Author(s): Medlar Lucan (Author), Durian Gray (Author), Alex Martin (Editor), Jerome Fletcher (Editor)
Publisher: Dedalus Ltd
Publication Date: 30 Nov. 2012
Edition: First Edition
Language: English
Print length: 226 pages
ISBN-10: 1907650555
ISBN-13: 9781907650550
Book Description
From their offices above a boxing gym in Old Havana, Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray have set aside their congenital lethargy to begin a glittering and fantastical new project: The Decadent Sportsman. ‘We are inspired in part by the magnificent wastefulness of the London Olympics – exactly the kind of futile extravagance that Caligula or Nero would have adored – and in part by the pungent odours of sweat and bruised leather that waft up through the ventilation grilles in the floorboards from the boxing ring below.’ This orchid-scented duo bring their wit and monstrous imaginations to play across the entire history of sport. The book also includes the full text of their proposal to the IOC for a new and more impressive Decadent Olympic Games, with events such as voyeurism, cocktail mixing, posing, couture, hairdressing, architectural patissserie and Russian roulette.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Lucan and Gray are two coves who have given their lives over to the pursuit of decadence, a fact reinforced by their previous tomes that include The Decadent Cookbook, The Decadent Gardener and The Decadent Traveller. They inform us here that all sports can be decadent and cite the bicycling antics of Alfred Jarry (a 19th century French fellow who was a big inspiration for the surrealists and certainly not adverse to getting off his head on absinthe, painting his face green, and cycling manically through his home town) and the sailing exploits of Donald Crowhurst (who attempted to win a round the world boat race by not sailing around the world cheating basically). The book is packed with such anecdotes, literary allusions and what we should, in fact, even consider a sport (voyeurism or cocktail mixing anyone?). Fans of that august gentlemen s journal, The Chap and other assorted loafers – should find much to keep them away from the dreaded gym membership here. –RM in The Crack
comparable iconoclasm characterizes the endeavours of a pair of modern-day decadents, Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, the pseudonymous co-authors of The Decadent Gardener, Traveller and Cookbook, have now turned their attention to the sporting arena, contending that what was once ‘a savage, unruly activity, has been seized, disinfected, and shackled by bourgeois rectitude’. Their response is an alternative history of sport in which a series of postures- ‘The Fornicast’,’The Hydrophile’, ‘The Rider’, ‘The Gymnast’, ‘Sculptor of the Flesh’ -gleefully reclaim the athlete as the decadent subject par excellence. –Alicia Rix in The Times Literary Supplement
Rarely has a book about sport engaged me to the extent this one has with its sharp critical insights, its laugh out loud moments (these provoke nervous glances while reading on busses, trams and in pubs) and its ability to suggest an alternative and rich mode of thought about sport. This makes it that rare beast, an ironic book about sport that … is also a potent critical text that should both provoke and amuse. –Malcolm MacLean in Idrottsforum.org
About the Author
Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray are the authors of The Decadent Cookbook, The Decadent Gardener and The Decadent Traveller.
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