I do so love a crystal ball*

Oh la la! Mme Arcati has hit, or should I say delicately tapped, the nail, or is it the earring, on the head. Just what was this French state visit about again? Let's ask her.

The future - it may look orange...

While we're on the subject, of course I remember now the other post I never did last week: the one where I quote the tweed-suited one's hilarious astrological description of Julian Barnes.

"In his new book (a memoir really) Nothing to be Frightened of" - Madame writes - "Julian Barnes reveals as a literary performance, the full extent of his fear of death (or thanatophobia) - why, the poor poppet wakes up at night screaming and chewing his pillow at the prospect of eternal extinction. No more book awards! No more cool reviews from John Walsh in the Indy! Oh woe, cruel world! Fashionably, he is a devout member of the Literary Godless Religion (Christopher Hitchens is its current Archbish; M Amis one of the vicars) - "I don’t believe in God, but I miss him," Barnes writes, largely because the divinely-inspired painted prettier pictures on church windows, so far as I can tell. He tells us he's a melancholic person.

Mr Barnes will be appalled to learn that he is very true to his horoscope..."

Sorry. You know I can't resist this kind of stuff.

And while we're linking: even a quick look at Charles Lambert's blog is enough to show me just how incomplete my reading list of last night was...


* as the actress - oh, never mind.

the new cure for depression

Okay, this has made me weep with happiness. It is John Crace's "Digested Read" version of the impossible, and impossibly trendy (or whatever), and impossibly ageing and pretentious Hanif Kureishi's new novel, Something to Tell You. I confess: I liked The Buddha of Suburbia when it came out. It was fresh, and fun, and I was only young. And Daniel Day-Lewis in My Beautiful Laundrette? That was the Zeitgeist if ever anything was. But it was, like, a really long time ago. And what was that awful thing - oh, Intimacy. Bloody hell, I've never read such boring, trite prose in all my life. I threw it across the room.

Anyway, here is just a taste of the joy, which is like limpid honey, and will pour like the very sunlight itself into your winter-starved soul:

"As I do often these days, I begin to think over my struggles. I am a psychoanalyst, a reader of signs.

My patients include countless celebrities and I deal in delusions - none more so than those of the middle-aged novelist who clings to his sad autobiography, mistaking his characters for grotesques, drugs and explicit sex for transgression and clunky, name-checking nods to political events for gravitas.

Even I have secrets; dark, terrible secrets that torment my unconscious and spiral me into page after page of solipsistic diarrhoea on the unbearable angst of a west London literary colossus. Unbearable for you, that is. For me, they are the very essence of Thanatos and as Ruth Rogers shows me to my usual table at the River Cafe, I find myself ruminating on my drug-taking, tattooed, bisexual, mixed-race, single mother, council-flat living, anarcho-syndicalist sister, Miriam, for whom my dear friend, the eminent theatre director, Henry, has conceived a passion...

...I was separated from my wife, Josephine, and rarely saw my son. I was alone, distanced from the world by my all-consuming ego. What was left to me, save constant references to Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Plath and Emerson?"

okay, while we're on the subject of Tilda Swinton

What is that dress?!? Dear God in heaven. (She says it's "comfortable.")

Oh no, but wait, this really is funny:

"She said she was surprised people didn't know she's funny. 'I'm funny all the time', she says. 'I'll have to work on that'."

at least they're not idoits

I'm just shamelessly stealing this post. Kris from Stoke Newington, one of my favourite bloggers and definitely someone you want inside your tent pissing out (as the saying goes), has lately taken to recording conversations she overhears. I'm jealous, I'm envious, and I'm thinking I don't spend enough time on the buses these days...*

She writes:

On the 73, approx 11:00 am today (and no, American friends, there is no Thanksgiving holiday here).

Two school-girls on the bus. Let’s call them “Little” and “Large”: -

Little to Large: “I was with Hayley and Chelsea and I floored him. I fucking floored him and he didn’t do nuffink. Ask my grandad.

Large, shouting down her mobile: “WE’RE ON THE BUS TO KING’S SQUARE, THEN WE’RE GOING OUT WEST”.

Little: “Give me that phone”. Now down phone: “You fucking wanker, next time I see you, I’m gonna scratch your face up”.

Large, taking phone back: “YEAH, OUT WEST, BUT WE’RE GOING TO KING’S SQUARE FIRST”.

Little, looking out the window: “OMG! There’s my school police officer. Tap on the window”.

But what I really love? The labels she's given it: antisocial behaviour, idiots, London.

* Edited in. Wait. You don't have to be on a bus. Mlle B is sitting here watching America's Next Top Goddamned Model. Lots of sounds of girls weeping, sounding heartbroken - they probably broke a nail - and then inspirational, or exhortational, blather from all the weird people who run it. I'm not listening. Then, from the wall of sound, emerges the sentence, spoken by a voice neither male nor female but merely vapid: "Okay girls, and we're gonna do do four sides of your personality."

Zuckerman's ghost in the machine

"A notorious landmark in literary misogyny:" it's official.

I've had that argument so many times - including recently, and with people whose judgement I respect. But I knew it couldn't be just me!