Soft prawn….

I was engaged in the dexterous removal of clothing from some beautiful prawns which action brought to my mind the name of Dan Greenberg, the author of “How to be a Jewish Mother”, but also the author of a small volume, a copy of which has graced my book shelves for the last 4o or so years, and which travels under the self explanatory title of “Pornographics”. The book is introduced with the immortal words stating that “Dan Greenberg is no stranger to smut” which to my mind is a pretty damn good introduction for anyone. The thrust of the book (how else to phrase it) is to put clothes on the nude figures in famous classical paintings in order to eroticise them. This is achieved with carefully painted celluloid overlays or with cardboard cut outs that are articulated by tabs on the side of the pages. Thus the houris of a Delacroix harem are sexualised with an overlay of Victoria’s Secrets, or a naked angel in a Mannerist masterpiece by Tintoretto will have articulated wings that when moved by the tab at the edge of the page reveal that he has no manners whatsoever.The book is concluded by Marcel Duchamps’  “Nude  Descending a Staircase” which sports black rectangles scattered, willy nilly, all over the canvas. The point of all this is that I thought that the prawns looked a lot sexier with their clothes on. I chucked their discarded clothes in boiling water to make a broth. Could that be the origin of brothel? Nothing like a warming brothel on a grey afternoon.