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On Being Challenged By The General Public
Once in a while, I do like to challenge preconceptions and prejudices.
A while back, I noted in this blog how I'd walked through Manchester Piccadilly railway station, in front of two big, burly, armed police officers, carrying a book which clearly had the word "ARMORY" as its title.
Well, tomorrow it'll be a different kind of challenge. I aim to sit in a nice public place reading a book, and see if that book's cover will cause any kind of a stir in people.
The book, as I have pointed out in the post below, is Nabokov's Lolita.
I have a ready explanation to hand, as well. If I was reading a James Bond novel, it would not make me a secret agent. If this was Moby Dick, it wouldn't make me a whaler, any more than reading Arthur C Clarke's 2001 would make me a spaceman.
But reading Nabokov's Lolita does show one thing. It shows that I appreciate literature.
So why Lolita And why tomorrow?
The trigger was a show last night. The show mentioned the great hysteria that erupted over Chris Morris' Brass Eye programme satirising the way the press document the threat of paedophiles.
The Great British public have a dark side; a predilection for mass hysteria which erupts at random and leaves whole communities chasing shadows. Paedophiles, terrorists, Muslims, ginger people, witches.
Yellow journo rags such as the Daily Fail, the Scum and the Excess milk that hysteria with lurid, inaccurate headlines geared at generating fear and/or outrage on cue, and on aggregate, the sheep bleat as directed like Pavlov's bloody dog salivating at the bell.
But we're not sheep. We're not conditioned dogs. And I don't relish the idea of living in a tawdry, headline-led, media-soaked realm of sotted, alcoholic marionettes, their strings being pulled hither and yon by a cabal of petty, spiteful, clueless, bickering, blind puppeteers.
So tomorrow, it will be me and my controversial book, in public, challenging the leaderless masses. There's more to life than stupid newspaper headlines and Celebrity Big Brother. They need to wake up and wake up soon, or when they do get woken up it will be with an almighty slap across the face.
And I suspect nobody will like the one who's doing the slapping.
A while back, I noted in this blog how I'd walked through Manchester Piccadilly railway station, in front of two big, burly, armed police officers, carrying a book which clearly had the word "ARMORY" as its title.
Well, tomorrow it'll be a different kind of challenge. I aim to sit in a nice public place reading a book, and see if that book's cover will cause any kind of a stir in people.
The book, as I have pointed out in the post below, is Nabokov's Lolita.
I have a ready explanation to hand, as well. If I was reading a James Bond novel, it would not make me a secret agent. If this was Moby Dick, it wouldn't make me a whaler, any more than reading Arthur C Clarke's 2001 would make me a spaceman.
But reading Nabokov's Lolita does show one thing. It shows that I appreciate literature.
So why Lolita And why tomorrow?
The trigger was a show last night. The show mentioned the great hysteria that erupted over Chris Morris' Brass Eye programme satirising the way the press document the threat of paedophiles.
The Great British public have a dark side; a predilection for mass hysteria which erupts at random and leaves whole communities chasing shadows. Paedophiles, terrorists, Muslims, ginger people, witches.
Yellow journo rags such as the Daily Fail, the Scum and the Excess milk that hysteria with lurid, inaccurate headlines geared at generating fear and/or outrage on cue, and on aggregate, the sheep bleat as directed like Pavlov's bloody dog salivating at the bell.
But we're not sheep. We're not conditioned dogs. And I don't relish the idea of living in a tawdry, headline-led, media-soaked realm of sotted, alcoholic marionettes, their strings being pulled hither and yon by a cabal of petty, spiteful, clueless, bickering, blind puppeteers.
So tomorrow, it will be me and my controversial book, in public, challenging the leaderless masses. There's more to life than stupid newspaper headlines and Celebrity Big Brother. They need to wake up and wake up soon, or when they do get woken up it will be with an almighty slap across the face.
And I suspect nobody will like the one who's doing the slapping.