OVERHEARD IN HARRIS & HOOLE...
(An occasional feature)
14th February 2024 (Ash Wednesday)
Myself , Mary Winterbourne, Sebastian D'Orsai and Tony of the Big Saloon got together this morning in Harris & Hoole. The following conversation could be overheard:
Mary Winterbourne: I hear nothing but good about Granny Barkes Fell in Woolworth's these days.
Gene: Thanks Mary, I think those reviews helped - especially the Huffington Post one. Also I just loved what AN Wilson wrote about Granny Barkes Fell in Woolworth's. As I have said my ambitions for the book are modest. One never knows how a new literary form may be received so all this has been exceedingly good news. Overall on sales I've got to say that I really don't mind whether it sells just a few hundred copies in Uxbridge or goes to number one on the New York Times best seller list. Appreciation amongst the literati is much more important.
Mary Winterbourne: Gene let's once again all raise our cappuccinos. Here's to Gene. Here's to Uxbridge. Here's to Granny Barkes.
Tony of the Big Saloon: I see that the Canting Old Phony has deserted your blog.
Gene: Yes. I don't think any of us realise what a cataclysmic effect the publication of Granny Barkes has had on Detters. I think he is still in shock. Of course no review by him has appeared. I always said such a task would be quite beyond Detters' capabilities.
Still, I wish Detters, Delia, Sebastian and Cuthbert all the best. I shall be writing Detters an open letter soon. Sebastian is now a teenager and no doubt like all teenagers very impressionable. I don't want Sebastian coming under the pernicious influence of the Gay Lobby-driven Church of England.
Sebastian D'Orsai: Any news about Detterling's memoirs?
(Loud laughter from all)
The following review has been sent to Amazon, and will probably be published on the Books section by next Wednesday.
ReplyDeleteSTRAPLINE: A SIMPLE MINDED INSULT TO THE INTELLIGENCE
The front matter to this book by Gene Vincent says that his writing has "drawn comparison with James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh and Ernest Hemingway", although leaving open the question the literary qualifications of those who drew the comparison, let alone whether or not the comparison was favourable. Nor does an exhaustive internet search find any previously published work by Mr Vincent, apart from a blog "Gene, a voice in the wilderness". Well over 90% of the content this blog is stolen - as often as not without acknowledgement - from a variety of publications, most of them dealing with the affairs of the Roman Catholic Church. In these, as well as in original content, Mr Vincent espouses a pathologically malevolent attitude to homosexuality. often focussed on the practice of anal sexual intercourse, about which he seems obsessed. More than that, Mr Vincent exhibits more or less textbook symptoms of a narcissistic personality disorder - for example having published forged emails purporting to be from the late Clive James, from Dr Richard Dawkins - who, astoundingly, Mr Vincent claims to have converted to Roman Catholicism. His own writing style is laboured, hackneyed, obvious and dull.
Mr Vincent retired from teaching in December 2016, and has spent the last seven years, by his own account, as a full time professional writer; "Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths" is the product of Mr Vincent's labours - nothing else he has written in that time [if he has in fact written anything at all] has seen print.
"Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths" consists of 114 pages, over 70 of which are occupied by black and white photographs, many of them uncaptioned. The written text is approximately 7, 000 words long, and consists of a verbal collage assembled from verses of scripture, snatches of folksong, proverbs, quotations from poems, novels, plays and popular song. The streams of consciousness so dazzlingly used by Samuel Beckett in Godot, where meaning teeters in and out of focus, fascinate far more than they baffle. Mr Vincent's hommage to the cut-up techniques of such deservedly forgotten writers as Gysin, Tzara, Burroughs, Burns, Beiles, Gorski and Acker is turgid, tedious and meaningless, an offensively simple minded insult to the readers' intelligence.
"Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths "is, according to Mr Vincent, when combined with his collaborator Johnny Bluenote [in fact one of Mr Vincent's online pseudonyms] a work of art so innovative that it should only be reviewed by critics of the eminence of Christopher Ricks, and the late Bernard Levin. As it is, Mr Vincent claims that his book has been favourably reviewed in the Huffington Post, and has also received favourable notice from the critic A N Wilson, although I have been unable to trace those reviews.
"Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths" is a dreadfully bad book, the sort of book in which no publisher in his right senses would invest money. This is presumably why Mr Vincent has had to resort to Amazon's KPD publishing system. At the same time, the "Rattlesnake Press" of Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California, is credited with having printed and published this book, which makes it all the more baffling that no such press, and no such publishing company seems to exist.
I would not assail such a simple-minded and trivial book as this so aggressively were it not for the fact that Mr Vincent threatened to attack my wife and son on his blog - "it will be open season on Delia and open season on Sebastian" - were I to review this literary sewage in any but the most glowing terms. Mr Vincent often, and ringingly, proclaims his commitment to free speech; it is, perhaps, some measure of the kind of person he really is, that he threatens reprisals on those who use their right to tell him that he can’t write and that, even judged as rubbish, “Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths” is rubbish.
Ooh Matron!
ReplyDeleteDetterling my feeling is that Amazon will not publish your review. It is not a genuine book review but an ad hominem attack on Gene.
ReplyDeleteDucky Duckworth
Gene, Amazon have already told me that the review is not to be published because of the reference to anal sexual intercourse. Not that it matters, given that as of this afternoon, "Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths" is at number 2,130,453 in the Best Sellers List on Amazon, an utter and dismal humiliation for you that warms the cockles of my heart. No review in the world is either going to rescue this dreadful book or make its complete failure yet more complete.
ReplyDeleteAs for this:
"It is not a genuine book review but an ad hominem attack on Gene", that is nonsense.
In the first paragraph, your claim to literary eminence on a par to three acknowledged masters of the craft is examined, explored, and comprehensively dismantled, and the character of your published writing - this dreadful blog - surveyed and assessed, along with some examples of the kind of fraudulent nonsense you publish about your contacts with other literary masters. This is a legitimate and evidenced exploration of your antecedents as a writer. The fact that they turn out to consist of lies, fraudulent claims to literary connections and plagiarism may be a problem for you, but it is also a fact.
Paragraph two gives some necessary background to the writing of "Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths" including the salient detail that it has taken you eight years to write.
Paragraph three describes the book's structure and, as a conscientious review should, references its stylistic antecedents among writers for the most part justly forgotten for having followed a literary dead end. The summary of the book's written content is fair, and my view that it is pretentious, meaningless nonsense a valid opinion which you are at liberty to gainsay and prove wrong.
Paragraph four examines your claim that the book is innovative [it isn't] and also the solipsism of your view that only critics of the calibre of Ricks and Levin are fit to review it. Likewise your claim to having been reviewed in the Huffington Post is questioned. As for Mr A N Wilson, I have emailed him /co The Spectator to ask where he reviewed "Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths", giving him the address of this blog where he can see your claim for himself made yesterday in the "Harris and Hoole" feature. Should you wish to, you can refute my doubts about whether you have been reviewed at all by publishing both the Huffington Post's and Mr Wilson's reviews on this blog.
Paragraph five addresses the mystery of the book's publication, in particular why you claim it to have been published by a non-existent printer and publisher when in fact it is a vanity publication using the Amazon KPD facility.
And paragraph six seeks to make clear why, given that I think "Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths" to be a completely worthless book of zero literary and artistic merit, I have written a review 650 words long when 8 would have done - "even judged as crap, this book is crap". This is because I felt that your malicious threat of mounting personal attacks on my wife and son should I write an unfavourable review deserved a wider airing, offering as does a telling sidelight on your character. There have been complete shits who were great writers - Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens and Roald Dahl are only the first four to come to mind - but your fate is a great deal worse: you are a complete shit who can't write - an objective opinion evidenced and substantiated by your own words and actions, not, as you alleged - and typically ungrammatically - an ad hominem attack on you.
I will write only one more post on this blog, when I hear from Mr A N Wilson.
"Amazon have already told me that the review is not to be published because of the reference to anal sexual intercourse."
ReplyDeletePoppycock! Amazon rejected your review because it was not a book review at all but a malicious and spiteful ad hominem attack on Gene.
Ducky Duckworth
In which case, point out the errors of fact and aspersions in the review. You can’t, because there are none.
DeleteGary Bagnall
Detterling let's leave all this behind and move on.
ReplyDeleteI am going to ask a favour of you. Remember about ten years or so back I wrote a one-act play entitled 'Nancyboys Ahoy!' ? It was set in Kilronan on the Aran Islands in Galway Bay.
I have been searching high and low for it and cannot find it anywhere. Now, I have a feeling that I emailed you a copy in the days when we were communicating by email. If you do have a copy I would be so grateful if you could send me this by email to bobbyslingshot8@gmail.com.
Blessings,
GENE
"Amazon have already told me that the review is not to be published because of the reference to anal sexual intercourse."
ReplyDelete"Poppycock! Amazon rejected your review because it was not a book review at all but a malicious and spiteful ad hominem attack on Gene. Ducky Duckworth"
"In which case, point out the errors of fact and aspersions in the review. You can’t, because there are none. Gary Bagnall".
"Remember about ten years or so back I wrote a one-act play entitled 'Nancyboys Ahoy!' ?"
No you didn't: you wrote the opening scene of what was to be a play called NancyBoys Ahoy!.
It was bloody awful.
"Detterling let's leave all this behind and move on."
I have.
You can't.
Fuck off
Gary Bagnall
"Detterling let's leave all this behind and move on."
ReplyDeleteI have."
Oh! no you haven't.
GENE
No wonder you want to move on, Gene. You always do when you know that you have been comprehensively and utterly humiliated, as this facsimile of the latest news of "Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths" makes clear that you have.
ReplyDeletePublisher : Independently published (20 Dec. 2023)
Language : English
Paperback : 114 pages
ISBN-10 : 1671990722
ISBN-13 : 978-1671990722
Dimensions : 21.59 x 0.66 x 21.59 cm
Best Sellers Rank: 2,264,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
10,015 in Genetic Engineering Fiction
I got a royalty payment of £11.41 just before Christmas for a book I published in 2008. It is of course long out of print, but online , even sixteen years after it was printed, it is still buying me a bottle of decent Malbec four times a year from people who belong to the Copyright Licensing Agency scheme.
It must be dreadful for you to be saddled with the stigma of having published such a terrible mess as "Granny Barkes fell in Woolworths". I read it again this afternoon: a uniquely terrible experience. When you have nothing to say, as you have nothing to say, your only recourse is this kind of cacophonous verbal diarrhoea, followed by your nonsensical claims that it is so innovative as to defy understanding except by the scholars of All Souls. You poor, poor sod.
"I got a royalty payment of £11.41 just before Christmas for a book I published in 2008."
ReplyDeleteHa! Ha! Ha! It's the way you tell 'em Detters.