Dotty Parker

whoa. sexy.

What makes a sexy book? Jackie Collins thinks she knows. Perhaps she does; I've not read any. I did read some pulp fiction one summer.

As I recall it was about a woman from the south who is headstrong and beautiful. She loved the handsome bachelor who rode horses. One day on her ride through the country her horse was spooked and she was thrown from the horse. The handsome bachelor came along and there was some bodice ripping and passionate sex that bordered on the non-consentual variety, but it was supposed to be hot stuff, especially with the horses watching.

As things go in the world of pulp fiction, she got pregnant with the handsome bachelor's baby. She didn't tell him, though. The beautiful headstong darling woos the handsome bachelor and ends up waking up with him in her bed on several mornings. To hide her morning sickness, she kept crackers in her bedside table. She'd eat some of those and be just fine! He never noticed that she was pregnant until she was just about to have a baby. And they lived happily ever after.

Crap! It's all crap! While I could go on for hours about how incredibly unlikely it is for people to get pregnant at all given all the bajillion chemical and cellular nonsense going on, I should really just can it and say what I wanted to say:

SirDougg bought me a book of retro pulpiness. What we didn't know at the time of purchase was that it was poorly written and full of questionable propaganda. It's v. cool. Take a gander at the sexy, possibly fetishy dream fulfilling book cover.

And then with the description on the back?

Ahhhh, SirDougg, you know not what amusement and horror you've granted me. I am prepared to distill this joy for many people to enjoy right along with me.

Are you ready?

The first two paragraphs, sweeties:

Heaven and Earth are unequally allotted to the visible world where the rock called the island of Campagna towers up from the Mediterranean. The sky in the ample sphere arches all around and high above, and this is heaven. Then there is the round expanse of the enclosing sea, and this is on the earth; but the earth in fact is the rock. One thousand feet high, one mile across, and two miles long, it is alone in the midst of the sea and the sky, rearing up out of the water to represent the earth in an overwhelming preponderance of blue.

This isolated ambassador of the earth to the kingdom of the sea is Italian. It is one hundred miles from the mainland. In olden times there was a small population of fishermen who lived under the sheer cliffs along the shore, some of them dwelling inside the rock in the echoing grottoes where the sea comes in and slaps thunderously in the wet air, and the rest living along the pebbled beaches close to the waves that make the rock look from a distance like a thing jutting up from within a white wreath.

Oh yeah, baby. Can we agree that the cover was a lie?!

Here are some more samples.

Dare I say,"Good God!"

Can you count the prepositions? I believe it's beyond my abilities.

I'm considering sharing bits and pieces of this book. I think it's truly educational. And boy, is it fun.

Posted by dotty at August 6, 2004 10:36 PM