Bookkake

Unsurprisingly, we at Bookkake believe there’s too little sex in literature. But we still have a soft spot for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, established by Auberon Waugh in 1993 to “gently dissuade” authors from including “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”. This year’s winner was Rachel Johnson (sister of London mayor Boris), for a passage including such gems as these:

“I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me.

“I really do hope at this point that all the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance…”

Her novel Shire Hell was singled out by the judges for its superlative “mixture of cliche and euphemism” and “a couple of really bad animal metaphors”. But we were also pleased to see the don of Bad Sex writing, John Updike, honoured with a lifetime achievement award.

Dan Chiasson, writing in the New York Times a few months ago, called Updike’s poem “Fellatio” “perhaps the worst poem ever written on any subject,” and we’d hardly argue:

How beautiful to think
that each of these clean secretaries
at night, to please her lover, takes
a fountain into her mouth
and lets her insides, drenched with seed,
flower into her landscapes:
meadows sprinkled with baby’s breath,
hoarse twiggy woods, birds dipping, a multitude
of skies containing clouds, plowed earth stinking
of its upturned humus, and small farms each
with a silver silo.

Taking the piss out of bad literature is an easy - and dangerous - game, but we’re all for the war on cliche and, particularly, euphemism. “Plowed earth stinking” indeed.