The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope

The WaPo says that Homeland Security won’t be getting raw intelligence. And we already knew it wouldn’t be able to set intelligence priorities or collect intelligence. This makes it official: the agency will be completely useless. But very expensive.

To the list of small power grabs and politicization of the government, add the Bush move in keeping a seat on the Federal Election Commission reserved for Democrats vacant until the day after it had completed its work of writing regulations to ensure the emasculation of campaign finance reform.

The Catholic archdiocese of Boston is thinking about declaring bankruptcy, as always asking the question, What Would Enron Do? (That joke from the Daily Show)

Old times there are not forgotten: Here’s a frightening thought, from Trent Lott: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

I think the Bushies must be getting desperate, worrying that the excuse for Gulf War II is slipping away, buried under 13,000 pages of “disclosures.” The desperation can be seen in the shrill, badly thought-out demands for Iraqi scientists and their families to be abducted from Iraq and offered asylum in exchange for information. First problem: the UN can’t give asylum, only a nation can, and who do you think the US has in mind, and what does it look like if the UN abets that? Second: this is supposed to be in order that the scientists don’t feel intimidated. As opposed to the comforting feeling people usually get when they are forcibly removed from their countries and given the third degree. Third: if you give them a large enough bribe, of course they will say that Iraq is lying about weapons--whether it’s true or not.

GeeDubya is seriously thinking about putting a tiny web-cam on his dog, to show off the White House Christmas decorations and what goes on under Oval Office desks. Clinton thought about doing the same with Monica Lewinsky but thought better of it. The Bush family have a strange relationship with their dogs. You’ll remember Millie from the first Bush administration, the dog who has written more books than Shrub has read.

The Japanese have calculated pi out to 1.2411 trillion places. This is of no practical value whatsoever.

Everything the Israelis said about their shooting of a British UN official a couple of weeks ago turns out to have been a lie.

I mentioned that the US is forcing Singapore to permit gum (with a doctor’s prescription). The man responsible is Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill [i.e., Wrigley]), who I’ve never heard of either. Previously, those smuggling in gum were subject to a two-year sentence in prison, where presumably they were given something else to chew on.

Via the Guardian, extracts from the Literary Review's Bad Sex prize, for crap sex scenes:

The winner

Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam (Peter Owen)

She lay back on the bed while he positioned himself above her, then she slid her feet up his chest and on to his shoulders - Mr Hughes's shoulders. She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr Hughes's penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin. Enticingly rough yet soft inside her. The jargon he'd used at the consultation had become bewitching love-talk: '. . . dislocation of the second MTPJ . . . titanium hemi-implant . . . '

'Yes!' she whispered back. 'Dorsal subluxation . . . flexion deformity of the first metatarsal . . . '

They were building up a rhythm, an electrifying rhythm - long, fierce, sliding strokes, interspersed with gasping cries.

'Wait,' Ralph panted. 'let's do it the other way.' Swiftly he withdrew, arranged her on her hands and knees and knelt above her on the bed. It was even better that way - tighter, more exciting. She cupped his pin-striped balls, felt him thrust more urgently in response.

'Oh yes!' she shouted, screwing up her face in concentration, tossing back her hair. 'Yes, oh Malcolm, yes!"

The shortlist

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton)

Luckily the asha dulls Pran's senses. The experience is still painful, like having a fallen log hammered up one's backside with a mallet, but at least it seems to be happening at one remove, the pain-messages arriving at his brain like holiday postcards; brief, belated, and mercifully unenlightening about the sender's real feelings. His head has been pushed down into the dusty black bedclothes, so he cannot see the purple face of the man toiling behind him. He is aware, however, that the pounding is punctuated by a rhythm of buttock-slaps and regular full-throated hunting cries. As the major's excitement mounts, 'tally-ho!' gives way to 'On! On! On!', and the bed groans with the effort of maintaining its structural integrity.

Godchildren by Nicholas Coleridge (Orion)

This was so wrong, it was all so wrong, but Mary's strength to resist was ebbing away; she was like a tiny meteor drawn into the orbit of some great planet. 'Don't fight it,' Marcus murmured. 'I can make you happy again. Trust me, Mary. I understand how you're feeling, I can heal you if you allow me.' Slowly he moved her face towards his until their lips met. She was surrendering; even as she struggled against him, she felt her powerlessness.

He scooped her up in his arms and carried her to his bedroom, still stroking and caressing her, and lowered her on to a vast bed, its sheets turned down in readiness on both sides. Very slowly and gently, he undressed her, covering her white skin with kisses while he caressed her back. To her complete astonishment, she felt herself becoming aroused.

'Shhh, shhh . . . ' Marcus was brushing her breasts with his fingertips, all the time shushing and stroking her like a groom reassuring a frightened foal. The palms of his hands were moving all over her now, stroking her buttocks, her pubic bone. She shuddered when he gently parted her legs with both hands because it felt so good and she was so wet. Waves of guilt coincided with her orgasm; an extraordinary release of emotion washing over her like breakers across a tide barrier.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Bloomsbury)

Sometimes when I climbed on top of the Object she would almost wake up. She would move to accommodate me, spreading her legs or throwing an arm around my back. She swam up to the surface of consciousness before diving again. Her eyelids fluttered. A responsiveness entered her body, a flex of abdomen in rhythm with mine, her head thrown back to offer up her throat. I waited for more. I wanted her to acknowledge what we were doing, but I was scared, too. So the sleek dolphin rose, leapt through the ring of my legs, and disappeared again, leaving me bobbing, trying to keep my balance. Everything was wet down there. From me or her I didn't know.

I turned the light off. I pressed against the Object. I took the backs of her thighs in my hands, adjusting her legs around my waist. I reached under her. I brought her up to me. And then my body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope.

Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke (Bloomsbury)

Inside the Nova, with the windows blotted out from the fog of our breathing, Christy was naked from the waist down, sitting on my lap, her black parka zipped up her chest, and that little diamond on her ring finger. The sun had set on the Kingston bus station parking lot and we were making love, her vagina soft, silklike, encompassing, while I warmed up her feet by massaging them with my hands. Grace, the cat, was still sitting undisclosed beneath the passenger seat of the car.

There's something about the feeling of snorting cocaine till your brain freezes and you weep 'cause you can't fall asleep that I enjoy - it's a fear of death or an awareness of life - and there was something about being near Christy, kissing her, feeling her wetness, that touched the same pulse, only with her it was the opposite of poison. It was more like some ancient healing elixir.

'Can you say all that stuff again?' Christy breathed above me.

'What stuff?'

'About how you want to get married?'

'I'm not sure I can remember it.'

Christy snarled, stopped moving, and tightened her vaginal muscles around me.

'I'm never gonna love anybody more than I love you,' I said. 'So the question is: Do I believe in love?'

'Yes, you do,' she answered for me, excited. 'You do.' She moved her hips again and continued to fuck my lights out.

I thought of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, the story goes, knew the instant he heard the name Adolf Hitler that he had brushed up against the reason he was born. He had been living his whole life with this nagging sensation that he was waiting for something, and the moment he heard that name the feeling subsided into nothingness. He had arrived.

Now it's different, and to me it was shockingly humble, but there with my girl in my arms and our child in her belly I knew I had reached the moment my life had been waiting for. I was going to be a father and a husband.

I spanked her bottom and cranked up the tunes.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (Canongate)

Sugar pretending to seduce an invisible man, begging him in a voice almost hysterical with lust. 'Oh, you must let me stroke your balls, they are so beautiful - like . . . like a dog turd. A dog turd nestling under your . . . ' Your what? Shush had such a good word for it. A word to make you wet yourself? But Caroline has forgotten the word, and now's not the time to ask.

(Passage 2) 'Yes, oh yes,' she whispers, and embraces the small of his back to take more of him inside; she kisses him tenderly; their sexes are cleaved together; they are one flesh. A swirl of cloud folds around their conjoined bodies like a blanket as they drift through the balmy waves of eternity, borne along, like swimmers, by rhythmic currents and their own urgent thrusts.

'Who would ever have thought it could be like this?' she says.

'Don't talk now,' he sighs, as he shifts his hands down from her shoulder-blades to the cheeks of her behind. 'You're always talking.'

She laughs, knowing it's true. The pressure of his chest against her bosom is at once comforting and arousing; her nipples are swollen, her birth passage sucks and swallows in its hunger for his seed. On a great flank of cloud they roll and wreathe, until her passion rushes through her body like a fire and she thrashed her head from side to side, gasping with joy . . .

Shroud by John Banville (Picador)

Halfway through our slow-motion love-making she squirmed out from under me and made me turn on my back, and flipped herself upside down and lay with her belly on my chest and took me into her mouth and would not let me go until I had spent myself against the burning bud of her epiglottis. Then she swivelled right way up again - such an agile girl! - and balanced the length of herself along me, a sprat riding on a shark, and for a second I saw Josette, with her bobbed hair and upturned small breasts, smiling at me in the fish-scale light of Hendaye, and something went through me, needle-sharp, that was surprisingly like pain.

Behindlings by Nicola Barker (Flamingo)

She was now all but naked, except for an old-fashioned bra (which looked like it was made from a combination of cream-coloured tent fabric and some coordinated boot-laces) and a pair of loosely-fitting, almost contemporaneous (1920s? '30s? - what did he know of historical trends in female undergarments?) cami- knickers. The knickers hung off her hips revealing . . .

Her body was hairless. She was white as a maggot. Her breasts - inside those hockey-shoe-lace-cricket-white contraptions - Oh shit - deliriously full and slack . . . . . . The tangle . . . . . . Then his teeth were pulling too, but only very gently, and the laces were dampened and the ancient moth-smelling, cricket-pad, English-lawn- green-wax-rubbing cotton and the flesh just to the left of it- and to the right of it - and the damper flesh, pinkened by the pressure of fabric just under -

The tightness . . .

They were suddenly on the . . .

Tiles hot below the scrape of pale and the knickers loose as butter-fabric slipping with the ineluctable pleat of . . .

Five fingers each with . . . She had five fingers and they had that pressure-warm-push-and-determined force of . . . of . . .

Snout

Busy as any kind of sharp-nosed wild white woodland creature you might care to mention in the ice-snow-cold of winter with the searing-hot-scarlet of . . . of . . .

Snow Fox!

Teeth!

Fur!

Claw!

Arthur Young - Man of History - lay there, pulsating, whipped and panting, eyes without irises purple-flowering, calm as a log split and crashed into the moss-sodden forest of infinite languor, while she bit and tunnelled and dug him over.

Dorian by Will Self (Viking)

In one fluid movement Herman rolled forward on to his knees, grasped Dorian by the shoulders, and kissed him. Such suction. They were like two flamingos, each attempting to filter the nutriment out of the other with great slurps of their muscular tongues. Adam's apples bobbed in the crap gloaming.

White Mice by Nicholas Blincoe (Sceptre)

After a long while, when the pattern of her breath has let me think she is asleep, Louise says, 'It's a boat.'

'Not a boat.'

'It's a boat and the covers are the sails.'

'It's not funny, Louise.'

'Little pearls inside oyster shells.'

'I'm not, Louise.'

'You are. I can feel you. Put it inside me.'

She can feel me: the eye pushing through the fly of my underpants. She even presses against it, the softness of her bottom dissolving as she keeps up a slow, slow pressure. The cotton of my underpants first gives and then tightens, sliding to become a tourniquet around a bare neck, the artery gulping in fear beneath the skin.

'We can't do this, Louise.'

'Shush, baby. You're already inside.'

Only by a millimetre, less than a millimetre. But a soft muscle seems to pop out of place inside her and before it readjusts I am all the way through. It's just like we are back on our boat bed again, and we are making waves. As she rocks, the waves pass from her skin across mine. And soon the waves have their own momentum. We aren't doing anything, only letting them slip through us in warm trembles . . .

Her little belly shimmies under my touch, more waves that push my hands up to the sealskin tips of her breasts and down to the spiral of her navel. The movement breaks us apart and, before we lose ourselves, brings us back together. Louise is riding on top of me. The hard thing between us isn't really a penis any more, it is something that holds us together: something that she needs to push against the swell.

(passage 2)

There is a flip-down table below the cabin window, mounted on hinges on a bracket only ten centimetres wide. It is just large enough for Louise's bottom. She perches there, her back against the steamed-up glass, her arms and legs wrapped around me. I stand, buried deep inside her, my hands on her thighs and my nose in her hair. The cresting and falling of the train does half the work, not all; we keep stroking in together, stroking away, stroking back. When our orgasms come, it's like a naked electric cable dropped into a fish tank.

Wild Ginger by Anchee Min (The Women's Press)

He leaned over and said, 'Take off your shirt.'

'No. Why?'

'I hunger only for you.'

I began to laugh. 'Go chew Mao quotations! Fill your stomach with them. Come on! Chairman Mao teaches us. . . '

'"A thousand years is too long, seize the moment."' He grabbed me. 'Chairman Mao also teaches us, "A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."'

'Chairman Mao again teaches us' - I put down the buns and wrestled with him - '"The situation must change. It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism."'

He went wild. '"If the US monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world."' I could feel my body blooming. I was unable to continue the reciting. 'Don't you stop, Maple! Show your faith in Chairman Mao! Demonstrate your loyalty! Page one hundred fifty-six. "Speech at the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties." Come on now!'

'"It is my opinion,"' I began, '"that the international situation has now reached a new turning point."' I stopped, my thoughts suddenly scattered - the pleasure was too overwhelming.

'Go on, Maple, go on. "There are two winds in the world today"' - he caressed me, his hands cupping my breasts from behind - '"the East Wind and the West Wind. There is a Chinese saying, Either the East Wind prevails over the West Wind or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind."'

We were breathless. He insisted we continue reciting. I tasted his sweat as I went on. '"It is characteristic of the situation today that the East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism. . . "'

Our bodies came together again. . .

He groaned, 'Oh! Chairman Mao!'