the Shackle Report

Self-loathing for Beginners

(If you’re going to do it, do it right.)

Self-Loathing for Beginners is a tongue-in-cheek guidebook that satirizes the self-help culture. Beginning with the basics of self-loathing, it teaches you to loathe everything about yourself – your body, your hair, your character, your mind. Also covered are sections on self-loathing in sex, dating, fashion, the workplace and even death.

Because anything worth doing is worth doing with persistence, enthusiasm and panache, Self-Loathing for Beginners also shows you how to re-style your self-loathing to achieve success in fashion, show business and art. Thanks to its unwelcome insights and light-hearted abjection, its quizzes, lists and sidebars, even those readers as yet unaware of their self-loathing potential have only to glance through a few of its wisdom-splashed pages to realize that they are a lot farther along the exalted path towards self-rejection than they thought. And that is welcome news indeed, because maximizing your self-loathing is a trend you’ll hate yourself if you miss.

Life Without Shackles

Sexy, loose, boozy, rich and notorious. What’s not to like about Ava? Well, okay, maybe her ex-husbands Mickey Rooney, Howard Hughes and Artie Shaw, or her other ex-husband and sparring partner, Frank Sinatra. But she’s all yours, now, thanks to Lee Server’s new book: Ava Gardner : “Love Is NothingӅ. If you’re still hungry for large-living, dead icons, Server can also offer you his equally amusing bio: Robert Mitchum : “Baby I Don’t Care””. Server can’t conjure up the tabloid soul of Hollywood like Nathanial West in Day of the Locust, Bruce Wagner in The Chrysanthemum Palace, or Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon, but he’ll do well enough on a cloudy day, when you’re tired of counting the number of people who want Rumsfeld fired.

Torture 101

How best to celebrate Easter — the birthday of a man-god who was tortured before being crucified — than by giving your nostalgic uncles, sadistic bosses and boyishly morbid nephews a book all about the vile things people of every religion and clime have contrived to do to each other throughout history? Author Daniel P. Mannix was a frequent contributer to “True: The Man’s Magazine.”, and his prose style has that jokey but lurid twang men in the Fifties, who are now in their fifties, so loved. Before you wrap it, you might want to dip into it a bit yourself. Reading about bloody, genocidal Aztec sacrifices might help you understand what scale of discomfort your government is referencing when it claims it isn’t torturing detainees.

Cosmos-politan

If you’ve ever wondered whether the human mind is a sort of shackle all on its own, this is the book you can’t finish that thought without. It is a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s classic (40’s) excursion into the joys and pitfalls of obsessive paranoid narrative, the nearly universal impulse to imagine that one thing leads to another. Droll, sexy and smarter than a slap, Witold has accomplished the impossible and made serious philosophy fun. A pleasure and a charming antidote to every conspiracy theory on your list. Buy two. You’ll want one to cuddle with on snowy nights.

Torture, Ow!

Here we have a book that is everything we hope not to be: Self-serious, depressing and certain. But someone’s got to do it, and who better to edit a compendium of essays on torch-ah than than Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, the group that goosed McCain into falling out of goose-step with the administration on this issue. This is the perfect gift for all those on your gift list who would like to save the world, but just don’t know where to start.

Contributors include — Michael Ignatieff on whether torture is ever justified, Juan Méndez on the victim’s perspective, David Rieff on why the human rights community is naive about torture, Jamie Felner on domestic torture within US prisons, Sir Nigel Rodley on negotiating with torturers, Julia Hall on rendition to torturing countries, Jim Ross on the history of torture. Stop! Enough! Just buy it and give it away to the deserving.

Chain yourself . . .

. . .to a tacky fashion trend! Let everybody know that if you’re going to be put in chains and treated like a dog, you will do it all by yourself, and with your own hard-earned money. We’re not entirely sure what “Platinum Style#8221; means, but we’re guessing it means “not platinum.” But don’t let that discourage you from choosing one of these trinkets for your favorite ironic dresser — and another for your bookie.

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