The Cows

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The question over whether it is wrong to have a child because you want one, potentially without consulting the potential father – that’s more complex. As someone whose father was kept fully apprised of their existence but who decided before my birth that family was not for him, I don’t think the child is necessarily missing out but there will always be questions. Every situation is different but lightweight fiction such as this isn’t really the place to get into all of this.

For me, I wasn’t a big fan of the Cripps character. While he was important for Steven’s development and self discovery, I found his character to be too-over the top for the rest of the story. This, to me, is not your average extreme horror novel. There’s so much depth here. It’s a book about abuse, absence of love, and what happens when a person is driven to the point of losing their sanity. The main character, Stephen, wants a normal, happy life. To say he was abused by his mother is an understatement and my heart broke for him. He reaches a point where he’ll do anything to get that happy life and that’s when the madness that this book is famous for begins. Anyway, in total I didn't find anything deep, or moving, or intellectual here. I didn't find any inner beauty that only those who "get it" can see. I didn't find this to be an important novel in any capacity. You can paint a canvas with shit, and in the right place at the right time, you'll find enough influential people to convince others of its genius that you have a following. That's what "COWS" really means to me. The question COWS raises (the book seems to be cited in all-caps, which is appropriate to the way it shouts its perversions and obscenities) have to do with the place of extreme subject matter in art. In visual art, it’s common for students to become interested in violent or disturbing images, such as photos of car crash victims or medical deformities, and to try to use them in their work. Often it turns out to be unexpectedly difficult to use such images simply because they are so strong. A photograph of a man with Ebola just won’t fit with a collage of other images of Africa. Artists who have tried such experiments have sometimes found they need to work hard to aestheticize the difficult images: Andres Serrano’s beautiful, nearly abstract morgue photographs are an example, and so are some of Joel-Peter Witkin’s elaborately staged, faux-antique photographs of people with various medical conditions. (The intricate aesthetization of the unusual images, as Max Kosloff pointed out years ago, is a way of counterbalancing the subject matter, and somehow making the image into art.) For a contemporary artist it shouldn’t necessarily matter that the resulting artwork is harmonious—the purpose of choosing strong images, after all, is seldom to produce a pleasing or harmonious effect—but somehow it does. Despite the aesthetics of discontinuity and collage instituted by postmodernism, despite a half-century of work done without interest in aesthetic effect, we still find that very strong images don’t work as fine art unless they are elaborately contextualized, made to work aesthetically. It’s a puzzle that we still want our art, in these cases, to be nominally harmonious and coherent. And it’s interesting that given all the pressure contemporary artists face to be avant-garde, difficult, new, politically visible, strong, or persuasive, and in general to stand out against a crazily crowded field—that given all that, it’s interesting that the very strongest images are not more commonly used.Daisy (a left-leaning cow) : I believe it neatly encapsulates the human male infantile mindset, the fear and loathing of the mother, the horror of the female power of birth, of creation if you will, and the homo-erotic desire to be a man amongst men and to take charge of your manly destiny, all of which it appears has to be achieved by killing the mother figures. It’s all too lamely Freudian for me. Moo! Moo! I say trample him on aesthetic grounds, not on moral grounds.

This book shows how women are victimised in the workplace for being a woman, shamed for being a woman and generally treated unfairly at times. Forget it....You can't kill without getting infected. It don't have the effect Cripps says, but it gets under your skin in other ways. We warned you." A purer version of COWS could be imagined, for example, in which nothing violent, immoral, psychotic, or perverse takes place, but the world is full of stench, slime, and opportunities for nausea. In that simpler version of COWS, it might be easier to see what kinds of narrative work would need to be done to bring the nauseating elements into dialogue with the rest of the book. I don't really have an idea how to perform such an analysis, partly because I can see how the ingredients work together to produce the book's effects, and partly because I can't enumerate the kinds of extreme subjects, acts, and descriptions. Are there more than three? Is visceral repulsion separable from moral repugnance? Is there a sexual perversity different from moral perversity? Unfortunately, I didn't see it. Perhaps I should have gone into it more blind. But I don't think it would have made any difference. First of all, I could not pinpoint any messages or themes in this novel that said anything that hadn't been said by 1997 less crudely and graphically but with more emotional impact. I felt like I was treading in familiar territory. Perhaps that is because I also have been a lifelong listener of some of the darker subgenres of industrial music, such as power electronics, which highlights sensory experiences otherwise abrasive and repellent and uses them in a way that somehow captures a bleak psychological concept or story, while also managing to capture the beauty behind the noise. The cows kept coming, and each one took something from him; shavings of sensitivity, perception, care. He was being robbed, violated. One of the few parts of himself he wanted to keep was being cauterised into hard scar tissue."In a decaying apartment: a mother, a son and a paralysed dog. Monstrously fat and murderously driven, referred to only as The Hagbeast, the mother employs her own unique version of dinnertime cuisine as she attempts to bring about the demise of her only child.​ This story focusses on three very different women who are initially unconnected, but gradually become a part of each other’s lives due to events that in many ways are out of their control. This is a moving, introspective book of loss and rebirth; of globetrotting and family farming; of feeling lost and feeling a sense of belonging; of humanity and animals; of history and art; of death and new life; of centuries-old bonds and traditions, of love and caring, and also of the horrors man has caused in the world. I didn't expect to find all these things, but that's the beauty of books: you start reading a book about an Irish farmer, and before you know it, you're getting an unforgettable art lesson. By the end I identified with all three women and their difficulties in their lives. Sometimes I got quite angry at what was happening, especially in the total trolling of one of our heroines who was videoed without her consent and put through hell by the internet, the media and her friends and family, and she has a six year old daughter with all this crap happening to her.