Tactless brutality

Somebody is having a go at my mate impostune, over on his blog, about an excerpt of his writing which referred to suicide rates. This interjector was apparently concerned that the suicide rates quotes weren't up to date or verified by an independent panel from the Novelists Assured Facts Foundation (NAFF).

Perhaps this same "reader" might also do me a favour the next time he/she's in London and go into the National Gallery. I'd like them to go up to one of the six-quid-an-hour custodians and point out the Seurat picture contains pictures of people with thousands of garish dots on their skin. This is clearly not correct.

Whilst I appreciate that novelists have a duty not to mislead to the detriment of people's lives, I cannot imagine the health care services referring to a novel in order to put support and treatment in place. That would be chuffing ridiculous.

Therefore, for the sake of Wayne Rooney et al, put away your pedantry and accept that information is not knowledge. The knowledge in this case being that suicide rates are a damning confirmation that people are unhappy. The information on which this is based may be subject to change, interpretation and come from different sources. Knowledge is eternal.

Curb your plagiarism Ricky

I was watching "Extras" last night and noticed, of course, how different the second series is to the second. It's as though Ricky Gervais had run out of jokes-about-film-and-television-extras, so he decided to throw in a little homebrew version of Curb Your Enthusiasm (or the Larry David show).

Firstly there are the supposedly "name" actors all "challenging" their fetid public personas with end-of-term shenanigans. Then there are those endless punchline-less conversations in which offensive things are said in a deadpan manner to suggest that the creators' nihilism is just part of their everday experience.

On last night's Extras the Ricky Gervais character moans about a noisy child in a restaurant and this is then transmogrified by the press into a physical attack on a boy with downs syndrome. The Ricky Gervais character is then left to clear up the mess which, surprise surprise, leads to more mess. Slapstick with pies of political correctness.

The problem is, it's difficult to drum up any kind of sympathy or identification with Ricky Gervais because he has such a lot of thick hair. Now a bald guy...that's funny. Just look at Seinfeld. Jerry = lots of hair, lots of jokes, but zero memorability. Kramer = lots of hair, lots of clowning, and equally bereft of killer moments. But George, he knows how to suffer. He takes his karma badly and baldly. That's the spirit.

So is it any good? I don't know. I only watched it between the football. So it wasn't that vital.

Larry David 3 Ricky Gervais 1 (half-time score).

Snapshot

Recently a physiotherapist informed us that our twin sons were "severely delayed" in their physical development, as a result of their extremely premature birth. I wanted to point out to her that they had about seventy years to catch up. I wanted to say " No. The 17.20 from King's Cross may be severely delayed, but these are human beings and therefore a little more complex than that". I wanted to point out that when Aubrey picks up a book he does not waver his attention until the last page has been studied, he's too busy being himself to worry about performing some abstract tasks in a clinic. I also wanted to tell her that Edmund's frequent explorations of the house always end up with him tottering towards us with a smile that is half viking, half ballroom dancer. They're developing personalities at a good rate of knots, the rest is mere detail.

There's something wrong with my mind.

So. I'm writing a book. No big deal. Except I've got a deadline to meet that's six months old now.

My agent is a lovely chap, he tells me so every time his softly-spoken voice tells me not to worry.

Today I made an appalling discovery. There are things that I'm writing which have been written before. No, not word for word, nor in the slabs of content. But the general thrust and (what I'd thought of as a searingly new) ambition was, in fact, old hat.

Not just any old hat. Martin Amis old hat no less.

I love the duality that is Martin Amis. The voice that irritates and soothes, sweet and sour, cannon and ball.

The book I'm writing is an autobiographical work, an inquiring memoir no less. As I tell my story, I ask a lot of questions, deviate, ramble and divert. The ensuing body of work/mess, should be both gut-level sentimental and hard as fricken nails at the same time. Like Amis then.

This quote has ruined my day, but has simultaneously given me a colour scheme for the interior of my book.

Martin Amis - "Experience"
published by Vintage 2001

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending...

What is wrong with my mind is that I should never have seriously entertained the idea that I was doing something new. I must have a bit of my mind where everything I think is a set in a television studio, a studio in which they only produce pap for the simple people.

What is wrong with my mind part II

I have an appointment with a psychiatrist in ten days time. Never been to one before, and this appointment is purely to determine some evidence in a court case. I'm scared. But I did have a thought that I might turn into a story sometime.

I got the impression that the psychiatrist is based in Manchester, but works in London. Then, I imagined that psychiatrists rent rooms by the hour, like whores, and turn their tricks on somebody else's heavily-buttoned couch. I like that idea. Don't steal it. Or I'll voodoo you.

A tortuous justification for slagging off J G Ballard

I read a Ballard book once. No. Nothing there. He's a pale irritation of himself. As for this latest work of his, puh-lease. Shopping malls are malevolent gateways for capitalism's mind-control-police-state?

Gosh. The man's a fricken pensioner. Leave this kind of intellectually turgid anxiety to people with visible cheekbones and a working prostrate. How about writing a nice little story about your holiday home in the Algarve? People always appreciate a sloth's eye perspective on how amazing it is to smell flowers in a foreign country.

This is not a pretty piece of tart escapism. Sorry.

Today has been all about death again, sheesh, if you were to casually encounter this blog you'd think I was rilly goth yeah? Like, that's not the case. M'kay?

Today's death is in the family. I won't say who. The dying may be already spoken for, but that's no excuse to go around using their real name willy-nilly.

He's dying, according to my good friend Desmond Patrick Joseph Mary Emmanuel Cullen (that's his full name and he's perfectly alive) my dying family member will succumb to his fungalising skull tumour within a few weeks. This is the end of those few weeks. And Desmond was right.

The last time I saw him was two weeks ago, he looked pretty normal to me. I saw a mobile phone camera image of him yesterday and the change was shocking. The fungaloid tumour has spread across his skull above his right eye. In the most recent photograph the tumour has obviously been making itself known across all the neighbourhoods inside the cranium. His eyes now seem to bulge as the tumour spreads itself around like a drunken fat scaffolder on an ikea sofa. One eye seems unable to believe the impertinence and discomfort of this, it stares out like somebody else's eye, somebody else with a serious case of permanent pique.

I'll be going to see him in the next couple of days, if he's survived that long. I'm never comfortable with the dying, they make me ashamed. Not for being alive, but for not wanting to be in their presence. I can't pretend either. I don't like to think of myself as lying to the dying, that would just be appalling behaviour. Not that I've had a great deal to do with dying people, because I always manage not to be there, it's a habit I've developed over the years.

I'll miss him. But I'll miss the living him, not the now-decrepid physical husk of his body, nor the garbled idioglossia of his mutterings and sleep-talking. I'll miss the guy who could swing his false leg on the dance floor to Elvis and make it seem fresh. I'll also miss they guy who could flirt with a girl a third of his age and make that seem the right thing to do. I won't miss his insistence that there are "too many illegal immigrants getting brand new cars off the dole", but only because he said it so often it was boring. I'll miss his jump leads that got my old volvo going on winter mornings. I'm not looking forward to the presence of grief and recriminations that all deaths seem to incur, it will interfere with the writing of my book. He'd understand that. Well, he's not going to be around to contradict me on that one. (That line would make him laugh like a drain).

Adieu mon amie.

The bitter rantings of a man in pain.

Oh sorry in advance about the sheer rotten bile of this next post. I'm in agony again. My shoulder seems to have a sea-urchin imbedded in between its moving parts, and I'm in intolerable pain. The news item didn't help.

In Leicestershire on Saturday, two rottweilers killed a five month old baby. What a hideous abomination. So utterly foul in every way.

In a curious echo of this story, this afternoon we went to my partner's mum's for sunday dinner. She lives in a tiny terraced house, and it has a suitably tiny garden. Today in the garden, the next door neighbours appeared to say hello. They're lovely people, really interesting and chatty, good humoured too. But they had a fricken huge black labrador dog with them, which insisted on standing on it's hind legs and slobbering over the garden wall. By the frantic and hoarse breathing of this dog, it was very keen to find out what was going on in our garden. I immediately said out loud " Don't let that dog jump over the wall ", because with our twin babies toddling around the garden, and bearing in mind the story that I started with in this item, there was no way I was keeping quiet this time. Sod politeness, I'm allowed to say when lines should not be crossed.

Their reply was just the most ignorant and doltish thing that you can say when your manic dog starts threatening or acting up, " oh he/she's alright, just being friendly, they wouldn't do that "

WHAT? DID I MISS THE NEWS THAT YOU'D BECOME AN ANIMAL MINDREADER?

Sheesh. I mean people say the stupidest things, and animals do the stupidest things, combine stupid animals with stupid people and you've got a recipe for some really bad shit going down.
Like the poor five month old child that was killed by the two rottweilers. What were you thinking when you decided to keep both rottweilers and baby in the same household? Why not just put the baby down to sleep each night with a grenade as a cot-toy? Then you can say " Oh our baby wouldn't pull the pin out, they wouldn't do that ". Same difference in my opinion. A dog is an animal that has been designed to hunt, to maim and to then eat other animals. The moral compunction not to eat the babies of their owners is not something you should be testing in a "live" situation. Take your babies away from dangerous animals, take your small children and keep them distant to potential harm. It's not rocket science.

People who project some kind of disney-shit psychological profile on their dogs need a sharp and vicious lesson in basic awareness. Dogs cannot be trusted, on that basis they should be kept at arm's length. Just because Fido likes to curl up on the sofa next to you and eat hob nobs whilst you watch Coronation Street, does not mean that Fido is incapable of becoming stressed, jealous and territorial over the invasion of small children. Learn that lesson and love your dogs as animals instead of moving ornaments. Please.

This is rubbish and I am out of here. The pain is making me delirious and stupid.

xx

Straight into stuff. No messing.

Crikey. I should be awed by this. On newsnight Jeremy Paxman is interviewing Richard Dawkins about his latest book " The God Delusion ". But I'm not awed. The pair of them come across as ridiculous old men trying to out-smarm each other.

Dawkins talks as if he's never met anybody who can match his intellect and self-belief. Paxman talks as if he's met plenty of people who can match his intellect, but not his ego. The two of them chunter on about the book, which seems to be quite derivative and not at all cutting edge. It would appear that Dawkins might have had a bit of a funny turn when the Da Vinci Code became more popular than his own books. By the sound of it, Dawkins wrote the book in a hurry, in a fit of pique, and in order to get one in before the cryogenic storage facility called him back to his icy cot.

Paxman wasn't even listening. His once-chiselled features (now melting and bulbating into a living portrait by Lucien Freud) were frozen, as he fired off curt question after curt question. "Are you saying the miracles are all lies? What about the new testament? Are people happier for not believing in God?" Dawkins tilted his head at an angle sufficient enough to make his glasses look straight and replied with answers that were little more than talking in his sleep.

The conclusion I arrived at was shocking. Dawkins is poop. Paxman is past it. Move along now, nothing to see.

On the same programme, the Newsnight Late Review.

J G Ballard. A book about how consumerism is ruining society. Oh puh-lease. It was just Ballard still attempting to compete against the great late Anthony Burgess in the Duke-of-English-Letters-Hates-Modern-Life marathon. Jay Gee, it's over. You lost thirty years ago. Idiot.

One more thing. Charlie Brooker wrote a piece rubbishing Banksy, the scrawny-minded idiot-savaloy of graffiti. It's great, check it out. Everything I'd ever bitterly thought about Banksy was put into crisp and succint words that made me laugh. Banksy, you're an amateur and a fraud. You appeal hugely to those people with tiny weeny malfunctioning question glands. Just eff off with your tags and chit. You're not big and you're certainly not clever. Example? Goes to the Israel/Palestine border and paints a picture of a blue sky, to remind people that peace is better than war. Great insight. Great effort there Banksy. What next? Pee-ing about with Paris Hilton's CD in record shops? That's like, so relevant and worthwhile. Sheesh.

That's it. I'm back to writing my book now.

Kiss kiss.