Bulwer-Lytton

I would love to be deemed a literary snob, but I have a long way to go. I am a hardcover snob though if that gives me a couple marks!

I was researching some works by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. I was looking at the novel Paul Clifford in particular since it came up recently for it's famous opening line. I was amused to find out that this novel was considered badly written by literary snobs - and much of his work in general.

Although I have a couple of his works that I have not read yet, I did start reading Paul Clifford on gutenberg.org and was really quite drawn into it. What is it about his writing that would be considered bad? One word that was being used to critique his work was "florid". However, I don't find that unusual for novels written at this time period.

Put your best snobbery foot forward, but be kind to us simpler folk.

My friend David X has an interesting post about Bulwer Lytton on his blog (http://dxsuperpremium.blogspot.com/2008/04/zanoni-by-edward-bulwer-lytton.html). He has made me regret not buying any of those old collections of "Complete Works" I used to see so frequently in used book shops.

"It was a dark and stormy night." doesn't get to be a trite cliche without a lot of people thinking it worth stealing.

but...what about when you add: "Suddenly, a shot rang out?"

I would also love to be deemed a literary snob. I have become addicted to Bulwer-Lytton. I adore his "florid" phrases. "Turgid" is another good adjective often used to describe his prose. His style is so far removed from anything contemporary, so much a product of a nineteenth century mind.

I wish I had one of those old collections of complete works as well. They are rather expensive nowadays.

"I would also love to be deemed a literary snob."

David, welcome aboard...

Thankyou Cliff,

It's a pleasure to be here among the literary elite.

And, like all the best elites, we're self-styled...

In my case, it's a look I wear very, very well.

Sunglasses, withering scorn dripping from every word, a sense that the world just isn't smart enough for me, no matter how hard it might try to please me.

God, I love feeling superior...

Cliff, when you get up here on my level I'll introduce you around.

Cliff,

You certainly do wear it well. Judging from your pic on the book nudgers group "name the atmospheric man smoking and reading a book" thread. You are the very picture of an intellectual sir. Such a contemplative brow and such an intelligent mein. Alas one so seldom sees meins like that anymore.

Here's a snobby quote about snobbiness.

"One is not superior merely because one views the world in an odious light."

- Francois-Rene de Chateubriand

I think Cliff should lose the cravat, though.

My sartorial elegance should not be the subject of those who lack the discernment to correctly judge and appreciate high fashion.

In other words: the fucking cravat stays.

Stephanie Meyer is the new Bulwer-Lytton ... minus the talent.

Stephanie Meyer does not belong in the same sentence as Bulwer-Lytton. Her books resemble the outline of a very trite, very badly written book that was never finished. I'm convinced her books are written by a computer program.

And the ..... has no idea how to properly tie a cravat!

A paragraph! All you have to do is read just one paragraph and you know the cow has not an ounce of music in her literary soul.

As we've discussed elsewhere, more people might be reading these days but there are fewer good, smart readers. And that does not bode well for the future...

Poor Stephanie Meyer:

http://www.cracked.com/article_16878_if-twilight-was-10-times-shorter-100-times-...

There's a good review of the Twilight film in this month's Sight & Sound. The reviewer shreds it...

Radio 3 broadcast a documentary at the weekend on Bulwe-Lytton's concept of Vril (from The Coming Race). It was a very popular idea with the Victorians, especially with the krank section.

Hence Liquid Beef being renamed Bovril.

Amazingly, Bovril actually took the beef out of their recipe a few years ago. How stupid can you get? They had to put it back in after a public outcry.

Have you heard Peter Ustinov's Bovril story?

'In February 1921, Nadezdha Ustinov landed at Harwich. "She arrived one pea-soup-fog night," relates the boy whom she carried in her belly, "very nervous, for she could hardly move with the encumbrance that I caused, and didn't understand why every railway station between Harwich and London seemed to be called `Bovril'.'

I'm assuming non sequiturs are permissible here. Encouraged even. Do you follow me?

Liquid beef, kippers and kidney pie.

Good God, how did these people ever gain an empire?

Because we were manly enough to eat liquid beef, kippers and kidneys, of course.

And they survived English boarding school, which was a lot like the English Navy, minus the rum.

At least being oppressed by the British didn't involve a culture that venerates Toby Keith as a music genius and Larry the Cable Guy as the zenith of wit.

Along with Stephanie Meyer, those two can form up and create a lowbrow, idiocracy version of No-Culture Prole Triumvirate. Like a Voltron of pure concentrated stupid.

I think Toby Keith was born from the black stuff at the end of Time Bandits

"Don't touch it! It's pure evil!"

Hannah Arendt talked about the "banality of evil," and the oeuvre of Mr. The Cable Guy is pretty evil stuff.

That's a real chamber of horrors. Banal and pure evil certainly. I would assert that trite fiction is not only only being mass produced by american publishers. Just look at J.K. Rowling.

Re: Vril

Google "Vril" on a lazy sunday afternoon sometime and enter the schizophrenic world of the Vril Society, ariosophism, and nazi flying saucers.

Ha, great picture!

There's some real bonkers stuff if you dig too deeply into Nazi flying saucers and all that sort of rubbish. I read one book, The Reich of the Black Sun, which claimed the Nazis had built and exploded an atom bomb before the Americans. Part of the author's "evidence" was a simple mistake in physics made by a US lieutenant during an interrogation of a SS officer about nuclear explosions. Since the mistake was so obvious, the lieutenant clearly knew that the SS officer had knowledge he could only have gained if he'd been involved in a successful project to build an atom bomb. And that was one of the strongest arguments in the book...

Read Kooks and Strange Creations.

Believing in Nazi UFOs, is that any different than believing that the world is 6000 years old and Genesis is literally true? Unfortunately, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, among other dingbats of the Religious Right want to force this pseudoscientific voodoo down the throats of public school kids. They should go back to their Thomas Kinkade prints and leave modern Americans alone. This isn't snobbery, this is having a brain.

Delighted to find so many fellow literary snobs!

I have a solid victorian copy of Night and Morning which I picked up second-hand for the princely sum of £1 last month or so out of curiosity. I've not read it yet, so it's in my "fiction without intergrity" section, but I intend to give him a fair trial

"Fiction without integrity"--that's great.

And below that: "No Brainers".

And below that: "Sharecropped Franchises & Movie Tie-Ins".

Now those are some shelves it would be fun to browse. Good on ya, lad, you'll never be short of kindling.

I have Battlefield Earth. "Fiction without integrity," I like that. Between reading Beckett and Faulkner and Evelyn Waugh, you need the occasional palate cleanser. That's why I like reading Warhammer 40K, although I would assert the Warhammer books are better written than anything L. Ron Hubbard produced in his body-thetan jags.

I'd classify Battlefield Earth as "fiction without any redeeming quality whatsoever". I don't think integrity came into it. Elron was a lying bastard.

When he wasn't throwing overboard the girl-children he molested. Evil twonk.

Now, now, play nice with one of the major religious figures of the 20th century.

Along with Jim Jones, David Koresh and--

#30 - that section is next to the fireplace, but it's only symbolic! The rest of my fiction is mostly a-z, but it felt plain wrong putting The Mystery of the Scar-Faced Beggar next to (checks) My Life as a Fake.

You did say you were snobs, right? I feel mean now

Mean? There's no room for such sentiment here. Watch that stuff, Ben, the sharks are circling and if they sense weakness, the equivalent of a single drop of blood in the water...

(Cue John Williams' theme from "Jaws")

Might be worth another thread: "How do you arrange your bookshelves?"

"To arrange a library is to practice, in a quiet and modest way, the art of criticism."

-Jorge Luis Borges

I included Bulwer Lytton's immortal phrase in A BOOK OF AGES, and was pleased it fitted neatly adjacent to an anecdote about Charles Schulz, who immortalized it. But I give more play to Sterne and Nabokov and Pynchon and Capote and James and Thackeray and Salinger, also both Eliots, both Fitzgeralds and (I think) both Tom Wolfes. Authors are the richest vein of anecdotes.

And Borges too. What ironies in his life!

Non-fiction books are slowly being organized by dewey decimal! Fiction alpha w/in genre. Poetry/graphics off by themselves.

Well, I've started reading Night and Morning.
Fifty pages in, it's not terrible. It is slightly overblown - I don't have my copy to hand at present so am unable to quote examples, but not, I feel, laughably so. It's marred mainly by a plot structure that so far (I'm 60 pages in) has introduced us to 2 characters, given some backstory and depth, and then promptly presented us with their deaths; its other fault is an intrusive editorial stance, including the bizarre (quoted from memory) "No one heeded the wretch, no one heeded that BASTARD" (capitals Bulwer-Lytton's own.) He is here of course referring to illigitimacy, when characters say "damn" we are treated to "d---" and the action also takes place in the town or village of E------- in the year 18--, something common to many Victorian writers I know, but equally something Lord B-L seems to go out of his way to mention. I shall persevere.

I've given some thought to the snob value of the work, and am leaning towards it being acceptable as a snob to read Bulwer-Lytton, if only on the principal of "once a ophilosopher, twice a pervert," because noone actually does any more. Your opinions are courted and welcomed on the matter.

Ben - I think that sounds logical enough!

In the same vein, I've always sort of wanted to look up the old Gothic novels that heroines in 19th c. fiction always read - the literary trash of their day - Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho for example. But, I've never actually done so. Maybe this is the year.

How about starting a group read of nineteenth century trash.

When I finished Northanger Abbey a few years back, I swore I would one day read the books mentioned. Haven't yet, though.

I'd be happy to send this particular one on when I've finished it, if anyone has a burning desire in that direction

44: Like "The Pearl"? Or some of the more lubricated works of John Cleland?

I adore Lord Lytton. I loved Zanoni and The Coming Race.

Soon I plan to read Devereux, A Strange Story, and Pelham(Lytton's Dandy).

Lytton's sensational supernatural/occult fiction is great fun to read.

His short story The Haunted and the Haunters is a good example of his supernatural fiction. It's one of my favorite ghost stories.

Here is a link to the text on gutenberg if anyone is interested.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14195/14195-8.txt

I know nothing about Night and Morning. What is the premise?

The premise seems to be that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are, frankly, unfair

Thanks. How do you like it? Still not terrible? Better? Worse?

He's referenced in one of the Dubliners short stories. I laughed at the endnote number because I already know more about him than most people through LibraryThing. :)

(Incidentally, my Penguin edition endnotes EVERYTHING. They must assume that this is the first Irish/Catholic book their readers have ever attempted.)

Wait a tick ... the Pope's Catholic? :-O

Seriously, a note on every street the characters walk down or cross, a note on every business mentioned, a note on every religious reference including things like "Eucharist" - good grief. Oh, and the slang is also painstakingly translated, even when it is completely obvious from the context.

53
As Joyce might say, sounds like you got the annultated virgin.

I don't use aids to reading. If I get the allusion, good on me, if I don't, well, with Joyce at least, the allusion is not all there is to the words. Allusions add to the enjoyment, but they are like inside jokes. The trick is to make the work under the allusions worth while. If the author is successful this way, the allusions become like salt on watermelon, good if you get it, but certainly not necessary. If the allusions are all there is, then the work becomes boring and standoffish for the same reason inside jokes don't work outside. The genius of Joyce and those like him is the work stands in its own, with or without total understanding. If the meat and potatoes are no good, it ain't gonna matter how good the gravy is.

I've read the Annotated versions of Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist, and Dubliners. I get annoyed when they explain everything. My other pet peeve is when the annotator uses the end-notes to push a specific academic position.

I did find the footnotes helpful for Cousin Bette, since there were lots of characters, a convoluted plot involving money, and archaic terms. Otherwise, it was a 19th century potboiler that was a pretty quick and fun read.

to keep this away from the poetry thread..and also because i'm lifting straight from Stephen Pile's Book of Failures.: official handbook of the not terribly good club of Great Britain.

"Come muse and let us sing of rats" line abandoned upon listener response by James Grainger, 18thC

"And I was ask'd and authorized to go
to seek the firm of Clutterbuck & Co.
George Crabbe - usually a good poet.

Wordsworth's poetic description of a pond:
"I've measured it from side to side;
tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

#43. I love Ann Radcliffe - don't tell anyone though! Wow a lot has gone on with this thread since I started it. Glad to hear that many of you like Bulwer-Lytton.

On my journey to literary snob-dom, I am reading How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I am enjoying it. The author has read a lot of books - I probably won't make it before I push up daisies.

Hmmm. Is there such a thing as half-a-snob?

I imagine so. Just don't be three-quarters of a snob. You might be a nob.

#50: You know, halfway through it's not that bad, really not bad at all. A few unlikely coincidences swing or lurch the narrative along, but I am actively enjoying it. It's certainly nowhere near as bad as ghis reputation would suggest

I have really enjoyed the Lytton I have read so far. I like the archaic antiqueness of Lytton's writing. It tells a lot about the nineteenth century mindset and how different it is from our own. I get a kick out of his dillitantish style too.

If your interested in reading more Lytton, I would highly recommend his occult rosicrucian novel Zanoni. A very strange book. The protagonist is a 3000 year old immortal chaldean sage. It's similar to Melmoth the Wanderer by Maturin and Joseph Balsamo by Dumas. I loved it. Also if you like Jules Verne, you'll probably like Lytton's early sci fi The Coming Race.

My girlfriend got me Lytton's book on Pompeii. A quasi-gag gift, but still might be worth reading.

I think there's too much hating on purple prose in general. There's definite merit for specific cases, but it's a writing style that gets unnecessarily maligned. Against Nature by Huysmans and Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde has some of the most beautiful purple prose.

62: Yes, you're totally right about Dorian Gray. I loved the over the top writing style.

Thankyou!

Huysmans and Wilde are sacred.

Laughing at nineteenth century prose in the age of Stephanie Meyer is absolutely ludicrous, among other things.

Oswald Spengler warned in his Decline of the West(1918) that in the future there will be no artists or poets, only scientists and capitalists.

The Last Day of Pompeii by Karl Briullov

Bulwer-Lytton is said to have been inspired to write The Last Days of Pompeii, the first novelization of the subject and a blockbuster bestseller in 1834, by this painting by Karl Briullov from the early 1830s, which he saw in Milan.

64: Spengler was a pretty decent historian and writer, so long as he's not cheer leading for the Nazis. Beware of Germans talking about order and purity and national revitalization.

I usually do. Believe me, I'm anxious to avoid to having a pink triangle stitched on my shoulder.

That said, he was an amazing writer. Reading Decline of the West was a singular experience. It was sad to read a long magisterial passage, erudite and wide-ranging, end on a racist rant about "jazz music and n****r dances." It's like watching Michael Schumacher race at Monte Carlo, then blow his engine on the last turn of the last lap.

Agreed. I felt the same way recently when having fallen in love with Gogol's Dead Souls, I encountered his rabid antisemitism spoiling the rest of the book for me.

Racism, nationalism, and sexism are rampant in nineteenth century and early twentieth century literature of course. Something we should study in order to better understand our history in hopes of a better future.

That said Spengler was right on the money regarding the decline of the arts in our modern disposable world.

Then I recommend you read some Walter Benjamin, especially his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin has a mystical erudite quality, like that of Spengler, but he focuses on modern popular culture and commercialism.

Here's an online version of the essay:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Thankyou. I will read it this afternoon.

Well, I finished Night and Morning the other day. Although it would be easy to knock the damn thing, I really enjoyed it. I knew how it was going to end about 500 pages before we got there, Bulwer-Lytton frequently pops up and moralises at me and there's a rather saccharine epilogue appended. That said, I liken it to a wopping big battleship - it's crude and rough-edged, unwieldy and obvious but it works for aa' that. I worry that, speaking as a snob, I am being too forgiving towards it because it's old, unpopular trash as opposed to new, popular trash. That said, I did read the whole thing, and not out of a sense of duty to you chaps neither. The plot is that young Philip, our hero, loses everything - his father, his inheritance and his birthright, endures many travails and then gets everything back. Along the way though, he gets adopted by a criminal who has a heart of gold, is taken pity upon by a beautiful French aristocrat and goes off for years to become really good at war. He finds his brother again and vindicates his poor dead mother's name. You don't get that sort of thing in Dan Brown

It sounds very, very nineteenth century, but not as sensational as his supernatural fiction and sci fi stuff.

I'm glad I'm not the only person who enjoys Lytton. I think he's received a lot of unwarranted insults, especially considering the wretched state of popular fiction nowadays. Dan Brown, James Patterson, Stephanie Meyer, and the Oprah Book Club don't do anything for me, but offend my aesthetic sensibilities.

72: The old, popular trash was, by and large, written better. That goes even for the erotica. "Literary" fiction is carrying on the tradition of the well-wrought tale that tips its hat to the Western Canon and makes it relevant to today's reader. The new, popular trash seems like it was written by someone who doesn't even know how to read.

Like my friend's mini review of the Da Vinci Code: "Interesting facts wrapped around terrible writing."

Oprah should rename her book club Oprah's Book Club for Fake Holocaust Memoirs, Fake Addiction Memoirs, and the Occasional Faulkner and McCarthy Book to Look All Intelligent and Junk ... Who Wants a Free Car?

where were the "interesting facts"? jeez..given that there's no professor of "symbology" (sic) in any university i could find, the book was a total non-starter from the beginning. The jerk could've been a semiotician, an anthropologist, a lit/crit or art crit specialist, a historian of western religions, psychiatrist, a poet..a practitioner w/in and between all sorts of disciplines that, at least, exist outside of new age bookstores..but no, the james bond of academia has a phud in a non-existent discipline. Half baked factoids embedded in terrible writing.

And i finished the fking thing as a good friend had urged it on me and we very often agree on books.

Brown largely cribbed his source material, such as it was, from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which, to my reading, was a sort of "documentary novel", and much more interesting than the formulaic dreck ol' D.B. dreamed up*.

I enjoy books like this in which the authors believe (or pretend to believe) that what they are writing has some sort of objective reality. Another cheesy classic in this field is one I just picked up last week, the bizarre A Dweller on Two Planets by "Phylos the Thibetan". (It seems like this "Thibet" might be the place where lispy lamas are exiled.)

*Jealously on my part. Part of the frustrating thing about such pop phenomena is the feeling of wanting to kick oneself in the ass: "Hell, why didn't I think of cobbling this crap together? I could have bought a house in the south of France!"

One of Brown's characters is named for one of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Who subsequently tried to sue Brown for plagiarism. They lost because it could only be considered plagiarism if their book had been fiction. Apparently, you can't plagiarise non-fiction, even if every "fact" in your non-fiction book is completely bogus...

Aren't most Intelligence Estimates from the CIA fiction anyway?

At least Von Daniken and Immanuel Velikovsky before him made their stuff up themselves. They had the weird thoughts, did the weird research and made their weird ideas sound somewhat plausible, if acceptable only to the weird minded.

Dan Brown cribbed his stories and ideas from others and in order to not be considered a crack-pot, called them fictions. Sort of like Shakespeare only different.

79: Sort of like Shakespeare, only without talent.

Well, isn't that a difference?

Another difference between Dan Brown and writers I like is that the main character is not an obvious wish-fulfillment of the author (what the author either sees himself as, or wishes that he were like). Scifi people call this "mary sue/gary stu" and it's a really annoying thing about a lot of generally bad and bad genre fiction. E.g. Robert Parker's Spenser character. Now I know that some say that Shakespeare may have partly identified with some character or another in one or more of his plays, but you don't read the whole play thinking to yourself "this character is Shakespeare only handsomer and more popular."

82
Interesting point. I'm trying to think of others to whom this might apply...maybe the fellow who wrote the Hannibal Lecter books? (Wasn't Lecter supposed to be witty, urbane, with a good taste for wine - although with one slight character flaw?). I found Hannibal so very grating - in addition to the horrible writing, I felt that I was indeed reading someone's rather infantile fantasy version of themselves.

I have a dim memory of someone - Vonnegut? Borges? - writing a story about Shakespeare which revealed that the Bard was essentially a blank screen, a nonentity who existed merely as a conduit for the plays...

Then again, didn't he name his son "Hamnet" or something like that?

Bill O'Reilly wrote a pornographic mystery story in the late 90s (I think? Maybe earlier than that) and there are clips on the Internet of him reading some of the dirtier parts aloud. Apparently what he did is create two characters that, taken together, are his vision of himself, and it is really really bad. I have not read it and don't plan to, but it's an example of a very obvious Gary Stu.

I guess the Hannibal stories might have that flavor to them. (Oh dear, did I really just write that?) I have not read them.

Lynne Cheney, wife of Sith Lord Dick Cheney, wrote "Sisters," a Western lesbian romance.

http://whitehouse.georgewbush.org/administration/sisters-signed.asp

Conservatives really are dirty-minded smut-peddling hypocrites. Well, that's not surprising at all. I'm sure Rick Warren writes BDSM-infused gay porn under a different pen name. The Christian Right is chock-full of closet cases and meth aficionados.

What cheeses me off is when a one-off novel turns into an industry. Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs were great thrillers. Then it devolved into All-Hannibal, All-the-Time. It's what ruined the "Hitchhiker" series and I'm sure that's what indirectly lead to the death of Robert Jordan

It's what ruined the "Hitchhiker" series and I'm sure that's what indirectly lead to the death of Robert Jordan

? I always assumed Robert Jordan was felled by a Fascist bullet...

The author of Wheel of Time, not the character from Hemingway ;)

i know in the world of fan-fic, stories featuring the writer as the obvious protagonist are called "Mary Sues"; I don't know if guy books in the genre are "Dan Browns" or nowt.

They're called "Marty Stus":

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MartyStu

#89 - yeah..i asked Patty who reads some fan/fic and "marty stu" was here reply too.

#82

To me, Dan Brown reads like a conflation of "Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and Keystone Cops.

To me, Dan Brown makes my eye-balls bleed. Even Warhammer books -- not literary gems by a long shot -- are at least better written potboilers. My reaction reading "Angels and Demons", Chapter 1 -- I couldn't get any further -- was, "Is he in 10th grade?" I've read more compelling graffiti in truck stop lavatories.

Frequent truck-stop lavatories a lot, do you? Is that the US equivalent of cottaging?

Karl's personal proclivities are his own business...

If it works for Idaho senators, evangelical ministers, and George Michael, it works for me ;)

No, the US equivalent of cottaging is endorsing anti-gay marriage legislation. The equation is thus: anti-homosexual feelings = homosexual activities.

#22

There's absolutely nothing wrong with kippers: food for the gods, provided they're the genuine smoked, undyed article, and especially when eaten with wholemeal bread, unsalted butter, and unsweetened English Breakfast tea.

Er, you'll pardon me if I don't join you...

Reminds me of Minnesota's penchant for lutefisk That isn't food, that's a biological weapon.

I've had lutefisk (years ago)--it's like chewing lye soap. And there's that light, thin bread..."lefse", just looked it up. I have a bro-in-law who's got a touch of Norge about him and we usually have lefse when we drop in at Christmas. Not lutefisk, though....never, never, never again.

Or muqtuq (whale blubber). Once is quite enough.

Here's a nice lefse recipe, for those so inclined:

http://www.post-gazette.com/food/20011206suza.asp

I'm of German ancestry -- my ancestors came off the boat a century or so ago -- and there's some pretty horrifying food in that area too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blutwurst

Mmm. Black pudding.

I love black pudding, me. Why is this more horriffic than a 'normal' sausage?

Anything involving the words "German" and "blood" give me chills.

Karl...

(Laughter)

Let's not forget that olde Scottische delicacy, Haggis. Never had any, but it sounds rather like whiskey, an acquired taste.

I'll try Haggis before Blood-sausage.

Haggis before blood sausage. Sounds like a big night. How about a mushy peas starter? You'll definitely need to round that off with some whisky.

107: Laphroaig, right? (Sp?)

Ah, the best whiskey in America is made by a guy just down the street. Nothing over thirty days old. Clear as water. It'll knock your socks off.

After blood sausage, I'll just go straight to the heroin. Heroin is low carb after all ;)

Pfft. Haggis is vile. Even with tatties and neeps. It is the Brussel sprout of "vaguely unidentifiable national foodstuffs made out of the innards of a farm animal".

Oh, my! Brussels Sprouts are glorious bites of the food of the Gods. The ruler of the vegetable kingdom.

My 8 year old nephew calls Brussel sprouts "salad balls". Personally, I think they're disgusting and I won't even eat them at Christmas. Likewise turnips, swedes, mangelwurzels or parsnips.

I've always been puzzled how people discovered you could eat some things. Like oysters. They look and taste like rancid snot. Who discovered they were edible? Why did he decide they were edible? "I know," he thought, "I'll just try this shellfish here that looks like a consumptive's bogie and... um, lovely, it tastes just like it looks. I'll tell everyone it's an aphrodisiac." And fugu fish? When people died eating it, why did they carry on finding different ways to prepare it? Why didn't they give up because it was poisonous? Did some chef go, "No, I'm really really really sure we can eat it safely... oh, has another one just died? Let me see, there must be some way of cooking it so it doesn't kill them..." He should have been locked up.

Raw oysters are only good fresh in close proximity to a coastal area. Then again, the English haven't had the best luck in the culinary world when it came to fish. Fish and chips just seems like an abomination, all deep fried into oblivion. And fugu fish is culinary death-tripping. The equivalent of bungee jumping with your taste buds. The same category as steak tartare. Delicious in that Mad Cow kinda way ;)

But what's the alternative, Wonder Bread and Mayonnaise? I wouldn't mind doing what Anthony Bourdain did and eat a live cobra heart. Yummy!

I don't believe you. Oyster can never be good. They will always resemble a leper's snot, and taste just as vile.

And what's wrong with fish and chips, eh? I don't see how you can criticise it given that your country invented... the hamburger....

>114 kswolff: - the British only really deep fry two types of fish for fish & chips - cod in England, haddock in Scotland. Most other fish gets cooked in other ways.

Re haggis - despite being Scottish I'm not a particularly big fan of it but it's OK. Most of consists of oatmeal and onion, etc. You can actually get decent vegetarian haggis.

Re black pudding/blood sausage - both of these are excellent if they are properly spiced, that's the secret. A black pudding roll topped with a fried egg is a recommended hangover breakfast.

What amazed me about food in the States is that you got lots of it but most of it tasted of....nothing.

Things that really make so no sense are - non-alcoholic beer & decaf coffee. What is the point of drinking them then?

#117. Agreed. Also Quorn bacon. If you're a vegetairan, you shouldn't be eating something that tastes of meat.

#116 We fry more than two types. There's also plaice. And monkfish. Most chippies here in Yorkshire offer a choice of three - cod, haddock or plaice.

I haven't mapped out the connection between Bulwer-Lytton and haggis, but there is a funny food episode in Johnson & Boswell's trip to Scotland. (I've given my copy away, so I'm paraphrasing): Boswell advises their hostess to offer Johnson cold sheep's-head for breakfast. Johnson declines, the lady insists, Johnson declines vociferously. Boswell must have been blowing tea out of his nose.
Could someone who understands please explain what cold sheep's-head is? (Assuming it's something other than cold sheep's head).

You've all put me off my breakfast this morning.

Even Mini-Wheats look unappealing right now.

Cereals are bad for you. They stick sugar in them to make them cripsy, then cover them in salt to get rid of the sugary taste. You're better off eating the packaging.

Well, I'm off to eat some dry wholewheat toast. Anyone slaps a fish on top and I'll rip out their trachea.

You want to be careful with muesli too. I had some once in the Middle East - I poured the milk in, and all the currants swam to the edge of the bowl and climbed out.

I'd like to point out the British Navy no longer practices cannibalism. Jenkins! Put that down!

> 119 - I'm afraid cold sheep's head is exactly what it sounds like. My father (79 going on 15) claims his mother would receive it from the butchers with grass still in the teeth.

And Haddock, properly fried in a beer batter and beef dripping, is a food for the gods, so long as you buy it in Britain, somewhere north of about Doncaster.
I am told that dahn sarf things are not nearly as civilised.

And to go back to Bulwer-Lytton, how can we discuss nourishment without mentioning Vril, the motive power of the underworld supermen and (allegedly) certain Nazis?

"...with grass still in the teeth."

Now I'm the one shooting tea from my nose!

I'm waiting for someone to post a REALLY good sheep's head recipe.

Something tells me someone in this group's got one...

Take one sheep. Behead it. Boil the head.

Sounds like a quality jihadi recipe.

Nah. They use goats.

When I lived in Abu Dhabi, I couldn't get to sleep the night before Eid Al-Adha for all the goats bleating, and the following day there was goat blood on the pavements and the occasional cardboard box with a goat's head in it.

Ummm, goat's head! Don't the Brits make a soup from it?

Keep in mind while eating all that nerve tissue, (brains, mostly) that prions are impervious to normal heating temperatures. Cooking will not prevent Jakob-Kreutzfeldt. The only way to be safe is just not to eat the stuff at all.

As far as American food being tasteless, that's not so. Our food has nuances of flavor that a palate raised on liver, kidney, tripe, tongue, brains, blood, and other organ meats cannot begin to fathom.

Sweet Jesus but it's a good thing I'm only having coffee right now. Some of those last few comments... between the rapidly evacuating currants and the grassy teeth I nearly wet myself.

My wife's mother used to tell her that brussel sprouts were "God's little cabbages for children" and that the vitamins in bread were all in the crust. My wife bought that last one until she was about 20 and saw bread being baked on television (now THAT must have been some compelling entertainment) and announced "what the hell...BREAD IS ALL THE SAME STUFF!?!?!?"

Didn't the Stones have an album called "Goat's Head Soup"?

indeed the stones did - "late early period."
Brussels sprouts - they all went to our pet dog, Lisa, who would eat anything slipped to her under the table.
Massive fail when my Jewish mom tried "roots food" on her family - cows brains and tongue were totally left untouched. So she went back to Julia Childs, Craig Clairborne and the Joy of Cooking, thank goodness. (well i'm sure she found tongue and brains in the Joy..but there's just about everything between those covers)

Thanks, Karl, I was afraid that one just went thud.

As you probably know, The Rolling Stones "Sympathy for the Devil" was inspired by The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.

I love Julia Child(R.I.P.). She was such a jolly drunk.

In complete terror, I have often seen my father eat cow brains, tongue, and mountain oysters(sheep testicles) which are also sometimes called lamb fries(remember this so you can avoid it if you ever see it on a menu).

This is probably why I was vegan for five years in the 1980's. These days I enjoy nothing more than a good porterhouse and a blue chimay.

These days I enjoy nothing more than a good porterhouse and a blue chimay.

Great, now I'm drooling all over my keyboard (after having just finished my proper little turkey sandwich).

BTW, the old Dan Ackroyd send-up of Julia Child was one of the most genuinely hilarious things I have ever seen in my life.

I was in college, watching Julia Child (I like food, ok), with a friend. It was an astonishing, short conversation.

Friend: What are you watching?
Me: Come on! Julia Child!
F: That's a woman?!
Me: We're not friends anymore.

That ex-friend's name? Timmy Bulwer-Lytton.
(Not really, just trying to get back on track.)

Did this conversation occur on a dark and stormy night?

I've gotten enough crap from friends for watching documentaries on historic mansions and wanting to go to museums. America's Castles -- love that show. Then again, these same friends tell me how kewl the Da Vinci Code is. We're good friends from college, but in re: books and music, never the twain shall meet. He listened to Jimmy Buffett, I listened to NIN, yet somehow we avoided to kill each other ;)

138
http://www.hulu.com/watch/3523/saturday-night-live-the-french-chef

Ok, maybe not as funny as I remembered, but still pretty good. Not for the squeamish.

What the hell, here's another:

http://www.fargotube.com/fargo/view.aspx?1317

My apologies to Bulwer-Lytton for veering so far off topic.

Very funny indeed. But to me nothing is more entertaining than Julia Child herself. As Julia said "A few drops of cognac never hurt anything".

Julia in '78.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBQD3aSZ9R4