Lunch of Blood
Encyclopedia
Lunch of Blood is Antonella Gambotto-Burke
's first book and first anthology. The title was inspired by a Saul Bellow
poem:
"Mice hide when hawks are high;
Hawks shy from airplanes;
Planes dread the ack-ack-ack;
Each one fears somebody.
Only the heedless lions
Under the Booloo tree
Snooze in each other's arms
After their lunch of blood -
I call that living good!"
Published by Random House
in 1994, Lunch of Blood was dedicated to the artist and critic John Henshaw, and includes Gambotto-Burke's 1991 Independent on Sunday cover story on British cardiothoracic surgeons ("Affairs of the Heart"), and interviews with Martin Amis
, Edward de Bono
, Gerard Depardieu
, Alex Dimitriades
, Ben Elton
, Rachel Hunter
, Elle MacPherson
, Morrissey
, Marc Newson
, Noah Taylor
, Naomi Wolf
, and others. It peaked at number four on The Sydney Morning Herald
s bestseller lists and, according to a review section cover story in The Weekend Australian, established Gambotto-Burke's reputation as the "Stilettoed Assassin".
critic explained, "Geoffrey Wheatcroft called their tool of trade ‘the killer interview’. Mark Lawson christened the movement ‘jugular journalism’. It was like a bullfight, he said. ‘Fifteen hundred words flash by, a succession of passes with the muleta, and then comes estocada, and another carcass is dragged away by the mule-team’ … [Gambotto is] one of our matador-interviewers." Australian Bookseller & Publisher
concurred:
"The interviews hang together superbly as a collection, largely because Gambotto has … the astonishing ability to reveal the absolute essence of a person." And in The Sydney Morning Herald
, Don Anderson described Gambotto-Burke in interviewer mode as "a Tinker Bell among the pirates, sprinkling fairy dust in the eyes of celebrity crocodiles ...," and concluded: "Never let it be said that Michael Douglas's line in Wall Street, 'Lunch is for wimps', could apply to her."
: "Established authors often speak of the ‘coldness’ of novelists, a coldness purported to be necessary for the documenting process. Amis is not enthralled by the topic, narrows his pale eyes, lights another cigarette, and smokes it for a minute before speaking. ‘You’re certainly not one removed from your emotions, but a fraction of a removal away. You do have this sort of vampiric attitude to experience.'"
Edward de Bono
: "‘I find everything beautiful, everything,’ he says. ‘I am very much against the notion that for something to be beautiful, it has to be in a frame in an art gallery with someone reviewing it. Beauty may be the elegance of a mathematical solution, it can be a Penthouse centrefold, design, a rainy day … anything.’"
Cardiothoracic surgeons: "Allen suddenly slices a straight line down the woman’s chest with his scalpel, through the plastic. A jewel-bright bar of blood bubbles up. the sticky plastic holds the skin in place. He begins burning the slight aperture with an electrosurgical generator - a bolt of energy which cauterizes bleeding vessels. His face is calm. The fumes rising from the flesh are thick and foul and curl into the faces of those watching. Burning flesh has the stench of burning rubber, burning hair."
Nick Cave
: "‘I’m not really interested in the audience’s enjoyment,’ Cave mumbles once he has changed into his clean trousers. ‘It doesn’t bother me one way or another. I just don’t give a shit. People feel more and more disappointed with each concert because less and less happens. It’s really easy to suck an audience in. like I can wiggle my bum and backflip on my head and they love it. I could make an audience love me until the end of my days. There’s no point in it any more. I wish they’d just … die.’"
Ben Elton
: "'A single American stealth bomber costs five hundred million American dollars, and they are going to build one hundred and twenty of them. And then they turn around and complain about aid packages! Now that’s the kind of obscenity we accept in our lives, and yet none of us can stand being in the lavatory and hearing the splash next door.'"
Rachel Hunter
: "'There’s this thing people say that the child won’t know its mother if it has a nanny and that’s rubbish! I know dogs and babies are different, and I had a Great Dane at home in Auckland, and I left her when she was quite young because I had to go back to England for months, and she knew who I was when I got back!'"
Elle Macpherson
: "'However, men are men and women are women. That’s all there is to it. women who want to be men and men who want to be women are not, to me, particularly normal. I am a woman. I get my periods every month. I get premenstrual tension. I have babies, I like to wear skirts, I like to have men open the door for me and stand up for me when I enter a room. I have absolutely noooo ambition to wear overalls and to have somebody talk to me about some girl that he fucked last night.'"
Morrissey
: "'People tell me that they fall in love with me, but I sit at home, night after night, watching television documentaries, and I ask myself: Where are all these people who are falling in love with me? And, you know, I’m stroking the cat … I’m buttering a large piece of brown toast … I’m asking myself whether or not I really have anything at all to do with youth culture … it’s very curious.'"
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Antonella Gambotto-Burke is an Australian author and journalist.Gambotto-Burke has written one novel, The Pure Weight of the Heart, two anthologies, Lunch of Blood and An Instinct for the Kill, and a memoir, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, which has been published in four languages...
's first book and first anthology. The title was inspired by a Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
poem:
"Mice hide when hawks are high;
Hawks shy from airplanes;
Planes dread the ack-ack-ack;
Each one fears somebody.
Only the heedless lions
Under the Booloo tree
Snooze in each other's arms
After their lunch of blood -
I call that living good!"
Published by Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
in 1994, Lunch of Blood was dedicated to the artist and critic John Henshaw, and includes Gambotto-Burke's 1991 Independent on Sunday cover story on British cardiothoracic surgeons ("Affairs of the Heart"), and interviews with Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
, Edward de Bono
Edward de Bono
Edward de Bono is a physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He originated the term lateral thinking, wrote a best selling book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.- Biography :Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono was born to...
, Gerard Depardieu
Gérard Depardieu
Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu is a French actor and filmmaker. He is a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite and has twice won the César Award for Best Actor...
, Alex Dimitriades
Alex Dimitriades
Alex Dimitriades is a Greek Australian film and television actor.-Early life:Dimitriades was born in Sydney, the son of first generation Greek immigrants and is the youngest of three siblings . He grew up in the suburb of Earlwood...
, Ben Elton
Ben Elton
Benjamin Charles "Ben" Elton is an English comedian, author, playwright and director. He was a leading figure in the British alternative comedy movement of the 1980s, as a writer on such cult series as The Young Ones and Blackadder, as well as also a successful stand-up comedian on stage and TV....
, Rachel Hunter
Rachel Hunter
Rachel Hunter is a New Zealand born American model, actress and reality TV show host who now resides in the U.S. She is best known for her appearance in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues and her longtime marriage to singer Rod Stewart, which ended in 2006...
, Elle MacPherson
Elle Macpherson
Elle Macpherson is an Australian model, actress, and businesswoman nicknamed "The Body". She is perhaps best known for her record five cover appearances for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue beginning in the 1980s...
, Morrissey
Morrissey
Steven Patrick Morrissey , known as Morrissey, is an English singer and lyricist. He rose to prominence in the 1980s as the lyricist and vocalist of the alternative rock band The Smiths. The band was highly successful in the United Kingdom but broke up in 1987, and Morrissey began a solo career,...
, Marc Newson
Marc Newson
Marc Newson was born in Sydney, Australia. Now based in London, he is a successful industrial designer who works in aircraft design, product design, furniture design, jewellery, and clothing. He incorporates a design style known as biomorphism to his various designs...
, Noah Taylor
Noah Taylor
Noah George Taylor is an English-born Australian actor.-Early life:Taylor, elder of two boys, was born in London, England, the son of Maggie, a journalist and book editor, and Paul Taylor, a copywriter and journalist. Taylor's Australian parents returned to Australia when he was five, and he grew...
, Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf is an American author and political consultant. With the publication of The Beauty Myth, she became a leading spokesperson of what was later described as the third wave of the feminist movement.-Biography:...
, and others. It peaked at number four on The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published by Fairfax Media in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the SMH is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia. The newspaper is published six days a week. The newspaper's Sunday counterpart, The...
s bestseller lists and, according to a review section cover story in The Weekend Australian, established Gambotto-Burke's reputation as the "Stilettoed Assassin".
Critical response
The Canberra TimesThe Canberra Times
The Canberra Times newspaper was founded in 1926 in Canberra, Australia by Arthur Shakespeare.It was the second paper to be printed in the city, the first being The Federal Capital Pioneer. The paper was sold to the Fairfax group in the 1960s by Arthur Shakespeare on the condition that it continue...
critic explained, "Geoffrey Wheatcroft called their tool of trade ‘the killer interview’. Mark Lawson christened the movement ‘jugular journalism’. It was like a bullfight, he said. ‘Fifteen hundred words flash by, a succession of passes with the muleta, and then comes estocada, and another carcass is dragged away by the mule-team’ … [Gambotto is] one of our matador-interviewers." Australian Bookseller & Publisher
Australian Bookseller & Publisher
Bookseller+Publisher magazine is the journal of the Australian book industry and is one of Australia's oldest surviving magazines...
concurred:
"The interviews hang together superbly as a collection, largely because Gambotto has … the astonishing ability to reveal the absolute essence of a person." And in The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published by Fairfax Media in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the SMH is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia. The newspaper is published six days a week. The newspaper's Sunday counterpart, The...
, Don Anderson described Gambotto-Burke in interviewer mode as "a Tinker Bell among the pirates, sprinkling fairy dust in the eyes of celebrity crocodiles ...," and concluded: "Never let it be said that Michael Douglas's line in Wall Street, 'Lunch is for wimps', could apply to her."
Quotations
Martin AmisMartin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
: "Established authors often speak of the ‘coldness’ of novelists, a coldness purported to be necessary for the documenting process. Amis is not enthralled by the topic, narrows his pale eyes, lights another cigarette, and smokes it for a minute before speaking. ‘You’re certainly not one removed from your emotions, but a fraction of a removal away. You do have this sort of vampiric attitude to experience.'"
Edward de Bono
Edward de Bono
Edward de Bono is a physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He originated the term lateral thinking, wrote a best selling book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.- Biography :Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono was born to...
: "‘I find everything beautiful, everything,’ he says. ‘I am very much against the notion that for something to be beautiful, it has to be in a frame in an art gallery with someone reviewing it. Beauty may be the elegance of a mathematical solution, it can be a Penthouse centrefold, design, a rainy day … anything.’"
Cardiothoracic surgeons: "Allen suddenly slices a straight line down the woman’s chest with his scalpel, through the plastic. A jewel-bright bar of blood bubbles up. the sticky plastic holds the skin in place. He begins burning the slight aperture with an electrosurgical generator - a bolt of energy which cauterizes bleeding vessels. His face is calm. The fumes rising from the flesh are thick and foul and curl into the faces of those watching. Burning flesh has the stench of burning rubber, burning hair."
Nick Cave
Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, and occasional film actor.He is best known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1984, a group known for its eclectic influences and...
: "‘I’m not really interested in the audience’s enjoyment,’ Cave mumbles once he has changed into his clean trousers. ‘It doesn’t bother me one way or another. I just don’t give a shit. People feel more and more disappointed with each concert because less and less happens. It’s really easy to suck an audience in. like I can wiggle my bum and backflip on my head and they love it. I could make an audience love me until the end of my days. There’s no point in it any more. I wish they’d just … die.’"
Ben Elton
Ben Elton
Benjamin Charles "Ben" Elton is an English comedian, author, playwright and director. He was a leading figure in the British alternative comedy movement of the 1980s, as a writer on such cult series as The Young Ones and Blackadder, as well as also a successful stand-up comedian on stage and TV....
: "'A single American stealth bomber costs five hundred million American dollars, and they are going to build one hundred and twenty of them. And then they turn around and complain about aid packages! Now that’s the kind of obscenity we accept in our lives, and yet none of us can stand being in the lavatory and hearing the splash next door.'"
Rachel Hunter
Rachel Hunter
Rachel Hunter is a New Zealand born American model, actress and reality TV show host who now resides in the U.S. She is best known for her appearance in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues and her longtime marriage to singer Rod Stewart, which ended in 2006...
: "'There’s this thing people say that the child won’t know its mother if it has a nanny and that’s rubbish! I know dogs and babies are different, and I had a Great Dane at home in Auckland, and I left her when she was quite young because I had to go back to England for months, and she knew who I was when I got back!'"
Elle Macpherson
Elle Macpherson
Elle Macpherson is an Australian model, actress, and businesswoman nicknamed "The Body". She is perhaps best known for her record five cover appearances for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue beginning in the 1980s...
: "'However, men are men and women are women. That’s all there is to it. women who want to be men and men who want to be women are not, to me, particularly normal. I am a woman. I get my periods every month. I get premenstrual tension. I have babies, I like to wear skirts, I like to have men open the door for me and stand up for me when I enter a room. I have absolutely noooo ambition to wear overalls and to have somebody talk to me about some girl that he fucked last night.'"
Morrissey
Morrissey
Steven Patrick Morrissey , known as Morrissey, is an English singer and lyricist. He rose to prominence in the 1980s as the lyricist and vocalist of the alternative rock band The Smiths. The band was highly successful in the United Kingdom but broke up in 1987, and Morrissey began a solo career,...
: "'People tell me that they fall in love with me, but I sit at home, night after night, watching television documentaries, and I ask myself: Where are all these people who are falling in love with me? And, you know, I’m stroking the cat … I’m buttering a large piece of brown toast … I’m asking myself whether or not I really have anything at all to do with youth culture … it’s very curious.'"