Books Category
The latest books and literature reviews, comment, features and interviews, with extracts from famous texts and neglected gems.
KLF issue instructions for getting your book signed
If you want the KLF to sign your book, you’ll need to obey their rules.
On my way to Liverpool for the KLF thing and what’s shaping up to be the greatest book signing in pop history (pic via Kristy off Facebook) pic.twitter.com/nwHBxHwKns
— Peter Robinson (@Popjustice) August 22, 2017
Please listen carefully…
Welcome To The Dark Ages volunteer rules and regulations#k2planthire #jams #klf #theklf 2023 pic.twitter.com/z35sV5sjzD
— Bido Lito! (@BidoLito) August 22, 2017
Posted: 23rd, August 2017 | In: Books, Celebrities, Music, The Consumer | Comment
Children’s book confuses readers with 5 bananas graphic
“I imagine a child learning to count from this book and then just being incredibly confused for the rest of their life,” writes GooseHerder on Reddit.
Posted: 10th, August 2017 | In: Books, Strange But True | Comment
Stephen King’s recipe for successful writing
Stephen King In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft addresses the importance of a good night’s sleep and become a better writer:
Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule — in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk — exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.
In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night — six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight — so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.
How do you achieve wakeful dreams?
The space can be humble … and it really needs only one thing: A door you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world that you mean business. . . .
If possible, there should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall. For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it’s best to try and take care of them before you write. … When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.
Nonsense, of course. Distraction is welcome. Although it does reduce the risk of some spilling coffee on your laptop.
Spotter: Brain Pickings
Why Hunter S. Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby & A Farewell to Arms word for word
Learning to write is hard. Leaning to write well is a grind. Hunter S. Thompson put in the hard yards, typing out whole pages of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He did this “just to get the feeling,” writes Louis Menand at The New Yorker, “of what it was like to write that way.”
Johnny Depp told The Guardian:
“He’d look at each page Fitzgerald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once. Because he wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece.”
Josh Jones adds:
In a 1958 letter to his hometown girlfriend Ann Frick, Thompson named the Fitzgerald and Hemingway novels as two especially influential books, along with Brave New World, William Whyte’s The Organization Man, and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (or “Girls before Girls”), a novel that “hardly belongs in the abovementioned company,” he wrote, and which he did not, presumably, copy out on his typewriter at work. Surely, however, many a Thompson close reader has discerned the traces of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway in his work, particularly the latter, whose macho escapades and epic drinking bouts surely inspired more than just Thompson’s writing.
Spotter: Open Culture
Posted: 11th, June 2017 | In: Books, Celebrities | Comment
Vladimir Putin is playing things by the book: this book
Is Vladimir Putin following a book, namely The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia by Aleksandr Dugin, aka “Putin’s Brain”. You can read it on Wikipedia:
The book declares that “the battle for the world rule of [ethnic] Russians” has not ended and Russia remains “the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution.” The Eurasian Empire will be constructed “on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.”
The United Kingdom should be cut off from Europe.
Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics”.
The book stresses the “continental Russian-Islamic alliance” which lies “at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy”. The alliance is based on the “traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilization”.
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke “Afro-American racists”. Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements — extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics.”
Spotter: Kottke
Posted: 6th, June 2017 | In: Books, Politicians | Comment
The screaming abdabs: Anthony Burgess’s Dictionary of Slang
Anthony Burgess,
Manchester-born writer and academic Anthony Burgess began work on a dictionary of slang – “the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.”
Entries in A from Anthony Burgess’s lost dictionary of slang
Abdabs (the screaming) – Fit of nerves, attack of delirium tremens, or other uncontrollable emotional crisis. Perhaps imitative of spasm of the jaw, with short, sharp screams.
Abdicate – In poker, to withdraw from the game, forfeiting all money or chips put in the pot.
Abfab – Obsolescent abbreviation of absolutely fabulous, used by Australian teenagers or ‘bodgies’.
Abortion – Anything ugly, ill-shapen, or generally detestable: ‘You look a right bloody abortion, dressed like that’; ‘a nasty little abortion of a film’ (Australian in origin).
Abyssinia – I’ll be seeing you. A valediction that started during the Italo-Abyssinian war. Obsolete, but so Joyceanly satisfying that it is sometimes hard to resist.
Accidental(ly) on purpose – Deliberately, but with the appearance of accident: ‘So I put me hand on her knee, see, sort of accidental on purpose.’ (Literary locus classicus: Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, 1923.)
Arse – I need not define. The taboo is gradually being broken so that plays on the stage and on radio and television introduce the term with no protest. The American Random House Dictionary … is still shy of it, however, though not of the American colloquialism ass. Arse is a noble word; ass is a vulgarism.
NOTE: Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is cited three times in the historical Oxford English Dictionary: ‘thou’, ‘your’ and ‘droog’ which was invented by Burgess in the novel and appears on the first page: “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim.”
Via: The Anthony Burgess Foundation and Flashbak, which has more.
Posted: 3rd, June 2017 | In: Books, Celebrities | Comment
This Is How We Dot It: the daily lives of seven kids in seven countries
This Is How We Do It by Matt Lamothe features the daily routines of seven children from different countries around the world (Japan, Peru, Iran, Russia, India, Italy, and Uganda).
In Japan Kei plays Freeze Tag, while in Uganda Daphine likes to jump rope. But while the way they play may differ, the shared rhythm of their days — and this one world we all share — unites them. This genuine exchange provides a window into traditions that may be different from our own as well as a mirror reflecting our common experiences.
Spotter: Kottke
F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook: the recipe for every faddish dinner you’ve ever had
Faddish, modish food was played with brilliantly in 1932, when Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) published Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook, a cookbook that would trigger a “revolution of cuisine”. Humans, said Marinetti, “think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink”.
The introduction is choice:
Contrary to the predictable criticisms, the Futurist culinary revolution, illustrated in this volume, is aimed at the high end, noble and useful at all to radically change the power of our race, fortifying, dynamizing and spiritualizing it with brand new dishes in which experience, intelligence and imagination economically replace the amount, the banality, repetition and the cost. Our futuristic kitchen, set like a seaplane engine for high speeds, will seem crazy to some trembling and dangerous traditionalist. It wants to eventually create a harmony between the palate of men and their lives today and tomorrow… It is optimism at the table.
Suzanne Brill notes:
Futurist food was full of suggestiveness and provocation. Sex was one topic, the thrill of air travel another. Along with recipes for “Sculpted Meat” and “Man-and-Woman-at-Midnight” came whole scenarios for acting out themed meals while sitting in a biplane. The art chefs of our day, Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià, surely perpetuate what Marinetti began.
By way of a taster, here’s the recipe for The Excited Pig: A “whole salami, skinned” is cooked in strong espresso coffee and flavored with eau-de-cologne.”
Spotter: Flashbak, which has a lot more on FT Marinetti’s recipe book.
Posted: 1st, May 2017 | In: Books, The Consumer | Comment
500 Years of “Vulgar Tongue” Slang In One Dictionary
If you’ve ever wondered about the meaning of obscure words, Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the place to go.
“The three volumes of Green’s Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the English language, it covers slang from the past five centuries right up to the present day, from all the different English-speaking countries and regions. Totaling 10.3 million words and over 53,000 entries, the collection provides the definitions of 100,000 words and over 413,000 citations. Every word and phrase is authenticated by genuine and fully-referenced citations of its use, giving the work a level of authority and scholarship unmatched by any other publication in this field.”
Green tells us a bout the roots of slang:
Slang is a product of the city and without cities there is no slang. London was a great city – in contemporary terms – by the 16th century, and was seen as such before that. It had upper, middle and working classes. But slang is also a product of the street, a bottom-up creation, and as such condemned as a debased and marginal lexis. In a world where printing was still a relative novelty, and books therefore tended to be devoted to the concerns of the educated and powerful, slang was simply ignored. It is my belief that just as the criminals of the 16th century used their own non-standard language, there existed alongside it a non-criminal slang vocabulary, used primarily, as it is now, by the poor.
He adds:
I would call slang a ‘counter-language’, the desire of human beings, when faced by a standard version, of whatever that may be, to come up with something different, perhaps parallel, perhaps oppositional. For me, that is what slang does in terms of language.
See more at Green’s Dictionary of Slang. I hope to featrrue his writings and work on Flashbak.
You can buy George W. Bush’s portraits of US military veterans
Former US president George W. Bush’s portrait of post-9/11 US veterans is on sale. Called Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, all author proceeds will be donated to the George W. Bush Presidential Center, “a non-profit organization whose Military Service Initiative works to ensure that post-9/11 veterans and their families make successful transitions to civilian life with a focus on gaining meaningful employment and overcoming the invisible wounds of war”.
The book’s authorship and the eponymous ‘Center’ suggest the project is mostly about Bush, rather than the veterans. But do we mind the grandstanding so long as the hurt get help?
Can we overlook what many see as the ‘lies‘ that led to Bush declaring the “second stage of the war on terror” on 11 March 2002, six months after 9/11? The Bush administration went looking for the enemy. It identified Saddam Hussein and then hunted around for a cause to get him. Was the Iraqi leader behind 9/11? Did Saddam have Weapons of mass destruction?
Was it as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it ‘the latest chapter in the culture wars, the conservative dream of restoring America’s sense of Manifest Destiny. Extirpating Saddam is about proving how tough we are to a world that thinks we got soft when that last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975’?
Is this book a self-help book for Bush, who only continued the long-held US policy of intervening in foreign affairs?
The book’s blurb tells us:
Each painting in this meticulously produced hardcover volume is accompanied by the inspiring story of the veteran depicted, written by the President. Readers can see the faces of those who answered the nation’s call and learn from their bravery on the battlefield, their journeys to recovery, and the continued leadership and contributions they are making as civilians. It is President Bush’s desire that these stories of courage and resilience will honor our men and women in uniform, highlight their family and caregivers who bear the burden of their sacrifice, and help Americans understand how we can support our veterans and empower them to succeed.
So long as it helps, right…
Posted: 5th, March 2017 | In: Books, Politicians | Comment
Game of Thrones spoilers
Books. Ever hear of them? The Sun says “SHOCK LEAK Game of Thrones fans sent into a frenzy as ‘entire plot for season seven leaks online’”. Games of Thrones is based on a series of books by George R.R. Martin. If you want to know what happens in the TV version, why not just, you know, read the books?
Yes, yes, the TV version does differ from the books. Producer David Benioff says the show is “about adapting the series as a whole and following the map George laid out for us and hitting the major milestones, but not necessarily each of the stops along the way”. But you get the gist of the plot.
The Mail says “a Reddit user going by the name awayforthelads posted an enormous list of very detailed spoilers”.
How do we know to trust awayforthelads? Maybe they made it up? After all, the Sun looks at the leaks and says it is”reveals a pregnancy and a saucy romp between two main characters”. Sex in Game of Thrones is like the weather at the end of the evening news. It’s expected. As for a pregnancy, the show is about dynasties. Kids are part of the process.
And then comes the truly conniving part: the Mail wants to turn the taps open on that leak.
If you want to read the leaks, you can, of course. If you enjoy escapism, you might want to pass over the leaks and just wait for the entertainment.
Posted: 8th, November 2016 | In: Books, Reviews, Tabloids, TV & Radio | Comment
Howard Gayle and ‘Digger’ Barnes: When Liverpool FC rejected racism
Howard Gayle was the first black footballer to play for Liverpool. The State wanted to reward Toxteth-born Gayle for footballing whilst black and working with the anti-racism charity Kick It Out with an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire). But Gayle, 58, was unimpressed.
He explains why he rejected the gong:
If they want to be inclusive and accepting of black people around the UK and the Commonwealth, then they need to change the title of it – as it’s an exclusive club being an MBE or OBE or one of those gongs.
A lot of people around the world contacted me to say they accepted my decision and that the title of MBE did rankle.
In his book 61 Minutes In Munich, Gaytle talks about the racism that was rife in football and society. In the 1970s and 1980s, English football was infected by racism.
Gayle recalls an episode with Liverpool enforcer Tommy ‘Anfield Iron’ Smith.
Tommy tried to distract me by making nasty comments related to the colour of my skin. For a while, I somehow managed to restrain myself…
I received the ball, controlled it, and lashed a shot towards goal. Tommy Smith was on the other team and it hit him on the leg. It clearly stung and some of the other players started laughing. I had a smile on my face as well. I saw it as karma. Tommy responded with a tirade of abuse. It was ‘black this, black that’.
The place went quiet. Everybody could hear it, including the staff. He was a legend. I was a nothing. Nobody said a word.
I’d had enough of him (Smith): this bitter old man. So I went over and squared up: nose to nose. I looked at him dead in the eye.
“You know what, Tommy; one night you’ll be taking a piss at home and I’ll be there waiting for you with a baseball bat,” I said, calmly. “And then we’ll see what you’ve got to say.”
I wanted to start a fight with him. And then he walked away…
Graeme Souness was the only one that came over in the immediate aftermath. “Well done, Howard,” he said. “Tommy deserved that”. Graeme was a true leader.
Other might have just lamped Smith.
He adds:
After I left, John Barnes became the first black player to be signed by Liverpool from another club. He quickly earned the nickname of ‘Digger’, after Digger Barnes in the Dallas television series. Personally, I wouldn’t have accepted that because of its closeness to the ‘N’ word.
Hyper-sensitive? Seeing racial undertones in a nickname given to player who would be idolised at Anfield?
Things have changed. Now professional football might well be the lest colour conscious occupation in Britain – one in four of professional footballers is black.
Via: Guardian
Posted: 7th, October 2016 | In: Back pages, Books, Liverpool, Sports | Comment
Jamie Vardy’s skittles vodka and Sam Allardyce’s pint of wine
Jamie Vardy is plugging his autobiography. The Leicester City and England striker tells a good story in From Nowhere.
I had a three-litre vodka bottle at home I would put loads of Skittles sweets in. After that, you can drink the vodka neat and it tastes just like Skittles. When I was bored at home in the evening I’d pour myself a glass, sit back and enjoy. The vodka was decent but it wasn’t doing much for my dead leg, which didn’t stop bleeding for ages.
Dave Rennie, the physio, said he couldn’t believe it wasn’t improving. He’d seen a torn calf muscle heal quicker. He pulled me aside one day when nobody else was about.
“What are you doing?” Dave asked.
“Nothing I wouldn’t normally do,” I replied. Then I explained that what I’d normally do was drink Skittle vodka.
“Well, that will be why, then,” Dave said.
In other news, during a sting which has caused England manager Sam Allardyce to be investigated by the FA, he appears to have drank a pint of wine. The Guardian notes:
One question our useful feature doesn’t answer is what exactly is the England boss drinking in the picture on the front page of the Telegraph. The beverage is in a pint glass but it’s definitely not beer and doesn’t look like lager. Football365 are suggesting it’s wine…
A pint of wine? Skittles vodka. It’s like the football revolution with it microbiotic diets and image rights never happened. Football might have been repackaged for the lentil-munching classes, telling us to sit down, shut up and pay up, but here is evidence that something of the old game lingers. And you know what – we love it, don’t we.
Estate by Robert Clayton: buy the book, see the show, love the pictures
Robert Clayton’s Estate is now on display in a major solo exhibition at Four Corners, 121 Roman Road, London E2.
The exhibition also sees the launch of his new short film about the work featuring Jonathan Meades. Large scale prints and a film are on show for free until May 29th.
Find out more here.
You can see a selection of Robert’s wonderful photographs on flashbak.
And then you can buy the book. Do so. It’s really terrific. Buy it here.
Posted: 16th, May 2016 | In: Books, Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Kenneth Williams’ last diary entry is a powerful read
Kenneth Williams (22 February 1926 – 15 April 1988). His diary entry for the day before he died is a powerful read:
Posted: 15th, April 2016 | In: Books, Celebrities | Comment
Punctuation in novels: words stripped from books leaving only the punctuation
Punctuation in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (left) and in Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (right).
Adam J Calhoun stripped two books of words:
Inspired by a series of posters, I wondered what did my favorite books look like without words. Can you tell them apart or are they all a-mush? In fact, they can be quite distinct. Take my all-time favorite book, Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. It is dense prose stuffed with parentheticals. When placed next to a novel with more simplified prose — Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy — it is a stark difference (see above).
The beauty of good punctuation.
For sale: Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth
You can own a map of Middle-Earth annotated by Tolkien. Some lucky so-and-so found the map slipped inside a copy of Lord of the Rings. It’s yours for £60,000.
It shows what Blackwell’s called “the exacting nature” of Tolkien’s creative vision: he corrects place names, provides extra ones, and gives Baynes a host of suggestions about the map’s various flora and fauna. Hobbiton, he notes, “ is assumed to be approx at latitude of Oxford”; Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University.
The novelist also uses Belgrade, Cyprus, and Jerusalem as other reference points, and according to Blackwell’s suggests that “the city of Ravenna is the inspiration behind Minas Tirith – a key location in the third book of the Lord of The Rings trilogy”.
“The map shows how completely obsessed he was with the details. Anyone else interfered at their peril,” said Sian Wainwright at Blackwell’s. “He was tricky to work with, but very rewarding in the end.”
He also drew these maps:
Posted: 24th, October 2015 | In: Books, Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Lou Reed was a charmless ‘racist wife-beater’
Lou Reed wasn’t everyone’s best pal. A new biography by Howard Sounes labels Reed a racist, a sexist and a wife-beater. Reed was a man “with so little personal charm he would be regularly discharged from private gatherings.
“I loved his music, but you have to go where the story goes. The obituaries were a bit too kind, he was really a very unpleasant man. A monster really; I think truly the word monster is applicable.”
Monster?
1974/05/18 – Charlton FC
Posted: 13th, October 2015 | In: Books, Celebrities, Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Manchester United: Alex Ferguson ‘reveals the real reason’ he quit Old Trafford (again)
Sir Alex Ferguson today “reveals the real reason for his retirement as Manchester United manager” to the Daily Telegraph. It’s an “exclusive“. But really it’s just part of Fergie’s marketing for his new book, Leading. And is the news a revelation? Not really, no.
Sir Alex Ferguson would have stayed on as the most successful manager in English football history, but for the death of his wife Cathy’s twin sister, Bridget Robertson, which persuaded him to retire to be by her side.
Says the great manager:
“I definitely would have carried on. I saw she [Lady Cathy Ferguson] was watching television one night, and she looked up at the ceiling. I knew she was isolated. “Her and Bridget were twins, you know?… When I told her this time I was going to retire she had no objection whatsoever. I knew she wanted me to do it.”
And that’s it.
In his last autobiography, Sir Alex told readers why he left Manchester United:
The seeds of my decision to step down had been planted in the winter of 2012. Around Christmas- time the thought became sharp and clear in my head: ‘I’m going to retire.’ ‘Why are you going to do that?’ Cathy said. ‘Last season, losing the title in the last game, I can’t take another one like that,’ I told her. ‘I just hope we can win the League this time and reach the Champions League or FA Cup final. It would be a great ending.’ Cathy, who had lost her sister Bridget in October, and was struggling to come to terms with that bereavement, soon agreed it was the right course. Her take was that if I wanted to do other things with my life I would still be young enough.
Contractually I was obliged to notify the club by 31 March if I was going to stand down that summer. By coincidence David Gill had called me one Sunday in February and asked if he could come to see me at home. A Sunday afternoon? ‘I bet he’s resigning as chief executive,’ I said. ‘Either that or you’re getting sacked,’ Cathy said. David’s news was that he would be standing down as chief executive at the end of the season. ‘Bloody hell, David,’ I said. And I told him that I had reached the same decision. In the days that followed, David rang to tell me to expect a call from the Glazers. When it came I assured Joel Glazer that my decision had nothing to do with David relinquishing day-to-day control. My mind had been made up over Christmas, I told him. I explained the reasons. Cathy’s sister dying in October had changed our lives. Cathy felt isolated. Joel understood. We agreed to meet in New York, where he tried to talk me out of retiring. I told him I appreciated the effort he was making and thanked him for his support. He expressed his gratitude for all my work. With no prospect of a change in my thinking, the discussion turned to who might replace me.
…
One great difficulty, in the days around the announcement, was telling the staff at Carrington, our training ground. I particularly remember mentioning the changes in my life and Cathy’s sister dying, and hearing a sympathetic, ‘Aaah.’
Not quite the revelation it’s billed as, then.
Posted: 19th, September 2015 | In: Books, manchester united, Sports | Comment
Liverpool balls: Rafa Benitez has Steven Gerrard’s number in phone call spat
Steven Gerrard has told us about his gashed penis, how he bleeds Liverpool red and “hates” Manchester United. Now Gerrard uses his new book to reveal his thoughts on former Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez.
“I can pick up the phone and speak to all of my previous Liverpool managers, except for Rafa. It’s a shame because we shared the biggest night of our careers – the 2005 Champions League victory in Istanbul – yet there is no bond between us.”
Benitez, now manager of Real Madrid, has responded:
“I have read the quotes and I believe he is wrong because what we have to do is enjoy. And out of the respect that I have for Stevie and for the value and appreciation I have for him, and for Liverpool and the supporters I think it’s best to just let it pass.”
That’s a dignified response from a man who has thrived in the hotbed of top-flight football management – and whose family still live in the Liverpool area.
But Rafa had one more thing to say:
“He has brought out a book and now I’m the Real Madrid manager, that sells.”
Wonder what Rafa will have to say when his own book hits the shelves?
Posted: 15th, September 2015 | In: Books, Liverpool, Sports | Comment
Liverpool balls: Stephen Gerrard gets a gash on his penis in Bournemouth
Nice tackle
In today’s extract from Stephen Gerrard autobiography, the Daily Mail shares this anecdote with readers:
“The magic of the FA Cup was bloodied on the day my penis was cut and then stitched shut on an unromantic afternoon in Bournemouth last year. It was eye-watering. I tried to close down a winger to block his cross but felt a stinging in my privates. I thought, ‘S*** — that doesn’t feel right!’ It was stinging like f***. The gash looked pretty bad, right across the middle. There was plenty of blood. I needed four stitches and the lads were absolutely p*ssing themselves. You can imagine the jokes about inches and stitches and my future performances at home.”
File under: ball control.
Posted: 13th, September 2015 | In: Books, Liverpool, Reviews, Sports | Comment
Liverpool: Steven Gerrard reveals what would have made him stay at Anfield
The Daily Mail is puffing its interview with former Liverpool and England captain Steven Gerrard.
I might have stayed if Liverpool offered me the right job, reveals the Kop legend
Might have. Before we get to his latest words, it’s worth recalling what Gerrard said in May 2015:
“I am looking forward to being able to breathe and play football under a little less pressure and going back to days when maybe before I was in the first team at Liverpool when you really enjoyed your football and there’s not that responsibility and pressure.”
The Mail’s exclusive are is a trail for Gerrard’s” explosive book”, which the paper is serialising.
Says Gerrard:
“Yeah, I do miss it. I miss everything about it. When I switch on the TV and see the stadiums, with 50, 60, 70,000 people — the aggression, the intensity, the tension. I am jealous. I miss the build-up, competing with better players, I miss being Steven Gerrard, Liverpool captain and walking out in front of my people with that pressure and trying to get a result for them.”
But the bit we want to know is how Gerrard could have remained at Anfield?
“Ability-wise, I could still play but physically I couldn’t play every game at my age… I might be contradicting myself here but what would have kept me at Liverpool into this season was the chance of shadowing Brendan Rodgers and his staff as well as playing. Those ideas were only mentioned to me after I had announced I was leaving.
“I don’t know if I am going to be good enough to be a manager, or a No 1, No 2, No 3 or No 4. Liverpool replaced coaches Colin Pascoe and Mike Marsh in the summer, so they were looking for a new No 2, or No 3 or No 4. I would have been tailor-made to fill one of these roles, as well as making myself available as a squad player. I could have been a good squad player, a good sub, as well as getting management experience that money can’t buy.”
So much for being able to breathe.
“I’d have stayed on as a squad player if I’d had the chance to learn more about management or coaching. I left with all the doors still open, but yes, I could still have been at Liverpool now.”
Posted: 11th, September 2015 | In: Books, Liverpool, Sports | Comment
