“It was all too easy,” he said. “It all went too smoothly. America, you sit there, you plump beauty, still buying neckties from sidewalk sharpies, still guessing which walnut shell contains the pea… America, I sometimes worry about you.”
Category Archives: Frauds
Roast swan with green mashed potatoes
If, like Gert, you love big personalities with a sizeable helping of the fraud or impostor, you’ll enjoy this article by Edward White in The Paris Review about Fanny Cradock, the face and voice of cooking on British television from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s [who was] once described by one national newspaper as “a preposterous character, the foodie you loved to loathe.” She actually wasn’t much of a cook – mincemeat omelette, anyone? – but she was an excellent self-promoter, a brand before the time when celebrities were brands.
Frauds/freuds 8: the ‘Very Reverend’ Robert Parkin Peters
A damned talented elephant
The Path of Pollen or Frauds (freuds) 7
Lately we’re picking up a great deal of consternation in the media about bees, or the lack of them. Unrestrained use of fertilisers in the USA has killed off many of these essential pollinators, and now some canny operators are hiring out mobile bee-pollinating units and driving from one end of the country to the other with them. Continue reading The Path of Pollen or Frauds (freuds) 7
The Little Red Chairs-Edna O’Brien
‘Edna O’Brien was the first Irish woman to have sex,’ says Anne Enright in her Guardian review of O’Brien’s 2011 novel, The Light of Evening. She goes on to say for Irish women of that time, 1960, sex was mostly about having children.
Continue reading The Little Red Chairs-Edna O’Brien
Gurus in the Family Part 2 My Father’s Guru by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Jeffrey Masson’s father’s guru PB Brunton, known in the family as PB, unlike Sri Ramakrishna, was not given to ecstatic fits or animal possession. A small neat man with a pointed beard he inspired the devotion of Masson’s father Jacques and his uncle Bernard without performing any spectacular feats. Continue reading Gurus in the Family Part 2 My Father’s Guru by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson