dalliance wrote: His brilliantly withering turn of phrase remains intact but I'm not sure you'd want to wade through 475 pages to pick out all the good examples.
Agree with that. In hindsight, it would have enriched my life more if I'd waded through the Avon Gorge at low tide than the 200 or so pages I've tackled so far, but there have been one or two lines that made me chuckle audibly.
Nothing to do with a turn of phrase, but the anecdote about the bloke from the record company being so chuffed about the success of one of the albums that he presented Morrissey with a bag of biscuits has been the highlight of my festive season thus far.
Santa has delivered me a copy of this book plus another belter in Dominic Sandbrook's State of Emergency. Clearly I've been naughtier this year than I can remember.
"Imagine, for example, if you were in a nightclub and someone said to you: 'Hello, I enjoy bloodshed, throat-slitting and the destruction of life,' well, I doubt if you'd want to exchange phone numbers," he said.
I actually did guffaw out loud at that article. I would rather he be having a go at us meat-eaters rather than ethnic minorities. I am waiting for a vegetarian paedophile to take exception though.
£4.49 in Morrisons this afternoon.
I wonder if he'll be happy with that? Hmmm happy? Hmmm meat products available? Hmmmm at least its a Northernish supermarket. I just hope the shelf stacker didnt stack any spam tins without washing their hands.
Christ's tits, that is a weak lemon drink excuse for a hatchet job (and if you can't get some decent pisstaking into a review of that thing you should be ashamed of yourself). Gill's hoist by his own petard; he doesn't even have the requisite intelligence to outwit Morrissey on home turf.
Like, look at what's wrong with this sentence, which follows a praised but unimpressive quotation from Moz's tome (which he says "stands out", twice in 100 words):
That has the sense of being both revelatory and touching, but it stands out like the reflection of the moon in a sea of Stygian self-justification and stilted self-conscious prose.
That's not a parody of Morrissey's style or anything; he's actually aiming to be superior by writing prose as misguidedly aspirational as his subject's. He thinks you'd have a sea that's like the underworld's river Styx, and that the moon being somehow reflected on it is a handy simile for an enlightening passage in an otherwise duff book. This is student paper standard, wouldn't have been published in a real paper even ten years ago, I reckon.
"All of this takes quite a lot of time due to the amount of curlicues, falderals and bibelots he insists on dragging along as authorial decoration. Instead of adding colour or depth, they simply result in a cacophony of jangling, misheard and misused words."
While I can quite imagine that Morrissey's book is a bit crap, it should not ever be forgotten that AA Gill is a racist, homophobic, sexist, baboon-killing piece of shit of the lowest kind. There are few people who cede the moral ground to Morrissey before they even start, but Gill is one.
He could have tortured an immigrant trans* Gila monster for all I know, but lay a tepid piece like that on me when I awake in the middle of the night and you cross a line.
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