Please to get your hands on J.P.Donleavy's The Unexpurgated Code. At once, if you know what's good for you.
Choice Excerpts-
Knowing When You Have Reached the Top
Upon a chosen clement day, exercise a sartorial master stroke of impeccable taste. Don a neatly laundered and sharply pressed pair of flannel cricket trousers, white buckskin shoes, white moleskin hacking jacket with a red carnation in the lapel, silk shirt and purple tweed tie. In your summery stylish regalia, and really looking nice, poise on the sixth floor room balcony of a goodish old fashioned downtown hotel. When everyone is suitably assembled to watch you jump off to break your head, commence peeing. If no one tries to rush the hell out of your pissing all over them, you have reached the top.
Shaving
This daily repeated ritual of symbolic castration does help to keep chaps in their place who might otherwise become roaring out of control gorillas. Those who have the audacious vanity to let sprout sideburns, moustaches and the like only call attention to their self advertised symptom of testicular curtailment...
...Being yourself a hairy ape accosted by some clean shaven rube who comes bleating at you with his bare face hanging out with the question.
'Hey why are you growing that beard.'
Always reply in pukka.
'I say, you unpleasantly unfortunate radoteur, I'm not doing a thing. You're shaving every day.'
Upon Travelling in Space
When your fellow passenger's dinner floats away from his mouth with weightlessness, gently push it back in his direction. Be doubly careful at your toiletries and remember, breaking wind in these rarefied atmospheres can be positively dangerous.
Arriving on the foreign planet, do not display your clod hopping primitive ways but attempt to imitate their modern ones. And don't above all try to get funny by telling a long string of earthy jokes to the first foreigner you see. Nor attempt any carnal linkage or saucy dovetailing until you know for sure where to put your what for into their this is it. Also you better hope to god you can get it out again. As you wouldn't know what the hell kind of magnetics they've got out there in some of them galaxies.
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9 comments:
wow - this guy sounds like he can make P.g.Wodehouse sound like a talentless hack :)
i wonder though - a guy who writes such stuff must be like godawfully cynical - i guess he cant have had much fun life
The man keeps at it for some 300-odd pages. It's amazing. Haven't read the whole thing myself...
It seems he was penniless early in life, then made his money via books and now owns a castle. So I guess he knows a thing or two about social climbing. :)
Hahaha! Some purchases will have to be made, clearly.
> 'I say, you unpleasantly
> unfortunate radoteur, I'm
> not doing a thing. You're
> shaving every day.'
Bril. Chelpark, almost. Tending to Camlin only. This must be used somewhere. Radoteur. Mmm.
duffilled? Theroux overdose? The man did a reprise of the railway bazaar trip last year, you know. Made a pot load of money doing it, of course. Living my life, basically. He's from Somerville/Medford, y'know? So you now have a more Cosmic Connection with him.
heheh.
mm, ludwig's comment does make me ask - so given that you've had your blog 'currently nameless' for.. what, a year and more?, is it some Prince like posturing? :P
aandthirtyeights: Hello! Pity the book's out of print though, and unfortunately, mine must soon be returned to its rightful owner...
Ludwig: Excellent, that was the reaction I was aiming for-please do use it! I had to look radoteur up, heh.
Ya, was overdosing on Theroux back when I started the blog. Well, sort of. Have only read Great Railway Bazaar and The Pillars of Hercules, apart from some of the stuff he published for the New Yorker aeons ago.
Heard about his reprise. He came to Madras and gave a talk- my brother went (to my great envy), and was gloating about it. Did you happen to hear him?
He's from Somerville?! Didn't know that!
Bobo: Aiyyo, I can't be bothered to find a name. I'm hard pressed to even find titles for my posts! :P
Nope, I missed the man and his tour. I've lapped up quite a few of his train travel stuff (Bazaar, Hercules, Dark Star Safari, the Patagonian one) and the Chinese one is gathering dust on bookshelf.
Like it primarily for his utter crustiness and refusal to romanticize travel except very very infrequently. Kind of agree with the man that half (more?) of the point of a journey is coming back home.
And yes, he's a Somerville/Medford type guy. He makes a mention of something like "...houses in a style that are found only in Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts...", in the bazaar book, I think.
We used to go running around the Mystic Lakes and I used to wonder whether the man lives in one of the houses there.
Must get Old Patagonian Express and Riding the Iron Rooster at some point, soon.
Like it primarily for his utter crustiness and refusal to romanticize travel except very very infrequently.
True, but the man also comes across as a bit of a jerk sometimes, no?
Divides his time between Cape Cod and Hawaii (where he keeps bees and sells honey under the brand Oceania Ranch Pure Hawaiian Honey- who knew?!), according to this article. Wonder where in Boston Murakami lives...
He's very crusty in Patagonian thingumabob, so be warned! :)
And yeah, he does do the jerk impression very well. He actually is one, I think. His latest hasn't got very favourable reviews. The NYT one, for ex.
Murakami lived close enough to Harvard that he could walk to office, per the latest book. He does mention that the plumbing/heating in his apartment goes kaput and so on, so one can hazard a Central Sq. guess :P Next time you see a 50ish Japanese man running on Mem Drive, intently following some youngling with a ponytail, you can safely shout out a "konnichiwa Haruki-san"!
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