A gaudy volume, gross and florid,
too many pages stuffed into too fleshy covers.
An overweight volume.
Its greasy with expanded effort.
Each word
is pumped up with consonant cholesterol.
Its full of fat words.
The pages cream with subcutaneous fat,
New letters are guilded like showy teeth,
Making comprehension constipated and exorbitantly metalled.
This book needs to lose weight.
If you want to drop it, watch your feet.
Its a toe-breaker.
Its own weight would crush it's spine.
The pages have been liberally scented, but the aroma has palled and grown stale.
The pages smell of sour glue, or the bad breath of a liar
Determined to spend time smiling with sticky gums.
All sweet taste and no enduring substance.
All glitter and gases.
This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower
Which smells so bad after a good hot water soaking,
Like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet
Incompatibles blended incongruously to no purpose.
Chapter One promises excess.
Chapter Twelve proves the particular promise, truly wearisome.
A reader is required to sweat his way to comprehension,
Avoiding the craters of hyperbole that scar its pages.
Every adjective is underlined as though incapable of sitting still on the page,
Incapable of being an equal to its neighbour.
Its humour is heavy and vulgar full of expletives commanding you to appreciate its wit.
(The Pillow Book)
Page created 2 November 2004