The Story Behind This Tattoo (Part Two)

**This here's my review of Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." It turned out the way I conceived it, and it had fangs and spit and all that arsenic goodness, and it received a corrosive whipping because it was "needlessly philistine." Meanwhile, those two words further improved my admiration for The Mistress of the Universe.

This tattoo will remind me, to the day I die, to keep at it. 

And what do I think of Ms Angela Carter's Bloody Chamber? 

1. Ms Carter tried to exhume fairy tales that were buried with our childhood. And, to a weird gay nerd like me, exhume is a rather attractive description. 

2. I was having a hell of a time trying to re-read the first paragraph of this book. For the second time. And then it hit me. My poor eyes have become feet. And they were dragging themselves tired up this mountain of words that used to be, at first glance, a paragraph. But I have a commitment to honor, and I rallied myself up, and I read on and on and on, until forever terminated, at last, in that one elusive period which celebrated the end of that very first paragraph. And then the second paragraph is a different trek of its own. How did that feel? Yes she can be wordy to a fault, and her sentences can be four hundred meters long. Why, there were instances where, I swear to God, she squeezed two pages of a thesaurus in one paragraph alone.

3. It can be wordy to a fault. Maybe she's trying to emphasize on styles and themes and symbolism and the bigger picture. Shit. I read to entertain myself, not to think. So these objectives are dead to me. This book might be pushing for those things, but to me, it's just wordy. 

4. Erotic? It will be a straight yes, and that is only if you happen to be aroused by 12th century dentistry. It's the long sentences that undid my imagination; they did to my appetite what inexperienced tit-biting does to foreplay. It absolutely killed the mood. 

5. I'm a child at heart, first, and then a jaded homosexual nerd next. It is my nature, and this collection greatly appealed to one of these natures. And it thoroughly disappointed the other. See, fairy tales helped develop me. They did to my brain what yeast does to barley to create beer. And, more importantly, fairy tales take us back to our childhood. But this book makes me want to look back, and smile in recollection of that one time I was being strangled. Because that sure as hell felt better. And it's not even in a sexual, erotic asphyxiation content. 

6. It absolutely missed my fairy-tale G-spot by a mile. No, a time zone. But it tries to be twisted, and it does so with some moderate success. I was reading about how the Nazi made soap out of the fat of corpses when I was given this assignment. And twisted can be very relative at that point.  

7. It is an interesting treasury of euphemisms. So if you are meaning to enrich your choice of words, then you will do well to give this book a good borrowing. Or downloading, if you're into that. 

8. This collection can be an obscene pleasure at best. But it is armed to the teeth with sentences that swell with a hundred thousand words each. These will knock the wind out of you. That being said, let me, out of the kind generosity of my heart, share some useful advice on how you can best appreciate this collection of zombified timeless classics. Read it cross eyed. That way, you can imagine that you are getting twice the value. But then, it will be twice that many words, so we might as well dismiss that tip. Of course, I'm kidding.