tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-522109 2012-10-03T09:14:01+01:00 TypePad typepad/JMDahttp://feedburner.google.com tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345161b569e20133f207be0b970b 2010-07-03T12:25:58+01:00 2010-07-03T12:25:58+01:00

The Sixties is out now in paperback with an ancient picture of me on the cover as hippie. I looked younger and surrounded by foliage. That's how it was then.

Jenny Diski http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2010/07/the-sixties-out-now-in-paperback.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345161b569e20134852777fc970c 2010-07-02T10:12:46+01:00 2010-07-02T10:20:33+01:00

I'll be adding updating info, writing occasional new blogs, and adding pieces of writing on the This and That page at my web site: www.jennydiski.co.uk, so please check there.

Jenny Diski http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2010/07/updates.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345161b569e20120a62877c2970b 2009-10-28T13:58:37+00:00 2009-10-28T14:02:17+00:00

This is part of my Diary piece in the latest London Review of Books: Read all of it here (See also the latest from Bernard-Henri Lévi in the Huffington Post) In 1961 I was raped by an American in London. I was 14, a year older than the girl Polanski gave half a Quaalude and champagne to, then had oral, vaginal and anal sex with. In defence of Polanski, various people have pointed out Geimer was a teenage model and was doing a photo-shoot her mother had fixed up with Polanski, who said he wanted to take the pictures for Vogue. As further evidence to mitigate Polanski’s crime people have pointed out that after she had been drinking champagne (encouraged by Polanski during the photo session) Polanski got into a jacuzzi and suggested she join him, but she said she had to go home. He phoned her mother and said she would be late, then he let her speak to her mother. Geimer replied ‘no’ when her mother asked if she wanted to be picked up and taken home, and she consented, according to one telling, though this isn’t clear in the grand jury transcript, to oral sex. She also...

Jenny Diski http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2009/10/-raperape.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345161b569e201157151947f970c 2009-07-29T16:23:00+01:00 2009-07-29T16:23:00+01:00

In 2001, Armin Meiwes, a computer technician from Rotenburg in Germany, advertised on the Cannibal Café website for someone to have dinner with. He received numerous replies, but some withdrew when he responded and he considered others not serious enough. Eventually he invited Bernd Brandes for dinner. The plan was that Armin and Bernd would dine on Bernd’s severed penis, to be bitten off at the table for the occasion (this failed and it had to be cut off). Bernd found it too chewy, he said, so Armin put it in a sauté pan, but charred it and fed it to the dog. Later, Armin put Bernd in the bath (to marinate?), gave him alcohol and pills, read a science fiction book for three hours and then stabbed his dinner guest in the throat, hung him upside down on a meat hook in the ceiling, as any good butcher would, and sliced him into manageable portions. The world was agog at the news of the German cannibal and his two trials, at the first of which he was found guilty of manslaughter (no law against cannibalism in Germany, and his ‘victim’ had consented, volunteered actually, to being killed and eaten)...

Jenny Diski http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2009/07/all-eat-all-from-the-latest-london-review-of-books.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-59111066 2008-11-26T17:49:31+00:00 2008-11-26T17:49:31+00:00

From The Sunday Times November 23, 2008 The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness by Mark Rowlands A wolf-dog is fighting with a pit bull terrier, probably to the death. A man, who has been pumping iron in order to keep pace with the power of his wolf-dog, grabs the embattled 120lb animal by the scruff, lifts it off the ground so they are eyeball to eyeball, and whispers, “Do you want a bit of me, son?” By way of full disclosure, I should say that I am one of the older ladies with cats that Mark Rowlands refers to in passing in this emotionally lamentable memoir and meditation about himself as a young man with his dog. Rowlands was in his twenties when he bought Brenin, a hybrid wolf-dog puppy. It was the early 1990s and he was lecturing in philosophy at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In his spare time he hung out with the students, getting through a bottle or two of bourbon a night, playing rugby and lending Brenin to his team mates because, of all their big, bold dogs, Brenin was the best “chick magnet. In fact, they used a slightly...

Jenny Diski http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2008/11/woof.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-58264546 2008-11-09T22:20:18+00:00 2008-11-09T22:20:18+00:00

My Book Of A Lifetime: The Essays, By Michel de Montaigne Reviewed by Jenny Diski Friday, 31 October 2008 In 1585 Marie de Gournay, an awkward 18-year-old who spent her days mooching in her father's small library, read the first two volumes of The Essays by Michel de Montaigne, then a man in his mid-fifties. She fell immediately in love. Her mother administered a dose of hellebore to bring her back to her senses, but she determined that one day she would meet the writer, because in all the world no one understood his remarkable work so well as she. Three years later, she did meet him, and he spent several weeks in her house in Picardy recuperating from an illness and wallowing in her adoration. After his death she became his editor. A reader's dream came true. Marie de Gournay was just the first of many readers to be seduced by Montaigne and to be made to feel by his writing that he spoke directly to them. Montaigne has stood by my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, too, though, of necessity, he is more ectoplasmic these days. It's not just Montaigne; all avid readers know that the best...

Jenny Diski http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2008/11/book-of-a-lifetime-independent-october-2008.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-58264470 2008-11-09T22:17:00+00:00 2008-11-09T22:17:00+00:00

Bits of Me Are Falling Apart: Dark Thoughts from the Middle Years by William Leith 208pp, Bloomsbury, £10.99 What's Going On? The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion by Mark Steel 256pp, Simon & Schuster, £12.99 The lack of a proper bed brings it home, it seems. So when comedian Mark Steel and journalist William Leith find themselves sleeping (separately) on a settee in the living room and a mattress in the office, the parlous state of the world synergises with the meaning of being over 40, and each bursts into publication. There are the kids, wife or girlfriend, house and proper bed on the one hand; and there's Steel and Leith cut loose from the bosom of, back to square one, personal inadequacies, the Iraq war, entropy, greed, the failure of socialism, the implacability of biology, on the other. And time - marching onward. Exactly how the state of the world bleeds into their personal pain differs according to each author's general relation to the world. Leith's self-obsession - his hypochondria, his lack of sustained relationships or continuing professional success - overwhelms current events, so that the state of the world serves mostly to point up his private...

Jenny Diski http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2008/11/mark-steel-william-leith-review-guardian-august-2008.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-58264330 2008-11-09T22:13:17+00:00 2008-11-09T22:13:17+00:00

The Sunday Times review by Jenny Diski Credit Crunch is not yet available on the menus of elBulli or The Fat Duck restaurants; it's still only what's happening to the economy as these two books are published. Who could have foreseen it? Still, on a morning when local authorities had announced a loss of £42m, all 5.44kg of The Big Fat Duck Cook Book arrived, looking a little like a regatta with gaily coloured satin ribbon place-holders, silvered paper edges, silver-embossed feathers and duck feet on the black cloth cover and outer slipcase, and measuring 30 x 35 x 6cm thick. Just bad timing. Or good timing for any financier or pensioner planning to drown their sorrows with a plate of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, which is served with a gold-leaf-covered langoustine bouillon cube in a teapot for you to dissolve yourself with some frankincense hydrosol, and pour over sea-urchins' tongues. The book costs £100 - four-fifths of the cost of the tasting menu at The Fat Duck in Bray, itself a mere bagatelle compared to what the government is paying out to salvage capitalism. Practically speaking, you'd be better off spending the extra £25 waiting two months for a...

Jenny Diski http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2008/11/heston-blumenthal-elbulli-review-sunday-times-october-2008.html