – ever), or bad with money (women's families come first – always), etc, etc, etc.
If she did it, it was because she was a slut. Or because she was a slut. Or maybe even a slut.
2. Bad children. She didn't bring them up properly – end of conversation.
3. Bad husbands. If he hit her she provoked it. If he hit the children she'd brought them up badly and they'd provoked it. If he fucked the children it was for the same reasons as number 1 – see Infidelity.
4. Bad housekeeping. She was a slattern, a lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing who'd rather stand a the street corner yakking than polish her step.
And that was it, pretty much. In other words, anywhere you could go wrong would be domestic. It was up to you to keep the house running sweetly. If the house wasn't sweet it was your fault. Your domain; your fault.
Now look at how that list has grown. Here is a list of the things that are now women's fault:-
First – all of the above. Nothing's changed. Women are still considered guardians of home and hearth and custodian of everybody's feelings – even the cat's. What's more, now it isn't just your relatives or neighbours that are going to judge you – now it's everyone. Complete strangers on TV, the media – 'experts', every one – are all pushing into your home, pointing out all the things you should be doing – from taking care of your husbands 'feminine' side, to making sure your kids get enough vitamins to get them into Mensa.
On top of that we now have to worry about being essentially flawed, something that needs 'fixed'.
Only a couple of days ago I actually read on Yahoo news that women were twice as likely to get depressed as men (nooooo…) and that 'they' (the scientists) didn't know why, but that it was possibly (read probably) hormones.
Jesus Christ, yes. Why hasn't someone told us before? It's the depression hormone. All us women are fitted with a neat little depression gland that secretes Deprestrogen. It's probably behind our tits.
Men don't have hormones, you see. Nope. They have this unique biology that runs on something else, just not hormones. It can't be hormones, you see, because they're a woman thing. Because women have ovaries and wombs and shit like that, and they have these hormones that just gallop into the blood at random moments and suddenly – snap – we're engulfed in Deprestrogen, which makes us cry and rant and eat chocolate. Because men never cry, or rant or eat chocolate, never mind do anything irrational.
Where the hell do these cretins get off with this shit? Although it's been recognised for a long time that negative thought patterns are the most likely factor in depression, and that cognitive therapy is the most successful method for treating it – with no chemicals, hormonal or otherwise, involved – they are still spouting piffle like this.
Why is it that whenever anything a woman says or does is considered unacceptable that the mental illness/chemical imbalance, you're-just-a-mad-bitch crap starts pouring out?
Because we're flawed, that's why.
That's what the modern woman has attained that her mother and her grandmother and all the others before her never had – the 'proof' that you are a fundamentally flawed, genetically irreversible disaster area.
See, before we had the cure-all of the 'Women's Movement', women were still considered inferior – actually, physically, like blacks having longer arms and a sense of rhythm.
When we got the vote, and the 'right' to work our asses off for less pay and no real promotion, it became politically incorrect to consider a woman as inferior. They could be smart enough, they'd proved it by fitting all those little wires on the circuit boards for half of men's wages. The scientists had to stop talking about their inferior biology and their smaller brains.
But the horrible fact was the inferiority theory didn't go away. It's like all those people who think taking Sambo and gollies out of children's books stops racism.
Newsflash – it doesn't, it just diverts it somewhere else.
And our 'somewhere else' is our flawedness.
And now all you cheery chappies, male and female, who think feminists are angry lesbians, are sitting shaking your heads, sneering at what mysterious 'flaws' these might be. Like the blacks, the women get it too easy. Everybody bends over backwards for women these days – they get all the best jobs, and they get to wear skirts (oh, the envy).
Okay, let's just look at some of these silly, irrelevant, too-much-fuss-over-nothing-typical-women flaws we've acquired along with our 'rights' and votes. Here's a short list, roughly in order of fear and loathing.
1. Fat. Women are fat, fat, fat. Unless you are a size 0, you are FAT. Nowadays a size 10 or 12 (that's a 6 or an 8 in the U.S.) is likely to be referred to as 'round' or 'curvy'.
On what planet?
The average British woman is a size 16. Ms Average is even bigger in the U.S., and yet a size 12 is 'curvy'? By what standard? Why, by the standard of how in error women essentially are. It's nothing you can fix, you're just wrong.
Women have a genetic predisposition to fat. For a start we have an extra layer of it. Nature thought it would be useful for us. Nature was WRONG.
Not only that, but we put it on easily. Pregnancy, menstrual fluctuations – hey, those good old hormones that make us depressed. Wouldn't you just know it? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
2. Hair. Unless it's on your head, it's wrong. Body hair on a woman is just wrong. It grows there? That's our point: you're flawed. 'Real' women (i.e. sexy, desirable women; the only real value women have) have smooth legs, arms, faces – skin in general. Flawed, wrong women have hair in their underarms, on their legs, their faces – hell, even round their nipples. Goddamn freaks.
And don't even start us on hairy snatches. To quote the internet, ewwwwwwwwwwwwww….
See? Even the internet in the immensity of its wisdom, knows hairy snatches are just wrong.
3. Smell. Everything about women smells. Especially their crotches. Women's crotches not only smell but their smell varies throughout the month, getting more or less pungent according to how moist it is. Which also varies. Smelly and moist? Dear God, does it get any wronger?
4. Wrinkles. Women wrinkle, age, go grey. It's a disgusting lapse of taste. Real women (i.e. sexy, blah, blah, blah….) are smooth, pre-pubescent, scentless, hairless, and forever chestnut/flaxen-haired. If you're not – you're wrong.
And that lot's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even touched on tit size, bleeding (that's beyond wrong, that's repulsive), emotional instability, showing off, dressing 'badly', frigidity, sluttishness, eating disorders, excessive shopping, drinking and shoes, relationship problems, failure to raise child geniuses, male emasculation… The list is endless.
The simple fact is your mother and grandmother just didn't have these problems. Mothers were expected to get fat, go grey and adopt the 'peenie' (that's an apron to you, not a sex organ) as soon as they popped their first brat.
A pre-consumerism mother aspired to a weekly perm and a pot of cold cream as her beauty care. She shaved her legs, and anything else that sprouted, with her husband's razor, and her muff was her own. Only sluts meddled with their pubic hair and no-one saw your big sensible, comfortable, sane cotton pants anyway. The only things they waxed were floors and furniture and they didn't have thrush every two minutes from tight nylon underwear and vaginal deodorants.
Yes, we women, we've never had it so good. Now we have so many products to choose from, so many solutions to fix ourselves.
Roll on the next great new Celebrity Beach Nettle and Rhubarb Soup Diet. I need to be perfect. And I need it now.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
22:20 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Deprestrogen - and How You Cunts Can Cure It
Between Taschen catalogues crammed full of tits & ass – and one book on penises – magazine supplements pointing out how my 'female brain' can't 'understand' men, and various films and TV where my sex gets to strip and scream, sometimes together, I seem to be surrounded – sunk in – just how irrelevant I am.
Then this afternoon I come across this article headlining on IMDB Is There a Real Woman In This Multiplex?
And a very good article it is too. A woman after my own heart.
But, there's no doubt about it, besides me and her, there seems to be precious few of us yelling about the sheer misogyny of who we are 'supposed' to be.
With the exception of getting to fend for ourselves – albeit for less money – women's lives have definitely got worse. The suffragettes could have saved themselves a lot of hunger-striking, and the women's libbers a lot of underwear. They did fuck all in the long run.
Sure, they don't marry us off to old men these days (unless you're a royal or from a fundamentalist religion), but otherwise women's lot is definitely worse than it was in your mother's day – or your grandmother's.
Think about it. We get to work, but we don't get to have a career. Some women try it, and even pull it off up to a point, but they pay a price for it that men never do.
Career women are selfish, unfeminine, ball-breakers. Even other women don't like them. They're hard, unfeminine (can't stress that often enough), cold, mean, heartless, greedy, ambitious, warped, unnatural. They treat their families appallingly, depriving their husbands of masculinity, belittling them by association. (How can a man be a man if his wife earns more, works harder, and commands more respect?) They neglect their children, putting their four-wheel drives and blackberries before everything else. They produce narcissistic, neurotic, driven children and mincing, suicidal homosexuals. Even delinquents. And serial killers.
Career women have broken down the very fabric of society, producing a generation of latch-key kids who don't know how to cook and who smoke crack.
This, of course, is because it is all women's fault. No matter what it is, it's women's fault. No matter what's gone wrong with the world – we done it.
I'd like to believe this was a new thing, part of the general malaise of modern life, because it would make my argument look so very shiny, but actually it's a very old thing; it's just got more comprehensive, that's all.
This is the list of the things that used to be women's fault:-
1. Infidelity. If he did it, it was because he was bored (because she didn't make enough effort), or because she'd 'let herself go' (his beer belly/baldness is never an issue), or she was a shrew (you don't pick fault with men – ever), or bad with money (women's families come first – always), etc, etc, etc.
If she did it, it was because she was a slut. Or because she was a slut. Or maybe even a slut.
2. Bad children. She didn't bring them up properly – end of conversation.
3. Bad husbands. If he hit her she provoked it. If he hit the children she'd brought them up badly and they'd provoked it. If he fucked the children it was for the same reasons as number 1 – see Infidelity.
4. Bad housekeeping. She was a slattern, a lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing who'd rather stand a the street corner yakking than polish her step.
And that was it, pretty much. In other words, anywhere you could go wrong would be domestic. It was up to you to keep the house running sweetly. If the house wasn't sweet it was your fault. Your domain; your fault.
Now look at how that list has grown. Here is a list of the things that are now women's fault:-
First – all of the above. Nothing's changed. Women are still considered guardians of home and hearth and custodian of everybody's feelings – even the cat's. What's more, now it isn't just your relatives or neighbours that are going to judge you – now it's everyone. Complete strangers on TV, the media – 'experts', every one – are all pushing into your home, pointing out all the things you should be doing – from taking care of your husbands 'feminine' side, to making sure your kids get enough vitamins to get them into Mensa.
On top of that we now have to worry about being essentially flawed, something that needs 'fixed'.
Only a couple of days ago I actually read on Yahoo news that women were twice as likely to get depressed as men (nooooo…) and that 'they' (the scientists) didn't know why, but that it was possibly (read probably) hormones.
Jesus Christ, yes. Why hasn't someone told us before? It's the depression hormone. All us women are fitted with a neat little depression gland that secretes Deprestrogen. It's probably behind our tits.
Men don't have hormones, you see. Nope. They have this unique biology that runs on something else, just not hormones. It can't be hormones, you see, because they're a woman thing. Because women have ovaries and wombs and shit like that, and they have these hormones that just gallop into the blood at random moments and suddenly – snap – we're engulfed in Deprestrogen, which makes us cry and rant and eat chocolate. Because men never cry, or rant or eat chocolate, never mind do anything irrational.
Where the hell do these cretins get off with this shit? Although it's been recognised for a long time that negative thought patterns are the most likely factor in depression, and that cognitive therapy is the most successful method for treating it – with no chemicals, hormonal or otherwise, involved – they are still spouting piffle like this.
Why is it that whenever anything a woman says or does is considered unacceptable that the mental illness/chemical imbalance, you're-just-a-mad-bitch crap starts pouring out?
Because we're flawed, that's why.
That's what the modern woman has attained that her mother and her grandmother and all the others before her never had – the 'proof' that you are a fundamentally flawed, genetically irreversible disaster area.
See, before we had the cure-all of the 'Women's Movement', women were still considered inferior – actually, physically, like blacks having longer arms and a sense of rhythm.
When we got the vote, and the 'right' to work our asses off for less pay and no real promotion, it became politically incorrect to consider a woman as inferior. They could be smart enough, they'd proved it by fitting all those little wires on the circuit boards for half of men's wages. The scientists had to stop talking about their inferior biology and their smaller brains.
But the horrible fact was the inferiority theory didn't go away. It's like all those people who think taking Sambo and gollies out of children's books stops racism.
Newsflash – it doesn't, it just diverts it somewhere else.
And our 'somewhere else' is our flawedness.
And now all you cheery chappies, male and female, who think feminists are angry lesbians, are sitting shaking your heads, sneering at what mysterious 'flaws' these might be. Like the blacks, the women get it too easy. Everybody bends over backwards for women these days – they get all the best jobs, and they get to wear skirts (oh, the envy).
Okay, let's just look at some of these silly, irrelevant, too-much-fuss-over-nothing-typical-women flaws we've acquired along with our 'rights' and votes. Here's a short list, roughly in order of fear and loathing.
1. Fat. Women are fat, fat, fat. Unless you are a size 0, you are FAT. Nowadays a size 10 or 12 (that's a 6 or an 8 in the U.S.) is likely to be referred to as 'round' or 'curvy'.
On what planet?
The average British woman is a size 16. Ms Average is even bigger in the U.S., and yet a size 12 is 'curvy'? By what standard? Why, by the standard of how in error women essentially are. It's nothing you can fix, you're just wrong.
Women have a genetic predisposition to fat. For a start we have an extra layer of it. Nature thought it would be useful for us. Nature was WRONG.
Not only that, but we put it on easily. Pregnancy, menstrual fluctuations – hey, those good old hormones that make us depressed. Wouldn't you just know it? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
2. Hair. Unless it's on your head, it's wrong. Body hair on a woman is just wrong. It grows there? That's our point: you're flawed. 'Real' women (i.e. sexy, desirable women; the only real value women have) have smooth legs, arms, faces – skin in general. Flawed, wrong women have hair in their underarms, on their legs, their faces – hell, even round their nipples. Goddamn freaks.
And don't even start us on hairy snatches. To quote the internet, ewwwwwwwwwwwwww….
See? Even the internet in the immensity of its wisdom, knows hairy snatches are just wrong.
3. Smell. Everything about women smells. Especially their crotches. Women's crotches not only smell but their smell varies throughout the month, getting more or less pungent according to how moist it is. Which also varies. Smelly and moist? Dear God, does it get any wronger?
4. Wrinkles. Women wrinkle, age, go grey. It's a disgusting lapse of taste. Real women (i.e. sexy, blah, blah, blah….) are smooth, pre-pubescent, scentless, hairless, and forever chestnut/flaxen-haired. If you're not – you're wrong.
And that lot's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even touched on tit size, bleeding (that's beyond wrong, that's repulsive), emotional instability, showing off, dressing 'badly', frigidity, sluttishness, eating disorders, excessive shopping, drinking and shoes, relationship problems, failure to raise child geniuses, male emasculation… The list is endless.
The simple fact is your mother and grandmother just didn't have these problems. Mothers were expected to get fat, go grey and adopt the 'peenie' (that's an apron to you, not a sex organ) as soon as they popped their first brat.
A pre-consumerism mother aspired to a weekly perm and a pot of cold cream as her beauty care. She shaved her legs, and anything else that sprouted, with her husband's razor, and her muff was her own. Only sluts meddled with their pubic hair and no-one saw your big sensible, comfortable, sane cotton pants anyway. The only things they waxed were floors and furniture and they didn't have thrush every two minutes from tight nylon underwear and vaginal deodorants.
Yes, we women, we've never had it so good. Now we have so many products to choose from, so many solutions to fix ourselves.
Roll on the next great new Celebrity Beach Nettle and Rhubarb Soup Diet. I need to be perfect. And I need it now.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
22:20 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Well, at least I didn't turn into a daffodil...
I've been in the land of the insane this week. Or at least the seriously disturbed.
I managed to catch a cold from a teller in Asda's (and what was worse, I knew I would and was too socially programmed to ignore my instincts and go to another till). Hardly had said cold took hold than I came down with some odd bastard species of cystitis. Feeling shivery, spaced out, in pain and incredibly tired, I down-tooled on Cult Fiction (that poor thing is blighted, I tell you) and decided to move away from the computer and do something else.
'Something else' turned into me buying books on narcissist families and immersing myself in the 'madness' that was my "family of origin" as psychiatrists love to call it. (As opposed to your family of rental, or your family of adoption for the day, perhaps.)
In the strange ways of the universe, I have no idea exactly how I came to the narcissist thing. I know I was looking at books on shame on Amazon and I'm guessing one of them sneaked in there. It rung a bell because I remember my brother throwing it into the mix of Ways My Sister is Insane and Therefore My Parents are Not, and My Life is Unchanged… No, Really.
They tell me some narcissism is healthy, but it crosses into pathological narcissism when people can't empathise with other people. There's even some division of thought on when a narcissist morphs into becoming a psychopath – but, hey, they're all the same in my book.
Kidding.
Still, it wasn't comfortable and I do kind of wonder what drove me to do it. You'd think maybe having a little festival of Marx brothers movies or some such might have been a better idea.
I have to admit that although I still feel like crap (the sleep deprivation alone has ensured that) I do feel better for having read them (three of them in a week). But has it helped any?
Yes and no. I do seem to be a rarity in the heady world of Children of Narcissist Parents, in that I recognised early on a lot of the things that others seem to take a lifetime, or two, to spot.
I seem to be even rarer in that I dumped mine, realising that they would never be any use for anything. One of the books I bought actually spends around half the time telling you how to "deal" with these madly abusive parents so that you can have a "relationship" with them.
I think that could probably be adopted as the new definition of insanity to replace the 'doing what you've always done and expecting different results' maxim currently in use.
Of course, it is a form of doing what you've always done, but what they advise is changing your usual behaviour for new behaviours that create a different, supposedly less mad-making interaction with said narcissist parents.
And I say, Why, God, why?
I will never, ever understand people wanting to hang onto families that don't – and, worse, can't – love them. Why would you do that? What in the name of all that's holy are you getting out of the relationship if they don't love you, don't even really know you exist and recognise you solely as a way of off-loading their bad feelings about themselves onto you?
So, any of you fellow Children of Narcissist Parents™ (let's trademark that), if you feel you can argue a good case for why you are hanging onto a dead but painful relationship that still gives you endless grief no matter how much you adapt your 'behaviours', tell me about it – I'd really love to know.
So what of me then? Did I see myself writ large on every page?
Yes, pretty much. It's disconcerting and unnerving to see family scenarios, nearly all set in America, that might well have been played out in the Henery household. To discover that your parents are nothing but a psychological stereotype and that your own behaviours are nothing but bog standard reactions to that behaviour is completely underwhelming. Looks like none of us are as original as we like to think.
Conversely, it's also comforting: to know that you haven't imagined it, to know that you haven't exaggerated it, to know that your realisation that it wasn't 'normal' is immensely reassuring, in a depressing kind of a way. Depressing because you wonder how human beings can be so dumb. This has always been my problem with my family. After a lot of hurt and rage you start to see it in a more detached way and you realise just how breathtakingly dumb their behaviour is (if only it was so easy to see how dumb your own behaviour is).
Take but one tiny example off the stock-pile of my parents' greatness.
My mother had a thing about stuff. She couldn't part with it. She was, and is, a truly bizarre mix of someone who will kill for stuff and who equally well doesn't give a toss about stuff. She's like some ancient biblical painting of good and evil having a wrassle over a man's soul.
My mother couldn't give you anything. No, I don't mean emotionally (that was a given), but she actually couldn't hand things over. This meant in practice that when I went food shopping for the family I had to buy four of everything, because she couldn't cope with the insecurity of not having her share. This also meant there was a rule that you only ever ate your piece. You couldn't have an extra one because four were bought and the four were designated to each individual. If anyone (and it didn't happen often) accidentally ate my mother's piece then she would go deadly silent.
This wasn't a sulk, it was a glacial withdrawing. My mother could be silent for weeks at a stretch if she felt slighted. If it was very bad she would use someone else to communicate – you know the old joke, "Go and ask your father if he wants his supper" when he's sitting right there.
None of this was comic, understand. It was deadly serious. Trust me, a mother who was already 99% absent going for the full Monty was no joke.
This problem with giving also meant she faced a terrible dilemma in any other sphere where it might be required of her. She couldn't give presents. She had two techniques for dealing with this: 1) give very cheap, freely available presents so that she didn't feel that anything 'special' was being given and therefore she wasn't, by implication, being somehow deprived. Or 2) take the present back.
My mother regularly took clothes and dress fabric back off me after it was bought, on various grounds, such as "It's too old for you" (green lurex, Chinese pattern satin, some nice pastel psychedelia), or in the case of clothes: "You never wear it", or that good old stand-by – no reason at all, just take it.
I didn't truly see a pattern in this until I was in my early teens and witnessed it operating outside of my relationship with her, giving me some much needed perspective on what was actually happening.
One year when we came back from a holiday in Czechoslovakia, my mother brought home with her a present for a work colleague. That was unusual in itself, my mother had no woman friends and didn't give presents. I don't know whether she had promised this woman something, or it was a game of one-upmanship, but a present was duly bought, a fancy-worked copper-coloured bracelet.
Now, it's important to understand here that my mother never wore jewellery, neither valuable nor costume. When she went out at the weekends she'd wear large, glitzy 60's/70's earrings, that being the fashion then, but otherwise, no jewellery, ever.
Now she brought this bracelet home, took it into Centre 1 (tax office) where she worked and that was that.
I have no idea how I learned this, but I assume I asked her how her friend had liked the bracelet. My mother confessed she hadn't given her it. I have a feeling she either said something odd here, or I somehow twigged it, but I realised for the first time how absolutely insane her behaviour was. Never, ever, would she wear this bracelet (and she didn't), but she was physically unable to give it over to this woman.
I have a feeling she told her she had forgotten to buy her a present or that she'd lost it. I remember her confessing that it was still in her work drawer. I remember her rationalising it: that the woman wouldn't like it, it would be wasted on her, she'd never wear it. Ironic given that it was brought home and put in my mother's jewellery bowl where it languished, unworn, but safe from the horrible fate of being given to another.
My mother never even attempted to overcome this problem. In fact, I don't think she even recognised it was a problem. This, of course, being the problem with being a narcissist – you don't have a problem.
In practical terms this meant that my mother gave me nothing, from cuddles and kisses (awwwwwwww….) to reassurance, compliments, advice, help, presents, not even the bare necessities.
The only clothes my mother could bear to give me were school clothes – so I lived in school clothes. My mother never touched me and disliked being touched. My mother couldn't give help or reassurance, always telling me instead that I didn't need it. My mother was afraid of sickness and avoided the sick room with a repugnance that was almost obsessive, thus meaning that if you were ill you were on your own. Presents meant the cheapest thing she could buy at the newsagent at the last moment and leave in the bag, or wrap in some old 10-sheets-for-10p Xmas wrap. Any request for help, disguised as advice-seeking (the only way you could get her to notice your problem), was always met with a strange and subtle bragging about how she didn't need what you were asking for so she couldn't advise you on it.
My mother was superhuman, beyond perfect. She didn't get ill, have period pains (her periods were well-nigh invisible, so low-profile did she keep them), she always beat everyone at everything she did or died trying.
She's still like that now. When I was in Orkney I started having what I thought was pre-menopausal symptoms. I decided to phone her up and ask her about her menopause. I hadn't had any contact with her for years but we'd been briefly brought together by Max's dad – an aberrant guilt-trip I should never have allowed myself to be sucked into, but that's another story.
Anyway, in the course of the conversation my mother told me that her menopause had lasted only around a year, with virtually no symptoms, and then it was over – painless and a piece of cake. In fact, a typical old Mary Henery I-am-de-greatest summation.
The truth was, though, that this time I could remember some facts that she seemed to have conveniently forgotten. She had, for example, at least once bled non-stop for three weeks. So badly, in fact, that my father had asked me to try and talk her into going to the doctors. Completely unheard of in the shamed and repressed Henery household to actually voice such a squeamish horror, and from my father at that – that's why I remembered it.
She had also conveniently forgotten that she'd had headaches so severe that she'd once been reduced to tears. It was the only time that I ever recall seeing my mother cry, and it was sufficiently shocking that it was carved into my memory.
Oddly, she remembered the headaches when I reminded her, but she had no memory of the crying, only that she'd had to go to hospital for brain scans – a fact about which I knew nothing. Secrecy was our other great fun family game.
But the fact was, even in her seventies, my mother was still acting out Perfect. It was far more important to her that she be seen as indestructible than that she should share anything with me that might help me. There was no mother/daughter bond and never would be, she was too busy winning an imaginary game of one-upmanship with me.
Such, dear friends, is the life of a Child of Narcissist Parents™.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
18:06 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Well, at least I didn't turn into a daffodil...
I've been in the land of the insane this week. Or at least the seriously disturbed.
I managed to catch a cold from a teller in Asda's (and what was worse, I knew I would and was too socially programmed to ignore my instincts and go to another till). Hardly had said cold took hold than I came down with some odd bastard species of cystitis. Feeling shivery, spaced out, in pain and incredibly tired, I down-tooled on Cult Fiction (that poor thing is blighted, I tell you) and decided to move away from the computer and do something else.
'Something else' turned into me buying books on narcissist families and immersing myself in the 'madness' that was my "family of origin" as psychiatrists love to call it. (As opposed to your family of rental, or your family of adoption for the day, perhaps.)
In the strange ways of the universe, I have no idea exactly how I came to the narcissist thing. I know I was looking at books on shame on Amazon and I'm guessing one of them sneaked in there. It rung a bell because I remember my brother throwing it into the mix of Ways My Sister is Insane and Therefore My Parents are Not, and My Life is Unchanged… No, Really.
They tell me some narcissism is healthy, but it crosses into pathological narcissism when people can't empathise with other people. There's even some division of thought on when a narcissist morphs into becoming a psychopath – but, hey, they're all the same in my book.
Kidding.
Still, it wasn't comfortable and I do kind of wonder what drove me to do it. You'd think maybe having a little festival of Marx brothers movies or some such might have been a better idea.
I have to admit that although I still feel like crap (the sleep deprivation alone has ensured that) I do feel better for having read them (three of them in a week). But has it helped any?
Yes and no. I do seem to be a rarity in the heady world of Children of Narcissist Parents, in that I recognised early on a lot of the things that others seem to take a lifetime, or two, to spot.
I seem to be even rarer in that I dumped mine, realising that they would never be any use for anything. One of the books I bought actually spends around half the time telling you how to "deal" with these madly abusive parents so that you can have a "relationship" with them.
I think that could probably be adopted as the new definition of insanity to replace the 'doing what you've always done and expecting different results' maxim currently in use.
Of course, it is a form of doing what you've always done, but what they advise is changing your usual behaviour for new behaviours that create a different, supposedly less mad-making interaction with said narcissist parents.
And I say, Why, God, why?
I will never, ever understand people wanting to hang onto families that don't – and, worse, can't – love them. Why would you do that? What in the name of all that's holy are you getting out of the relationship if they don't love you, don't even really know you exist and recognise you solely as a way of off-loading their bad feelings about themselves onto you?
So, any of you fellow Children of Narcissist Parents™ (let's trademark that), if you feel you can argue a good case for why you are hanging onto a dead but painful relationship that still gives you endless grief no matter how much you adapt your 'behaviours', tell me about it – I'd really love to know.
So what of me then? Did I see myself writ large on every page?
Yes, pretty much. It's disconcerting and unnerving to see family scenarios, nearly all set in America, that might well have been played out in the Henery household. To discover that your parents are nothing but a psychological stereotype and that your own behaviours are nothing but bog standard reactions to that behaviour is completely underwhelming. Looks like none of us are as original as we like to think.
Conversely, it's also comforting: to know that you haven't imagined it, to know that you haven't exaggerated it, to know that your realisation that it wasn't 'normal' is immensely reassuring, in a depressing kind of a way. Depressing because you wonder how human beings can be so dumb. This has always been my problem with my family. After a lot of hurt and rage you start to see it in a more detached way and you realise just how breathtakingly dumb their behaviour is (if only it was so easy to see how dumb your own behaviour is).
Take but one tiny example off the stock-pile of my parents' greatness.
My mother had a thing about stuff. She couldn't part with it. She was, and is, a truly bizarre mix of someone who will kill for stuff and who equally well doesn't give a toss about stuff. She's like some ancient biblical painting of good and evil having a wrassle over a man's soul.
My mother couldn't give you anything. No, I don't mean emotionally (that was a given), but she actually couldn't hand things over. This meant in practice that when I went food shopping for the family I had to buy four of everything, because she couldn't cope with the insecurity of not having her share. This also meant there was a rule that you only ever ate your piece. You couldn't have an extra one because four were bought and the four were designated to each individual. If anyone (and it didn't happen often) accidentally ate my mother's piece then she would go deadly silent.
This wasn't a sulk, it was a glacial withdrawing. My mother could be silent for weeks at a stretch if she felt slighted. If it was very bad she would use someone else to communicate – you know the old joke, "Go and ask your father if he wants his supper" when he's sitting right there.
None of this was comic, understand. It was deadly serious. Trust me, a mother who was already 99% absent going for the full Monty was no joke.
This problem with giving also meant she faced a terrible dilemma in any other sphere where it might be required of her. She couldn't give presents. She had two techniques for dealing with this: 1) give very cheap, freely available presents so that she didn't feel that anything 'special' was being given and therefore she wasn't, by implication, being somehow deprived. Or 2) take the present back.
My mother regularly took clothes and dress fabric back off me after it was bought, on various grounds, such as "It's too old for you" (green lurex, Chinese pattern satin, some nice pastel psychedelia), or in the case of clothes: "You never wear it", or that good old stand-by – no reason at all, just take it.
I didn't truly see a pattern in this until I was in my early teens and witnessed it operating outside of my relationship with her, giving me some much needed perspective on what was actually happening.
One year when we came back from a holiday in Czechoslovakia, my mother brought home with her a present for a work colleague. That was unusual in itself, my mother had no woman friends and didn't give presents. I don't know whether she had promised this woman something, or it was a game of one-upmanship, but a present was duly bought, a fancy-worked copper-coloured bracelet.
Now, it's important to understand here that my mother never wore jewellery, neither valuable nor costume. When she went out at the weekends she'd wear large, glitzy 60's/70's earrings, that being the fashion then, but otherwise, no jewellery, ever.
Now she brought this bracelet home, took it into Centre 1 (tax office) where she worked and that was that.
I have no idea how I learned this, but I assume I asked her how her friend had liked the bracelet. My mother confessed she hadn't given her it. I have a feeling she either said something odd here, or I somehow twigged it, but I realised for the first time how absolutely insane her behaviour was. Never, ever, would she wear this bracelet (and she didn't), but she was physically unable to give it over to this woman.
I have a feeling she told her she had forgotten to buy her a present or that she'd lost it. I remember her confessing that it was still in her work drawer. I remember her rationalising it: that the woman wouldn't like it, it would be wasted on her, she'd never wear it. Ironic given that it was brought home and put in my mother's jewellery bowl where it languished, unworn, but safe from the horrible fate of being given to another.
My mother never even attempted to overcome this problem. In fact, I don't think she even recognised it was a problem. This, of course, being the problem with being a narcissist – you don't have a problem.
In practical terms this meant that my mother gave me nothing, from cuddles and kisses (awwwwwwww….) to reassurance, compliments, advice, help, presents, not even the bare necessities.
The only clothes my mother could bear to give me were school clothes – so I lived in school clothes. My mother never touched me and disliked being touched. My mother couldn't give help or reassurance, always telling me instead that I didn't need it. My mother was afraid of sickness and avoided the sick room with a repugnance that was almost obsessive, thus meaning that if you were ill you were on your own. Presents meant the cheapest thing she could buy at the newsagent at the last moment and leave in the bag, or wrap in some old 10-sheets-for-10p Xmas wrap. Any request for help, disguised as advice-seeking (the only way you could get her to notice your problem), was always met with a strange and subtle bragging about how she didn't need what you were asking for so she couldn't advise you on it.
My mother was superhuman, beyond perfect. She didn't get ill, have period pains (her periods were well-nigh invisible, so low-profile did she keep them), she always beat everyone at everything she did or died trying.
She's still like that now. When I was in Orkney I started having what I thought was pre-menopausal symptoms. I decided to phone her up and ask her about her menopause. I hadn't had any contact with her for years but we'd been briefly brought together by Max's dad – an aberrant guilt-trip I should never have allowed myself to be sucked into, but that's another story.
Anyway, in the course of the conversation my mother told me that her menopause had lasted only around a year, with virtually no symptoms, and then it was over – painless and a piece of cake. In fact, a typical old Mary Henery I-am-de-greatest summation.
The truth was, though, that this time I could remember some facts that she seemed to have conveniently forgotten. She had, for example, at least once bled non-stop for three weeks. So badly, in fact, that my father had asked me to try and talk her into going to the doctors. Completely unheard of in the shamed and repressed Henery household to actually voice such a squeamish horror, and from my father at that – that's why I remembered it.
She had also conveniently forgotten that she'd had headaches so severe that she'd once been reduced to tears. It was the only time that I ever recall seeing my mother cry, and it was sufficiently shocking that it was carved into my memory.
Oddly, she remembered the headaches when I reminded her, but she had no memory of the crying, only that she'd had to go to hospital for brain scans – a fact about which I knew nothing. Secrecy was our other great fun family game.
But the fact was, even in her seventies, my mother was still acting out Perfect. It was far more important to her that she be seen as indestructible than that she should share anything with me that might help me. There was no mother/daughter bond and never would be, she was too busy winning an imaginary game of one-upmanship with me.
Such, dear friends, is the life of a Child of Narcissist Parents™.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
18:06 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Brigitte Bardot - One Suicide-Bombing, Motherfucking Racist Bitch
I'm reading tonight that Brigitte Bardot is up for the fifth time – yes, you read that correctly, fifth – for "inciting racial hatred", said "racial hatred" being, apparently, a dislike of Muslims and, specifically, the influx of Muslims into France.
As an animal rights activist she doesn't like their habit of slaughtering sheep for religious festivals, but I am also 'reliably' informed by the same news bulletin that she "published a book attacking gays, immigrants and the unemployed, in which she also lamented the "Islamisation of France"."
Waaaaaaay! Go long, Brigitte, go long! You've got to admire that. Not just the Muslims but throwing in the gays and the unemployed too. I like someone dedicated to their dislike, irrational or otherwise.
There seems to me to be something deeply ironic in the fact that she keeps finding her ass in court (the prosecutor is quoted as being "a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot") when the internet is wall to wall – or ether to ether perhaps – hatred of just about every kind, colour and depth you can imagine, but nobody seems to be doing very much to stop any of that.
Could it be (say not so) that it's easy to target Ms Bardot whose fat, rich ass is up there for all to see – and line their pockets with. I mean, on the inciting racial hatred front, a mad Frenchwoman (and let's fact it – that's what we think of her, isn't it?) who lives reclusively with her cats, wittering on about animal rights, isn't exactly going to whip up a feeding frenzy of Nazis, is she?
Can you see Brigitte storming through her retirement community on her Zimmer frame, yelling for the partisans to take to the streets and lynch them a few towel-heads?
So I think it's alright for Brigitte to whip up racial hatred?
I don't know – do you think it's alright for the National Enquirer to whip up Britney hatred? Or the world and his dog to whip up fat hatred? How about Eddie Murphy's hatred? I think Norbit pretty much whips up fat and women hatred. How about taking Norbit to court?
Oh, that doesn't count, that's entertainment. Well, for all you know Brigitte laughs her guts out when she's writing bad shit about Islam – is she not allowed to be entertained?
I'm only asking because I wonder why she isn't allowed to vent her spleen on a group's blood-thirsty religious practices when it's okay for everyone on the web to hate an individual for markedly bloodless brolly-bashing. I know if I was standing before God I'd rather take my chances on justifying whipping up hatred against slaughtering sheep than hitting cars with brollies.
Unless, of course, it was the old testament God. In which case I'd recommend telling him you rounded up every whoring little slut from here to Memphis and the hell with a few sheep. I'd say the old testament God is more in line with the Muslims any day, and it surprises me he hasn't struck Brigitte down before now – the fat slut (two strikes right there).
Am I the only person in the world that finds it odd that Brigitte indulging in a little reactionary (or heartfelt) disgust for the ways of Islam is prosecutable, but that Islam strutting around, often in someone else's country, screaming the odds about our behaviour (those slutty women again) and inciting just about anybody to take up arms against the infidel, doesn't seem to find itself in court?
Oh sure, if they build a few bombs, get a gathering of local dentists (why do they always seem to be innocuous dentists? Is it a sadism gene?) to talk about the next suicide mission, we whip their asses into court, but talking, or even writing about it? I don't think so. We have to respect their religion, you see. Doesn't do to offend someone's religion.
Well, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an offended religion. I've seen some damn antsy papists in my time, and some downright vicious protestants, but an offended religion? Not in my lifetime.
What I can't stand about this is the rampant double standard.
Let me give you a very specific personal right-on-your-doorstep example.
About a year after I came to Aberdeen I was in a thrift store. It didn't belong to a high street charity; it was just entitled Charity Shop on the sign. It was a big, clean shop with lots of donated goodies (it still is – it's still there, thriving away). Behind the counter was an 'Asian' man of indeterminate origin, but he looked Middle Eastern, not Indian or Pakistani. I paid no particular attention to him, being drawn, as usual, to the jewellery cabinet. I asked to see a couple of pieces and he stood talking to me, perfectly affably and politely friendly.
He went into the back shop after a while and I realised I could hear an odd tape playing in there – odd because it was part in Arabic and then in English.
After a while of eavesdropping it became apparent that what I was listening to was a translation, rather like a French lesson – écouter et répetér (listen and repeat for those of you who hated French). I, being me, and always caught on oddity, started concentrating on what was being said and discovered a whole new world I wasn't sure I had ever really believed in until that moment – me being a good woolly liberal and all.
This was a 'sermon' by a religious leader. He was extolling young men to be careful in their 'ministry', when trying to follow the ways of Allah, that they were not seduced by the women of their 'enemies'. He actually used the word enemies. He wrote a whole imaginary scenario for his keen young disciples, visualising them finding these poor women wandering the streets, 'orphaned' by combat and suggesting that they might take them in out the goodness of their hearts – but that they shouldn't. They should beware of this "temptation", because their 'enemies' had sent these dangerous women in amongst them, to lead them into sin and vice, so that they would stray from Allah.
Now, putting this into a real world context, what he was actually saying was, "In our 'holy war' you will find women, destitute, traumatised, wandering homeless in the streets without help and family. You should ignore your natural human tendencies to be a good Samaritan, because remember, your enemy will attempt to seduce you, because, let's face it, he's Satan. So don't be kind, and don't do good, because your enemy doesn't deserve it. And, anyway, enemy women are sluts."
Such is the magnanimous heart of religion. Founded on moral principles my ass. Anything that extols unkindness to people in need is neither good, charitable, nor godly. Unless, of course, he is that old testament God that we all fear so much – the wrathful, punitive one that always seems to want you to "take up thy word and slew mine enemy". Why doesn't he slew his own enemies if he's so damn powerful?
But the long and the short of it was that's where the money was going from anything I or anyone else bought in that shop. The bloke in the shop was perfectly nice and affable, but he still considered me the 'enemy' and that as a woman I'd be likely sent to try and seduce him and other good Allah fearing men off the path of righteousness. If I was in pain or distress he wouldn't lift a hand to help me – his preacher had told him not to. And he was listening to this bilge masquerading as righteousness in full hearing of a shop full of (at that moment) white people (aka 'enemies') like myself.
He obviously saw nothing wrong with that. After all, he was just practicing his religion and he has a right to that.
But what I want to know is this – why doesn't he, or the many like him, find himself hauled into court with Brigitte Bardot for "inciting racial hatred"? Perhaps because he's not famous and rich?
No. That would be wrong.
After all, he wasn't fat.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
23:35 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Brigitte Bardot - One Suicide-Bombing, Motherfucking Racist Bitch
I'm reading tonight that Brigitte Bardot is up for the fifth time – yes, you read that correctly, fifth – for "inciting racial hatred", said "racial hatred" being, apparently, a dislike of Muslims and, specifically, the influx of Muslims into France.
As an animal rights activist she doesn't like their habit of slaughtering sheep for religious festivals, but I am also 'reliably' informed by the same news bulletin that she "published a book attacking gays, immigrants and the unemployed, in which she also lamented the "Islamisation of France"."
Waaaaaaay! Go long, Brigitte, go long! You've got to admire that. Not just the Muslims but throwing in the gays and the unemployed too. I like someone dedicated to their dislike, irrational or otherwise.
There seems to me to be something deeply ironic in the fact that she keeps finding her ass in court (the prosecutor is quoted as being "a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot") when the internet is wall to wall – or ether to ether perhaps – hatred of just about every kind, colour and depth you can imagine, but nobody seems to be doing very much to stop any of that.
Could it be (say not so) that it's easy to target Ms Bardot whose fat, rich ass is up there for all to see – and line their pockets with. I mean, on the inciting racial hatred front, a mad Frenchwoman (and let's fact it – that's what we think of her, isn't it?) who lives reclusively with her cats, wittering on about animal rights, isn't exactly going to whip up a feeding frenzy of Nazis, is she?
Can you see Brigitte storming through her retirement community on her Zimmer frame, yelling for the partisans to take to the streets and lynch them a few towel-heads?
So I think it's alright for Brigitte to whip up racial hatred?
I don't know – do you think it's alright for the National Enquirer to whip up Britney hatred? Or the world and his dog to whip up fat hatred? How about Eddie Murphy's hatred? I think Norbit pretty much whips up fat and women hatred. How about taking Norbit to court?
Oh, that doesn't count, that's entertainment. Well, for all you know Brigitte laughs her guts out when she's writing bad shit about Islam – is she not allowed to be entertained?
I'm only asking because I wonder why she isn't allowed to vent her spleen on a group's blood-thirsty religious practices when it's okay for everyone on the web to hate an individual for markedly bloodless brolly-bashing. I know if I was standing before God I'd rather take my chances on justifying whipping up hatred against slaughtering sheep than hitting cars with brollies.
Unless, of course, it was the old testament God. In which case I'd recommend telling him you rounded up every whoring little slut from here to Memphis and the hell with a few sheep. I'd say the old testament God is more in line with the Muslims any day, and it surprises me he hasn't struck Brigitte down before now – the fat slut (two strikes right there).
Am I the only person in the world that finds it odd that Brigitte indulging in a little reactionary (or heartfelt) disgust for the ways of Islam is prosecutable, but that Islam strutting around, often in someone else's country, screaming the odds about our behaviour (those slutty women again) and inciting just about anybody to take up arms against the infidel, doesn't seem to find itself in court?
Oh sure, if they build a few bombs, get a gathering of local dentists (why do they always seem to be innocuous dentists? Is it a sadism gene?) to talk about the next suicide mission, we whip their asses into court, but talking, or even writing about it? I don't think so. We have to respect their religion, you see. Doesn't do to offend someone's religion.
Well, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an offended religion. I've seen some damn antsy papists in my time, and some downright vicious protestants, but an offended religion? Not in my lifetime.
What I can't stand about this is the rampant double standard.
Let me give you a very specific personal right-on-your-doorstep example.
About a year after I came to Aberdeen I was in a thrift store. It didn't belong to a high street charity; it was just entitled Charity Shop on the sign. It was a big, clean shop with lots of donated goodies (it still is – it's still there, thriving away). Behind the counter was an 'Asian' man of indeterminate origin, but he looked Middle Eastern, not Indian or Pakistani. I paid no particular attention to him, being drawn, as usual, to the jewellery cabinet. I asked to see a couple of pieces and he stood talking to me, perfectly affably and politely friendly.
He went into the back shop after a while and I realised I could hear an odd tape playing in there – odd because it was part in Arabic and then in English.
After a while of eavesdropping it became apparent that what I was listening to was a translation, rather like a French lesson – écouter et répetér (listen and repeat for those of you who hated French). I, being me, and always caught on oddity, started concentrating on what was being said and discovered a whole new world I wasn't sure I had ever really believed in until that moment – me being a good woolly liberal and all.
This was a 'sermon' by a religious leader. He was extolling young men to be careful in their 'ministry', when trying to follow the ways of Allah, that they were not seduced by the women of their 'enemies'. He actually used the word enemies. He wrote a whole imaginary scenario for his keen young disciples, visualising them finding these poor women wandering the streets, 'orphaned' by combat and suggesting that they might take them in out the goodness of their hearts – but that they shouldn't. They should beware of this "temptation", because their 'enemies' had sent these dangerous women in amongst them, to lead them into sin and vice, so that they would stray from Allah.
Now, putting this into a real world context, what he was actually saying was, "In our 'holy war' you will find women, destitute, traumatised, wandering homeless in the streets without help and family. You should ignore your natural human tendencies to be a good Samaritan, because remember, your enemy will attempt to seduce you, because, let's face it, he's Satan. So don't be kind, and don't do good, because your enemy doesn't deserve it. And, anyway, enemy women are sluts."
Such is the magnanimous heart of religion. Founded on moral principles my ass. Anything that extols unkindness to people in need is neither good, charitable, nor godly. Unless, of course, he is that old testament God that we all fear so much – the wrathful, punitive one that always seems to want you to "take up thy word and slew mine enemy". Why doesn't he slew his own enemies if he's so damn powerful?
But the long and the short of it was that's where the money was going from anything I or anyone else bought in that shop. The bloke in the shop was perfectly nice and affable, but he still considered me the 'enemy' and that as a woman I'd be likely sent to try and seduce him and other good Allah fearing men off the path of righteousness. If I was in pain or distress he wouldn't lift a hand to help me – his preacher had told him not to. And he was listening to this bilge masquerading as righteousness in full hearing of a shop full of (at that moment) white people (aka 'enemies') like myself.
He obviously saw nothing wrong with that. After all, he was just practicing his religion and he has a right to that.
But what I want to know is this – why doesn't he, or the many like him, find himself hauled into court with Brigitte Bardot for "inciting racial hatred"? Perhaps because he's not famous and rich?
No. That would be wrong.
After all, he wasn't fat.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
23:35 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 09 April 2008
100 Reasons Why I am a Genius - no, really...
In the strangest of strange places right now. I'm chiefly engaged in writing new features for Cult Fiction to make it an "all new, all singing, all dancing" kind of publication.
So far, I have a new bio of me which confesses to my ownership of The Dirty Club – a child sex club that isn't nearly as perverse as it sounds, or is possibly more perverse than it sounds, depending on your point of view – then I have the Will I Like DANNY? 'criminal profile' i.e. a Cosmo style (not) listing of Are you the 'typical' (there's no such thing) DANNY reader? Then we have the Read a Good Movie feature which is a list of the 'if you like X movie, you'll like DANNY' variety and, last of all – at least so far – a feature entitled Subverting the Genre, about how DANNY subverts just about any genre you care to name.
And that's as far as I've got.
It's a strange place because I'm doing something I've never really done before – I'm using me as my Perfect Reader. We've had so many misfires with DANNY publicity that we've decided to throw caution to the winds and model the perfect DANNY reader on my likes and dislikes, the places I'd go (IMDB & Amazon, pretty much), things I'd see and do.
The only real basis we have for this breathtaking strategy is our most 'successful' fans share a remarkable similarity of taste in 'fiction' to mine, and our most 'unsuccessful' fans have had preferences and tastes where I'd never venture in a million years, so we figure, walk towards me and away from them and we're heading in the right direction.
Hey, it's a plan – the best one we've had so far – so don't knock it.
We've been sitting on advertising campaigns for IMDB & Amazon for ages – too scared to spend the budgets in case we cock up, or they are not the right place – but we've got to let go some time and that would be now.
Or, at least, after the 4th of July when DANNY Volume 1, the Revised Edition, officially hits the US.
It will be available here too, by the way, should you want to read The Version With More Commas as I've come to think of it. Truthfully, it will be a slightly better edition: easier to read, more graphic cover, better design generally, plus, of course, it may have some of the original beginning reinstated.
Still not entirely sure on that. After all, I cut it out the first time – must have had a reason. Personally, I think I just got the Must-Have-Striking-Opening-Scene disease and went a little nuts when I was editing it. But we'll see.
So, what other news? Well, the free extract of Volume 3 is up and running finally. You can read this via the Secret Site portal on Danny-is God (you'll find the link down below). Unfortunately it still has bold type on the first page because Mr Scratchmann has been doing a load of commissions in the US (he recently placed an online portfolio on the i-Spot after deliberating on whether he should for a mere 10 years). He was immediately inundated with work, which was nice, but which came on top of a load of commissions in the UK.
Still, never complain about work – you never know when it will dry up again. I will, however, keep chivvying his ass about getting it fixed to make it a more comfortable reading experience.
I, for my part, have decided finally to put the DANNY Elite Discussion Board (not sure it is a discussion board, but can't think what else to call it at the moment) on a whole new site, which is at neither MySpace nor Livejournal but is, instead, on Blogger, a Google site. And here is The Dirty Club.
It has been named in memory of the above-mentioned child sex club which I, disappointingly – (once again, or not) – ran as a child, and which got me into no end of trouble. Now, as then, I am going public, but we will definitely not be indulging in any actual sex, just talking about sex and its ramifications as viewed through DANNY – and other academic-sounding and fun polemics, of course.
As you can see, you have to be a member to get in and we will set up a page on DANNY-is-God in due course to let you join up.
The very rigorous testing will involve truth drugs, eyeball scanning and an oath of allegiance to the Lithuanian flag, plus some indisputably filthy hazing rituals and the sacrifice of your first child or a small pet – whichever the phase of the moon proscribes.
More details of that once we've set up the painstaking entrance exam (and I've actually written some content).
So that's my excitement for the week.
God, what a sad life I have.
Been watching Heroes and enjoying it but, dear God, it really does have fanboy coming out its ass. It's as if they sat down and thought "How can we capture that huge fanboy market out there?" and wrote an identikit story where all the fanboys get to play a part and sad losers get to have the dreaded "special powers".
As I am enjoying it, I consider myself very lucky that I saw a few episodes when it was just starting to get famous here, on the strength of which I got the box set for my Xmas. If I'd come to it from the fame end, as it were, I'd have undoubtedly run away from it screaming.
On the face of it, it seems like a nightmare scenario: geeky kids; comic artists (nooooooooooooooooooh!); Japanese geeky kids in comics (nooooooooooooooooooh!); doughnut-eating-decent-policemen-with-nasty-friends-and-adulterous-wives; cheerleaders who spend the whole thing in split-front mega-short skirts, and who look like some terrifying cross between Shirley Temple and Amber Bosoms the Teenage Slut Porn Starlet from Texas whose web cam gets more hits than Youtube, and who may regularly get burnt/beaten/broken but who never loses the curl in her hair and whose lip gloss still shimmers in 1000 degree furnace fires; evil men who have huge art collections (why?); evil English men (I would say why again but we all know it's the accent) who chop vegetables; the Petrelli brother incestuous touchy-feely thing (oh, I'm the pot and it's the kettle); the evil über-villain who absorbs power to become über-villainous so that he can rule the world and reign supreme as The Evil One Who Feels "Special".
What? You might as well put The Evil One Whose Mother Preferred His Jock Brother.
See, that's what I mean, wall-to-wall geek. But, hey, it's good wall-to-wall geek, so more power to them. I suspect that the two Japanese boys, much as they are by far my favourite thing in the show, are raging racism of the worst kind, but what the hell – we're white, right? We can say anything.
So, the inexplicable title of this blog? I wrote a piece called 100 Reasons Why I am a Genius then decided I'd never publish it, but I so loved the title I thought I'd put it on here.
Got to give you something to wonder about me in your idle moments.
P.S. The child sex club mentioned in this blog DOES NOT exist, nor has it ever existed, anywhere, ever. It is A JOKE. Tasteless maybe, but still a joke. The Dirty Club™, is a discussion forum for readers of DANNY by Chancery Stone and has nothing to do with child sex, anywhere, ever. There is no such thing as child sex.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
20:05 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
100 Reasons Why I am a Genius - no, really...
In the strangest of strange places right now. I'm chiefly engaged in writing new features for Cult Fiction to make it an "all new, all singing, all dancing" kind of publication.
So far, I have a new bio of me which confesses to my ownership of The Dirty Club – a child sex club that isn't nearly as perverse as it sounds, or is possibly more perverse than it sounds, depending on your point of view – then I have the Will I Like DANNY? 'criminal profile' i.e. a Cosmo style (not) listing of Are you the 'typical' (there's no such thing) DANNY reader? Then we have the Read a Good Movie feature which is a list of the 'if you like X movie, you'll like DANNY' variety and, last of all – at least so far – a feature entitled Subverting the Genre, about how DANNY subverts just about any genre you care to name.
And that's as far as I've got.
It's a strange place because I'm doing something I've never really done before – I'm using me as my Perfect Reader. We've had so many misfires with DANNY publicity that we've decided to throw caution to the winds and model the perfect DANNY reader on my likes and dislikes, the places I'd go (IMDB & Amazon, pretty much), things I'd see and do.
The only real basis we have for this breathtaking strategy is our most 'successful' fans share a remarkable similarity of taste in 'fiction' to mine, and our most 'unsuccessful' fans have had preferences and tastes where I'd never venture in a million years, so we figure, walk towards me and away from them and we're heading in the right direction.
Hey, it's a plan – the best one we've had so far – so don't knock it.
We've been sitting on advertising campaigns for IMDB & Amazon for ages – too scared to spend the budgets in case we cock up, or they are not the right place – but we've got to let go some time and that would be now.
Or, at least, after the 4th of July when DANNY Volume 1, the Revised Edition, officially hits the US.
It will be available here too, by the way, should you want to read The Version With More Commas as I've come to think of it. Truthfully, it will be a slightly better edition: easier to read, more graphic cover, better design generally, plus, of course, it may have some of the original beginning reinstated.
Still not entirely sure on that. After all, I cut it out the first time – must have had a reason. Personally, I think I just got the Must-Have-Striking-Opening-Scene disease and went a little nuts when I was editing it. But we'll see.
So, what other news? Well, the free extract of Volume 3 is up and running finally. You can read this via the Secret Site portal on Danny-is God (you'll find the link down below). Unfortunately it still has bold type on the first page because Mr Scratchmann has been doing a load of commissions in the US (he recently placed an online portfolio on the i-Spot after deliberating on whether he should for a mere 10 years). He was immediately inundated with work, which was nice, but which came on top of a load of commissions in the UK.
Still, never complain about work – you never know when it will dry up again. I will, however, keep chivvying his ass about getting it fixed to make it a more comfortable reading experience.
I, for my part, have decided finally to put the DANNY Elite Discussion Board (not sure it is a discussion board, but can't think what else to call it at the moment) on a whole new site, which is at neither MySpace nor Livejournal but is, instead, on Blogger, a Google site. And here is The Dirty Club.
It has been named in memory of the above-mentioned child sex club which I, disappointingly – (once again, or not) – ran as a child, and which got me into no end of trouble. Now, as then, I am going public, but we will definitely not be indulging in any actual sex, just talking about sex and its ramifications as viewed through DANNY – and other academic-sounding and fun polemics, of course.
As you can see, you have to be a member to get in and we will set up a page on DANNY-is-God in due course to let you join up.
The very rigorous testing will involve truth drugs, eyeball scanning and an oath of allegiance to the Lithuanian flag, plus some indisputably filthy hazing rituals and the sacrifice of your first child or a small pet – whichever the phase of the moon proscribes.
More details of that once we've set up the painstaking entrance exam (and I've actually written some content).
So that's my excitement for the week.
God, what a sad life I have.
Been watching Heroes and enjoying it but, dear God, it really does have fanboy coming out its ass. It's as if they sat down and thought "How can we capture that huge fanboy market out there?" and wrote an identikit story where all the fanboys get to play a part and sad losers get to have the dreaded "special powers".
As I am enjoying it, I consider myself very luc