Wisdom beef

"I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy ... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve."

- Charles Bukowski

Baseball quote of the day

"My brother and I always liked to alternate shagging and hitting."

As heard just now during a Tigers-Mets spring training game.

UPDATE: Swiftly followed by

"Ollie always liked to pound right-hand hitters inside."

Courtesy of my fellow amnesiac

"The world is only as funny as the people who look at it."

Amen, brother.

More on petards

Superb.

Hoist by their own petard?

Just asking for trouble, surely...

The Amnesiac Texts IIIb

ASH: So, how went your show-down with the out-laws?

Dom: I think I survived. Quite interesting, actually. Have been stoned ever since.

ASH: The out-laws hooked you up? Score!

The Amnesiac Texts III

Dom: MIT MIT Looks like I'll be dining with the mother-out-law tonight. Any advice for a condemned compadre?

ASH: Lie.

Dom: I knew I could count on you.

Inbox surprise

Koons For The Poor!

Latest publication from Taschen. (And retailing at £39.99, incidentally.)

E-mail also contains this sentence:

"Koons has been contemporary art's bad boy — a reputation he (ahem) nailed in the early 90s via works depicting him in flagrante delicto with then-wife Cicciolina, the Italian porn star-cum-politician."

I have always striven to avoid that last formulation. And there's why.

The Questionable Joys of Text

If you are the person (f.?) who sent me this

"Medals, large hands, inflatable match and lighter."

please get in touch. I have several questions.

Irish graffito

And another...

"As an author you have to vampirise your friends."

I hope he's right.

The wisdom of Kinky

"[T]here's two kinds of people that wear cowboy hats: cowboys and assholes."

"[T]he mainstream really doesn't understand satire at all. You just can't explain it."

[On writing] "If you look deep enough into yourself, I think you will find everybody else."

"I think if you're not offending people today, you ain't living."

"Twenty-eight books I've written so far. I say it's an index of an empty life. If I'd heard you'd written twenty-eight books, I already wouldn't like you to start with."

"You know, nothing's better than writing. That's a great life."

"It's a beautiful thing, to be surrounded with animals and have somebody pay for that and you write what you feel what you wanna write."

"If you look at the people that have told the truth throughout history, you'll see they haven't fared too well. Starting with Socrates and Jesus and that bunch there..."

"Find what you like and let it kill you."

All taken from The Kinkster's interview with HUMO magazine.

A pair of dingers from Bob Hope

"This is the worst last meal I ever had."

"I wanted to be a detective, too. It only took brains, courage and a gun. And I had the gun."

Albert Einstein - not so dumb

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts."

[Thanks to Ben Macintyre, The Times]

Misery memoirs UPDATE

This is the bookshop I would like to have worked in.

I worked in Waterstone's.

My misery memoir

I was just mooching in a bookstore in Heathrow Terminal 5.

Bestsellers:

• Helpless: The true story of a neglected girl betrayed and exploited by the neighbour she trusted
• Cut: The true story of an abandoned, abused little girl who was desperate to be part of a family

Noodles to say, both of these smash hit books had pictures of pretty little girls adorning their covers.

Clearly this is where my fellow amnesiac and I went wrong: We were never abandoned, abused and neglected pretty little girls who were betrayed and exploited by our neighbours.

Dammit!

Maybe there's still time?

Here are some snaps of me that could adorn the cover of my own little girl misery memoir:

Cover Snap #1
A shot of my sister and I. (That's me on the right, in blue.)


Cover Snap #2
Here I am contemplating suicide. (I didn't do it.)


Cover Snap #3
And finally, here I am in later years, completely fucked up by my incredibly traumatic and miserable childhood experiences (hopefully in Ireland).


Right, I'm off to pick out something nice to wear for the book tour.

Greg House rides again!!!

"I call you Cut-throat Bitch... well, quod erat demonstrandum.

(And I speak in Latin because I don't try to hide what an ass I am.)"

Tip for the day

Never hoover barefoot.

My drug growing woes

Imagine my excitement last night when, before the baseball, while I was eating hot mexican chicken with chilli black beans and rice and supping Peroni, I flicked idly through the channels and came across a show on BBC2 called "Grow Your Own Drugs".

I threw my chicken bones over my shoulder, reached for my pad and pen, and perched on the edge of the sofa in a state of excited anticipation. Unfortunately, the show was not as billed. Instead of invaluable gardening tips on how to grow nuclear bomb skunk with the buds still on, all I got were recipes for face cream and cold sore cures.

Typical BBC.

And then, this morning, Amazon has the nerve to send me an email urging me to buy the book of the series. 45% off the cover price? No wonder!

Uh-oh

Thanks to the (er...) classic World Baseball Classic Final last night between Japan and Korea, I've had my first glued-to-the-game sleepless night of 2009. The first of many, I fear. I'm not sure how I actually made it through 2008 (assuming of course that I did). MLBTV (and my addiction to it and worship of it) has changed my life, almost exclusively for the better, unless you count the dark circles under my eyes, and my tendency to start twitching like a breakdancer every day around 2pm. As I write this, there are 12 days, 14 hours and 14 minutes left until MLB Opening Night. I figure if I sleep from now until then, I'll have a chance of seeing 2010.

Except... Well, take Thursday night. The Villanova-Duke tip-off isn't till 2am my time. Admittedly, March Madness is not baseball, but that's just not cricket!

Speaking of which, why can't I get more into some of the exciting English sports, likes darts and bowls, that tend to be played at more civilised hours? (The BBC's coverage of these two major sports is extensive. They're also number one for any sports that involve wheelchairs. If I want to watch the (able-bodied men's) cricket, I need to erect a satellite above my bed.)

Meanwhile, while I'm here, and heavy-eyed, I must say that... Last night's final was spectacular. The standard of baseball. The passion. The sushi rolls that I was chewing in my dreams. All of it was off the radar. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a game that much - just because of the game being played, and not because of my tragic Ray Kinsella type tear-jerking sentimentality about "the game". It also made me think. It goes without saying that the WBC is bigger in every country that isn't the US, than it is in the US, host nation and home of baseball. (Read that sentence back, I promise it makes sense.) About half of Japan and Korea were watching last night's game. And while I'm not faulting the commitment of the Team USA players this time around (they did seem genuinely into it), I am questioning the attitude of the US to the world at large.

So here's my new theory: I reckon the United States has become terrified of competition. The reason the US is not interested in any international competitions - only in its domestic competitions - is because it's scared of getting beat (which it tends to do, incidentally) by other nations. Notice how the only time the US public seems to show any interest in US involvement in international competitions is when there's a chance of total domination by a US individual or team. They get pumped about the (NBA) Dream Team or Michael Phelps, or whatever, because they want to watch Americans stomp on the world. The moment there's a threat of getting beaten by fundamentally more sound and less macho, egotistical, self-congratulatory individuals or teams (like Japan and Korea in the baseball) they don't tune in, and pretend it doesn't matter.

It does matter. The WBC really does matter. The rest of the world treats it like the World Cup (of football). The passion and intensity is that high. But look at how the US feels about the World Cup. It shrugs with disinterest. I used to think there were a lot of reasons for this, but now I think it's just because Americans are pussies. They're scared of getting beat. It's like if England never played cricket against Australia or the Windies or India or Seffrica. We do, and we regularly get our arses whomped. But then we stand up straight, dust ourselves down, before bending over again for another beating.

There is of course absolutely no political comment of any kind hidden in this message. None at all.

Much.

UPDATE: To all those who've been in contact, threatening to come round and pummel my ass, I should say in my defence that:

a) I love baseball.
b) My girlfriend is American.
c) She's yours, if you refrain from pummelling my ass.
d) I've had no sleep.
e) I never mentioned Vietnam.
f) Some other things.

The art of non-fiction

"For everything I describe I have seen; and if I may have been deceived when I saw it, I am most certainly not deceiving you when telling you of it now."

- Letter to Marie-Henri Beyle, in Paul Hoffman's The Golden Age of Censorship

Further Wisdom of Dr. Gregory House

"Indiscriminate niceness is over-rated."

NB This particular episode also features an actress by the name of Bobbin Bergstrom. That is all.]

Erm...

"It never occurred to me to think it was a risk," said the 77-year-old archaeologist from north London, Bridget Jones.

"I'm an optimist. I think it'll never happen to me."

She admitted she had heard "a couple of explosions", and then she told me that she would prefer to be killed by a car bomb than die in a hospital geriatric ward.

(BBC)

The Wisdom of Dr Gregory House

"There are three choices in this life.

Be good; get good; or give up."

The better part of valour

Discrete, adj. - detactched, apart, isolated, separate

Discreet, adj. - circumspect, decorous modest.

They have discrete meanings, innit.

More literary legends

Albert Camus played goalie for the Algerian national side.

Yeah, and Cole Porter was in the Foreign Legion!

Oh, no, wait...

Warning to young poets

"Young would-be poets... noted that Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas were poets who drank, and... went on themselves to be drunks who wrote poems."

- Julie Burchill, Beckham

Factionalism

"Although truth is not necessarily stranger than fiction, it can at times arrange itself more artfully."

- William Shawn, New Yorker

AdB

Alain de Botton has a new book out.


























Needless to say, it is excellent. Buy it, and read it.

That is all.

--
NB Penguin do not pay me a retainer for these services. If only...

Question

Who holds the world record for failed world record attempts?

(I wanna meet that guy.)

In The Red...

During the making of The Red Badge of Courage, legendary movie director John Huston

1) had to get MGM to advance him $150,000 to clear outstanding bookies' debts (from a total salary of $200,000 p.a.);

2) wrote the screenplay on a return flight to Mexico (for his wedding);

3) and directed the entire film from horseback.

They don't make 'em like that any more.

[Thanks to Lillian Ross (RIP)]

Dilemma

By way of a spiritual and corporeal (and financial) rest cure, each year my parents make an effort to mark Lent with a laying off of booze.

This evening they are dining at the vicarage.

I bet you any money there'll be wine.

Burchill's 'Fifth'

In her Beckham monograph, Julie 'isn't she a bit frightful?' Burchill reminds me that there were, rather inconveniently, two "fifth Beatle"s called Best.

Pete, who was actually once in the band and isn't dead yet,

















and George, who wasn't but is.























Something of a coin toss, innit?

Last night's TV

Thursday's Newsnight featured:

1) A reference, by Tim Whewell, to 'cutting back on the trimmings.'

2) Middle-class Russians in Yaroslavl illustrating the effects of the economic crash by whingeing that their children's bedrooms will now only have 30' TV screens.

3) The worst interview ever.

Messiah UPDATE

Er...

I reckon I've listened to Handel's Messiah a good thousand times now, and have long since grown comfortable with such pseudo-kinky humdingers as

"All we like sheep..."

and

"He gave his back to the smiters..."

What I hadn't picked up, though (and here I blame the impeccable diction in Harry Christophers' ace 2008 recording of the work) was the next line in that movement:

"He gave his back to the smiters... and his cheeks to them that pluckéd off the hair."

Which is just plain weird.

The run of the (tread)mill

My mate Paul writes to say:

"Yesterday I managed a 45 min session in the gym and rounded it off with the 1.5miler in under 10 mins... on a treadmill."

I must confess I've been pretty lax on my fitness this week. Yesterday I ran up Tower 42...


























and only spent about seven minutes on it, at that.

[Thanks to PC]

From my local paper

Brookes exposed himself to a 22-year-old woman on a Bakerloo Line train between Wembley Central and Harlesden last year, before getting off.

Editing crimes UPDATE

My friend Jack Sandham weighs in via text message:

"Musicians tend to fuck it up for themselves, whereas writers have an editor to do it for them."

Neatly put, I thought.

Sub-editing crimes

This one should make my fellow amnesiac's day.

Mate, I know you think you are the victim of some of the worst subbing crimes of the millennium, but imagine how you'd feel if (what you once called) "the HR monkeys of the print world" spelt your NAME wrong on your album cover.

That's really quite an achievement.


Thankfully, their illiterate sins cannot take away from the sweet, sweet sounds of the great Mr. Dekker. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: We should've been musicians. I think I'd rather be overproduced than overedited.

Maybe.

Alternative advice to would-be writers

Don't bother keeping notes on anything.

Trust me, you'll never use them, even though you really should.