Doug Newdick > Recent Status Updates

"Connell's initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys..."

"Without a murmur of dissent, the monkeys immediately bowed and wished their new king a long, long life. Their new ruler quickly dropped his old name - Stone Monkey - in favour of Beautiful Monkey King and appointed a few of the monkeys to ministerial and civil service positions." p 4

"That's money, the substance that makes the world real. There's something so corrupt and sexy about it." p 160

"He will learn to shudder in the trenches. But this girl cannot make him shudder." p 120 in The Lady of the House of Love

"So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious and resourceful as: PUSS-IN-BOOTS." p 95

If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us - mounts and riders both - could boast among us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, unsubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out. (p 70)

Finished the titular story - it was quite a tour de force.

“His wedding gift, clasped around my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.” P 6