Word: pete
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perhaps even Pete would admit that he takes himself a little too seriously in this slim volume. Certainly, he must snicker just a little when he rereads the last line of his preface: "Each story deals with one aspect of my struggle to discover what beauty really...
...grapplings with beauty become fairly obscure among Pete's serious-if-weird musings on God, alcohol and drug abuse, getting laid, and being famous, which contain not a trace of the attractive, let alone the beautiful...
More accurately, Townshend's search seems to be not for the beautiful but for the esoteric. In his overtly Freudian sketch "Horses," Pete presents one of the many dreamlike situations offered by the book: "Confronting the white horse I put out my hand and brushed hard down the flank as if to smooth away the mark of a girth strap. As I did so, the skin fell away, and the dry white bones of the rib cage appeared. Beneath the ribs, living within the body of the horse, moved a massive snake. Its skin shone green and blue...
Even from Jim Morrison, this anecdote would be puzzling. More curious, though, is the way in which the "Horses" chapter ends, with the line, "Nothing has anything to do with you or me." Pete obviously thinks he's pretty deep, but this adolescent profundity works better in his pithy songs of the 60s than in a thin, overpriced book...
...case Pete's sentiments and strangely convoluted prose forays don't convince people that he knows a lot about Life's Important Questions, Townshend peppers his stories with a bibliography of the Very Impressive Writers he knows about. He refers to Proust and Joyce. He lists Conrad, Burgess, Bashevis Singer and Balzac as writers he's keen on, as well as P.G. Wodehouse and H.E. Bates: "I read fairly heavy stuff. To mention all the authors might make me sound pretentious...