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And Finally Artist News
Morrissey says critics don’t like his novel because they don’t like him
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 5 November 2015
You might have forgotten that Morrissey recently published a novel. I had. It sounds like something you might have dreamt, doesn’t it? But it really happened. Now that I’ve jogged your memory, you might also remember that it wasn’t very well received by critics. That, says Moz, is more to do with him than his book.
That’s right. Any and all criticism of the book was a personal attack upon him and had nothing to do with his story of a demonically possessed sports relay team. A story that, let’s not forget, contains this actual sentence: “Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”.
Ah yes, how could we have forgotten about Morrissey’s bulbous salutations?
Anyway, speaking to Cooperativa in Chile (meaning this interview has been translated from English to Spanish and back again), Morrissey said: “I strongly believe in freedom of expression, so the critics have to be allowed to say what they want to say. But often the criticism is a rejection of me as a human being, and has nothing to do with what they have in front of them. Nor can you express moral indignation at a book just because you do not like it. It was not written for you. You cannot pretend to know what the author should have written rather than what he did”.
Pondering further, Morrissey then decided that the reviews weren’t actually about him or his book, but the critics themselves. He continued: “Most critics … will launch a holy war against anything that brings them some attention, because it’s all about themselves and their own personal taste. In such a world, nothing evolves”.
Indeed, if the first fish that crawled out of the sea onto the land had been a critic we’d all still be on the beach. Which doesn’t sound that bad when you put it like that. Yay critics!
