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Pete Townshend yet again (fwd)
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From: Mvoscol@aol.com
Times Literary Supplement, January 31, p. 16 (No. 5209) ("NB"):
Pete Townshend, musician, librettist, Faber editor and author (Horse's Neck,
1985), stands accused of subscribing to a website that supplies images of
underage girls in sexually alluring poses, or in "hardcore" situations (we
haven't been told). Branded a "paedophile", Townshend can look forward to a
pariah's future. There may be worse things to be called in 2003 but, if so,
we cannot think what. Police in charge of "Operation Ore" have searched
Townshend's house in pursuit of proof. The star's stated defence is that he
subscribed to the site for purposes of "research".
Were they to break our own door, they would find what would surely be
interpreted as evidence of paedophiliac enthusiasm, in the form of a novel
published by the Olympia Press in 1955. It contains the following passage:
There I would sit, with ... nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her
gambol, rubber-capped, bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her
trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly
would I marvel that she was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent
matitudinal swoon ...
What that "swoon" entailed has been revealed a page earlier, in reference to
the narrator's relaxation "after a particularly violent morning in bed". The
later mention of "a quick connection before dinner" evokes a similar scene.
He attends to "all the wants of my little auburn brunette's body", and in
turn gives her "to hold in her awkward fist the sceptre of my passion". He
is possessed by a wolfish desire to turn her "inside out and apply voracious
lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the
sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely kidneys".
The book is, of course, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. For reasons we might
hard to explain to Inspector Knacker, we harbour no fewer than three copies
of it, including the "underground" Olympia edition. Lolita was banned,
unbanned and rebanned, and its original publisher, Maurice Girodias, endured
a long process of what he called "lolitigation". Mr. Townshend, whose only
alleged crime so far has been to go click-click, pay up and sin (if he did
sin) through cyberspace, can expect a lolitalot more than that.
Manfred Voss
Times Literary Supplement, January 31, p. 16 (No. 5209) ("NB"):
Pete Townshend, musician, librettist, Faber editor and author (Horse's Neck,
1985), stands accused of subscribing to a website that supplies images of
underage girls in sexually alluring poses, or in "hardcore" situations (we
haven't been told). Branded a "paedophile", Townshend can look forward to a
pariah's future. There may be worse things to be called in 2003 but, if so,
we cannot think what. Police in charge of "Operation Ore" have searched
Townshend's house in pursuit of proof. The star's stated defence is that he
subscribed to the site for purposes of "research".
Were they to break our own door, they would find what would surely be
interpreted as evidence of paedophiliac enthusiasm, in the form of a novel
published by the Olympia Press in 1955. It contains the following passage:
There I would sit, with ... nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her
gambol, rubber-capped, bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her
trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly
would I marvel that she was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent
matitudinal swoon ...
What that "swoon" entailed has been revealed a page earlier, in reference to
the narrator's relaxation "after a particularly violent morning in bed". The
later mention of "a quick connection before dinner" evokes a similar scene.
He attends to "all the wants of my little auburn brunette's body", and in
turn gives her "to hold in her awkward fist the sceptre of my passion". He
is possessed by a wolfish desire to turn her "inside out and apply voracious
lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the
sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely kidneys".
The book is, of course, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. For reasons we might
hard to explain to Inspector Knacker, we harbour no fewer than three copies
of it, including the "underground" Olympia edition. Lolita was banned,
unbanned and rebanned, and its original publisher, Maurice Girodias, endured
a long process of what he called "lolitigation". Mr. Townshend, whose only
alleged crime so far has been to go click-click, pay up and sin (if he did
sin) through cyberspace, can expect a lolitalot more than that.
Manfred Voss