I get so confused now I am in my dotage.

Come back from CeBIT blurry-eyed and bamboozled, only to fire up Bloglines and find that John Gray – author of the laser-guided mememissiles “Straw Dogs” and “Al Queda and what it means to be modern” is also the author of cheesy self-help tome: “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus” and the centre of a controversy.

From The Guardian’s review of “Straw Dogs”:

“John Gray’s political vision has been steadily darkening. Once a swashbuckling free-marketeer, he has, in his recent studies, become increasingly despondent about the state of the world. With the crankish, unbalanced Straw Dogs, he emerges as a full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist. He has passed from Thatcherite zest to virulent misanthropy.

Not that nihilism is a term he would endorse. His book is so remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope. Nihilism for Gray suggests the world needs to be redeemed from meaninglessness, a claim he regards as meaningless. Instead, we must just accept that progress is a myth, freedom a fantasy, selfhood a delusion, morality a kind of sickness, justice a mere matter of custom and illusion our natural condition. Technology cannot be controlled, and human beings are entirely helpless. Political tyrannies will be the norm for the future, if we have any future at all.”

Or if you prefer:

“This powerful and brilliant book is an essential guide to the new Millennium. Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions
— J.G.Ballard”

Not exactly self-help. Or maybe the best type of all if you’re of a gnostic persuasion…

Anyway.

I have had it explained to me that people can have the same name and be completely different people.

Like Donna Summer, for instance.