Offmessage

Right then… This was the free book for members from Canongate when I ordered
Loriga’s other book (Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us
Anymore). What a shock. The subtitle says it all: “A Novel of Disposable
Lives, Immediate Fame and a Big Black Automatic”. The narrator’s older brother
finds a gun and uses it to kill a security guard in a local store. Thing is,
the family are attractive, and all of a sudden the narrator and his mother are
all over the telly…

It’s a real shocker this one… Amoral in a way that I haven’t read since
Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero or Guinzberg’s Beam Me Up, Scotty.

I read it as a story of a boy’s unquestioning love for his older brother…
The blurb says that it’s a “wickedly funny and breathtakingly lucid treatment of
media and the cult of celebrity.” It’s both really I guess – the narrator spends
most of the book almost justifying what his brother has done, finding ways to make
sense of the brutal actions and always seeing something cool in what happened. At
the same time he and his mother become media darlings, entirely due to their
looks.

I’m not sure I’m really the person to review this book – I like this kind of
novel, but I can’t really offer much intellectual wrapping for it. It’s a quick
read – it’s only 120 pages long, and these are sparsely populated pages. It’s
enjoyable, it’s linguistically elegant in its quite deliberate naivety, it’s bleak,
it’s all the things that books like this should be. It makes me think more of
films though – films like Bonny and Clyde or Natural Born Killers or Outlands. Or
Less Than Zero. Or Man Bites Dog. Or Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. I think
that may actually say it all. It’s a good book, but it’s not a great book. It
will probably make a very popular film.

I seriously recommend you read Michael Guinzberg’s
Beam Me Up, Scotty
before this. It’s a more intelligent, more shocking, more angry book than this.
If, after that, you still want another outsider novel this one is a bit less…
how shall I put it..? Challenging. Enjoyable, but I’m enjoying Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us
Anymore a lot more… Review to come…

http://www.teemings.com/extras/lotr/index.html

Really rather funny…

More Location Aware Technology stuff… CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering) are suggesting that we boycott Gillette for their use of RFID technology in snapping consumers (blogged below…)

Dorset is nice, isn’t it?

Good Lord. Apparently people do buy products sold by spammers:

An order log left exposed at one of Amazing Internet Products’ websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to e-mail ads and placed orders for the company’s Pinacle herbal supplement. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills at a price of $50 per bottle.

Definitely worth a read

A rather unusual selection of items…

It’s a sad day, but Goughie has finally given up Test cricket. Not necessarily ODIs (which may or may not be a good thing, I’m not sure), but definitely the 5 day game. He’s done us proud.

“It has become apparent to me, no matter what my heart, head or public want me to do, that my knee will not allow me to play Test match cricket”

Poor old Cherie… Jumping in to save Tony from some embarrassment on the recent trip to China may have caused more problems than it solved… Apparently someone has reworked her rendition of “When I’m 64″ into a dance track that’s storming the dancefloors of Ibiza…

Remember I said that some people find Claire’s location aware technology stuff a little intrusive (or even Big Brotheresque)? It would appear that Tesco are having the same problem… Also, UK politicians have picked up on the issue, with the announcement last week of a parliamentary review of this whole technology area. These are interesting times… Unfortunately.

…and I have bought myself a digital camera… See the devastating effect of combining the two here.