I didn't know...

... that Jonathan Caouette had a blog. Well, he does, and here is the music that was featured in the film. As you can see, it is my sort of music: Melancholy FM.

I'm actually starting to think that people don't have a blog are either too lazy or have something to hide. On the other hand, they may just be boring people or people who think their lives are too boring to document, which is a tenet I fundamentally disagree with. Mundanity is inherently fascinating, because life is mundanity. On yet another hand, they might have no internet access and work their cotton socks off at work. Man, my mind is doing cartwheels. Can't wait till I get home and do something extra-mundane.  ¶ 4:09 PM

  Sillius Soddus
You buy a UGC Year's cinema pass, and what happens? You don't use it. You feel stupid that you spent £155 on something that you will hardly ever use because it required you moving your fat arse. Then you will guilty. Hmmm….

Anyway

The conclusion I’ve reached from watching two documentaries ending in the two syllables “-ATION” is we’re damned to hell, and there’s very little we can do about it. Can you guess what I saw? That would be Tarnation and The Corporation. The latter I will lightly brush over. In effect, corporations are run by evil bastards who will make profits at any cost (this is proved time and time again). One example: one company privatises the rainwater in Bolivia and the people react by fomenting revolution. Humanity does not even come into it, and if it does, it comes under the dubious banner of “corporate responsibility”.

However, that’s not forgetting that no industry is sustainable at its current rate. NOT A SINGLE ONE. It’s depressing that we have treated the world with such a disdain, that by bending the biosphere to our will and convenience we have doomed future generations. No wonder the corporation is diagnosed as a classic psychopath.

Thank God for people such as Ray Anderson, CEO of the carpet company Interface who had such an epiphany and has been telling other captains of industry as well as the wider world that we are heading for the precipice and will be going over some time soon. At least he will have made his company sustainable by the year 2020. But just think what giant, malevolent multinationals such as Shell and General Motors have to do if they are to make themselves sustainable. It scares the shit out of me. (That is after I was shocked by Noam Chomsky’s vocal and physical resemblance to an older Michael Mann, the film director. ‘Tis uncanny.) But the very fact that I was so shocked by this litany of criminality means that there is some hope that people will take it upon themselves to change this sorry, tragic state of affairs.

I mean it has moved me enough to make me think that I may go green, at least politically. I’m horrified by the current political situation, as well as sickened by people’s selfishness, and have done two ‘who you should vote for’ tests just to ascertain my ideological moorings. Both times it came out green. There you go, you say, he’s willing to stake a political stance on account of some internet tests! Nutter.

On to Tarnation, the film that has been called the $218.32 documentary (in fact post-production boosts it to $400,000). It’s a remarkable piece of work, almost like touching a live-wire, so shocking is its rawness. Jonathan Caouette’s life story (schizo mum’s electro-shock treatments fucks her life up while abused son grows up gay and artistic in Texas) is the stuff of which Dave Pelzer’s books are made.

I didn’t think it was exploitative, not at all. I can’t imagine the pain that Caouette has gone through, or his mothers. Yet it did feel like one long performance piece or a long music video. Since the music was stuff that I love (Iron and Wine, Magnetic Fields, Red House Painters, “Wichita Lineman") I was more inclined towards the latter most of the time. No surprise that Uncut loved it, because it is so indicative of their dark, depressive and introspective tastes (so it had to be my sort of movie).

However, Tarnation is revolutionary only if you consider the context or the circumstances in which it was strung together; that is if you were a budding filmmaker or at least someone with hours of disturbing home movie footage. Yes, this is homemade, computer age, pioneering work. But the viewing experience stays the same as if I watched something like Elephant or Requiem for a Dream. On an emotional level it will burn you eyes out, and if you watch it in the cinema bursts of feedback will shake you out of your seat. I like it because how often do you get to see a real-life Drama Queen’s Family Scrapbook of Mental Devastation. In fact, it ends on a fatalistic note. Still soaked in pain, Caouette hopes he won’t end up a brain-damaged schizophrenic like his once-beautiful, now-pudgy mother. Ending a film on a note of worry of the future was a brave move. Sadly, I think it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m actually left to wonder if Caouette can go anywhere from here, although the Warhol/Liquid Sky route lies wide open (I hope not, those films sucked so sucky were they).

I was thinking that these two movies are emblematic of the culture I have chosen to immerse myself in. I think I live in Leftfield world. It’s a bit Guardiany, perhaps a bit Cahiers de Cinema crossed with Shoreditch and Selectadisc, but far far too self aware to go truly bo-ho without feeling like a fool. It is, in fact, the complete opposite of The Sun World, Suburban World and Financial Times World. Do you get what I’m saying? We’re young but we’ll age disgracefully. It is a place where cynicism has usurped responsibility; where knowledge means more than practicality and melancholy has conquered the emotional spectrum. It is a place, which breeds a certain sort of contentment. And I’m happy about that. It just means that I know I have to grow out of it some time, or run away to a beach shack in Goa.

My word I’ve forgotten to say something about The Man with the Golden Arm (despite mentioning it three times previously on this blog). Let’s just say this: Nelson Algren is a genius with an eye for human weakness and urban and physical decay. It was the most beautifully written novel I have read in quite some time. I loved it when a character said she liked a song because it sounded like a song she REALLY liked. I know what he (she) meant. It explains why I like a whole load of music. And a phrase about a stopped clock being able to tell the right time for a while sure sounded familiar.

But having said that, putting the word doomed next to Frankie Machine’s name in your plot synopsis on the back does give away the ending, because that is the last thing that happens. Reading this substantial tale of a GI turned heroin addict (or Trainspotting meets The Sweet Smell of Success), you realise that Algren is one of the greatest unsung American authors of the last century.  ¶ 3:53 PM

  Inventory continued

I'm sorry, okay. My laziness has overcome me as easily as David Walliams has conquered every c-list lady celeb to have ever flaunted their sagging/taut bodies on the pages of 3am. I think there is a fundamental problem in that my feelings for the books are visceral enough for me to (mal)form an opinion, but then a month later when I have to write a few sentences about them, such enthusiasm, or downright hatred has evaporated. So let's try this:

A Confederate General from Big Sur: Funny, surprising, dreamy, hopeful. It makes me want to read a lot more Brautigan.
The Icarus Girl: HOW DARE A 20-YEAR-OLD PUBLISH A NOVEL AND GET IT REVIEWED ON NEWSNIGHT REVIEW. Jeanette Winterson was right. This is juvenilia. But then again Jeanette once said she was the one writer she couldn't live without, or something equally surprising in its shocking arrogance or powerful will (the opposite of Nick Hornby, who hates his own stuff - I know how it feels). Mind you, it's perfectly readable for a kids book and has, oh, about two surprising phrases in it. The rest is straight down the line supernatural stuff (twin, whose twin died at birth, goes to Nigeria and picks up a ghostly friend and takes her back to Blighty where she wreaks havoc). Oyeyemi is no Zadie Smith. And that statement is only 33 per cent motivated by insane, green-tinted jealousy.
Epileptic: Brilliant, exhausting, it's everything those critics said it would be. Portrait of a Family with One Sick Son, and how it affected their lives. The drawing is stark and tears into you, but is more in tune with Marjane Satrapi's stuff, as opposed to Craig Thompson's Blankets's lush, fantastical realism.
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust: West writes wonderfully. This is really the start of those "there's no there there" accusations that have been levelled at Los Angeles. Everyone is miserable and heading, to the West Coast, heading to their doom. I thought, God this is great, but soooo depressing (you ask me, what did I expect? And I reply, well I didn't expect it to be that much of a downer). Then I get to p. 79 of Locust. Why it's none other than a dumb lug called Homer Simpson who starts helping out a manipulative little actress. I picture a yellow bald cartoon character parading among the cast of drab, hopeless misfits. The book actually gets better, and worse, if you know what I mean. Seminal, you ask? Yes. If you're in the mood.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: I am drawn to emotional wreckage memoirs. This Boy's Life is misery but also discovery and finally triumph. A Million Little Pieces is a piece of shit written by a odious narcissist. Bullshit Suck is better than the latter but still nowhere near as good as the former. Flynn's dad is quite a character. Apart from that Flynn keeps himself out of the story - emotionally at least. Which is good, if not making for a blank slate in my critical mosaic. (Nope that last sentence didn't work did it)

You know I was only going to write a sentence each, but you've seen what happens. The fingers, you see, they just go tappety-tap-tap for 20 minutes. I can't control it.

Okay, let's try this again.

On the Road: Beat classic. Much better than Big Sur. Meandering but compulsive. Perhaps too much love for the words raw and riot. But does this life on the road really go anywhere? Or is it just preparation for doom? If these people settled down, I think they would be much happier (so saith the aging, near geezer in me). Bunch of losers, me thinks as well.

But seriously. I met James Ellroy who told me he hated these fucking drugged-up piss artists. They were peddling hot air which they really called freedom. I can see his point. Then I read about Lester Bangs who said he cried when he read about the pathetic real lives of Neal Cassady and the whole beat crew because they meant so much to him. I love these writers, even if The Cold Six Thousand was intensely annoying in style and some of Bangs's stuff makes me want to go to America and piss on his grave. Can't we strike a balance between the two? Go wild in a small space, perhaps.

Enduring Love: Let's see. Would a typical McEwan sentence go something like: "He could feel his neural pathways buzzing with the new technological information he had wrestled from the computer screen, but then he felt a jolt in his bowels and had to go for a crap." But I like this book. Even if I did do the cinematic thing again. The one thing I admired it most for was his control.

Where I was From: Didion's memoir is a memoir of a place - California - and mines the same seam that Day of the Locust does, that it is a place built on dreams but inhabited by scoundrels and the people they exploit. It's detached because I think it's the only way she knows how to write (this place is going to shit, but let me have a cigarette while I lie down etc). It's all about disillusion and creeping moral turpitude. Beautifully written and researched, but you get the feeling this is an exercise in style, or that because of your inferior intellect, you are missing something. I only wish I could write with such subtlety.  ¶ 3:18 PM

  Meme Amendment

I have just noticed that something got lost in the transcription regarding the Fahrenheit 451 question, which is meant to read:

You're inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book would you burn?

Easy. THE FUCKING DA VINCI CODE. I went on to Amazon.co.uk yesterday and read a fair sample of the 587 reviews. Those who gave it one star I salute you. To the 550-odd fucktards who gave it five stars and said things like "the best novel I've ever read" "wonderful writing" and "amazing", I have this to say - go shove your a stick of dynamite up your stupid ass and light it while standing in a bookshop next to a pile of Dan Brown novels, hopefully while Dan Brown is giving a reading to hundreds of adoring Brownites. You think the writing on sweet wrappers is Shakespearean and you dribble at bus stops while trying and failing to read numbers on the vehicles. Your favourite food are Chilli Cheese Tacos from the 99p menu at Burger King and you have hair like a mangy rat that has just swum through a mile of festering turd-slurry. May thousands of small black creatures burrow into your genitalia. May your children be green and have misshapen lumps on their forehead. May you become a big Cliff Richard fan.

You know when I see someone read THE FUCKING DA VINCI CODE on the train, I think that's okay, they're just satisfying their natural curiosity. But when I see someone reading Angels and Demons, or GOD FORBID, Deception Point, I know this person has liked THE FUCKING DA VINCI CODE and gone out and bought more fucking Dan Brown books. Hear this, ye foul of brain and small of heart, when the revolution comes you will be first up against the wall. Along with whichever Sun journalist thought up the Save Jordan's Jugs campaign. Hell awaits for your craven minds.  ¶ 8:19 PM

  First: I’ll finish off inventory number two once I have both tired of listening to Running on Empty by Jackson Browne and rediscovered my will to live. I’m not entirely sure if it dropped out of my jacket pocket on the way to work. Maybe this will-loss has something to do with the live liposuction surgery with Vanessa Feltz I watched the other night (I know, I cannot live down the shame, so I have to tell you).

The decreasingly chubby lady, stripped of all her dignity, pubic hair and her clothes had 30 pounds of yellow yuck sucked from her thighs (deposited in some see-through canisters for all to see and retch at) with the aid of a doctor, who used a huge nozzle which he kept sticking rapidly and willy-nilly in and out of various puncture holes in her groin area, while the commentators talked without pointing up the insanity of it all, saying she was on ketamine (yes, horse tranquilisers; the drug for any hipster who doesn’t really care about their lives anymore) - "She won't remember a thing". And when it was almost all over, the surgeon said to his delirium-strafed charge: “Hey, Wanda, you can go to the Prom, now”. Her reply? “Muh-huh-muhhhh”. My jaw had already hit the floor.

Ben, that silver-flecked, hunchbacked student scum-muncher, once again thinks if he sends me something then I might respond via this blog. He knows me too well. Don't worry he loves abuse. Abuse him at will. Abuse him in his comments boxes. You know I'm just writing this because I'm bored out of my tiny little mind.

Which book would you memorise if you were on a desert island?
I’ve read Fahrenheit 451. I thought it blew goats, which is why I’ll never ever read any Ray Bradbury (not while there are Robert Ludlum, Marian Keyes and Andy McNab novels left in this world). I also saw the movie. That sucked too. Worst Truffaut ever. I also would have felt sorry for anybody who had to memorise Vanity Fair rather than Nightmare Abbey. So let’s cast the “being a book” thing aside. If I wanted to memorise every word of a book, it would be The Adventures of Augie March – you know why.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Errr, no. I’m thinking you have to have a mental defect or extremely peculiar proclivity to fancy somebody who you have conjured partly from your own imagination and the words on the page. I’ve thought about Bellow’s intellectual bimbos, for sure, but they’re too two-dimensional, albeit alluring. I mean, I used to fancy beheaded Lady Jane Grey from her portrait when I was young, but I was one fucked-up kid and had an obsession with the Tower of London. And when Madame Bovary committed suicide I laughed my arse off. You see I’m heartless. Mrs Rochester being burned to death in Wide Sargasso Sea, I tittered a little too. So idiot dreamers stay out of my way. Crushes on fictional characters are for people far too romantic for this world. People who will always get shot in the back. Or laughed at. With pointed fingers.

The last book you bought is?
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford. It was 50p on Amazon Marketplace. I have a particular weakness for participatory journalism, because so many of those books (Paper Lion by George Plimpton, Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis for example) provide such opportunity for creative pilfering and idea plagiarism that I can’t resist. If you want to know what it’s about then: American intellectual/Granta editor gets into football hooliganism. Result? He quite likes it. Or so I’ve been told. Actually it was more like £3.25 because of postage. Stealth postage, if you will.

The last book you finished is:
The last book was Searching for Bobby Fisher by Fred Waitzkin. The last novel was Yellow Dog by Martin Amis. I’m not spilling for that inventory yet.

What are you currently reading?
Positively Fifth Street by Jim McManus. It’s brilliant. Another participatory journalism classic, this time on poker. See above.

Five books you would take to a desert island?
The Complete Works of Shakespeare – because I always wanted to be erudite enough to play that “source the Shakespeare quote” game that the Van Doren family play in the film Quiz Show. Perhaps, I will also have enough time, the rest of my life in fact, to get round to the same level of understanding that Harold Bloom possesses, without the requisite urge to fondle future feminist heroines.
Gravity’s Rainbow – I’m still reading it. I dearly want to finish it. I’m sure Thomas Pynchon is a genius.
Ulysses – it lies there in my unread stacks talking to me: “Oi begorrah, the rumbubble of your grey silliness (I’ll stop it right there).”
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations – why limit yourself? There’s lots in here to enjoy. Snatches of wisdom from throughout history. I decided not to go for a single-volume encyclopaedia because of this meme’s literary flavour. But you know how much I love reference books when I’m in a certain mood.
You know there really is too large a choice to pick from. Dickens? Because I haven’t read any. Would I take Robinson Crusoe for some really rubbish survival tips? I could finish Underworld (but it did lose me after 100 pages – great opening blah blah blah). I know it’s a straightforward, boring choice, but yes, I would go for War and Peace. Or maybe War and Peace in the original Russian and a small Russian dictionary (with pages pasted inside to dodge this five-book rule) to translate, just to make it more fun, and pass the time and smother those thoughts of darkness and despair as I mull over the rubbishness of life on a desert island without Keira Knightley and a lifetime’s supply of rum. Don’t you think two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels is a bit much? Look what happened to The Matrix *shivers*.

I’m going to send this to:
Tara – because I think she reads more books than me and actually thinks about what she’s read. Though she probably has done this meme before. If she hasn’t, then that’s, you know. Something.
Wan – because he’s this fancy-dan man who reads Chekhov, Cervantes etc, and watches Britney Spears videos, while he lounges horizontally in his suppurating filth and unguent odours. Probably.
Chris – He reads books. He buys them at Sussex Stationers because of the outstanding discounts. I leant him Persepolis. He gave it back to me wrapped as a Xmas present. I bought him The Future Dictionary of America and Chas ‘n’ Dave’s greatest hits for Xmas. He lost them. Why bother, eh?  ¶ 2:41 PM

  Book Inventory no. 2

I sit on bed and listen to The Tenderfoot, mired in activity limbo. But worry not, I'll just tell you what I've been reading this month. Sometimes I'm not entirely sure read is what I mean; conquer or consume seem more apt, whenever I count how many pages to go; how much a percentage of the book before I finish and put it on the used stack. Once it is done, I feel, hmmm

Anyway:

Promises Made (haphazard order)
In the Fast Lane by Geoffrey Boycott
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
London Fields by Martin Amis
Yellow Dog by Martin Amis
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Heaven Lake by John Dalton
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Henry and June by Anais Nin
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
The Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard
The Trials of Lenny Bruce by Ronald KL Collins
Epileptic by David B

Promises Kept (order in which it was read)
A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
Epileptic by David B
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Where I Was From: A Memoir by Joan Didion

Let me take you through what I bought and why. The Boycott, well, I have an enduring fascination with the West Indies cricket team, and therefore its present decline. My own boyhood hero was also Michael Holding, a gentle giant with a relaxant voice that belied his fuck-you-up bowling. Indeed, the book - a diary of the 1980-81 tour - details possibly the greatest over in the history of cricket bowled by Holding to one grumpy Yorkshireman, who blamed, yes, he had to really, the pitch. The Line of ... well, that's because I suppose a Booker prize might bring Hollinghurst back into my favour. After The Spell (Ecstasy silliness) I thought 'never again', but then I remembered how much I loved The Swimming Pool Library, even with its phallic overload. The Amises - I had to do the rest of them some time. I'm prepared to give Yellow Dog a chance, while I enjoyed the first 150 pages of London Fields, borrowed from my sixth form library. For some odd reason, I decided to put it down for ten years. I have to give Eugenides a chance some time. I have a certain grudging respect for all 90s Pulitzer Prize winners, I mean, Kavalier and Clay is one of them. Enduring Love - I've never read a McEwan before, yes, 'tis true, so I thought I might start with his nicer phase. Perhaps the incestuous antics of the film of The Cement Garden put me off. The West because it seems like one of those seminal 20th-century works; Heaven Lake merely because it is award winning and has a nice calming cover; the Rolling Thunder probably because it got a decent review in Uncut and I can be a sucker for good production values, especially when Mr Shepard's brand of cool wraps the book up. Finally Epileptic because I really have to one a token graphic novel once in a while, and if it's a currently critically acclaimed one then, you know it's OVER.

But then I must confess: I was supposed to read Henry and June for the book group. For shame, I read only 111 pages out of 270-odd. I still went though and I thought my criticism was justified. It was a diary and it was all about feelings or "delicate perversions"; no plot, no direction, what did I expect? It was fine when I was reading it but when I stopped, looked around, held it to the light, I realised, my God, this is some worthless annoying crapola I'm reading. The act of breaking off actually made it far worse. So come discussion time I drank a lot of Ayingerbrau and moaned about this silly woman. However, at least I tried to make as few references to the film as possible. You know it's so hard.

Anyway, it has gone into the unfinished pile, or the cemetery of lost books (each of whom has some reason to annoy me). Maybe it will end up in the other column next month, should I wish to turn off my sense of outrage.

Commentary to follow...  ¶ 8:05 PM

  Mist and Menace

I love Interpol. No wait, love isn't the right word. I am compelled to listen to Interpol. When I go see their gigs I know I will enjoy them because I know all the songs, the peaks and troughs, the almost katherin hepburn curl of the vocals, the thunderous bass and crashing, metronomic drums. I don't expect anything different or out of the ordinary. All I ask is that they do what they do the same way they always have and always will.

So I rocked up to the Brixton Academy on Friday and went to see these New Yorkers for the third time. Cos I'm lazy I got seats; unintentionally, subconsciously who knows? At least when I get circle unreserved I know I will be standing. Only circle unreserved is actually the seating far above the stage; the gods, that paradis. I think I sat more or less in the same place that I did for Sonic Youth last year. Sorry, I'm babbling (thinking about brushing my teeth).

Spoon supported. They looked small. They struggled gainfully with their brand of indie-pop and if I hadn't actually listened to their stuff and maintained an amiable view of their relentless chug-chugness then I might have wanted to throw my pint at them. Nevertheless, they supported. That is all they had to do.

After listening to Aphex Twin provide the interval music (great idea, that REALLY put us in the mood), Interpol come on and wham - it's Next Exit. They frontload with Antics stuff: Slow Hands etc, and that's okay with me. The two albums are almost all there (except one notable absentee), and Not Even Jail's strange intro-sound is recapitulated weirder than I could ever have imagined - why the muffled screams of a thousand children. It is still rendered as an awesome, epic piledriver. And old favourites PDA and Say Hello to the Angels are rendered as sprints (the former has a silent interval designed to take the piss out of the adulation radiating crowd). But you know I never liked NYC that much. Here I find myself quite partial to it, to my surprise. Even if I see in my mind's eye Joey approaching Rachel's Bahaman hotel room in an episode of Friends.

Lit up as if they were standing on an airstrip at night, I have to say, the lighting added to the experience immensely. As did the immense amounts of dry ice. They know how to push the atmosphere buttons - for they are probably the quintessential atmosphere band at the moment (no on stage banter from this lot). So immense congrats to the lighting operator whose only major boo-boo was coming in on Evil early, twice. Silly billy. Got the audience excited in all the wrong places.

Now detractors, or twats as I might sometimes call them, have called Antics a letdown, a boring travesty, nothing special, a lack of progress. Shut up. It's fine. It's not as good as their debut, but fitted into the existing set, it sounds so darned 'samey' that there is no jarring disconnect. It sounds unified. It never lets up. I can honestly say that there was not a moment where I was not bored. I was always perched on the edge of my seat, singing along and smashing my calfs as if I was playing drums. They bruised, actually. People criticise Interpol for this one-beat shit and silly singing, but really, if it's good you have no reason to complain.

This was a powerhouse performance. They filled the Academy with their sound. I don't think Bloc Party will do the same in a few months time when they try to tackle this space. My only gripe is that they did not deign to play Stella is a Diver and She's Always Down. I was hopping mad. Perhaps it is a song that brings out the worse in them, regrets even: the pounding guitar that seems to go even lower just after the chorus hits, the plaintive lyrics and yearning that might sound a bit jejune three years on, the lengthiness and first album-ness. But all that silliness is exactly why I would pay to see these miserable fuckers once again and many times more. Bombast is nice, sometimes, or perhaps more than often. I like serious. I'm sick of matey bands and their cute little rock dittys. They can go to hell. Give me the ice, thunder and incomprehensible lyrics any time.

The word 'semi-erotic' is one example of my compulsion to watch again. It looks stupid; sounds redundant, but the way it's sung has just scratched itself into my brain. Like I said, they're compulsive.

That is except for one of my gig companions who decided to fall asleep (he peaked far too early, as you would too if you had been drinking since 10am) during most of the set, only to reawaken during the encore and do his special spastic dance, or the "I'm not asleep you bastards" boogie. I think he may have a problem with seated gigs.

Hmmm, I wonder if Carlos D still has herpes.  ¶ 10:53 PM

  New York Twat
In this column, speccy twatbox David Brooks appropriates the death of Bellow to laud it over Old Europe - in his view a rotten structure riddled with delusion, decay and bad bad French people - by saying that Europe has nothing to show in the way of ideas, as if ideas were pop hits or films that needed to be riding high in the US charts if they were deemed to be even the slightest bit noticeable. Sure, Bellow was a curmudgeonly fucker with inclinations towards general right-wing frailties as he journeyed into his twilight years (as Father Ted said, funny how you get more right-wing as you get older), but he would never have come up with such a lame-ass insinuation, the implication being that the European invasion into our cultural life has stopped. America has conquered all. Europe, in fact, sucks ass.

Who is Francis Truffaut? he asks. I'm sure Mr Jim Calthorpe of Skokie, Illinois could go on and on about Jules et Jim when it came out, being up with French New Wave and reading every issue of Cahiers du Cinema back in the 60s, but now couldn't tell an Ozon film from a Noe because Vin Diesel in The Pacifier is such a better draw. Gimme a break you fucktard. I'm sure Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet likes to be thought of as utterly obscure by an NYT columnist.

What book is the talk of Germany? - another rhetorical doozy. Yep, I remember that Gunter Grass was a right fucking Dan Brown back in the day. Actually wait a minute, I do know what book is: The Swarm by Frank Schatzing. Subject to plagiarism accusations may be the ultimate reason, but since I do know, fuck you Mr Brooks and your dumb questions.

I can't tell you how much of a dickhead I think Brooks is. He's not necessarily in the vanguard of cock-swaggering right-wing nutjobs who'd prefer it if we shot every Muslim in sight. Nope, he's just an insidious smug creep, who believes being conservative is a noble, decent, upstanding cause. One who listens when he likes what he hears and puts his fingers in his ears and goes "nahnahanahanah I can't hear you" when he doesn't. He's yet another greed is good crony who is encouraging an ideology that seeks to, for one thing, take anything slightly risque (The Catcher in the Rye and This Boy's Life, fer fux sake) or casually mention the existence of sexual intercourse off high school reading lists because puritanism is attempting to go mainstream again.

He's talking about ideas is he? Well, high school kids won't have any. I'm thinking about the same high school kids who have been drip fed so much right-wing media bullshit that they think freedom of speech is bad and newspapers should be told by government what to report. And don't get me started on Terri Schiavo. This very vacuum of ideas, is for the want of absolutely anything else, filled with Christianity for many looking for some ideological guiding light. Oh Jesus, what have you done? We Europeans have some brilliant ideas, but it's not as if Americans are going to listen to them (Or is that the right Americans)? Brooks also conveniently ignores all the fine cultural British stuff that makes its way cross the Pond. The problem I think is that everything else is in a foreign language.

I love this line most of all, however:

"Finally there are the rest of us who don't pay attention to what is being written and said in Europe because it doesn't seem that exciting."

That is so profound. IN NO WAY IS IT BANAL AND IDIOTIC AND A STARTLING SUBCONSCIOUS ADMISSION OF HIS OWN STULTIFYING IGNORANCE.

"Because it doesn't seem that exciting". Try: BECAUSE I COULDN'T GIVE A SHIT ANYWAY. Naturally, it's far more exciting - absolutely all of it - when it's happening in your own country, which happens to be the greatest nation on earth. What's been the most talked about book during the last few weeks. Hey, who was that middled-aged novelist who gets read by Laura Bush and who was interviewed in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly alongside a huge Star Wars quiz? Oh, it was Ian McEwan. An Englishman. Whose new book is chock-full of ideas and shit.

I say thank fuck for Bob Herbert, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd. Liberals such as these have a sense of decency and outrage that is sadly missing in most of the American troglodyte media. The NYT's top op-ed dude, Thomas Friedman, actually writes like he is some kinda fucking angel of democracy, when in actual fact he's just a highfalutin journalist trying to cement his place in history; Tom, I'll tell you one thing. HL Mencken would defecate on your head if he was still alive. As for Brooksy, in the manner of Mel Gibson saying he would like his Frank Rich's intestines on a stick, I can think of nothing better than his severed head on a pike stuck on top of the Eiffel Tower. Hopefully many birds will feast on it, though they may be disappointed by the unusual deficiency of grey matter.  ¶ 9:40 PM

  Tribute

I was thinking about Saul Bellow the day he died. Yesterday, in fact. While making my way through the supposed pick of mid-20th century American fiction this month, I realised why I loved his novels so much compared to the stolid, depressing gruel that was so often served up again and again by a bunch of deadbeat beatniks or social realists with truncheons inserted high up their anuses. He's breathless, frantic, knowledgeable, fast; he's everything.

Bellow's books contain worlds of their own. They shout and rattle with ideas. Ideas burst out of them. The first Bellow I read was Humboldt's Gift. I couldn't actually believe it was this good. It was intellectual but still rolled in urban concrete and a sense of being alive. It was so packed with everything that as you read on you knew your life was being enriched by it.

The Adventures of Augie March is my favourite ever book. Probably because it hit me at the right time; a lad growing up, experiencing life at a million miles an hour and slowly sinking into his mature self, but still finding that no matter how much you look for something, anything, you will probably find nothing. But anyway, it's good to keep looking. I had a mind to write a book with the first line "I am an Englishman - Eastbourne born" but it doesn't quite have the same kick or vision as Augie's first. Yet reading Augie, you can feel the freedom, the breaking of the rules, written between the lines. It makes you think that the rest of US literature is actually repressed to the point of boredom and silliness. How could they write like THAT, when they could write like THIS. But, perhaps, they couldn't. It's quite conceivable that Bellow was one of the cleverest people of the last century. He was certainly one of the most virile: bearing a kid at 84. Scary, and maybe a bit heartening.

Bellow was the writer's writer. In the next few months you will undoubtedly see a paean from each of his disciples come splayed in foot-high lettering across every literary supplement in the world. We're talking Pynchon, Amis, Hitchens and McEwan etc etc here. The big boys, those swaggering titans, and deft constructors. You have to breathe them in; let them guide you to the golden seam. It will be nutritional advice for both brain and soul. I used to wonder why it was so, but, really, all you have to do is read his stuff, just like Nabokov. The only problem I had with it was that all his heroes, all utterly autobiographical, were these insecure intellectual heavyweights who attracted these wonderfully, feisty Amazonian women, just like that - especially when he looked like a vulture with a sharp grey fringe (he must have dazzled them with volleys of words, or perhaps, book awards). Then he goes off and complains about it when they leave him and screw him for alimony. Bah. Is it not enough to get a touch of some of those rippled mozzarella busts? Bellow was a priapic pussyhound, of course, he was, so it was probably all his fault. Actually, maybe I loved the whining. He whined like a champion word-juggler, with insights conjured up in a single sentence that I might be able to uncover in a decade.

Yet the strange thing is that I feel no real sadness at his passing. Sure, it was a shock when I heard Hunter S Thompson had blown his own head off, but even though he might have produced a few more brief but brilliant vituperative condemnations of America's right-wing, he would never have done anything substantial again. Not when his body was failing. Being in the thick of things, being a witness to the savagery was his ticket to literary fame. However, like Bellow, it seems his contribution was complete. No more needed to be said. I mean 89. He was born during the first world war. Lives fully lived are to be celebrated. There's no real loss. Only a clinking of glasses and full appreciation of what he has left behind. Needless to say, it is a mighty legacy.  ¶ 8:51 PM