On parlour games

From The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith:

He suggested we should play “Cutlets,” a game we never heard of.  He sat on a chair, and asked Carrie to sit on his lap, an invitation which dear Carrie rightly declined.

After some species of wrangling, I sat on Gowing’s knees and Carrie sat on the edge of mine.  Lupin sat on the edge of Carrie’s lap, then Cummings on Lupin’s, and Mrs. Cummings on her husband’s.  We looked very ridiculous, and laughed a good deal.

Gowing then said: “Are you a believer in the Great Mogul?”  We had to answer all together: “Yes—oh, yes!” (three times).  Gowing said: “So am I,” and suddenly got up.  The result of this stupid joke was that we all fell on the ground, and poor Carrie banged her head against the corner of the fender.  Mrs. Cummings put some vinegar on; but through this we missed the last train, and had to drive back to Broadstairs, which cost me seven-and-sixpence.

Parlour games! It's the time of year when Charades and Consequences make an appearance at Christmas time in many households, a durable hangover from their Victorian heyday, when there were parlours aplenty in which to play "Cutlets". Few homes today have parlours, and fewer still enough space space for 'Is that you, Montagu?' (two blindfolded players with rolled-up newspapers roll around on the floor - the game features in David Nicholls'  novel One Day). 

While parlour games remain popular the parlour itself has gone the way of the pantry and scullery in domestic architecture. From the  Anglo-Norman French parlur (‘place for speaking’) the parlour was, in medieval Christian Europe, the two rooms in a Silent Order monastery where monks, constrained by vow or regulation from speaking, could natter away too their hearts' content with their fellow monks.

We no longer tend to use formal reception rooms although 'front parlour' used to be the term used in the North of England as the room for the (seldom-used) ground floor front room, kept 'smart' for special occasions.

The parlour has a rather downbeat commercial afterlife - think of funeral parlours, beauty parlours, tattoo parlours and, though less frequently, ice cream or pizza parlours. As a domestic feature it has declined, along with the pantry, to the point of near extinction. I'm drawn to objects which retain a husk of their original, utile meaning; 'glove compartment', for instance, harks back to the time when a motorists would sport a pair of leather gauntlets. The term exists but I don't suppose one in a million drivers keeps gloves in that odd little cubby hole.

But enough already. Let's get down to business:

Three words! First word? Four syllables! First syllable, sounds like . . .

A Merry Christmas to all my readers. You know who you are.

My most popular blog, ever

So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.

For some reason hard to fathom the following is by far the most popular of the 800-odd blogs I've posted since 2013, at least in terms of the baffling number of readers it has attracted. I have no idea why this should be the case, although suspect the 'Numbering' link may be responsible. 

Tomorrow will be the day before the night before Christmas and to mark the occasion I've perpetrated a seasonal blog, after which I plan to go quiet for a few days. Then in the dog days between Christmas and the New Year a further rummage in the archive.

Sunday, 29 May 2016

Morbid pedantry

A fascinating review by Judith Flanders in the current TLS of an exhibition of Dutch flower painting at the National Gallery. I was particularly struck by the following:

The art historians Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips have estimated that of the 10 million-plus paintings produced in the Netherlands between 1580 and 1800, less than 1 per cent have survived.

That's still an awful lot of paintings, isn't it? If we can rely on the figures it means around 5 million paintings per century were produced during the period, at a rate of 67 per day (including Sundays) or almost three per hour. Astonishing. How the two art historians arrived at the big number I cannot imagine. Were Dutch painters especially prolific compared with their peers in Italy, for example? I assume they were catering more for a secular demand from the rising merchant class than ecclesiastical commissions. But what do I know?

I was slightly taken aback by something else in the review :

From the mid-century, painters like Jan Davidsz de Heem continued to experiment with both form and content. 

Which painters were they, the ones like Jon Davidsz de Heen, who continued to experiment thus? Or does the writer mean painters such as Jan Davidsz de Heen? Presumably yes. There was a time when no sub-editor would have let this pass uncorrected.

It was Frederic Raphael who alerted me (not personally, you understand, but in an essay) to the increasingly commonplace use of 'like' instead of 'such as' when giving comparative examples. It's incorrect to say, for instance,

     Countries like Australia are home to exotic flora and fauna.

Which countries? It's correct to say:

     Countries like Australia, such as New Zealand and Tasmania, are home to exotic flora and fauna.

Actually this is merely a pretext to share a clip of the comedians Mitchell and Webb performing one of a series of very funny sketches featuring a fictitious and utterly baffling telly game show called Numberwang. Amusing, this, and they have fun with 'like' and 'such as' at some point.

My second most popular blog

This is really odd. On the first day of each month I usually publish an index of the previous month's blogs and for some reason the April Index this year attracted a monstrous cohort of readers. I have no idea why. But here it is, my second most-read blog ever, and a link to thirty other blogs. Tomorrow's blog will re-cycle my single most popular blog over the past three years - and it's quite a surprise.

Sunday, 1 May 2016

April index

As is customary on the first of the month I offer an index to the previous month's blogs, on the assumption that you may not have read all, or most, or even any of them. I hate to think of you missing out, and feeling bitter about it. 

I shall never tire of describing the monthly index as 'a veritable smorgasbord'. So here it is: a veritable smorgasbord. Click on each title for a link back to the original blog. What larks!

• 01 March index -  an earlier veritable smorgasbord
• 02 Country matters - an encounter with Donald Swann 
• 03 W. H. Smith's Fresh Talent 2016 - reflections on the promotion of mainstream novels
• 04 Mr Toomey takes on the Nazis - Anthony Burgess and Earthly Powers
• 05 Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets - how many versions of the Bible are there?
• 06 Alun Lewis on my home town- an uncollected poem by a great poet
• 07 Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson - goings-on in Iceland and the Panama Papers
• 08 Transport for London's vision of the future -  bilious reflections on goals and dreams
• 09 99 novels - Anthony Burgess again, on key novels 1939-1983
• 10 33 novels - I pick up where Burgess left off, with key novels between 1983 and 2015
• 11 The Bony King of Nowhere - a lovely song, and memories of Bagpuss
• 12 Mark E. Smith und Bruno Ganz - and a fine poem by Andrew Elliot
• 13 On Odilon Redon and Guy Maddin - two favourites, together at last
• 14 Falling into Nastiness - Jonathan Swift's 17 Resolutions for old age
• 15 On Kenneth Allott - a fine poem form a neglected poet, and a discovery
• 16 On Raymond Devos - a very odd fish
• 17 'Deep joy' : Stanley Unwin - the entertainer remembered
• 18 Cisgenderism and the Beats - on Robert McCrum's 100 greatest novels in English
• 19 Political booklists - what do politicians read? Or claim to read?
• 20 On deodorants - why are there so few?
• 21 On 'grammar snobs' - a response to Mona Chalabi
• 22 The Curse of Celebrity - a Prince, among men
• 23 On James Patterson, authors - the writer as a brand
• 24 An American on Paris - the latest novel by the  world's most popular author
• 25 The Habit of Art - Alan Bennett's 2011 play, belatedly reviewed
• 26  On L. T. C. Rolt and the Talyllyn Railway - engineer, author, visionary
• 27 Beckett list - unscripted insults in En attendant Godot 
• 28 Salman Rushdie and Geoffrey Archer - twin titans; terrible titles
• 29 Experiments with severed heads - sorry about this
• 30 Dodge Rose by Jack Cox (revisited) - a brilliant debut

My third most popular blog

This blog seemed to strike a chord, and became my third most-read. This really is the worst poem ever written. There's no mitigation.

Friday, 26 September 2014

Worst. Poem. Ever.

This dashing fellow is Théophile-Jules-Henri "Theo" Marzials who was, despite his exotic monicker, a British composer, singer and poet. His French clergyman father married his English mother and Theo, born in 1850, was the youngest of five children.

At the age of twenty he started work in the British Museum as a junior assistant in the librarian's office where his path crossed those of Coventry Patmore, John Payne, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, and Edmund Gosse (who may have been his lover). He was not really cut out for a library career - he reportedly once yelled "Am I not the darling of the British Museum reading room?" from the balcony of that noble institution.

He nevertheless continued working there until retiring at the ripe old age of 32, on a handsome pension of £38 a year supplemented by royalties estimated at around £1000 annually. These were derived from his successful career as a composer, noted for his settings of Christina Rossetti's verses and some popular ballads that were all the rage in the 1880s.

He moved to Devon in the early 1900s where he became addicted to chloradyne (a potent patent medicine invented in the 19th century by Dr. John Collis Browne, a doctor in the British Indian Army as a treatment for cholera, diarrhea, insomnia, neuralgia and migraines. It was made from a mixture of laudanum, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform.) He died in Colyton in February 1920.

As a poet he had his admirers - Gerard Manley Hopkins for one - and his work featured in that era-defining periodical  The Yellow Book. He is now forgotten, though not entirely, and for rather a sad reason. His poem 'A Tragedy', included in his only published collection The Gallery of Pigeons and Other Poems (1873), has strong claims to being the very worst poem ever written in the English language. I first came across it the other day in Ross and Kathryn Petras' harrowing anthology Very Bad Poetry (1997). It isn't bad in the way (say) William McGonagall's oddly memorable and sweet-natured doggerel is bad. Marzial's astonishing perpetration has no mitigating qualities.

I've typed it out in full below for you to read and savour.


A Tragedy by Theophile Marzials

Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop,
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop...
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop...
And my head shrieks - "Stop"
And my heart shrieks - "Die."...
Ugh! yet I knew - I knew
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end--
My Devil - My "friend."...
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air -
I can do,
I can dare
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip, drop.)
I can dare, I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop
Dead.
Plop, flop,
Plop.

My fourth most popular blog

Continuing a short season in which I thriftily (or lazily) re-cycle my top five most-read blogs. This, the fourth most popular, is very recent (and if the thousands of readers who have so far read the blog all buy several copies of the novel then this terrifically gifted writer's future is assured. 

Thursday, 1 December 2016

Forbidden Line - an Essex epic

The Only Way is Essex is a rowdy reality television show which does not, let's agree, represent my home county at its best. This begs the question: what does? 

John Betjeman's 'sweet uneventful countryside' of silted creeks and farms and drowsy villages under high East Anglian skies offers a bucolic alternative:

The deepest Essex few explore

Where steepest thatch is sunk in flowers

And out of elm and sycamore

Rise flinty fifteenth-century towers.

That Essex, home to John Fowles, Gerard Manley-Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, Ruth Pitter, Jilly Cooper, Sydney Smith, Warwick Deeping, Sabine Baring-Gould and Joseph Conrad, is a calmer, stranger and admittedly duller place than the makers and viewers of TOWIE will ever be likely to explore. Which version of Essex is echt and which ersatz will depend on your cultural priorities.. 

In the Middle Ages the county was so renowned for the quantity and quality of beef calves dispatched to London meat markets that 'Essex Calf' became the slang term for a native. The sassy types caught on camera living life the Essex way, simultaneously exploiting and exploited by the medium within which they appear to flourish are, one hopes, savvy enough to avoid becoming calves for the slaughter. They all seem to know and like and even understand what they're doing.

Essex traditionally gets a bad press and has not, as far as I'm aware, provided the setting for a major literary novel. Until now, that is.

Forbidden Line by Paul Stanbridge is published today by the Norwich independent Galley Beggar Press. The author's first book is a breathtakingly ambitious attempt to re-purpose Cervantes' Don Quixote for our times. The adventurous contemporary pair are the maniac autodidact Donald J Waswill (Don) and his doltishly engaging companion Isaiah Olm (abbreviated to Is, which never fails to look like a typo and I had no idea how this should be pronounced until it's made clear after several hundred pages). The duo set off on a shambolic adventure from Don's Colchester base in the colossal Victorian water tower known locally as Jumbo (and you should Google this extraordinary structure).

What Forbidden Line immediately brings to mind is the great short story by Borges - 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', originally published in 1939. You'll know this, I expect, and if not can read it here (and it takes about 15 minutes). This single story anticipates and demolishes the more absurd tendencies of literary post-modernism. Menard's grandchildren crop up briefly in the later stages of Forbidden Line in a seriously hilarious hospital episode featuring one Ian McEwan, who is clearly THE Ian McEwan.

Stanbridge's Don is every bit as deranged and single-minded as his Spanish prototype - obsessed with a baffling metaphysical phenomenon he calls 'the hyperfine transition of hydrogen' and in thrall to Lady Chance, a capricious secular deity who dictates his every random move. He and the shrewdly cloddish Is set off on foot together to undergo a series of downbeat, farcical encounters with the contemporary world - our world. These are beautifully rendered and as funny anything in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet or Beckett's Mercier and Camier (two abiding favourites, both of which feature incompatible male compadres navigating the wide world and beside which Forbidden Line confidently takes its place).Don and Is make their way slowly to London, running into drunks, crusties, Chelmsford dignitaries, the Essex constabulary and feuding locals. They repeatedly destroy a hefty home-made case containing Don's Encyclopedic life work, which repeatedly reappears with its contents miraculously intact. Is cannot read or write (unless the plot requires him to do so) but has the same gift of total mental recall as Funes the Memorious (another Borges link, from the Ficciones) and becomes Don's lumpen recording angel. Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl are among the intellectual shades who accompany the travelling pair.

What grips at once is Stanbridge's beautiful, stately, eccentric and richly rewarding prose. He never lets up, never falters. The lyrical descriptions of backwater Essex are consistently lovely, providing a backdrop for mesmerisingly erudite riffs by Don on every subject under the sun, while the hapless Is offers a stalwart comic foil subject to no end of painful indignities. There's a deeply satisfying and sophisticated philosophical undertow, lots of very good jokes, lavish digressions, pointless repetitions, countless literary references,stretches of dialogue in Greek and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, sudden violent reversals, dazzling rhetorical flights and, throughout, a sense of unalloyed authorial joy in the whole project. His sole concern is all for our delight and, while he is unafraid to court tedium when the fancy takes him (generously inviting the reader to skip such passages), he has the rare gift - vanishingly rare - of making one laugh out loud, and regularly. Chapter 27 reduced me to a giggling puddle of contentedness: at one point therein Don and Is discuss what they respectively pronounce as 'déjà vu' and 'deja-vu', leading to a wonderfully mad mis en abyme in which simultaneous hypothetical déjà vus (or deja-vus) are embedded within one another. leading inevitably to 'an eternal stasis of the hyperfine transition of hydrogen'.

                     - What you are saying is so far over my head, said Is, that it has ice on it.

Forbidden Line is very, very silly and as wholly and profoundly serious as Cervantes' original. It's a rich plum pudding of a novel, but a plum pudding with antlers.

For the first time in my ramshackle career as a literary hack I sent the publishers an unsolicited encomium (in case they needed an early blurb). In it I said that Forbidden Line was "breathtaking, magisterial, uniquely demented and hilarious - a lavish comic masterpiece". It really is. You can, and certainly should, buy a copy from the publishers here. Read it in the dog days between Christmas and the New Year.

If my enthusiasm isn't recommendation enough you might like to know that the novel has been long listed for the first Republic of Consciousness Prize the founder of which, Neil Griffiths, has this to say:

A modern day Don Quixote channeling early Wittgenstein and late Heidegger, and the events of the Peasant’s Revolt, Forbidden Line take us on a picaresque journey through Essex and London in what must be the most exuberant and maximalist novel of ideas ever written in English. It really shouldn’t work, but it does so with a kind joy and comic panache that few writers possess. It’s an achievement to be admired, relished, and loved. Not only will there be PhDs written about this novel, there will be fan-fiction and meta-fiction, and I won’t be surprised if very soon there are clubs and secret societies dedicated to unravelling how the ‘hyperfine transition of hydrogen’ permits a chest of papers continually to appear after many determined destructions. This isn’t magical realism – it’s so much more mysterious and profound than that. 

My fifth most popular blog

In what we now all seem to call 'the run-up' to Christmas (one thinks of 'Typhoon' Tyson thundering along the pitch at Old Trafford) I've decided, for the next five days, to re-publlsh my top five most popular blogs (or at least the ones that have attracted the largest readership). To get this festive count-down under way here's my fifth most popular blog. It appeared a few weeks before the publication of Harry Parker's superb debut novel, published early in 2016 by Faber. It's followed by  brief postscript.

I note with a jolt that this blog originally appeared a year ago this week. It was good to see the rapturous critical reaction to the book's appearance but for some reason Anatomy of a Soldier hasn't appeared on any 'Novels of 2016' list (apart from mine).

Monday, 21 December 2015

Anatomy of a Soldier

I first became aware of the author Harry Parker when he featured in an evening of readings by Faber authors earlier this year. The star turn that night was Edna O'Brien (the only human being I've ever seen who is literally dazzling), supported by Eimear McBride (reading from her forthcoming second novel The Lesser Bohemians, clearly delighted to be sharing the stage with her literary mentor). The line-up  also included Viv Albertine (late of The Slits and reading from her iPad) and a chap (whose name escaped me), a nephew of the critic I. A. Richards who had written a book about mountaineering. Harry Parker, first up, read from his unpublished novel Anatomy of a Soldier.

The Critics' Samurai Code is  unambiguous: books should never be reviewed before they are published, and reviews never circulated before they appear in print or online. Our leading literary organs generally abide by that and so do I, so what follows is not a review but a sort of drum-beating pre-view, and certainly not the first to appear. (I cleared permission with the author's agent before writing this blog). There's been a discernible buzz surrounding this book for some months now and for once the hyperbole is entirely justified because Anatomy of a Soldier is one of the most brilliant debut novels you're ever likely to read.

It's an unapologetically experimental work and a far cry from the Andy McNab school. The first-person narration (although the term itself is hardly the right description of what the author has achieved) comes from a series of inanimate objects: a rifle, some medical gauze, an army boot, a bag of fertilzer, a prosthetic limb and so on. Each object is imbued with a degree of consciousness and insight (although never quite amounting to self-consciousness) and each object delivers an eloquent, necessarily partial (in both senses) account of its role in an emerging catastrophe. I can't begin to tell you how incredibly impressive this is - the cumulative effect is harrowing, convincing and profoundly satisfying. Parker served in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009 and clearly knows what he's talking about and he understands the vital importance of a soldier's kit and of bantering camaraderie. He doesn't aestheticise the experience of war but renders it directly and with complete conviction in an arrestingly original way. It's hardly a just comparison but the last time I read an avant-garde account of conflict this powerful and persuasive it was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

The central character, Captain Tom Barnes, is horribly injured by an explosive device in an unspecified country and Parker's novel explores in penetrating, clear-eyed detail this traumatic event and Barnes's subsequent treatment and rehabilitation. The fragments build up a lucid and coherent account while the narrative perspective shifts between Barnes, his fellow soldiers and the local insurgents. This is gripping and rewarding. It extends the range of the novel.

When I heard the author read a few pages that evening my immediate reaction (since amended) was that such ingenuity, however well executed, would be unlikely to sustain the reader's interest at novel length. The danger, I thought, was that the approach would sooner or later degenerate into a simple guessing game in which the reader, having identified (as it were) 'the mystery object', would be tempted to skip to the next section, and that while that might offer some ludic satisfaction it would not amount to a coherent fiction. I'm happy to admit I was quite wrong.

I received an advance copy a week later and having read it in (as they say) a single mesmerised sitting realised that what I'd heard at the Faber reading was representative but not typical (if you see what I mean). Anatomy of a Soldier is  potent, compassionate, visceral and necessary. It knocked the stuffing out of this reader and will certainly be one of the great works of fiction published in 2016. 

Anatomy of a Soldier will be published in the UK by Faber and Faber in 2016.

Postscript After writing this blog I started reading up on Thing Theory., a branch of critical theory that focuses on human-object interactions in literature and culture. (Adopts Village Explainer pose)

It borrows from Heidegger's distinction between objects and things, which posits that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer function according to the use to which it is commonly put. When an object breaks down or is misused, it sheds its socially encoded value and becomes present to us in new ways through the suspension of habit. The theory was largely created by Bill Brown, who edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry on it in 2001 and published a monograph on the subject entitled A Sense of Things.

As Brown writes in another essay, Thing Theory: 

We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.

Harry Parker may or may not be aware of Thing Theory, but his wonderful novel seems to me to articulate many of its concerns. As William Carlos Williams said: "No ideas but in things".

Jacko, Prince and me

Michael Jackson and Prince were both black men and internationally-renowned performers. I am a white man, and a vanishingly obscure literary hack. But we have a lot more more in common than you might think

Michael Jackson was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. He died in 2009.

Prince (or the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince) became a Jehovah's Witness in middle age. He died in 2016. 

I don't like pop music, much. Or any music, much. But Michael Jackson and Prince are, or were, my brothers. Or rather I should say my Brothers, because like them I was a Jehovah's Witness. I had no choice in this as my parents joined what is known by its members simply as 'The Organisation' or (tellingly) 'The Truth' when I was 8 years old. 

The Jehovah's Witnesses (correctly known as The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, the world's most prolific publishing outfit) are an evangelical fundamentalist religious cult within which everything that is not forbidden is compulsory. It's hard to communicate how very strange the convictions held by its followers are to anyone outside the organisation, so I shan't begin to try. Most Witnesses are not bad people (although there are some very nasty types within the organisation who are occasionally brought to justice, usually for some form of extreme child abuse). But they are dupes.

Michael Jackson and me were raised to believe (although that's a weak word for the kind of zealot conviction we were expected to embrace) that the world would come to an end at some point late in 1975, when we would both be 16. Prince, who signed up later, may never have known this. (The Witnesses regularly give precise dates for the Apocalypse, based on measurements derived from the Great Pyramid, or something, and these pass quietly and without discussion or comment.)

I can't lift an image from the Walt Disney film Peter Pan for copyright reasons, but if you know the movie you may recall the moment when Peter arrives for the first time at the Darling family's house in Bloomsbury, and the uncanny moment when he crouches on the roof and is briefly lit from below, his expression momentarily diabolical.

My theory is that this particular image made such an impact on Michael Jackson that he would spend much of the rest of his life carving his features into a simulacrum of it - the huge eyes and grotesquely retroussé nose, the abundant floppy hair, the weirdly asexual or presexual look that became the Jackson trademark.

Why?

Because, I'd further theorise, he wanted to arrest his own development and, in so doing, stall the Witnesses' ghastly eschatological chronology. He wanted, in his simple way, not so much to turn back time but to stop it in its tracks. His paedophiliac tastes (and there can be no question that Jackson was a paedophile) were, it seems to me, an aspect of a more general rejection of maturity, and of the passage of time itself.

Witnesses are not interested in life, only in eternal life. Eternal life in a paradise on earth that will follow Armageddon, a point at which all worldly things will be swept away and only practising Witnesses will survive (or be resurrected). According to their magazine The Watchtower, the earthly paradise will look like this:

This may look to you like a kebab shop mural, or a North Korean calendar (the aesthetic priorities of any tyranny, religious or secular, can be remarkably similar). There are no buildings and there's no infrastructure, although there's plenty of fresh fruit, and wild animals are friendly and approachable. The lion shall lay down with the lamb (it says so in the Bible). Everyone is neatly dressed. Will there be ironing boards in this early paradise? Washing machines? How does the fruit get distributed? And who built that yacht? Is there a currency? On what system does the economy operate? Will money be magic? Where are the old people?

Here's the thing though - back in the 1970s, when I was growing up (and Michael Jackson was for good reasons of his own deciding not to grow up) the kind of images found in publications from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania were more like this:

And like this:

Or this:

Theologically speaking they were weird. And more than weird - mad. Mad and ridiculous and wrong - an assault against taste, intelligence and reason. And they were not something to be challenged because zealot evangelists do not have anything as fragile as beliefs, they have only convictions. These are not hard won, or open to negotiation. They are self-evident truths, and ungainsayable. Ultimately a longing for eternal life is nothing more than a profound timor mortis - the fear of  oblivion. 

It's surprising that Prince - not a dullard - should have been suckered into something so lifeless and wrong.  It's even more surprising that a hip rocker such as David Thomas of the cult avant-garde band Pere Ubu (they meant something in the late 1970s; check out their debut album The Modern Dance) should also have been washed in the blood of the lamb. There are others - other Sisters, other Brothers.

Images © The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania