November 30, 2005

Bad Sex in Fiction awards 2005 - Like Zorro!
  • Giles Coren wins my vote. I now intend to finish every statement with the phrase "Like Zorro!"
  • Indeed, I fully hope to see the phrase take wing, as it were. Like Zorro!
  • God, the mental image.. *splap* *splap splap* I'M COMING FOR YOU, ALCALDE!
  • Like Zorro!
  • Lately, all of my sex is in fiction...
  • Hee. This reminds me of the Imitation Hemingway Contest, aka the Bad Hemingway. Fun. Like Zorro!
  • Why are genitals so awkward?
  • Mine aren't.
  • Less of a sauce, more of a glaze.
  • By 2008, "Like Zorro!" will supercede "In Bed" as the obligatory phrase to be tacked on after every chinese cookie fortune. Limited pockets of resistance will remain in the Belgian Congo and in the Outer Hebrides, but their efforts will be limited in scope and largely symbolic in their effectiveness. Like Zorro.
  • You know they beep in the dark right? Only an englishman or perhaps a chinaman would describe love like that. here I got one , "he spread the silk folds of her damp lust, and mad love as passionatley as a porn satr, with the endurance of a marsupial rat. her cave of lust was wet with the pungent tides of womaness." That first guy makes it sound like a french cook book. And then the saucier licked the bowl of her lust... aw christ, why havn't I been published yet? I think even Fabio could have done a better job than that. Whats that part about unleashing the snake? What is it strippers and boas? what did he do an Indian rope trick? The other guys making soup this guys playing with a water hose,what the beep.
  • Yeah, like Zorro, "slap that ass Zorro, slap that ass!" this ain't out of context is it?
  • The glaze part I can understand "she basked in the lust that was their passion, and she glowed as red as a summer sun set."
  • "So, are you a sauce or a glaze?"
  • OoooOOOOh. I get it.
  • Oh dear, I hate to think what Alan Titchmarsh has written to be a past winner. Porn in the pergola?
  • Huh. Guess I don't have much literary taste - I didn't think the first two were that bad. The Updike one wasn't sexy, but I liked the writing well enough and doubt he meant it to be sexy. And the Brando one was hysterical - probably intentionally. I'd have to vote for Coren because it was bad enough to make me stop reading. The only good part was 'Like Zorro'.
  • Heh. You said "tit".
  • Airplane! Airplane! *snickers De plane, boss. De plane! I knew that little guy was gay.
  • Coren won. LIKE ZORRO!
  • A part of someone's anatomy is thrust into a cave of someone else's lust -- dear gods! verbosity flows on while poor word-bludgeoned readers yawn. It isn't paradise, my dear, but jaundice overtakes us here.
  • He's whippin' it out, Like Zorro, this lout And when he squirts He writes it on the wall. The printing press Was Guttenberg's best But this screed worth nothin at all.
  • I thought the Marquez passage was really nice, eloquent and expessive as he can be. Rather euphemistic (pleasantly so) compared to the crass details of many of the others. Sex doesn't want clinical detail, it wants delicate metaphor. The Rushdie one wasn't a sex scene, but worked too - I could picture the two characters right away, in that short bit. The Coren one, however....um...
  • ...was Like Zorro.
  • I enjoy Zorro!
  • *still snickering*
  • lads! out wi' yer trousers snakes before a shook-spear shakes ere sword of zorro strikes carving a zee beside the adobe wall now hear the alcalde call. "Look, de la Vega is takin' a pee!"
  • The Gay Blade. Like Zorro! /swish
  • Wow. No matter how many Chick tracts I read, they never lose their ability to shock. I mean, dig the hairstyle on that cat in the 3rd or 4th panel. Crazy, baby.
  • Everything I Needed to Know Ashes, Ashes, we fall on our asses because the teacher has us. Rodeo clowns make about as much sense, but then they don't graduate from kindergarten early either. Neither did they have for their teacher Mrs. Cunningham, whose grave countenance no kid had the word for: Her is no bull sitter. Her is squeezing in chair, knees together. Her is a locked jaw with lips like a bad ventriloquist's. Kind of like a lady Church Cargo. Or like the bride of a Nordic Frankenstein, motherless but blonde, beautiful, and big. Nobody here knows she has another occupation but me. I'm her little Picasso, her baby ham, and cunning. "Quit staring, Karl Curtis," she says, looking right at me. She knows I know for a split second she disappeared and does not want to reveal her secret identity underneath. I know she knows I draw some very naked ideas. Later, when we go around and tell in tones like the xylophone's, girls always first, what it is you want to be when you grow up. I say Zorro because a poet needs a mask. -- Karl Elder
  • hmmm... I can no longer access MCT's link because: "The website which you are trying to access is restricted by the Media Development Authority (MDA)." (from my ISP) Oh. Dear.
  • *bursts in* Oh yes, wot's all this then?
  • ... ride through the dark like Zorro search and swish ... a door in Singapore now closes fare well to Robin's raffled 'hood...to bow and arrow... the steady hand and marksman's eye of William Tell adios ... see the swashes buckle ... around a waste like zero heroed
  • > I now intend to finish every statement with the phrase "Like Zorro!" isabel allende's zorro a rattlingly good yarn for the 100 pages i've read thus far has a short intro that ends with the sentence: Let me say it straight out: there is no one like Zorro.
  • I stumbled across this recently in an article about Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. "Much of the story conveniently prefigures Freud for the reader who only looks for the three-volume pornography blanketed up inside the authorial perambulator. Coming from someone other than Collins, subtle narratological involutions (viz. widow Threadgall's anachronisms) might provoke a second or third reading of the text; the critical reader should at this point recall that Collins was paid by the word, and that the only thing easier to write than melodrama is sexually euphemistic melodrama." All I could think of was "...like Zorro?"
  • Where are the longlisted extracts? We need another "Like Zorro!"
  • Yes! We need linkage!
  • We need another "Like Zorro!" I don't know, I think "Reader, she bit him" is pretty damn good.