— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, March 14 1907
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Ellis Paz has become the first man in history to be awarded a doctorate by the University of Oxford while wearing just his pants.

Matthew Perry once entered a Vanilla Ice lookalike competition and came fourth.

There is no single recognised word for ‘gay’ in Pashto.

Trypophobia is an aversion to the sight of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps.

Air India have bespoke a special plane in order to transport the sacred Parsee flame.

There are few bears in Edinburgh.

There is an emoji oversight board.

Emma Bunton “wouldn’t know where to start” in trying to come up with a vaccine for Covid-19.

BMX has been breaking ground in Nigeria.

‘Eelam’ is the Tamil name for spurge, for toddy and also for gold.

Readers of books on nature are expected to be interested in poetry in a way that readers of literary biography are not necessarily expected to be interested in willow warbler migration.

Mussolini didn’t diet.

Even an Oxford man cannot summon knowledge out of the ether.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Tuesday, October 2 1906
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The moon is up for longer than the sun.

Your antivirus expires in 29 days.

The Dogmata Theologica of Petavius are a work of incredible labour and compass.

The steep limestone walls of a huge rock can make it look, from a distance, like a ship without sails.

Without yin, yang dies on the battlefield.

Eggs are probably not a type of fruit.

Oscar Wilde was pardoned for the crime of homosexuality in 2017.

The laws of Sri Lanka can be bought for Rs74,000.

Russians are the opposite of elephants.

Spitting is prohibited.

The American university is one of the few remaining places in the United States where reflection and study can take place in an almost utopian fashion.

The chief duty of man is service to man.

There’s always a few arseholes.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, March 14 1907
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Los Angeles is a lousy, boring little town. A European could die there from boredom.

January ain’t about the blues.

Piers Morgan is sick.

The veins of Englishmen flow with rainwater.

In a land with no fathers you get Chernobyl and Sellafield.

Andy Murray is a quilter.

A fast herd of deer is nothing more than a herd of fast deer.

It is illegal to take more than 5000 rupees into Sri Lanka.

Benedict Cumberbatch has personally caused Brexit.

Twentieth-century Western philosophy has forgotten air.

All shoplifters risk arrest.

No wine can be considered as unimportant since the marriage at Cana.

Dominic Hilton came out to his family at age 14, worked as a male escort well into his twenties, and engaged in homosexual acts with over 150 men. He now likes women.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, March 14 1907
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The persecution of Christians is now worse than at any time in history.

Toto’s ‘Africa’ is one of Myleene Klass’s all-time favourites.

The Hillsborough disaster is still in the news.

Simon Bolivar, a Venezuelan military and political leader, liberated Colombia.

The quern performs best when the grindstone has been pitted.

Not everything in life is a $20 jerk-job.

In the ten years of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, the Chinese population increased by 200 million.

Kevin Spacey has always been gay.

Quite a few forests have no trees to speak of.

Orlando is a thoroughly disconnected short novel by the famously unreadable and wildly overrated Virginia Woolf, whose long-suffering husband was a colonial civil servant in Ceylon.

The odds on a white Christmas have been slashed to 2/1.

Nobody ever sits in a badly-lit cellar holding the day’s newspaper for a camera without feeling fear.

Legoland Windsor is full.
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Born two years after the Great Earthquake of 1923, in ‘not too good a section of Tokyo’, Kochan is a sickly child, brought up by stultifying parents and a morbid grandmother.

His first reliable memory is of the ‘night-soil’ man, and he immediately becomes obsessed with tragic lives, particularly in story books: anybody who is ‘fated for death’.

He is furious upon discovering that his favourite doomed knight is actually Joan of Arc. But after seeing a performance by a female magician, he begins to dress up in his mother’s clothing – and by adolescence he is committed to playing his ‘part’ upon life’s stage, ‘without ever once revealing my true self.’

Kochan is a literally and literarily pained young man, quoting Wilde, Huysmans, and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. He edits a Hungarian fairy tale to make the hero’s grisly end more realistic.

He quickly realises his interests are not merely aesthetic. He is aroused by the sight of marauding priests, sweating soldiers, sea-bathers, male in-laws. He stashes away images of (thin-ish) wrestlers and samurai as other boys would hide their porn mags.

Aged 12, he jerks off for the first time – over a picture of Guido Reni’s St Sebastian.

He falls in love with the school jock – ‘because of him I cannot love an intellectual person’ – and falls back out again some pages later, having got an envy-boner at the sight of hairy armpits.

He struggles, naturally enough, to blend in, since he has no idea what other boys are even thinking. (In his defence, mind you, he’s at the sort of pretentious, rigid school where grabbing other boys’ cocks is viewed as a normal playground pastime.)

His anaemia is counterbalanced by a raging blood-thirst. He daydreams, elaborately, of his family being obliterated in an air-raid; of tying a class-mate to a pillar and then stabbing him; of slaughtering ‘many white slaves of Arabia, princes of savage tribes’. He has long-since been enraptured by his own death.

A schoolfriend’s sister appears to provide the social cover that he’s needed. The approach of war looks set to grant him what he wants: ‘some natural, spontaneous suicide’.

A tough and compact piece of literature – in the manner of a JG Ballard, say, or Anthony Burgess – the most surprising thing about Confessions of a Mask is that, for all its euphemistic delicacy (‘inversion’, ‘bad habit’, ‘big thing’), this boundary-pushing novel was published only four years after Japan’s atomic cataclysm.

It is also plainly autobiographical. But as an exercise in personal catharsis, alas, it did not do the trick. Two decades, several dozen books, and three Nobel Prize nominations later, Mishima launched a one-man para-military coup, and wound up disembowelling himself. At least one biographer suggests that this was his intention from the outset.

—
For The Amorist