They Call Me Naughty Lola
Page 1
SCRIBNER
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Copyright © 2006 by the London Review of Books
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2006 by Profile Books UK Published by arrangement with Profile Books UK
SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
Designed by Sue Lamble
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4504-0
ISBN-10: 1-4165-4504-2
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
This book is dedicated to Molly Parkin,
Jamie Carragher, Evel Knievel and Nicola.
Contents
Introduction
Love is strange–wait ’til you see my feet
I’ve divorced better men than you
Last time I had this much fun, I was on
forty tablets a day
Golden nutritious wheat in a rotting column of chaff
I once came within an ace of making
my own toothpaste
Vodka, canasta, evenings in, and cold, cold revenge
They call me naughty Lola
My last chance to get a man fell in autumn, 1992
I’m not a vet, but I do enjoy volunteer work
My mind is a globe of excitement
Must all the women in my life take the witness stand?
Like the ad above, but better-educated
The harsh realities of my second mortgage
This column reads like a list of X-File character rejects
Failure? Pah! I invented the word
Evel Knievel / chronology of jumps and injuries
Index
Introduction
The London Review of Books personal ads began in October 1998, with the simple idea of helping people with similar literary and cultural tastes get together. We hoped the column might be a sort of 84 Charing Cross Road endeavour, with readers providing their own versions of Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft finding love among the bookshelves. The first ad we received was from a man ‘on the look-out for a contortionist who plays the trumpet’.
In truth, there are few people who can adequately summarise themselves in the thirty or so words that make up the average lonely-heart ad. There are few products or concepts that can be summarised in the same space, so it’s unreasonable to assume that a description of all the complexities and subtleties that make up a person can be trimmed down to a couple of abstract sentences. Add to this the many inherent psychological issues at stake in the placing of a lonely heart–guilt, nervousness, fear of rejection–and an ad can be an accident waiting to happen or an anticlimactic event that fizzles out into an episode of one’s life best forgotten.
Because of the dangers of looking slightly foolish, and because of the difficulties of being concise when talking about ourselves, lonely hearts ads, appearing in many publications throughout the world usually become fairly homogenous statements that often default to bland physical descriptions. Height, weight, eye and hair colour are all standard, but so too is every clichéd adjective that can be applied to them. Eyes will be ‘dazzling’, ‘bright’, ‘seductive’, but little else. Advertisers will be ‘slender’ or ‘cuddly’, possibly ‘flame-haired’, or all too often inappropriately compared to a celebrity–‘looks a bit like George Clooney’. The main factor in the success of garnering responses with this type of ad is the wishful thinking of the reader, who will fashion an image of the advertiser based on what little information has been given together with what it is they’ve been looking for all these years. The first exchange of photographs, therefore, will often prove disappointing when it’s realised that the advertiser isn’t Angelina Jolie but an arthritic old sailor with scalp problems.
There are notable exceptions. The New York Review of Books has a remarkably successful lonely-hearts section, and the demographic of readers is quite similar to that of the LRB–middle-class, well-educated, intellectual. Rather than list physical attributes, typically advertisers in the NYRB pitch incredibly positive aspects of their personality. They use their thirty-odd words to talk about things they like: favourite seasons, favourite authors, beaches they’re fond of or lakeside walks they enjoy. As a model of lonely hearts it is very encouraging, if at times a little starchy.
The advertisers in the London Review of Books, however, are rarely inhibited by positive thinking and they don’t tend to suffer the same degree of nervous overstatement found in other lonely-hearts sections. They have pitched themselves variously over the years as ‘bald and irascible’ or ‘dour and uninteresting’ or ‘hostile and high-maintenance’. Such a self-denigrating and all too honest approach carries a distinctive note of charm. It’s hard, for example, not to fall instantly in love with
I’d like to dedicate this advert to my mother (difficult cow, 65) who is responsible for me still being single at 36. Man. 36. Single. Held at home by years of subtle emotional abuse and at least 19 fake heart-attacks. Box no. 6207.
Monday mornings are a regular harvest time for personal ads. In the natural order of things they follow the lonely heart’s weekend of solitary wine-drinking in front of Taggart on UK Gold. Consequently, the ads in my post-weekend email inbox tend to have more of a hangover about them than others, or the smoky whiff of a solipsistic Saturday night still in full melancholic tilt and hanging heavy in the adjectives. The authors are ‘unbeaten’, ‘down but not out’, ‘fighters’ or ‘terminally disappointed’. By mid-week the ads are much less gin-soaked in tone and much less likely to mention the advertiser’s preferences for adopting naval ranks in the bedroom. Personally I prefer the weekenders. Apart from anything else they’re much chattier when I have to call to say they’ve given the Ceefax recipe page instead of a valid credit-card number.
People who place small ads are rarely salesmen or advertising creatives. So they often fail to meet the basic principles of advertising. Typically, an ad for, say, a BMW car or a Prada shoe or an insurance scheme has less than half a second to attract the attention of a magazine browser, amid pages of stiff competition. This is far more difficult for a lonely heart who doesn’t have the resources or expertise to produce a glossy, full-page ad brimming with clever copy and zippy graphics. But if a personal ad manages in its few words to hold the gaze of the reader a little while longer than its competitors, then it’s a long way down the road to getting a reply. And seizing attention to provoke a reply, rather than actually finding a mate, is initially the point of all personal ads.
The Russian critical theorist Viktor Shklovsky identified the processes of arresting a reader’s attention, citing phrases, motifs or concepts that seem incongruous within a surrounding text.1 He used the term ostranenie, or defamiliarisation–literally ‘making strange’. It’s tempting to venture that advertisers in the LRB personal ads adhere to these early Russian Formalist principles. The casual reader would expect the standard formula of ‘Man, leonine looks, 5′11″, regularly works out, enjoys cinema’. Instead they’d get this:
On 15 March 1957, Commander J. R. Hunt of the United States Navy landed at Key West Florida in his non-rigid airship having travelled for 264 hours and 12 minutes without once refuelling. Coincidentally, that’s the same length of time as I’ve spent without once making contact with a woman (apart from my mother, who doesn’t count, but who only ever asks me what I’d like for breakfast–it’s eggs; I like eggs for breakfast, poached, please, on two slices of granary bread). Is this a world re
cord? Answers, please, to 37-year-old male idiot. Box no. 2169.
If ostranenie is their strategy, they are shrewd advertisers indeed and this possibly gives the ads more credit than is strictly warranted. None the less it’s all too easy to underestimate the discursive gymnastics behind
More than just a personal ad! This is your ticket to a world of pleasure. Write now to Putney care assistant and weekend league bowler (48). Box no. 7721.
A lonely heart also provides clues and hints for the reader to interpret. The response to each ad depends as much on what can be inferred as on what is explicitly stated, which is often as little as the advertiser’s gender and geographic location. In its remaining few words and phrases the ad has to convey a sense of the author’s personality; the inferences of the reader are crucial. What is it we can infer from, for example, ‘Man, 34, Worcs., WLTM F to 35 with the sort of attributes that make the NetNanny my mother installed on my PC go off like a 1978 Ford Capri discharging up a dinosaur’s rectum’? There’s a PhD’s worth of material to be gathered from this ad alone, and at least a year’s employment for any newly qualified social worker.
While many LRB personals are similarly off-beat they’re not without their share of responses. It doesn’t claim to be the most successful lonely-hearts column in the world (far from it) but it has given rise to friendships, marriages, at least one birth, and at least one divorce after a marriage resulting from an ad in it. There are also plenty of advertisers ready to call in to complain about getting no responses whatsoever despite the LRB enjoying a readership known in marketing circles to be more responsive than most. This isn’t so surprising–whatever the responsiveness of the readership, the advertiser still has to do a bit of work. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it avoid talking about its mother or cats:
Coming from one of the world’s largest coal-producing regions, you’d expect me to litter this ad with clever references to coal and the decline of the coal industry and possibly some nostalgia about my father working in a coal mine and a few anecdotes about accidents and heroism and camaraderie and everyone supporting each other in times of coal-related hardship and crisis. Instead, I’d like to talk about my cats. Gentleman, 55. Likes cats. Box no. 5380.
Advertising for a lover or a soul mate or a marriage partner has always existed in some form or other. But the protocols of advertising in lonely hearts have changed considerably over the years. Lonely hearts from the nineteenth century show men specifying their annual incomes rather than giving any hint of physical appearance; today this would be deemed crude. Nowadays it’s also considered coarse to be exact about age; women, in particular, are discouraged from stating how old they are, and are advised instead to give the age range of the partner they’re seeking. Advertisers in the LRB, however, have no truck with such conventions and will often specify the income required of any prospective partner, their own level of personal debt and their age to the exact day (occasionally in dog years), along with weight, slipper size and favourite type of soup:
What’s your favourite soup? Mine is mulligatawny. Mulligatawny-liking gentleman (50). Box no. 4401.
Some rudimentary statistical analysis is possible. Whereas women tend to supply the majority of personal ads in other publications, the split is fairly even in the LRB (49 per cent women, 51 per cent men) and the age range reflects that of the readers of the magazine, between thirty-five and fifty-five. Women who specify their employment are likely to work in publicity departments (28 per cent of all named female occupations). Men who cite their occupation are often lecturers (35 per cent of all named male occupations–71 per cent of them in the fields of classics and history). There have been plenty of scientists, far too many poets and, encouragingly for an increasingly mechanised society, at least two stevedores. Seven per cent of women applying adjectives describe themselves as ‘edgy’ or ‘highly strung’ (these account for 83 per cent of those working in publicity departments), while 8 per cent of men mention their mother and 2 per cent enjoy the music of Bachman-Turner Overdrive (of which 63 per cent are forty-two-year-old classics lecturers still living at home with their mum). In the early months of the LRB personal column, women and men were equally likely to ask for respondents who were ‘intelligent’, ‘thoughtful’ or ‘well read’. These days the men are much happier to receive a full medical prescription history rather than a photograph, and the women have long since learned to lower the bar:
Hi. I’m am intelligent, attractive, cultured, recently divorced woman in her early forties looking for a man whose maxim in life isn’t ‘pull my finger’ or ‘smelt it, dealt it’. Box no. 5022.
In many publications, help is at hand to guide advertisers through the processes and pitfalls of copywriting so as to avoid any devastating faux pas. A lot of newspapers and magazines contract out their lonely-hearts column to agencies that help pen the adverts. Some have simple personality tests and will formulate copy for the advertiser on the basis of the results. The aim is to maximise the number of responses by making sure the advertiser doesn’t blow it by mentioning his compulsive gaming habits or her aversion to the colour red or a mishap they had with rabbits during a school trip to Morecambe in 1965. This seems a shame. Every publication has its own particular tone and flavour, and there are only two places where readers can effectively contribute to this: the letters page and the classified section. A lonely-hearts section is a column of reader contributions more than it is an advertising asset, and it’s a mistake to homogenise it for the sake of additional revenue. There is a currency in lonely hearts that goes beyond mere numbers.
Moreover, for the brave and the bold, there is a lot of fun to be had in the process of finding a mate, be it through dating agencies or singles nights or lonely-hearts ads. Indeed for some LRB advertisers meeting a partner is no longer even the main objective of placing a personal ad. Creating these silly little flourishes has become an art form, successfully sidestepping the potentially awkward self-appraisal of other lonely-hearts columns. They’re a frolic, a bit of whimsy. If they earn responses, then so much the better, but the stakes aren’t high if they don’t. The silliness, in this sense, becomes a sleight of hand, a trick done with mirrors to disguise the machinery beneath the stage:
Writing this advert has given the biggest sense of accomplishment I’ve felt since successfully ironing my trousers (14 June 1998). Man, 37. Box no. 2473.
Having fun is an important element in breaking down the anxieties that have made us so acutely hopeless when it comes to speaking about relationships, and I like to think the LRB personals have played their small part. Pitching oneself in the LRB is no longer about trying to locate one’s most attractive aspects, principally because it’s tiring trying to figure out what other people find attractive. The ads in the LRB aren’t necessarily about saying anything at all; they are little statements of absurdity–flashes of silliness that brilliantly, if briefly, illuminate the human condition and all its attendant quirks and nonsenses.
There have been many Monday mornings when, opening those emails that have accumulated during the small hours of the weekend, I’ve clutched my head in despair and wept like a little child, wishing they could be more straightforward or at least toy with the idea of being conventional. But more often than not I’m glad of their eccentricity. I’m grateful for the ‘Low-carbing, high-maintenance F (43)’ seeking an M to 50 ‘with no small knowledge of hiding trigger foods, the protein count of devilled eggs, and nature’s own cures for constipation’. It helps me appreciate the importance of silliness and, among other things, the value of a regular bowel movement.
LRB personals exist because of the many hundreds of readers who have contributed so indefatigably to the column over the last decade, and I’m profoundly grateful to them all. Nor should the work of staff at the LRB be underestimated; I’d like to thank Mary-Kay Wilmers and all the editorial and business staff of the LRB for nurturing such a dedicated readership. In particular I’d like to thank the following, without whom
this book, and the column itself, would simply have never existed: Tahmina Begum, Howard Bromelow, Ben Campbell, Daniel Crewe, Bryony Dalefield, Penny Daniel, Tim Johnson, Thomas Jones, Daniel Soar, Sara Tsiringakis and Nicholas Spice, who has been a friend and a mentor throughout.
Note to readers: It should be pointed out that the ads in this volume are no longer active and as such responses cannot be forwarded on to advertisers.
1 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated and edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 5–24.
“Love is strange
–wait ’til you
see my feet”
This ad may not be the best lonely heart in the world, nor its author the best-smelling. That’s all I have to say. Man, 37. Box no. 7654.
My finger on the pulse of culture, my ear to the ground of philosophy, my hip in the medical waste bin of Glasgow Royal Infirmary. 14% plastic and counting–geriatric brainiac and compulsive NHS malingering fool (M, 81), looking for richer, older sex-starved woman on the brink of death to exploit and ruin every replacement operation I’ve had since 1974. Box no. 7648 (quickly, the clock’s ticking, and so is this pacemaker).
7 million is good for me. Most days though I plateau at around 3 million. Any advances? Man with low sperm count (35–that’s my age) seeks woman in no hurry to see the zygotes divide.1 Box no. 8385.
Dinner’s on me. Gap-toothed F, 32. WLTM man to 35 with permanent supply of Wet Ones. Box no. 7364.
Remember when all this was open fields, and you could go out and leave your door unlocked? Woman, 24. Inherited her mother’s unreasonable and utterly unfounded nostalgia (and her father’s hirsute back). WLTM barber with fondness for Sherbet Dib-Dabs and Parma Violets.2 Box no. 8486.
Virtually complete male, 63, seeks woman with spares and shed. Box no. 7923.