New Statesman -- different genre winners
No 4289
Set by J Seery
We asked you to send in an excerpt from an attempt at a different genre by a writer of your choice.
This week’s winners
Superb. The winners get £20, with the Tesco vouchers going, in addition, to Chris O’Carroll.
Richard Dawkins tries his hand at children’s fiction
“Daddy, Daddy!” cried Sarah excitedly. “There’s a unicorn
in the garden!”
“That is self-evidently absurd,” said Daddy. “No biological mechanism exists whereby any member of the family Equidae may generate a horn from its cranium.”
“But there is one,” Sarah insisted, a tear welling in her eye. “I saw it.”
“Can you produce any empirical evidence in support of your claim?”
“No,” Sarah mumbled.
“I thought so. So what do we say about unicorns, fairies and Father Christmas, Sarah?”
“They’re sinister fantasies designed to gull the credulous.”
“I suppose one must make allowances for the fact you’re only three,” sighed Daddy, “but pull a stunt like that again and I’ll have you adopted.”
Then they both had tea and chocolate cake and read On the Origin of Species. Again.
Rob Stuart
Hemingway on Macramé
There are those who will tell you that macramé is an effete skill and of no account except for women but do not believe them. In truth, it is an art that for men requires cojones, otherwise the mockery of other men will break your morale and you will be like the matador whose courage fails in the ring and deserving of mockery. Gertrude Stein would mock my macramé but she was herself without the skill and, moreover, a woman who had never known the love of a man.
It is in the knotting that courage must be shown and it will break those whose courage is not a true thing but a pretence, like the wig that is worn on the chest to fake virility. When I commenced macramé in the
year of Joselito’s fatal cornada, my knots unravelled and I had to learn to make them stronger.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Gaining Mastery in the Kitchen by E L James
The plump chicken is naked, tied up exactly as you desire. It is happy to be so helpless, so completely subject to your power. It is ready to be seasoned to your taste. It will feel the slippery smoothness of the butter as you slide the thick stick slowly and thoroughly around on its bare skin, adding a thin layer of gleam to the voluptuous swell of the bird’s breast and to its tightly trussed legs. It will feel the sandpaper roughness of coarse salt and freshly ground black peppercorns as you apply those flavour agents, smearing them hard across the curved surfaces. When the chicken’s red room of pain and fulfilment has been heated to roasting temperature, the bird will submit to the all-encompassing fire that transforms its flesh into a succulent masterpiece ready to be consumed.
Chris O’Carroll
James Joyce tries his hand at golden-age detective fiction
And so sherlocking Anna rivery Livia did outmarple and peregrinate wimseyley that haunt of bibliophiles. There lay the corpse mothernaked and entomed, breathless as a mermaid said Anna Livia, and what do we learn here from the bullet pock is it a bullet no it is mark of a hypodermic. So what said Anna Livia can we learn from this who had the hypodermic or was it hypnodermic transfusing Hamlet’s death sleep dreams all unwilled unlooked for when sleeping, his habit always in the afternoon? Who pricked and what say the Dublin-born sisters of Nausicaa can they unravel as Penelope her shroudweb? Let us question butler and cook especially cook-maid queen of the puddings but then where the nurse the doctor the addict for we must examine whowhenwhathow and mostly why. So said the Plurabelle . . .
Lydia Shaxberd
Instructions for Your Boiler by Virginia Woolf
Oh, what a lark! What a plunge, one muses, journeying home on a dreary city omnibus, heart pounding in breathless anticipation. A hush, a delicious moment of suspense, then (ecstasy!) one bursts open the box. Every woman needs her brand new Vaillant EcoTec Pro 28 combi boiler. To the toolbox? No! Better to await tomorrow, a wholly more auspicious day? Beginning, hesitating, beginning again – thinking, “What is the meaning of life?” That is all – the question simple, yet the great revelation never comes. Only little daily miracles, intimations. This, fully automatic, wall mounted, high efficiency, with need of neither copper cylinder, nor cold water tank, nor feed and expansion vessel, nor scale reducer – yes, perhaps this is that miracle.
David Silverman
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