Unpleasantness

"When did we become so enamoured of unpleasantness? More importantly, when did we start automatically accepting it as truth, particularly in literature? The world is, of course, often quite unpleasant, and any brainlessly pain-free book purporting to show truth can and should be dismissed as unrealistic contrivance. But while contrived cruelty may seem more artful than contrived sentiment, it’s still contrivance."

Patrick Ness in The Guardian, writing a review of the book, More Than it Hurts You, by Darin Strauss.

I'm just about finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a book I've been keen to read since a friend let me skim through the first few pages while I was waiting to accompany him in a singing competition two or three years ago. The book is overlong - Stieg Larsson never spares on detail, even when it contributes nothing to the story in hand - but that's survivable.

What I've struggled with is the emphasis on sadistic sexual violence. I think if it wasn't for the fact that the story itself is intriguing, I'd have put it away early in the piece. Larsson is making a point, I guess, and puts statistical quotes at the beginnings of chapters about how many women are abused sexually each year - and in terms of the way women are abused throughout the world, it does no harm to remind us of how awful some women's lives are.

Nevertheless, there's a sense of enjoyment in the way the book writes about these episodes, and most of these episodes are written in such a way that they draw the reader in. This is particularly evident when one of the main characters takes revenge on a man who's abused her. However, I found myself skimming pages when Larsson continued to add more and more sickening detail to later parts of the book. I didn't feel it was necessary to have all this hammered home.

We've got the other two titles on Kindle, but if they're similar to the first, I think I won't be reading them.

Tattoo

For a brief period, when I was last in England (in 2007), I toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo.

Yes, I do realise that I was 62 at the time. I'm not sure why being in England should have brought out this somewhat unfocused latent desire in me; I'd never really thought that tattoos were that exciting a thing to put on your body. I still don't. Two of my daughters have them, and most of the time you can't see them because they're not exactly in visible places (the tattoos, I mean, not my daughters). One of my sons has had two lots of tattoos - the second joining up with the first. (I kinda hope he stops there.)

Even knowing that there's such a thing as a tattoo remover doesn't greatly endear me to the idea of putting marks on my skin that would require me to grit my teeth while they're being done - and require me to grit my teeth even more if I decided to have them taken off again (leaving nasty marks of a different kind).

So why would I even consider getting a tattoo - it wasn't as if I was going through a midlife crisis. Even given that being in your sixties is now not considered 'old' when it used to be, fifty years ago, I don't think I can really claim a midlife crisis at 62. I'd had two or three or more midlife crises earlier on in my life; I didn't need another.

I just think it was one of those things I was kind of daring myself to do; I don't dare myself much of the time, as it happens, so in that sense this was rather daring of me even to consider daring myself. If you're still with me. In other words, I'm not the world's greatest risk-taker. I read these obituaries where young men and women have 'died doing what they most enjoyed', usually something that requires climbing sheer cliff faces, or cycling through impenetrable forests, or canoeing down rapids that will flip you over as soon as look at you. And I think: well, dying while you're enjoying something is okay, but wouldn't it be better to enjoy something that doesn't destroy you in the process?

So I find doing dangerous enjoyable things a bit incomprehensible. Being tattoed can't really be classed as dangerous - unless you strike a tattoist who doesn't keep his needles clean - but my whim about getting a tattoo seems to have died after leaving the UK. And while I may sometimes look back and wonder what would it be like, I really don't regret not spending money on indelibly marking my skin. It's getting enough indelible marks on it already....

Photo by Glenn E Malone: Follower of Christ, Husband, Father, Musician & Geocacher

When Google pulls ideas together...

Someone did a search on Google the other day for Kiri te Kanawa tattoos. It was surprising how many results came up that had both Kiri and tattoos together. However, when you checked them out (including the one that came up with my blog) you found that New Zealand opera singer Kiri te Kanawa was in general keeping a good distance between herself and tattoos. Mostly the two ideas appeared on the same blog page, for instance, but days apart.
The same thing happened with Garrick Tremain, the New Zealand cartoonist, and the word, smoking cartoon. To my knowledge, Tremain has never done a ‘smoking cartoon’ but from the Google results you might think he had.
I find this blog is now appearing on German Google search results. Of course it helps if they go looking for Löffelkippzylinder, which you’ll all remember means ‘bucket crowd ram’.