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Christmas funny books

Bevis Hillier

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Stocking fillers

It’s a very useful phrase, as there is no English equivalent; but my doughty French dictionary by Paul Robert and Jan Collins has ‘ésprit d’escalier’, without the definite article — ‘to be slow on the repartee’. Which version is right? Or are both acceptable? For elucidation, I wrote to the French embassy and received a helpful reply from Paul Fournel, whose formal title is Attaché Culturel pour le Livre. He says that either is OK, but that Mark Daniel’s version is ‘maybe a little more common’. He adds: ‘I guess the first apparition of this expression was in Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le Comédien.’

I’m not up in pop music since the Beatles, but I have got a lot of laughs from Tom Reynolds’s Touch Me, I’m Sick: The 52 Creepiest Love Songs You’ve Ever Heard (Portrait, £9.99). This is a more enjoyable sequel (or sick-well) to the same author’s I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard (2005). The title of the new book is derived from ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick’, a song by Mudhoney — ‘an unwashed Seattle grunge outfit’. Reynolds thought it would be nice to follow up a book of depression with one of obsession. ‘Modern romance,’ he writes, ‘has turned into a cruel spectator sport…’

Each entry in the book is divided into ‘The song’ and ‘Why it’s creepy’. In most cases one hardly needs the exegesis. This is part of what Reynolds has to say about ‘Don’t Stop Swaying’ — written, composed and performed by Sophie B. Hawkins, released 1992 (no chart position):

Welcome to the creepiest and worst love song ever written … Once you hear it you Won’t Stop Barfing Until She Stops Singing …When I started the song it creeped me out right away because I had it on headphones and the first thing I heard was Hawkins whispering something like ‘looks good, put it in your hair’ or ‘cooks food, good with angel hair’, something like that, followed by those chimes you hear in films about children who kill their parents with pitchforks.

In Reynolds’s view, the song is about incest between Hansel and Gretel.

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