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"FacebookPinterest\n\n_The complete list of my sexual conquests: 1994-1995\u2014Anna; 1996\u2014Julia, Alison; 1997\u2014Italian girl at Karl's party, Claire (Clare?), Jessica (fingered); 1998--Anna again (big mistake), receptionist at my second temp job (possibly called Helena), Becky (I was in love but she went back to her boyfriend); 1999\u2014Jeremy's girlfriend; 2000-01\u2014Karolina (deported); 2002\u2014woman at nightclub, woman at nightclub, woman at nightclub, woman at Stewart's barbecue, Stewart (accidental coming together of groins, the three of us were naked and very, very drunk), woman at nightclub; 2003-2006\u2014Evil Satanic Bitch Whore; 2007\u2014the Internet. [London Review of Books]-reading women to 35\u2014don't pretend your relationships have been any less incongruous and unsatisfying. Write to probably the most normal guy you'll ever see in a lonely heart advert and maybe we'll end up friends or lovers or despising each other and wincing every time we remember our awful one-night stand or maybe we'll get married and have children. Writing's a good start though. Man, 31. Box no. 3243\n\n _\n\nSo goes the favorite lonely heart advertisement of David Rose, the 36-year old editor of Sexually I'm More of a Switzerland: More Personal Ads from the London Review of Books, a wonderful little volume released by Scribner earlier this week. \"It's just a beautiful advert,\" says Rose. \"On and on he goes, listing all these people, all of those sexual conquests, and it's all so hopeless. But you get a nice picture of this guy and what's going on in his life. You also get the absurdity and the touching moments.\"\n\nRose has been editing the lonely hearts column of the London Review of Books, a prestigious literary rag that publishes articles with titles like \"Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of 'Thuggee,'\" for more than a decade. The personal adverts in the LRB, however, are unlike anything you'll encounter on Match.com\u2014the personal ad elevated to a literary form. These advertisements are self-effacing, soaked in pathos, heavy with wisdom, and so damn funny that I've been carrying it with me to social engagements\u2014dinner parties, bar nights\u2014and reading excerpts to friends.\n\nIf intense, post-fight sex scares you, I'm not the woman for you (amateur big-boned cage wrestler, 62). Box no. 8744.\n\nNothing says 'I love you' in a more sincere way than being woken with champagne and pastries and roses. Apart from a dog with peanut butter on the roof of his mouth. Write, we'll meet, sleep together andDavid Rosein the morning, just before my friend's wife tells me to get off their sofa and get out of their houseDavid RoseI'll show you Winston's trick. It's hilarious. You'll have to bring the peanut butter thoughDavid Rosethey've put locks on all the kitchen cupboards. Man, 26. Box no. 6433\n\n Recently I met up with Rose\u2014who claims to be \"socially constipated,\" the very last person in the world who should be meddling the love lives of others\u2014to discuss our favorite advertisements from this latest installment.\n\nALEX FRENCH: The London Review of Books isn't exactly the first place I'd go in search of a date. How on Earth did the LRB personals column come to be?\n\nDAVID ROSE: I started at the LRB in February of 1998. I had come from a car magazine. You know the feeling\u2014you're in an organization and you want to do something of your own, but nothing is your own. I was put in charge of two columns of classifieds. In the back of my mind, I had this nice idea for a personals section\u2014if you're interested in this book and somebody is interested in the same book, then you could meet. That would be nice, wouldn't it? I was young and idiotic. The first ad I got was from a man who described himself as a 67-year old disaffiliated Flannard jacked up on Viagra looking for a contortionist who can play the trumpet. I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be good. There's no way they're going to let me run this. What an idiot I am.' But I work on the Bowie principal\u2014do something once and it's a mistake; do it three times and it's an arrangement.' We had to let it go for a couple of issues. My attitude was 'I'm going to print these ads because they're the only ones I've got.' They're ridiculous and silly, but it was like, who blinks first? Are the readers going to say, 'No I didn't mean for you to print that ad?' Or am I going to say 'No, we can't print this!' They were consistently like that from there on in. They never altered. Never any change in the pitch or the camber. They were just ridiculous. It was like the advertisers seized on something.\n\nFRENCH: This is a personal favorite of mine:\n\n_If you think I'm going to love you\u2014you're right. Clingy, over-emotional and socially draining woman, 36. Once you've got me, you can never ever leave me. Not ever. Prone to maniacal bursts of crying, usually followed by excitable and uncontrollable laughter. Life is a roller coaster; you've just got to ride it, as Ronan Keating once said. Buxton. Box no. 0617.\n\n _\n\n ROSE: That's got all the elements of an ad that I really like, including an obscure musical reference. I was going to put a musical discography at the back of the book thinking it would present the perfect sound track to an emotional ride\u2014if you put all of these songs together, this is what heart ache sounds like. But the songs were just completely ridiculous. There was far too much Dean Friedman. Far too much Bachman Turner Overdrive. If that's what loneliness sounds like, then I don't want to hear it.\n\nFRENCH: One of the notable features of Sexually is the footnotes. These adverts are loaded with tons of obscure references\u2014\n\nROSE: It was an awful lot of work. And there was an awful lot more going on in these ads that a reader needn't necessarily be attuned to. A lot of times they hit on a knowing wink. A lot of people can read these adverts, but only two or three will get the references. Take this one, for instance:\n\n _\n\n Newly divorced man, 38, Would like to meet woman to 40 whose heroes don't include Leslie Cole, Bill 'Dink' Hewit, Roger Martinez, Peter Jaconelli, Dave Man or William Corfield. Northumbria. Box no. 6362._\n\nROSE: Nobody in the world knows who they are, and it took an awful lot of digging. I got a hold of this guy and he revealed that they were all world record holders. Leslie Cole set the world record for the fastest consumption of eels. All of them had been taken from the Guinness Book in 1971. I'm not sure how successful he was in getting a date.\n\nFRENCH: The pathos and brutal honesty in a lot of these personals seems to run contrary to the rules of advertising.\n\nROSE: It completely goes against the grain of a sales pitch. Those other personals are like resumes, and who's ever turned on by a resume? In the few words the lonely hearts advertisers have in the LRB, they still manage to capture a more complete essence of that person than anything you could find on Match. A while back I was (very dubiously) an expert on a BBC panel about lonely-hearts advertisers. They brought in a number of Dear Abby-types, and one of the other members of the panel was a woman who ran the personals for a massive agency. She was appalled, just outraged at some of the ads we were publishing. She said to me 'How can you let people do this? This is not good! You're ruining these people's lives!' Then she gave me her business card and said, 'Give me a call and I will take over your section.' The truth is, however desperate and unattractive people appear to be in these ads, the ads themselves are attractive, the words are attractive. The character behind the ads is attractive.\n\nFRENCH: I'm not sure if I'd say the guy who wrote this ad sounds in anyway attractive, but there's something about it that makes me simultaneously laugh and cringe:\n\n _\n\n If you respond to this ad and agree to meet me, you'll probably want to get yourself good and drunk first. Man, 51. Good looking but rarely great with conversation. Especially if it doesn't require me thumbing nervously through the Welsh costal tides timetable that I always carry in my wallet next to a picture of my mother (may the Lord have mercy on her sweet soul, snatched injudiciously away from us by ulcer complications on June 17th, 1987\u2014we love you, Mum, you're with us every single day). Box no. 9291_\n\nFacebookPinterestDavid Rose.png\n\nROSE: As funny as these are, they are really nice little vignettes. You've got all the elements of good writing, but condensed to this tiny thing. You've got a sense of narrative; you have a sense of a very specific reality; you have a very distinct voice. Those are three elements to good writing.\n\n FRENCH: This is a form\u2014like a sonnet or a Borges-ian fiction, in it's own perverse way, isn't it?\n\nROSE: Or at least there are real suggestions of form. They have a certain meter. They don't have a lot of space or time, but they've found ways to play around with the form. Part of what makes these adverts attractive is that there's a build up and a punch-line, but after the punch line comes a further level of absurdity, often in parenthesis:\n\n **\n\n Some incidents in life are blacked-out for a reason.** Much as I shudder to recall an incident at Dulwich in 1968 involving a goose, a penny whistle, and the local priest, so you will probably twist in the wind whenever, in years to come, you're forced to relate a tale about how you once replied to a personal advert in a flurry of misplaced appreciation for what you regarded at the time as a heightened and sophisticated sense of irony. Man, 40. Hates geese. And priests. And penny whistles. Box no. 7793.\n\nROSE: That's a great example. It's got a Smother's Brothers kind of way of building up the pathos and knocking it down and then finally coming in with the final killer line. It is a very sophisticated form of comedy, but whether or not it's intentional, I don't know. That's a mystery.\n\nFRENCH: A lot of the humor has a distinctly British feel.\n\nROSE: One of the things I like about the ads that because they're from that British intellectual class, you get a lot of Monty Python. There's an awful lot of silly and outrageous and full on non-sequiturs:\n\n In February next year I will begin work in my garden on a 1:128 working scale model of the Karakumsky Canal, which stretches 1,200km from Haun-Khan to Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan. It irrigates a course of 800km and is the largest in the world. Now make love to me. Man, 53. Kettering. Box no. 5889 \n\nFRENCH: Sometimes I find myself wondering\u2014can this person really be looking for love? Or is he really just participating in a rich and difficult genre of writing? This is, after all, the LRB.\n\nROSE: It's an interesting slight of hand on their part. They are all empathically looking for love. But they're lowering the stakes. If you put up an advert on Match, and nobody responds to your profile, they you're going to feel like gobshite. But here, if nobody responds to you, you can say you were just playing the game. It's a way of distancing yourself from the possibility of rejection.\n\n On the other hand, I can tell you that we have had a handful of singles nights at the LRB bookstore. One night I met a guy who was very proudly pointing out the adverts that he'd written and I knew bloody well that he was lying because I'd just met the advertiser who had actually gotten married from one of the advertisements that this guy was claiming to have written.\n\nFRENCH: Have you ever read one of these ads and thought to yourself, 'Gee, I'd like to meet this person?'\n\nROSE: No. Not ever. But I enjoy talking to them on the phone. They're all clearly intelligent and engaging. They worry and fuss about their ads as much as anybody writing anything. As much as if they were a poet. These personals can take upwards of 20 phone calls to get right. A lot of anxiety goes into these\u2014'Should I be saying this?' or 'Should I change this word for that word?'\n\nFRENCH: These people are writers.\n\n ROSE: Yes. And a lot of the time, they're also drunk. On Monday mornings I always have a huge blitz of emails in my inbox that have clearly been written in the early hours of Saturday morning. Or they phone up and say, 'Ahhh, I may have emailed you this weekend\u2014\n\n _\n\n Tall, handsome, well-built, articulate, intelligent, sensitive, yet often grossly inaccurate man, 21. Cynics (and some cheap Brentwood psychiatrists) may say 'pathological liar', but I like to use creative with reality'. Join me in my 36-bedroom mansion on my Gloucestershire estate, set in 400 acres of wild-stag populated woodland. East Ham. Box no. 0620_\n\nROSE: That one cuts to the chase of the adverts that you read in all of the other magazines where they're advertising these tremendous specimens of human kind, but they're in a lonely-hearts column. Something's not working for those people. This guy's cutting right to it\u2014it's all bullshit.\n\nFRENCH: Do these ads make any money for the LRB?\n\nROSE: No. I can tell you categorically, emphatically, that we don't. And beyond that, I think the other editors just kind of distain them. When the column started in 1998, the editors were nervous about them at first. They wanted to vet them. Honestly, nobody trusts me. But we've gotten to the point where everybody else just thinks, 'Why bother? These things are just ridiculous.' Now they just disdain them. The editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers had a book come out recently and she did an interview with the London Times. Invariably she was asked about the personal ads and she replied--'I never read them. I'm aware of them, but they're not my thing.' This column has been running for over a decade now, and it's never changed. I love that. That's intense. That's longer than Friends was on television. Every week there's something different. There are new characters, all saying different things but making the same statements of loneliness."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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