The Politics of Dancing

Anyone who writes has to to deal with, often ill informed, hostile critique of their writing. On BBC Radio Four's Start the Week a year or so back Gore Vidal heard his book being slated as meretricious. Gore's response, 'Mmm, meretricious, meretricious and a happy new year!' Now that's the way to do it.

‘Whatever’ Michel Houellebecq ‘Whatever,’ the throwaway line, the conversation stopper, the verbal tic, the ubiquitous response to complexity, pregnant with meaning, ultimately meaningless. Julian Barnes states that any serious writer must write as if both their parents were dead. I would expand this to include all relatives and friends and anyone whom you admire or seek to impress, otherwise the internal censor works surreptitiously to undermine your attempts at authenticity, at undiluted honesty. Of course in reality this is nigh on possible. However if any writer has achieved this it is surely Michel Houellebecq, (pronounced Wellbeck). Having read ‘Atomised,’ ‘Platform ,’ and ‘ The Possibility of an Island’ I have finally read his first novel ‘ Whatever.’ A French writer who writes with a highly anglicised style, threatened in France by the Muslim lobby with legal action and accused of ‘Islamaphobia,’ he now lives in exile, having first resided in Ireland he now lives in S...

There is a rather shallow formula that declares that the older you get the more prone you become to adopting religious faith, this is a variation of there are no atheists in foxholes argument, presumably the greater proximity of death concentrating the mind. In my own case this does not appear to be true. In his rather wonderful memoir ‘Experience,’ Martin Amis reflects that your parents are what stand between you and death. Certainly, having as they say ‘lost’ both my parents within the last eighteen months,- and isn’t the terminology here interesting, rather as if one had suddenly regressed, a child wandering around the station concourse having been separated from mum and dad, -I can certainly testify to this sense of having nobody now between me and the abyss, the feeling that “next comes me.” Not that I find myself in the departure Lounge just yet, more that the time when my flight will be called just got closer; though I have to say that this feeling has not induced in me any p...