Customer Reviews (2)

Do Not Untie This Knot!
What a hopeless hash of a book.I'll be the first to admit that the conception of the book was undoubtedly clever, and must have taken a good bit of work.But just as it's not possible to make a cake without decent ingredients and it *is* possible to make a horrid cake despite the best ingredients, The Knot Garden turns to compost in this author's hands.The book is a mystery, yet as we near the end of the book, there is no mystery left to solve, and along the way, no Aha! moment.One needn't be clever to figure the thing out-- once the clues are in place, a six year old could untie this unsavory glop.And ultimately, with everything and everyone revealed, there is an overwhelming sense of "So what?" for the reader to take home.Rarely have I disliked a book so much that after finishing it the only reasonable thing left to do is throw it in the trash and try to forget ever having read it.This is one such book.

Gardening mayhem
This book follows a lot of the themes common in Geoff Nicholson's books - intrigue and sex revolving around an unlikely pivot, in this case a TV gardener. The book is written from a number of peoples views, and whilst this worked well in his other books, the number of angles taken spread the story a little thinly. Whilst I enjoyed the book, it is by no means his best, and is probably one for the true fans. ... Read more

Book Description
Guitar players change lives. Everybody knows that. Geoff Nicholson's deliriously funny Flesh Guitar is an overstimulated love letter to the guitar, complete with feedback, reverb, and special guest appearances, with a lead player the likes of whom has not been seen since Hendrix departed this earth.

Into the Havoc Bar and Grill, an end-of-the-world watering hole on the outer fringes of the metropolis, walks the entertainment, Jenny Slade. She has the look down: beat-up leather jacket, motorcycle boots, cheekbones, and wild hair. But she's no ordinary guitar heroine. Her guitar is like none her audience has ever seen, part deadly weapon, part creature from some alien lagoon. Is that hair? Are those nipples? Is it flesh? Where does Jenny Slade come from? Where does she go? Geoff Nicholson fans know that wherever that is, the ride will be like no other.

"The electric guitar is Nicholson's latest test case and he nails it. Flesh Guitar is brilliant and clever beyond your wildest dreams." --Newsday

"A blackly comic homage to Western culture's obsessive love affair with the electric guitar . . . always clever."--The New York Times Book Review

"[Flesh Guitar] should prove, once and for all, that Nicholson is incomparable."--Independent on Sunday ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Flesh Guitar- Worst Novel
This is one of the most poorly written books I've ever had the discomfort of reading. It lacks style, imagination and depth. I suppose it could possibly entertain 13 to 16 year old wanna-be musician's, but if your over that age, then don't waste your time. This book is not even comedic. Don't waste your money. Instead buy Angels & Demons or Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy --Something with content...-Anything but this...No offense to Geoff Nicholson the author

A Road To Nowhere
Definitely the weakest of the three Nicholson books I've read (the other two being Bleeding London and Still Life With Volkswagen), this novel haphazardly follows the career of Jenny Slade, an avant-garde female guitar player. Other readers have criticized it's lack of narrative framework or traditional plot, but I think it adheres fairly closely to the traditional "quest for knowledge" structure. The problem is that the various incidents and episodes fail to add up to the larger knowledge or truth that is implicit in such a structure.

Over the course of the book, Jenny appears as a vision and converses with various guitar gods right before they die, including Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain, and also dispenses advice to a young Frank Zappa. Intermingled are her encounters with fictional musicians, the most captivating of which is the one-armed Freddie Terrano and his band of worshipers. Intermingled are excerpts from the "Journal of Sladean Studies", an uber-fanzine written by her favorite fan. Ultimately, it's a surreal hodgepodge that is intermittently entertaining, but kind of meanders to nowhere. In that sense, I think Nicholson is rather like Jonathan Lethem, who is also capable of great writing and wild ideas, some of which are genius, and some of which flop. For Nicholson, this is a flop.

Directionless and a bit pointless
This is indeed Nicholson's weakest book. A series of vignettes and anecdotes that taken individually would be fun, are presented in the place of a traditional narrative or even an overt message.These tales of theflesh guitar simply don't add up to much.

A big letdown
As a fan of Nicholson, hands down, this is the weakest of his work.It's a surreal story set in a post-modern guitar rock fantasy world that goes nowhere.(Was he experimenting with a new style?) After all the brilliantplots, characters, and dialogue; this was a huge letdown.

...wildly inventive, my ass...
If you want to read a poorly written book with no plot and very little to no understanding of music or guitars or the creative process, Flesh Guitar is for you. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Unusual
A wellmeaning but pompous nebbish sets off on a disastrous trip with his hellish family (nymphomaniac wife, religious freak daughter and delinquent son). His misadventures pile on like an early Charley Chaplin's. It's kind of an updated "Diary of a Nobody." These comparisons are the problem, because when you read "Diary of a Nobody" (or watch an early slapstick comedy movie) the hundred year old jokes are funnier. Originality is the soul of wit. The updating consists of adding a lot of sex and violence, which doesn't bother me so much because of any puritanical beliefs but because it is gratuitous and indicates that the author could not think of any better way to update. The ending rather suggests that he ran out of ideas other than escalating the violence.
The definitive updating of "Diary of a Nobody" has yet to come. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Tale of a Flynn Completist
"However, if you are a Flynn completist, and you happen to stumble upon a used copy for no more than 50 cents, you might go ahead and add it to your collection - if only to keep it out of the hands of someone else.. Or it might make a useful thing to start the logs burning in your fireplace on a cold winter night. Or still again, it might be worth keeping in one of your drawers for its limited curiosity value, as yet one more piece of garbage about Errol Flynn that has no redeeming value, and is about as bad a book as it could possibly be." Lincoln Hurst

It appears that there is a love/hate relationship with this novel. And it looks as if hate is on the fast-track. Not for me, I found it a bizarre fascinating read. Geoff Nicholson is known as a farcical writer, and I can see some of that exhibited in this novel, but it needs more. This was no laugh out loud novel, sort of a hehehe under your breath. Some of the story is so far fetched that I can envision a movie screen with the characters looking at each other in confusion.

Jake is a down at the heels wanna-be actor, working in a photo shop when one day a former classmate, Sacha, appears, and within a day Jake has been hired to appear in a film about Errol Flynn. Dan Ryan, the director starts sending reams of paper, books about Flynn, music and what not. Jake has difficulty keeping up with all of the info flying at his feet. And then he realizes that he wants to play Errol Flynn. This seems to have been the plan all along and off he goes to make a movie. Nothing is ever as it seems we are told, and that is true here. The film is strange, Errol Flynn is shown as the sexually explicit man he was, warts and all are fully filmed. Dan Ryan, the director becomes more unhinged and the dark side of movie making is exposed. Dan Ryan's, wife Tina, seems to be made of sterner stuff but is that really true?The novel moves from London to Hollywood to Las Vegas and the desert in-between. The charcters are more outlandish and overdone as the story moves on, but that is when the fun really begins.The novel bogs down at times, but at the same time I needed to know the ending of this strangely elusive novel. The sex talk is explicit, but there is nothing here that has not been said time and time again.

This is a novel of obsession, the dark side of Hollywood with a twist. Not enough of a twist to keep Errol Flynn intact, but this was entertaining in a bizarre sort of way. Would Errol Flynn approve? No idea, but why should we care?

Recommended. prisrob 01-01-08

Looker

Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica"

Bedlam Burning

errol flynn by nicholson
This is not a book about Flynn - but a sleazy novel using Flynn's name-notfor flynn fans ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Some people are soo insecure
I have to admit it was quite a few years ago that I read this book but it left a lasting impression on me.No, I have yet to develop any sort of foot fetish but i recall the heightened awareness of never looking at another person's feet quite the same way again.In fact, i would have to say it instilled in me a deeper appreciation and adimiration for the human foot and the process of buying a new pair of shoes has never been quite the same.Afterall, what does your shoes say about you?
Not for the faint of heart, Geoff Nicholson promises to drive you deep into the world of fetishism.Embrace the journey, because allowing yourself to enjoy this book doesn't make you a sicko.

Carrie Bradshaw would appreciate this one
This book is perhaps more about shoes than it is about feet, but there's quite enough material for anybody who's feeling a little "feet-ish" stirring in their toes.

We never get the narrator's name, and all we really know about him, other than his foot and shoe fetish, is that he's a manager with very few friends, who's not above conning women to get information for his archives, taking sneaky photos and stealing stray shoes.

One fine day on the street where expensive shoes live, he happens upon a woman attached to a pair of perfect feet, and unbelievably, she has only minor reservations about getting involved with a foot man.

In another coincidence, he discovers a perfect pair of shoes at a shoemaker's shop, and not only do they fit the perfect feet - in a Cinderella story that Disney never told - but they also get a surprising bonus on the deal.

I'm betting that the girls of Sex and the City would have been all over the shoemaker in this story, and that he would have needed a lot of help from the elves to keep them satisfied.

Other than the foregoing, the story line is really, truly flat, and all the arch support in the world couldn't give it a boost.It's your typical boy meets feet, boy loves feet, boy loses feet story, with a touch of well worn drama thrown in at the end with a little twist.

It's an easy read, and gives a lot of information on feet and shoes, but sorry to say the plot's a little cheesy.

Amanda Richards, January 30, 2005

disappointed
I was interested in reading this book because I have always found the female foot to be the most sexually appealing part of the body. Now I am not sure if I an a "fetishist" or a "partialist".That discussion is beyond the scope of this review.From someone who does like women's feet, I was very disappointed.From a literary standpoint, I felt the book had a very weak plot and the characters were disappointing.It was not great writing by any means and it left me bored.From a personal standpoint, I was disappointed in the main character.I like feet but I am no where near that perverted.Stealing women's shoes and sneaking around taking pictures is....disturbing. Very stereotypical character.It is akin to using a black man named Rastus in an Afro-American novel. Kind of insulting to black people.In the same vein, the main character in this book is insulting to me.

Should have been called Shoelover
I finished this book after many trips to the library on my lunch break because I was too embarrassed to check it out and have people I know see me with it. Despite a lot of lip service that the protaganist pays to being a "foot and shoe fetishist" and not being interested in the shoes without the feet, his actions make it clear that it is the shoes that are the focus of his admiration, and the feet are not much more than a means to display the shoes he finds so compelling. I mean, he has an entire collection of shoes, he steals shoes from women who leave them in public.

What plot there is in the book is flat, very poorly developed, and all too conveniently wrapped up. While there is much exploration of the main character and his interests and motiviations, there is little or no depth to any of the other characters in the book, especially Catherine, whose feet the protaganist is smitten with. However, that may be intentional by the author because it is her feet, and nothing else about her that so transfixes the protagonist (I don't think I ever caught his name). Also, there is a lot of historical garbage about feet and fetishes that is superfluous, and often simply disgusting. There is a very small twist at the end that I thought was fairly interesting, but it didn't make up for the near complete lack of any attention to plot development.

All in all, if you have a shoe fetish, you'll probably find this book very compelling just because of the fetish aspect. If you have a foot fetish, you'll probably find it interesting for the same reason, although it's probably not exactly what you might expect. For anyone else, you'll probably just think the whole thing is strange.

Psychological study
From the standpoint of a psychologist studying foot fetish this is an interesting viewpoint. The story got lost in the psychology many times. ... Read more

Book Description
Though you might not encounter the subject in Artforum or stumble across it at Sotheby's, the thriving business of erotica is a mixture of sophistication and seduction, an underground world of eccentric artists and serious collectors.

In Sex Collectors, Geoff Nicholson hunts down an assortment of these obsessives around the world. From the Florida grandma with five million dollars' worth of sexual collectibles to Third Eye Blind's manager, who owns more than eighty thousand men's magazines, Nicholson celebrates these collectors and the occasionally beautiful, frequently bizarre, and always fascinating objects they have amassed.

He accompanies Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, as she is taken on a tour of a collection devoted to her. Days spent in the Kinsey archives reveal the cultural artifacts resulting from the sexual awakening of public America, as well as boxes with labels such as "Phallus with Agricultural Tools" and "Scarf Trick when Folded." Nicholson journeys to Germany to visit with the legendary Karl-Ludwig Leonhardt, sex collector extraordinaire of first edition volumes such as Flagellation pour couples pervertis and Tender Bottoms, erotic Picassos, and notes handwritten by the Marquis de Sade.

Throughout his exploration of some of the wildest collections in the world, Nicholson's discussion of collecting as an expression of self and psychology goes hand in hand with his gleeful discovery of the seventh giant phallus used in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Hitler's creepily erotic personalized bookplate, and a woman who has a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix's penis. Sex Collectors is a winning story of one man's attempt to collect collectors, to reveal the neuroses that drive some people to collect, and to have good, dirty, high-minded fun while doing it.

... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Collecting the Collectors
It is not surprising to come across a person who collects things: stamps, coins, books.No one considers such collecting remotely abnormal, even though a person might get so focused on collecting as to be unable to talk with interest about anything else.Then there are the people who collect erotic items, and that makes alarm bells go off.Of course, the erotica collectors are not as likely to bore us with their collections as, say, Barbie collectors are.For one thing, erotica is interesting to almost everyone who will admit it.For another thing, such collections are usually covert, and for yet another, even though the collectors might be obsessive, they don't get tedious with their stories about their treasures, since they are usually not a topic of conversation.Geoff Nicholson has seen lots of such collections, and gotten the collectors to talk, and reports back in _Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica"_ (Simon and Schuster).It's a funny, genial guide to odd (but not sociopathic) people and strange pursuits; Nicholson has seen plenty of eye-popping material, and while he candidly admits that there are some things he has seen that he wishes he could excise from his memory, he does not include such stuff in his descriptions.The book reflects his experience in researching it: "I've seen a great many things that were sexy and fun and beautiful and fascinating, and I wouldn't have missed them for the world."His enthusiastic book is much more about collecting than it is about erotica or sex.In fact, he dismisses the argument about differentiating between what is pornography and what is art by saying that it doesn't make a difference for the purpose of the book; what matters is that someone is collecting it.

Who is doing the collecting?Generally, people with a lot of money, for originals are not cheap and the collections are often extensive.Take Naomi Wilzig, of whom the _National Examiner_ headlined, "GRANNY Proves You're Never Too Old for PORNO!"She enjoys showing the enormous collection in her home, but is having a museum built so that we can all see it someday.Another great collector was Alfred Kinsey, although he is better known, of course, for his interviews and his reports on the sexuality of Americans."Kinsey believed in data," Nicholson writes, and was trained as a biologist; he collected hundreds of thousands of gall wasps, his specialty, and when he moved into investigating sex, he collected anything having to do with it.Nowadays, "People donate to the Kinsey having reached the stage of their lives when they want to get rid of their collections."Also, police departments donate sex-related materials taken from offenders.
If there are collectors, there must be dealers, although "each considers the other a necessary evil".Some of them enjoy wonderful items going through their hands and being passed on (at profit) with no impulse to own any of them; others buy and sell to make a living, but also to improve their own collections.

There are tales of many other collectors and collections here.Cynthia Plaster Caster has spent decades making plaster casts of famous people's penises, and has branched out into breasts.There's the small collection of lotus shoes, the kind that were worn by Chinese women whose feet had been bound.There's a collection of 80,000 girlie magazines.There is a large group of people who collect erotic book plates, and commission them.Nicholson eventually helps us realize that we are all sex collectors; we may not look for something to put on our shelves, but we do, if health and opportunity allow, amass sexual experiences.He also comes to the conclusion that he is a bit of collector himself, not necessarily of the type of item the more generous of the collectors profiled here sent him away with, but a collector of sex collectors, an activity that has involved such familiar endeavors as finding interesting examples, doing negotiations, lucking out on good finds, and other things that collectors here do.His is a unique collection, and it is generously shared in a breezy, amusing book. ... Read more