Ricky Ricardo?
Manolo says, only one more week until the Manolo’s latest work, The Consolation of the Shoes appears in print.
Here is the description of the Manolo and this work from the website of the New Pamphleteers.
How does one explain Manolo the Shoeblogger to someone who’s never visited his wildly popular internet site? Well, take two parts high-class shoe fetishist, one part Ricky Ricardo, and one part Jacques Barzun, a dash of Ignatius J. Reilly, shake vigorously and decant liberally, and you’ve got Manolo the Shoeblogger.Since first appearing in October, 2004, his website, Manolo’s Shoe Blog, has become one of the best read fashion sites on the internet, and the Manolo himself has been praised by authorities as various as the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Fortune, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, and the master shoe designer himself, Manolo Blahnik, for his eccentric, erudite, and at times outrageous sense of humor, and for his extensive knowledge of shoes and fashion.
Now, in The Consolation of the Shoes, the Manolo reveals yet another side of himself, recounting a late night visitation from a mysterious woman, a visitation that sends the young Manolo on a quest to find the perfect pair of shoes. Along the way he wrestles with a series of footwear-based teleological and eschatological problems culminating in a transcendent moment of pure shoe joy. Throughout the Manolo remains his usual unusual self, full of cockeyed aphorisms, oddball observations, and trenchant social and cultural commentary, all of it both hilarious and very intelligent.
Find out what the readers of Manolo’s Shoe Blog have long known, that fashion and philosophy are not incompatible, and that Manolo the Shoeblogger is one of the funniest and smartest people you’ll read this year.
Ayyyyy! Such fulsome praise is enough to make the Manolo blush.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:13 am
It would seem that the reviewer suffered a little slip of memory when writing this: instead of Ricky Ricardo, he was no doubt thinking of the Ricardo Romero, the suave bandleader who very nearly won the Ginger from the Fred in the film “Swing Time.”
Has the Guardian indeed discovered the Manolo? One shudders to think what they must make of him; no doubt they display the iron incomprehension of the dog gazing upon the Parthenon.
Anyway, congratulations to the Manolo, and it is hoped that many, many copies of his book will be bought and read avidly.
April 9th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I’ll be buying one, anyway. You had me at “teleological.”
April 9th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
eschatological!
April 9th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
The book of the Manolo, it just went on to my Amazon Wish List…and my husband does indeed read my Wish List…and my birthday it is coming up!
April 9th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
My copy, it is on order, and I eagerly await delivery. Bravo, Manolo, and many felicitations on your new venture!
April 10th, 2007 at 2:57 am
You little know, Annalucia, of the fashion pages of the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,2029130,00.html
April 10th, 2007 at 3:20 am
Not ony does the Guardian have the very good fashion and lifestlye features, they have also always been most kind to the Manolo.
April 10th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Oh Manolo, surely you are aware that “fulsome” means “cloying, disgustingly excessive, insincere”. Little do we expect such cack-handed errors from you.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:39 am
From The Freedictionary: Fulsome is often used to mean “offensively flattering or insincere.” But the word is also used, particularly in the expression fulsome praise, to mean simply “abundant,” without any implication of excess or insincerity. So the Manolo he is not wrong! =)