Thursday, September 19, 2013

Horses for courses part 2


Given the horse-related reading material afforded by Bill Manhire, as related in the previous post,  I was about to introduce my pony-mad daughters to what I thought was a benign, child-friendly book, The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, his brilliant 1988 version of those children’s books that let you choose which page/chapter to read next. A typical example:
With one superhuman effort you strain at your bonds and burst free. If you have the Swiss Army Knife you should attack at once and rid the world of this madman once and for all. If so, go to 29.
If you think the better plan is to flee through the underground labyrinth go to 38.
And so on – but what was I thinking? Benign, child-friendly my arse.  Fortunately I skimmed it and found what I had forgotten, the spectacularly filthy joke on page 36 – not as filthy as the one in Vincent O’Sullivan’s Believers to the Bright Coast (which is so filthy that I will not provide a reference to it as this is a respectable blog), but a close runner-up. 

Also, there are no horses in it.

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