Jan. 4, 2004 at 13:18:10

DEAR GRENDELUS (PART 4)

But this book can fall flat on its face by its own merits. The fourth chapter, entitled, "Frogs", weighing in at a "meager" 145 pages, never once alludes to the Marquis de Sade, no matter how much he defiles any of the 34 young French maidens he claims to have pimped. Never mind Barry's name, and never mind that the French have produced but one true pimp daddy in Sade, what about all those damned commercials of Albrecht-Buehler's where we suffered quote after extended quote of Philosophie dans la Boudoire ? Can't he even properly reference influences at the right time? Even if we could regard this as simply a slip of the pen, we could offer no such forgiveness for passages like, "Mon cheri, your glances from our excursion to the dairy fields could have had no other origin than the Hereclitean river of Hegelian nausea at the comprehension of the will of Schopenhauer (344)." What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? And so the book continues, describing neither acts of sexual nor philosophical defilement, though always self-satisfied that it is doing both.

Interesting to neither scholar, reader, psychologist, nor even Carlite (should any still survive following the Federally sponsored pogroms of 2022), Dear Grendelus, might be of some limited benefit to young writers as an encyclopedia of how to write excrement. Otherwise, it is the opinion of this reviewer that this book should serve no other purpose than leveling an uneven table leg, or, if this were a more perfect world, beating the poor, misbegotten soul who forced this from his bowels to death.