Jenny Diski's Blog, page 5

Rape-Rape

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 want...

All Eat All - from the latest London Review of Books

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, ...

Woof

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 o...

Book of a Lifetime Independent October 2008

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 wo...

Mark Steel & William Leith Review. Guardian August 2008

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 ...

Heston Blumenthal & elBulli Review. Sunday Times October 2008

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 f...

On Sleep from London Review of Books July 2008

If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep. Why would we ever allow ourselves to drop off if sleeping was entirely optional? Sleep is such a dangerous place to go to from consciousness: who in their right mind would give up awareness, deprive themselves of control of their senses, volunteer for paralysis, and risk all the terrible things (and worse) that could happen to a person when they're not looki...

Review in London Review of Books November 2008

Help-Self Jenny Diski reviews All in the Mind by Alastair Campbell I recently received an email headed 'Literature and Madness Network' inviting me to the '1st Seminar of the Madness and Literature Network', which is to culminate in the '1st International Conference in Health Humanities' in 2010. Leave aside the use of the word 'network', and the mystery of 'Health Humanities': at least the upshot is a conference, which is something I can grasp. What got me stuck for a moment was the Literatu...