Product Description
Well, Possums - What can we say about the lavendar-haired megastar that she hasn't said herself? Dame Edna Everage is the ultimate entertainer. Brought to life by the ultra-talented Barry Humphries, Dame Edna is back...and long may she reign!Playbill September 2004 Curran Theatre San Francisco California run. ... Read more

Product Description
Anthology of the bizarre in both art and nature compiled by Humphries (aka Dame Edna). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Wierd and Insightful early Humphries.
This is a great insight into vintage Humphries - the Dadaist known for staging bizarre, disturbing and shocking public events in Melbourne in the fifties.
The book is a collection of the wierd, bizarre writings vintage erotica, dadaist imagery and shocking freakshow photography.
Humphries has put together something that is genuinely comic and unsettling. A must for Humphries fans.

What else can you say but "Bizarre"
This is Barry Humphries from his later Dada days. It's a collection of everything weird, outlandish, unexpected and literally bizarre. Where else would you find a photograph of a three-legged man and other oddities of nature.

There is no easy way to classify, or even describe, this eclectic collection or anthology of the bizarre. There are pages on sexual topics. There are pages showing the effects of many different ways to mutilate pictures of the Mona Lisa. There is a wealth of detail, with the one theme being the bizarre nature of the contents.

This book is a lot of fun if you have an appreciation of the bizarre. It's classical Barry Humphries, playfully satirizing the world with its own bizarreness.

A miscellany of decadence.
Long before the current vogue for "reality TV", goth music, and even before the expurgated edition of "Hollywood Babylon", there was "Bizarre", a curious anthology of fin-de-siecle literature, photography of sideshow freaks, Symbolist and Surrealist art, and the like. Fashionably (for the time) underedited, its uneven quality (a page of "creative destruction of the Mona Lisa" -- by burning, stapling, "puerile manipulation", etc. of a small print) or a full-page, unflattering photo of Sophia Loren eating a banana abuts such fascinating material as the short story "Earl Lavender" and the novella "Count Fanny's Nuptuals", a small, forgotten masterpiece, here given in full.

At the time I first read it (at about the age of 14 or so) this book had the allure of patchouli oil, nose snuff, and poison rings. The freaks were the real draw...the literature was gravy. Nowadays, I'd be more interested in the lit...so little of this is reprinted. Still, I wouldn't mind having a copy...my mom made me throw it out. (It's that good!) ... Read more

Product Description
Colorful profile of Barry Humphries, AKA Dame Edna. Tipped in on the front free endpaper is a plastic holder with five commemorative Australian postage stamps featuring Mr. Humphries/Ms. Edna. ... Read more

Product Description
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from book:CHAPTER IIIGOOD AS NEWOO Spring danced away, and Summer saun- tered in. My pillows looked less and less tempting. The wine of the northern air imparted a cocky assurance. One blue-and-gold day followed the other, and I spent hours together out of doors in the sunshine, lying full length on the warm, sweet ground, to the horror; of the entire neighborhood. To be sure, I was sufficiently discreet to choose the lawn at the rear of the house. There I drank in the atmosphere, as per doctor's instructions, while the genial sun warmed the watery blood in my veins and burned the skin off the end of my nose. All my life I had envied the loungers in the parks — those silent, inert figures that lie under the trees all the long summer day, their shabby; hats over their faces, their hands clasped above their heads, legs sprawled in uncouth comfort, while the sun dapples down between the leaves and, like a good fairy godmother, touches their frayed and wrirfkled garments with flickering figures of golden splendor, while they sleep. They always seemed so blissfully care-free and at ease — those sprawling men figures — and I, x whom such simple joys were forbidden, being a woman, had envied them.Now I was reveling in that very joy, stretched prone upon the ground, blinking sleepily up at the sun and the cobalt sky, feeling my rery hair grow, and health returning in warm, electric waves. I even dared to cross one leg over the other and to swing the pendant member with nonchalant air, first taking a cautious survey of the neighboring back windows to see if any one peeked. Doubtless they did, behind those ruffled curtains, but I grew splendidly indifferent.Even the crawling things — and there were myriads of them — added to the enjoyment of my ease. With my ear so close to the ground... ... Read more