Monday, July 07, 2008

What do bad bookshops sell these days?

I lived for a time in Canada in the late 1960s. This was not long after the US Supreme Court had made the ruling which led to a lot of literature being freely available which had earlier been the province of the seedy back street shop or the British Library’s special collections. Since I had spent my whole life up to that point believing that such stuff was upsetting to read, there was a kind of interest in finding out what the fuss was all about

Natural curiosity led us to read some of it

Most of it was really bad genre writing-by-numbers, selecting from a pathetically narrow range of fantasies

What really finished my interest however was a story which I had to give up reading about halfway down the second page.

Interestingly there was absolutely no detailed physical description at all of who was doing what to whom, except that it seemed to be what missionaries do

It told the reader what was going on inside the man’s head. For him the Devil really was a woman

That is what I mean by real misogyny of the scariest kind