Why my cat is like Chauncey Gardener

There I was, thinking that my new kidney disease had allcomers beat. It's lifelong. Its rare. It put me in hospital for three days and the diagnosis features the word "sclerosis". You can't get more serious than that. And then I get home to find that my cat has cancer. Even I can see that cancer beats funky kidneys. I have been upstaged. Hannah is now the centre of attention, lording it up while we scurry around her, feeding and tending and petting. She's not nearly as alarmed as I would be if I woke up to find a strange tube up my nose, a big plastic collar around my neck, making me look like a futuristic Elizabethan, and my owners injecting me with strange-smelling fluids. She doesn't look at me with accusation in here eyes. She doesn't implore me to take the tube out or the collar off. She is either incapable of blame or causal reasoning (maybe the one comes with the other). She seems to regard our trips to the vet with much the same equanimity with which Chauncy Gardner regards the elevator in Being There: "This is a nice room". As far as she's concerned, it's just one of those things. Which means that not only does her disease beat my disease but her attitude is a lot better than mine too.

Maybe I should try living a week without any causal reasoning whatsoever. X will not cause Y. Y will simply be Y. X is not responsible. X is too busy being X. All I will be able to say is that X is X and Y is Y. Beyond those two unbudgeable facts lies only painful and self-punishing speculation. 

First blood

From the New Statesman:

"soap-operaish predictability... tawdry prose.... not only is [Shone's] novel patronising, it is emotionally redundant, inaccurate and, worst of all, unamusing".

He thinks all that was easy?

I am, of course, going to be taking a leaf out of Sylvester Stallone's book: I will cauterise the wound with a piece of still-smoking shrapnel, then climb into the branches of the nearest tree where I will sew myself back up again, using a segment of my own gut, before loping off into the forest with a cold hard flame of vengeance in my eyes and a hunting knife strapped to my thigh.

A stampede of unicorns

Publius is arguing that Bad is the best Michael Jackson album. I applaud the attempt to upend received wisdom, and I know how tempting and easy it is to bore of Thriller, but that's the point: just because we're bored of the front-runner doesn't stop it being the frontrunner. Therefore I must respectfully disagree. There are really only fourgreat tracks on Bad — the title track, The Way You Make Me Feel, Another Part of Me and Smooth Criminal — whereas you can't move for great songs on Thriller. Listen, too, to the production on Bad —all those tinny snares and over-reverbed bass drums, clanking  away. Its cumbersome, angular, noisy production which clearly apes the more mechanical, ritzy sound made fashionable by Bobbie Brown — the first time Jackson and Jones had followed trends rather than setting them, and the beginning of the end. It's all knees and elbows when placed next to Thriller, or the first 16 bars if Don't Stop Til You Get Enough. But then nothing sounds as good as the first 16 bars of Don't Stop Til You Get Enough, except maybe the gathering hoofs of a stampede of unicorns. 

Sobriety and the Arts

"It was a bold enough experiment, you have to admit, lasting the best part of a century, in which any suffering artist worth his salt was systematically deranging his senses before noon, getting into the kind of bar fights that make a man feel truly alive, before shrugging off his mastodon hangover the next morning to pound away at his typewriter..."

From my piece about sober artists in the Sunday Times.

Better than a kick in the kidneys

Toby Young, myself and Cosmo Landesman at the launch of my novel, In The Rooms, at Daunt's Bookshop on Fulham Road last week. It was a lovely evening, as they say in Jennifer's Diary. I saw a lot of friends I haven't seen in ages: the poet Craig Raine, Cosmo and Toby, with whom I used to work on The Modern Review, a contingent of the Sunday Times gang, headed up by my old boss Harry Ritchie, and a clutch of other fellow writers, most of whom have committed the cardinal sin of writing bestsellers, at one time or another, some of them repeatedly. I can only imagine how tiresome a string of unblinking megahits must get after a while, how insulated from the real world. Most of them have lost all sense of every day reality, and have only the scantiest grasp of basic right and wrong. Nick Hornby is a vicious, hooded creature these days, snarling over the top of his beer bottle at anyone who dares come near him, and Helen Fielding last smiled some time in 1992, I believe. As for Gavin Pretor-Pinney, who seems able to write popular science bestsellers almost at will — I believe his new book is a history of dust — the less said the better. To see the effects of fame and success in such vivid close up is... well, it's a salutary experience. 

The only downside to the whole evening was that somewhere between getting on the plane at JFK and getting off the plane at Heathrow, I appeared to have contracted a rare and debilitating kidney disease that required three days in the ER, a series of blood tests, daily injections and enough pills to fell a small bison. This put my guests, some of whom hadn't seen me in several years, in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between congratulating me on the publication of my book and inquiring as to the state of my kidneys. It is a measure of the sophistication of my guests that most managed to pull off this impossible task with a minimum of fuss and some grace, I thought. There is no question in my mind that were the positions to be reversed, I would make a complete hash of it. Congratulate them on their kidneys, and commiserate over the book, or some such. 

When the revolution comes

"When will it come, Ma?"

"Soon. It's inevitable."

"Will I be seven years old?"

"Well, now. That revolution is going to take a little longer than that."

"Will I be 10?"

"No."

"Will I be 11?"

"No."

"Will I be 18?"

"Yes, Saïd. You'll be 18. When you're 18 the revolution will come."

My interview with Said Sayrafiezadeh about his strange Iranian-Jewish-communist childhood here.

The Brits discover hyperbole!

I've only been back in London a few days but my overriding observation is how widespread — how humungously ubiquitous, how overpoweringly omnipresent, how gobsmackingly knock-my-socks-off pervasive — the use of hyperbole has become. Everyone on the TV is caught up in a competition to out-do one another with superlatives. Is the Michael Jackson story big? Its ginormous. How ginormous? Its massively, unbeliveably globe spanningly massive etc etc. The same goes for the Odeon cinema chain's boast of being "fanatical about film." I'd always assumed that went without saying: the enthusiasm of a cinema chain for the medium of film. But no. Everything goes to eleven now. I'm guessing it has to do with a forcible expulsion of the English reputation for understatement but its coming across as if someone at the BBC has sent around a memo instructing all presenters to give it a little more oomph,  a bit more welly. There's something a little over-compensatory about it, to this Brit's ears, but then maybe I've been away too long.