Roman Polanski's Tess revisited

The BBC are running their new version of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles, which is a perfectly natural and interesting thing for them to do given the public's liking for grand old books well-mounted, and this sorry tale in particular. Gemma Arterton, about to take her bow as this year's Ill-Fated Bond Girl (as well as the face of a new Bond Girl fragrance) takes the lead. I caught a few minutes the other night and it all looked fine and affecting enough. But the age you are counts when you come to these things, doesn't it? Back in 1979 aged 9 I was desperate to see Roman Polanski's big-screen Tess, just because of the utterly indelible impression made on me by its poster featuring Nastassja Kinski, who definitely at that time eemed to me the definition of an angel on earth. I eventually got to see the film a couple of years later on video, and it haunted me, as the saying goes. I only had an idea, albeit a fascinated one, of who Polanski was. It took me another year or so to find his memoir Roman and learn that Tess was a book Sharon Tate kept by her bedside and urged upon her late husband; that his version was a form of uxuriousness, a debt of love; and that Polanski never needed to be told that the world is cruel. So yes, Kinski's beauty was a big factor in luring me to Tess the movie, and I became her dogged fan over the next 5 years as she appeared in about 43 movies, of varying distinction. But Tess was also the start of my love of Polanski, and the near-ancient sense of fatalism and sadness that underlies his work. He was the right man for Tess, whatever they said at the time.

Sound advice on working practice by Muhammad Ali

This last week has had me re-reading The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter Thompson's late-70s era compendium of his journalism, which ends with the long interview-based study of Ali done after the first Leon Spinks fight. It's glorious stuff. Some say Thompson never wrote anything else that was much good thereafter. Whereas Ali beat Spinks in the rematch in New Orleans, though some might say it came at a grave cost to his physical wellbeing.

Thompson found Ali licking his wounds somewhat, but never down, never out. He blamed himself for not having got in the right shape and mindset, however younger and fiercer was Spinks. He had been with his adored wife and kids right up to the fight, which was lovely, but the doting had made him soft.

So what will you do if you get another shot? asked Thompson.

'I got to get away from the babies', said the Champ. 'I got to get evil. Gotta chop trees, run up hills, get in my old log cabin.'

And that's not the worst advice for a writer either, every once in a while, if indeed they happen to have an old log cabin at their disposal, and just as long as they get all that 'evil' stuff out and pinned onto a page before they come home.

The Strange Case of Richard Kellys

Thanks to a deft intervention from my brother David this site can now be accessed via the URLs http://www.richardkelly.co.uk/ and http://www.richardkelly.org.uk/. Well and good, and my only vague unease arises in the thought of now trying to lay sovereign claim to my given name online, shy of its distinguishing middle initial. That 'T' had to be affected as long ago as the Dark Ages before online search engines, when I realised how common was my name, indeed with what regularity it would crop up in the particular fields of endeavour (film, literature) where I was trying roughly to make my way.

In fact, even before that (and new acquaintances of mine tend scarcely to believe this Amazing Fact), at university I made a great friend in a guy who was also called Richard Kelly, and with whom I actually shared digs for a year, causing the inevitable calamity for all post and telephone enquiries. Richard was and is - would you believe it? - taller and better-looking than me, so the confusion mercifully ended in the flesh, so to speak. But as a fan of Poe's William Wilson and Conrad's The Secret Sharer and Nabokov's Despair and just about every other literary fable of the doppelganger, this Stunning Coincidence was of great amusement to me just as it was to Tall Richard, 'mon semblable, mon frere'. But at that juncture we both of us agreed that the adoption of a middle initial in certain matters would be politic.

Yet this was not the end of the strange case, dear sir, oh no. When I published my first book Alan Clarke in 1998, I pondered for a while and then decided to take the plunge of being billed as plain old Richard Kelly: a way of making my first little self-affirmative scratch on the wall of books and bookmen. Utter folly, as it turned out, for when scouting around for reviews my heart jumped on several occasions to see my name listed in the table of contents - only to find that I shared my name with not one but two reputable scholars, one the acknowledged authority on the poems of John Berryman, the other a teacher at Manchester Grammar Scholar with several well-praised volumes to his name on the psephology of British general elections.

'Scoundrels! Imposters! Accursed villains!'

Well, no, of course - in fact, I wrote to the Manchester RK inviting him to share in the amusement of the Great RK coincidence, and he sent a very witty reply full of Dostoyevskian ironies, asking me that I please be sure to keep him apprised of what We were up to.

All of this had come to pass even before the young Californian film director of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales fame reared his head. I severely doubt he's ever been mistaken for me, but you would be surprised how often the opposite used to occur... More than once I received emails from hip art magazines asking for my contribution or views on some cultural issue of the day, and with a sigh I would realise that the request was intended for my youthful and famous namesake. Still, I would do my best to preserve the masquerade and send back obscene and highly inappropriate replies to these magazines, just to make things a bit tougher for the talented young master. (Not really.)

Still, one should dwell on the matter no further. Clearly all these Richard Kellys are a good bunch of people with which to be grouped, even if only via aforementioned search engines. Presumably there are honest people out there called Jeffrey Archer, say, or Jonathan Aitken, who have never held a position in any Tory cabinet but must occasionally feel themselves traduced by association nonetheless.

Get Shearer, or, The Medals of his Defeats

I know a fair few Newcastle United fans, and I reckon they’re all pretty smart and astute and ironic about the football club and the game of football in general. Indeed some of them write on these very themes with great acuity, as at the excellent nufc.com. None of them have ever entertained any daft delusional ideas about Alan Shearer as some sort of Geordie messiah. Rather, there has been a general admiration tinged with scepticism.
Geordies are canny, they don’t suffer fools and they can sniff a wind-up. (In fairness, the very Geordie Shearer is made of the same stuff.) So any idea that the self-professed sheet-metal worker’s son from Gosforth was a flawless/selfless professional and immaculate team-player/leader who walked on Tyne waters and will one day come walking back to lead NUFC to the Promised Land… Get away, man. Never heard the like of it, other than on those Sky Sports vox-pop packages where the reporters bribe kids on the Barrack Road to say what they need for their preordained story. All this nonsense arises again over the reports stirred up by a dozy Joe Kinnear that a post-Ashley NUFC has Keegan and Shearer ‘parked round the corner.’ No-one in NE1 is losing any sleep over this fantasy.
All this said, it’s important to stress that Alan Shearer was an effing magic footballer. There’s not a football team the world over who wouldn’t be proud of a local-born striker who identified himself so strongly (and, in the main, unaffectedly) with the area, and also scored 200+ goals for the side in 10 seasons. So-called football experts make themselves ridiculous when they try to Get Tough with Shearer’s record, on which he always tersely asserted that he would be judged. Take the utterly third-rate Rob Smyth of the Guardian who last week attempted a critique of Shearer’s career stats so dripping with snide ill will and so foolishly argued as to constitute its own rebuttal.
The various Get Shearer factions are a funny old bunch. Man United fans are generally excused from this as their bragging rights are so strong, all the way from the ‘Let’s all laugh at Shearer’ chants struck up at the 1996 Charity Shield when Man U diddled the newly Shearer-enhanced Toon 4-0. That’s the main anti-Shearer plank: that his medals were largely born of defeats. True, other than his Blackburn league win Shearer’s career ‘victories’ were mainly pyrrhic. But Alex Ferguson knows football better than anyone in these isles, and his admiration of Shearer was avid and unfeigned if unreciprocated (twice), so Man U fans just have to swallow that little truth.
The other main hate-rap on Shearer was that, after his ankle injury of 1997 that robbed him of his pace, he became a bit of a lazy bully on the pitch. I have stood or sat in many an away ground and listened to fans delighting themselves with mucus-filled chants of ‘F@?k off Sheera yew c**t.' I have mingled with fans of the national side who thought Shearer as England captain and #9 was ‘a f@?king arrogant disgrace.’ Shearer himself tended to thrive on this stuff – not that he always got the last laugh, no sir. But I think the animosity he attracted is part of what made him special. He just really got up the noses of rival teams and their fans, and people generally don’t like it up them. And the main way he did that was by being a classic big English #9 - big shoulders, big shooting boots, same old Shearer, always scoring.
Management, by comparison, is a thankless task and requires a different skill-set, so for me as for thousands of Newcastle fans, I’d be perfectly happy if Shearer remained himself a Newcastle fan and kept smartly clear of the NUFC dugout.

George Osborne: Not In For a Relaxing Weekend

A poll for the BBC Daily Politics suggests that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are more trusted ‘to steer Britain's economy through the current downturn’ than are David Cameron and George Osborne. The Labour duo get 36% approval and the Tories 30%. 5% is a poor show for Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, given how widely ex-Shell man Cable’s economic analyses are admired in the papers. (Maybe Cable needs to get rid of that Clegg guy.) But at any rate, perhaps the most telling faction in this survey are the 24% who Just Don’t Know. Hard to blame them, really.
So, just to remind George Osborne that next Monday is a Big, Big Day for him. Big Tory conference speech. No drinking on Sunday night, George, early to bed for you with the draft and a red pen.
Economically it’s generally seemed to me that Cameron’s Tories have been shadowing Labour cautiously and looking to stay out of bother. That’s a low-risk game: the ERM disaster of 1992 didn’t cost John Smith any kudos, even though Labour’s policy was no different to the Major government’s. Moreover Cameron’s profile and approval rating has been more closely associated with stands on ‘the broken society’, education, crime, environmentalism etc. Meanwhile Osborne’s line on the economy has felt respectful toward public spending and shy of ‘unfunded’ tax cuts - though, of course, last year’s Conference-delivered pledge to cut inheritance tax for all but millionaires brought a full-throated roar from Middle England that was hugely influential, not least with the Government.
But this year, the utterly wretched state of the economy and the popular anger and bewilderment out there means that Osborne must be very focused and forceful and seen to be straining at the leash for his big chance to turn the world right-side-up again. That’s a test for a smart young operator who has clearly oscillated between poles of opinion within the tenuously ‘modernised’ Tories, and who must hear an awful lot of mutterings about how it was mainly timing and ambition and a bit of a W11 cabal that combined to propel him to a job at the very limit of his competence.
So how will Osborne be feeling about tax cuts this year? Cameron is said to have warmed to them, perhaps having sampled a little of the warmth that would-be Tory voters feel in return for any such pledges. But then Cameron’s ascent to the leadership was founded on the game notion of ‘compassionate conservatism’, so there is a certain imperative for the Tories to funnel any new tax cuts to low/fixed income workers – maybe raising the initial personal tax threshold above subsistence level – maybe devising forms of assistance that are a bit less forbidding than tax credits, though Osborne seems to be sticking by these.
By the by, one of the would-be populist measures that the newly influential Taxpayers Alliance has got behind – namely the Cut the VAT Coalition calling for a reduction in VAT to 5% for all building repair and maintenance work – has got me interested on first inspection.
Anyhow, I imagine Tory Party members would expect at least a pledge of no rises in income tax or national insurance (since Brown may be - allegedly - seeding the ground for a rise in the latter.)
Given the general grousing mood in the country, there must be a good many Tories who feel (in line with red-blooded Labour folk) that the corporate sector needs to suffer this year. But other Tories are bound to be dogmatic that only tax cuts can stimulate growth (what’s that again?) and that (South East) Britain’s wealth-creators must always be stroked and nurtured and protected and not driven from these shores – that peculiar socialism of the rich. So I’m curious to know how your average Joe/Jane Tory feels about bailouts for failing banks.
Less complicatedly, I’d bet that a big majority of Tories will feel it’s time (O, Now More Than Ever!) for Gordon Brown’s fat public sector to take some pain and be scaled down – recruitment freezes, executive salaries slashed, final salary pensions discontinued etc.
If the notion of newly Popular Toryism is to acquire a reality beyond the polls then Osborne needs to position himself as the defender of ordinary households hunkering down to cope with a recession. Everyone has told me to prepare myself for the vision of a sea of blue rinse in the Tory conference hall. But then the Tories need to be the party of pensioners if they want that working majority in 2010: hence the importance of pensions, fuel poverty, etc.
So I hope I get to Birmingham in time on Monday, even if only in time to find a working television set.

Democrats 08: 'More mush from the wimps'?

Down the years I’ve often admired the polemical writings of Alexander Cockburn (pictured), the Scottish-born, Irish-reared but essentially posh-English radical columnist who has plied his trade in the US since the early 1970s. For a variety of reasons I’ve found his stuff a good deal less interesting since sometime around the late Clinton era and the founding of his website Counterpunch.org; but that could be me getting soft, and it doesn't detract from all the good stuff of his that I've enjoyed. Tonight, watching Newsnight again (what kind of masochist fool am I?) I had to shout at the TV during an item on John McCain’s phony opportunistic stunt of ‘suspending’ his campaign on the pretence of adding his witless views on economics to the current mess besetting America – and in the spirit of ‘bipartisanism’, no less. Jeremy Paxman presented this story with his now-terminally arrogant/obfuscating blather, interviewing Rep and Dem strategists and asking exactly the wrong questions. The Rep guy was a smooth moron of an attack-dog who nevertheless made his moron point (Obama is an irresponsible un-American pencil-neck jerk) loudly and sharply and repeatedly. The Dem guy was a bespectacled fellow called Rosenberg who spoke carefully and declared that he didn’t like to be spoken to in the coarse manner that he was hearing.
‘More mush from the wimps’, I thought to myself - this a memorable term first applied by the Boston Globe to lambaste some pusillanimous aspect of the Carter administration. Recalling where I first heard tell of same term, I pulled down my old paperback of Cockburn’s Corruptions of Empire, consulting again his ‘Archive of the Reagan Era’, which saw him write on January 27 1983 of a ‘Bipartisan Appeal’ led by Peter Peterson (then CEO of Lehman Brothers, formerly Nixon’s commerce secretary), the appeal in question being a union of major US banks and multinational corporations seeking a reduction in the budget deficit.
Cockburn wrote, ‘It is axiomatic that methodical use of the word ‘bipartisan’ indicates that some gross deception is about to be practiced on the persons (and usually the pockets) of the citizenry and that the perpetrators wish to indicate by the deployment of bipartisanship that normal democratic procedures and alternatives have been suspended… Many of the people who got the economy into its present mess and who have been profiting vastly under present conditions signed the appeal with a shamelessness that would be irksome in a child but is repulsive in persons of mature age.’
Timely words, I think. For this is just the sort of rubbish McCain is now up to. So what is Barack Obama’s view on what Cockburn in a recent Counterpunch column quite reasonably calls ‘a bailout program designed to bail out the thieves running our financial system, and stick middle America with the price-tag’? This is not a moment to sit on one's hands: if Obama wants so badly to debate McCain on Friday night, then I hope he's got something sharp and wholly partisan to say, otherwise what's the point of him?

Ahmadinejad, positively gay with glee at the UN

Quite a day in politics. Maybe 6 out of 10 for Brown at Labour conference, I’d say - the usual sanctimony, with more polished attempts at levity (from a low base). In Washington the US financial institutions bailout is getting a hammering off Republican congressmen for being snide, unjust, un-American, and socialistic, and it’s certainly the first two: there must be another way to punish the guilty scavengers while protecting the benighted taxpayer. Meanwhile Newsnight seemed pleased to report that Ahmadinejad has once more reveled in the UN General Assembly's limelight in order to pronounce that ‘the American empire is reaching the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders.’ The first part is true for all sorts of reasons. As to the second, I assume we all know how hatefully hypocritical are these words in the mouth of this disgraceful little ratbag; but I do worry that certain constituencies out there think these views statesmanlike, sagacious and all-round impressive. Allah be praised, then, for Newsnight’s Mark Urban, peace be upon him, who drew attention to what he described as some ‘toxic’ remarks from the Iranian President in respect of the ‘Zionist regime’ and ‘the cesspool created by itself and its supporters.’ I trust all keen critics and opponents of Israel, well in charge of the copious evidence supporting their positions, understand too that for Ahmadinejad the Problem of the Jewish State is one arising from absolute first principles, and requiring a final solution. He should get back to his own little cesspool.

David Miliband, Man of a Thousand Faces

Out of all the thousands of photos snapped during big moments at events such as political party conferences... well, I can't say I understand why some images are more widely disseminated than others, and a select fewer picked out from within that first selection for widespread reproduction in media outlets...
But I think I can say with some certainty that a lot of people who are involved in such selections for the purpose of illustrating this year's Labour Party conference are people who don't like David Miliband very much - or indeed wish him plenty harm. Because everywhere I look on the web tonight there are people reporting Miliband's conference speech alongside photos of him looking like Goofy.
Meanwhile the BBC are very pleased with themselves because they can report that Miliband was indiscreet within their earshot while chatting to an aide after his speech: ‘I couldn't have gone any further. It would have been a Heseltine moment.’ We'll have to see about that - the wisdom of avoiding 'Heseltine moments', that is, as opposed to the wisdom of teasing/charming a frankly less-than-adoring half-full conference hall. None of this is terribly convincing for Labour supporters of any stripe. The proper measure of it will come when the Tories meet in Birmingham next week. I'll see you there.

Metallica, or rocking the middle years...

Should I buy the new Metallica album? Will I listen to it more than once? Or will I be able to play it at the volume that befits it, without disturbing my kid or the neighbours? These are not exactly rock 'n' roll questions; so it may be that to ask them is, sadly, to answer them. Earlier today my brother casually informed me that he attended this week's already legendary Later... with Jools Holland which pitted Metallica alongside Carla Bruni. He wasn't all that bothered, frankly... so, had he known I cared, he could have easily slipped his ticket to me (or indeed flogged it for at least £1000 on the night.) But then, to return to the issue of my fast-vanishing rock 'n' roll credentials, I'm not sure I could have got the evening off to get along there anyway. I'm perfectly happy using BBC iPlayer to inspect the band's performances of Cyanide and Enter Sandman, and searching YouTube for the (rather long) video to the lead 'single' from the new album. No wonder music sales are sinking fast. But then one assumes the bands now look to make their big money from live performance. In which case they'll not be getting owt from me in the foreseeable. Still, Metallica, I'm with thee in spirit if nowhere else.

Rose McGowan & the heartbreaking old cause

She has a look of the Irish, that Rose McGowan: she'd put me in mind of the girls one would see out on a big Friday night in Belfast or Dublin. She was born in Firenze, though, but her father's an Irishman. This all comes out because of the stew over her remarks about the IRA at a Toronto press conference held for the movie she's in that's adapted from the memoir by the Provo informer Martin McGartland. 'I imagine', said Rose, 'had I grown up in Belfast, I would 100 per cent have been in the IRA. My heart just broke for the cause.' McGartland doesn't sound too happy about the movie in any case, and he's definitely not pleased with Rose now ('Rose McGowan's comments were insulting to victims of IRA terrorism and she should apologise. It's easy to say this sort of thing when you live in LA.' Ouch.) Even the producers of the movie have had to distance themselves from their own talent. Whether the publicity helps or hinders the picture, I don't know: IRA touts are not the most promising commercial subject, and a right old moral thicket from which to try to pull out a genuinely good picture. I haven't read McGartland's book, but there have been some good accounts of informing on the 'Ra (Eamon Collins' Killing Rage) and others that are at least interesting (Sean O'Callaghan's The Informer). Yet they all tell the same essential story: 'My people were being oppressed and so I joined an organisation I considered revolutionary, so as to strike back. But to my horror this organisation also numbered among its members some rather disreputable characters...' It's a good yarn, and it works for people, but it could never be reckoned as the whole truth.

Sean Penn: Hayatı ve Zamanları...

My track-record with foreign-language editions of my books has been hit-and-miss, frankly, but some of the 'hits' give me amusement, such as the fact that there is a Turkish edition of the book I did with Sean Penn out there somewhere, though I've never held a copy of it in my hand. I assume, though, that Hayati is Turkish for 'Life' and Zamanlan stands for 'Times.' I could be wrong, though. When Sperling & Kupfer published the book in Italian they conferred on it the subtitle 'Un cattivo ragazzo', and I know no Italian but my wager is that that little phrase translates as 'A bad boy.' I'm not sure whether Crusaders will get rendered in many other languages (other than Geordie) in my lifetime, but I do believe there's an Indonesian version in the works. Which goes to show that we are the world.

Debt: formerly considered the best thing money could buy

Some naïve part of me has always supposed that when a bank died, the collapse/explosion would be something akin to the death of a star in the cosmos. No such phenomena attended the end of Lehman Brothers, though glancing across the covers of today’s papers (in some surprise, having seen/heard no news bulletins for 48 hours), I saw a lot of well-groomed and utterly gutted young professionals consoling one another after hasty clearings of desks.
What did Lehman reckon were its odds that Secretary Paulson would bail them out instead of ruling it were a better thing that the bank fell? That would be an interesting set of figures.
Meantime I have now caught up with the reportage and analysis, some of which is to the effect that Lehmann’s demise is a testament to functional capitalism and the survival of the fittest. This time, maybe. I won’t be celebrating, not least because for umpteen reasons I couldn’t be neutral about the state's efforts to keep Northern Rock afloat last year.
I suppose one silver lining is that, for a while at least, investment banking should now be seen as a career option roughly as hare-brained as putting your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.

October Esquire on sale now.

Per yesterday's remarks: I know it's out there now, and I commend it to you warmly. I know it contains my piece on Jar City and also a serial extract from a book I oversaw editorially at Faber and Faber, which is a memoir by the movie producer Michael Deeley entitled Blade Runners, Deer Hunters & Blowing the Bloody Doors Off. I'll maybe say more when I've got my copy and paddled through it.

Mike Ashley's literary leavings

Kevin Keegan has never been considered a wordsmith, though I hear his autobiography is a decent read, and he may even have written some of it. But KK certainly is, as everyone knows, a highly effusive speaker. I'm not thinking of the 'I'd love it' outburst so much as his coming to the steps of St James's after he'd sold Andy Cole to Man U, just to tell the gathering of vexed fans what his logic had been.

Conversely, Mike Ashley, the hoping-to-be-soon-ex-owner of Newcastle United, is not a man to speak his mind before a microphone or indeed on any public stage, but he and his cronies clearly love to write and circulate statements, screeds and rebuttals. Ashley put out a big fat one under his own name on Sunday night, just so that everyone understood he was looking to sell the club and that he and his money were feeling sorely unappreciated by all those Geordie tossers. In fairness, Martin Syed at the Times has taken Ashley's side on this one. So much for fairness.

The only point I feel is worth lingering over (beyond Ashley's refusal to address the fact that he either lied to Keegan about transfer policy or else reneged on a major pledge) is Ashley's bleat that he can't take his kids to SJP anymore, on police advice. I can't do better than the riposte of True Faith on this score: "Please. If he wants to go to the match – go in the bloody director’s box like every other football club owner, put on a proper shirt, blazer and a decent pair of strides and act your age."

Jar City now in cinemas; very good

A writer friend of mine ran into my wife at a party last week and told her I was 'on the poster' for Jar City, Baltasar Kormákur's Icelandic policier that has just been released into UK cinemas. (It's a couple of years old in its country of origin, where it's known as Myrin.) 'On the poster' in the sense that some line or other from my positive write-up of the movie for the October issue of Esquire has been pulled out and used for promotional purposes. I haven't seen the October Esquire yet. Have you? Nor have I seen any Jar City posters plastered around London yet, as opposed to those for Tropic Thunder, say, or Guy Ritchie's new one. But I hope the rumour is true. One likes to be of service when service has been freely given.

Norman Mailer's Spooky Art

Today, owing to an unfortunate necessity, I had to forsake my desk at home and go work in the local library, only 5 minutes' walk away, but a drag nonetheless. Waiting for some dogged daily newspaper scanner to give up one of the few writing tables with a plug-point adjacent, I wandered around the stacks awhile and was pleased to happen on a copy of Mailer's collection of thoughts on the writing process, The Spooky Art (2003). Browsing through it at least made the waste of time feel a good deal less vexing, even medicinal.

For a while I read from the index back and found Mailer very good on the affinities and disparities of the Russian masters: basically, that Dostoyevsky went down to depths that Tolstoy couldn't penetrate, but lacked Tolstoy’s panoptic sense of perspective and so tended toward hysteria; consequently from Dostoyevsky we come away with memorable individuals, and from Tolstoy entire societies.

Elsewhere: he's generally thoughtful about bad reviews, albeit occasionally desirous of knocking some picky little toerag's roof in.

He's bracingly self-critical about most of the books, as well as his much-advertised personal failings.

He sounds friendly enough about old Gore Vidal, to whom he is undoubtedly superior IMHO.

You get that sense that he wasn't ever as mad about The Executioner's Song as the book's ardent fans, for all that it's so alive to something fundamental in the big centre of American life, just because it was less his invention.

He makes a useful critique of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as a self-consciously big and well-upholstered novel that doesn't feel large or truly lived.
He expresses a touching love for the novel on the ground that it is 'the form best suited for developing our moral sensitivity - which is to say our depth of understanding rather than our rush to judgment.'
I nodded grimly in reading another version of his view that writers must discipline themselves 'to do a good day's work on a bad day.'

More grim nods when he volunteered that 'working on a book where the plot is already fully developed is like spending the rest of your life filling holes in rotten teeth when you have no skill as a dentist.'

Then there is the rub: ‘I remember saying in 1958, “I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” And I certainly failed, didn't I? At the time, I thought I had books in me that no one else did, and so soon as I was able to write them, society would be altered. Kind of grandiose…’

Still, searching around some reviews tonight I was satisfied that a fair few writers are properly sympathetic to Mailer's readiness to dare and risk failure.

Thomas E. Kennedy: ‘Perhaps the greatest works are inevitably flawed for they reach toward the unreachable in comparison to small works satisfied with small accomplishment.’

Richard Poirier: ‘At his best [Mailer] seeks contamination. He does so by adopting the roles, the styles, the sounds that will give him a measure of what it’s like to be alive in this country.’

Wilfrid Sheed: ‘Mailer follows the Chestertonian principle of exploring the psychosis proper to the group, the identifying madness, and letting it enter him, like an exorcist opening himself to the devil.’

Quite. Like the demon of his last wondrous production The Castle in the Forest, Mailer gave himself the right to inhabit men's minds. Spooky indeed.

NUFC: Take this ticket, go to hell and stick it

The excellent nufc.com reports that this Saturday there will be a protest march comprised both of Toon fans intended to boycott the Hull game and those intending to enter St James's Park but only after the 3pm kickoff. The plan is to meet opposite Tilleys Bar on Westgate Road for a 3pm march, to finish up outside of Shearer's Bar. There is also due to be a pure protest gathering outside Old Milburn Reception from 2pm, and one imagines that will be one long howl. Desperate times, but entirely justifiable actions.

Sebastian Barry: Booker Prize Contender, naturellement

Many congratulations to the man whom I hope I can get away with calling 'my fellow Faber novelist', Sebastian Barry, on his being shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his latest novel The Secret Scripture. From this point onward I don't suppose anyone can guess the outcome of the judging, it will all come down to five people in a room something like a month from now; but Sebastian Barry has been to this dance before in 2005 with A Long, Long Way, so one trusts he will be braced at least for the suspense that lies ahead, and able just for the moment to savour another richly-deserved recognition of his gifts.

Hunter S Thompson: Nothing Vicarious

At some point soon I hope to write properly and at length about Alex Gibney's documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which I saw this evening. For the moment I would only say that it sure stirred up some ghosts for me. The final credits run to the tune of Warren Zevon's 'Lawyers, Guns and Money'. The moment in my sluggish adolescence when I first made the connection between what these two men were up to as artists, and liked to in common and indeed together - sometime around the publication of Thompson's The Curse of Lono and the release of Zevon's Sentimental Hygiene - was a fairly vital one for me. Zevon, too, has been gone for some years now. And men like Thompson and Zevon, they really shouldn't die. And on another level, they clearly should. Not by fading away neither.

Newcastle United: Milner did indeed gan...

... in spite of my previous and heartfelt appeal, which, you know, I'm not sure reached him - did he happen to mention it last time you spoke?
Anyhow, today Milner told the Mirror - while no doubt breathing out a great blasting sigh of relief - "What is going on now at Newcastle showed what was going on behind the scenes at the club."
In other news: NUFC itself continues to try to deny it is an effing shambles by sending out pompous pseudo-tough-talking press releases, the latest purporting to be a point-by-point rebuttal of Kevin Keegan's expressed complaints, but failing utterly and risibly on the basis of previous on-the-record comments made by Ashley and Wise.