Hello,
Upon recently watching an excerpt from a Stewart Lee comedy gig on celebrity novels and autobiographies, I decided to explore this theme myself (namely by reiterating the points in a less humorous, less eloquent way). Celebrity books have always held a certain place in my mind, somewhere towards the back on the same level I consider cockroaches and gang rape. It honest baffles the mind to behold drab, dire, irritatingly self indulgent books written by the latest talent less nobody desperate to gain as much press coverage as possible. Examples include fictionalised accounts of irritating lives such as politicunt (sorry, couldn’t help myself) Bill O’Reilly’s hilariously self indulgent novel “Those Who Trespass” (Trespass on what, I wonder? The Democratic Party’s headquarters?), so-simple-a-Daily-Mail-reader-could-read-them novels like The Da Vinci Code, which takes a needless, paranoid conspiracy theory and turns it into a needless, paranoid novel. The worst thing is celebrities three or four years older than myself writing autobiographies about how hard it is making money and dripping recognition when you’re a talent less, useless, uncouth non human with a cocaine and hooker addiction and a BTEC in procrastination from a college nobody has heard of, while your former collegemates struggle to break even in whatever drudge they call employment. There are books by Russell Brand in which he flaunts his heroin addiction, seriously. It’s pathetic.
The biggest insult is how these books are smeared into the faces of anyone visiting a mainstream bookshop like Gulliver’s Yahoos rubbing faecal matter into those they deem inferior. More shelf space is wasted in major bookshops with the latest insufferable celebrity arsewipe than with any other kind of novel, magazine or technical manual. It’s not like there’s nothing decent to publish, there are simply countless writers (myself probably not included) with the ability and drive to produce some of the greatest books set to paper, it’s just that subtlety and integrity don’t sell as well as some Radio One Disk Jockey massaging his success in playing the same record every 15 minutes between dribbling out one liners about the girl he copulated with the previous night. The public like to point the all-too respectable finger of accusation at the supposed moral decay we’re all existing under, blaming everything from immigration to teenage culture. Maybe the problem doesn’t lie so much in teenagers themselves, but in lack of genuine stimulation in this shallow world of meaningless words splattered onto wasted trees?
Rambling incoherently for the greater good,
- Tom
