Perry's Reviews > Dancing in the Dark

Press Release for Immediate Publication, May 29, 2017
From: CUPID (Committee for Understanding Priapism In Development)
Subject: 2017 CHUB Award Goes to Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard

CUPID, the international Committee for Understanding Priapism In Development, is much pleased to announced our 2017 CHUB Award winner, Karl Ove Knausgaard, for his contributions to a better public understanding of the Chronic Hell of Uncontrollable Bulges that all men suffer in their formative years ("CHUB").

We selected Karl Ove for the first five volumes of his upstanding "My Struggle," recently published in English, and primarily for his semi-autobiographical novel, My Struggle, Book 4: Dancing in the Dark, in which he brilliantly portrays the tormented mind of the male in his late teens. In the novel, Mr. Knausgaard describes his hardest year, as a nineteen-year-old teacher on the northern coast of Norway, with a mind chronically cluttered with carnal cacoethes, so much that he could hardly stop his virginity from being taken by a wanton woman a year his senior.

CUPID believes such truthful depictions of the male developing into manhood are much needed for western and westernized females to gain a more complete understanding of the male as he grows under an ominous terror brought on by the petrifying conflict between his moral compass and chivalric aspirations on the one hand and, in the other, the arising involuntary demonic thoughts and the uncontrollable reaction of his bodily functions.

"Dancing in the Dark" is a rigid reminder that, as Sir William Osler, father of modern medicine, so veriloquently stated, "The natural man has only two primal passions -- to get and beget."


Portions of Interviews with CUPID President Johnson N. Palmer, Fusée de Poche, Louisiana, May 25, 2017:

I too grew up as a young male. It was quite hard. Mr. Knut gave such fitting descriptions of the pain endured by the young man in the vulgar visions spewing randomly into his head which lewdly unloose an altogether irrepressible granitic growth.

You might not think it, but my mind was not at all complicated back then. It was all quite simple. My mind was not, as some of you gals might believe, a pornographic potpourri.

Heck, the most provocative photos in my room were a poster of Farrah Fawcett, in an unbelievably hot pose in a burnt-orange bikini burnt into my mind, and of the model Cheryl Tiegs in a see through fishnet bathing suit. Boy howdy, that brings back some moving memories.

The forming male mind is more idolatrous of the female figure, a worship in which they are congenitally corneous and carnally-afflicted supplicants. One of our doctors on the CUPID premises says a young men we are overloaded with what they call androgen. I says, hey now boy, I ain't no androgynous, and he explained that weren't what he was talking about. From what I've been able to gather in my power position, the thrust of it is that this chemical plagues us as boys with bouts of what you might call a sort of depression of the mind and inflational, compromising poses. We become depressed because we are cheapened by our persistent, involuntary preoccupations with female machinations, each of us a walking contradiction with an itchy false sensor always going off with what it believes is female pheromones. You could say we was in a testosterone zone.

Oh sure. I think the teen male mind is completely misunderstood by womenfolk. Most of us is tongue-tied, terrified and timid in the presence of the female subspecies, when we are usually nothing but peach-fuzzed, pimple-faced punks repeatedly suffering persecution from our peers. I was often flummoxed by my buddies bragging with all-fired bravado after a girl walked by, and then I'd become a bashful boy with an inner barbarian when approached by a pretty girl.

We need more books like this here one written by Mr. Knuttsen [pointing] to help us here at CUPID counter the negative feministic reactions to young men in general at a time when these boys have increasing pressure to handle themselves amidst the plethora of porn available on the internets. Today's young man is dazed and dogged by thoughts he does and should deem demonic, he's likely just a gawky geek losing grip on reality by his salacious yearnings. We need more contributions to help young men as they face the insidious internets full of pornographic photos and what they call naked selfins bombarding their cellular phones.

Yes, sure. I'd tell the fellows and upstanding ladies out there to send in whatever you can afford because young men are out there in need of your aid and succor as they face the devilry in porn purveyors and selfie-sending harlots. Our address is CUPID, Box 96, Fusée de Poche, Louisiana 69699. Thank you very much.