bee feast

As the whiskey soaked in, it occurred to him that a spouse was the person who listened to the story of your life and who, making certain allowances, chose to believe you.

I love Jay McInerney. I'd put a link in there but I just found one to his first-hand account of TTEOSTE written three days later (harrowing) and one to a snotty Salon thing about how he's "the Dan Quayle of American literature". "'Story of My Life'", it snotted (in brackets even to denote its flimsiness as a work and even as a point in a snotty article), "was particularly thin". Damn swine. I know McInerney is lumped in with his mate Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahnuik (pron. 'Paula-Nick', apparently, and it gives me great satisfaction to know that) and Douglas Coupland as some trendy vacuous ponce-a-like, but . . . for fucksakes. I know critics have to make sense of the world in such ways, but I tried to negotiate around that as much as I could when I was one, and while good criticism can enhance your experience of art, so much of it is so lazy and limp and corrosive. It's even lazy to talk about 'lazy journalism'. I hated that expression so much. Hate, hatey hate.

But there's lazy and then there's blog-divertingly, bewilderingly crass. Last year I read 'Wasted' by Marya Hornbacher, this prodigious recovered anorexic-bulimic. I'm fascinated by eating disorders anyway, but her memoir was astonishing in its clarity and sense of responsibility and lyricism. Struck me that anyone of such galloping intellect couldn't have avoided succumbing to one psychological eruption or another. Such people have a very hard time finding their place in the world, and other people find them hard to accept. So I looked it up the other day and found some of the contemporary mag reviews of this brave and important book by this extraordinary woman including this one from Harpers & Queen:

‘The mind of Hornbacher is sharper than were her collar-bones when she weighed 4 stone, was given a week to live, and suddenly decided not to die. It is her 23-year-old body that was wasted by fourteen years of anorexia and bulimia. Her true story is painfully honest, analytical, complex and

No, shut up, look at your first clause, you fucker. 'Mind sharper than her collar-bones when she weighed 4 stone'. You just rendered all the earnest admiring glurge to come redundant, you posturing, blinkered, embarrassing idiot. You have lost touch with everything that is good and decent. Look, there it goes, your last shred of integrity, floating away on a sea of offensive bollocks like a burst lilo. Clear your desk and go into politics right now.

I wonder when the first Terri Schiavo book will come out. Someone wrote that she was being kept in a "persistent legislative state". A rare gem, that, the worthy and pertinent pun.

Anyway, Jay McInerney is as worthy as anyone. Never mind lazy journalism, consumers are lazier. They refuse to look past any conspicuous stylishness, flourish and foppery in books or music, and get to the good stuff, the stuff that stays with you. Some of the music that means the most to me (and I'm smart, discerning, I've read hefty books and listened to terribly serious music) is the glossiest pop. It can leak stuff that wasn't even put there by the people who made it. As for literature, it's tempting to dismiss simple sentences as trite or glib or inconsequential or naive or cynical but it happens occasionally that a nail is hit on its head with a resounding sob and some penetrating truth is pinned.

It never lasts. I haven't seen one example yet. But there's still this ideal in your head, you know, like a vision of a place you've never visited, but that you've dreamed about or seen in a movie you've forgotten the title of, and you know you'd recognize it immediately if you ever saw it in real life. It would be like going home, tired and whipped after a really long time on the road, if home was like it's supposed to be, instead of the disaster area it actually is.

Meanwhile, the sun is still shining, I've got nothing done besides pillaging the buy-one-get-one-free rail at Top Shop and taking the beast for a brief prowl. The pillage was committed whilst trying out new contact lenses (which are OK, I suppose, but I just had to take them out because they were trying very hard to mate with my corneas), and I didn't realise until I got into the changing room that I still had traces of orange dye around my eyes. Fumbling optometrist poked it in there with bits of sterile paper and observed that "no one else ever does that" when I blinked madly and orangey tears rose in protest. Well, I'm terribly sensitive.

I've had to consider today whether or not I'm generally successful in balancing near-complete transparency (I believe in it, but even if I didn't I would have to grudgingly concede to it because most of the time everything I'm thinking is blazoned on my dumb face, although I've been told twice in the last few weeks that I might as well be standing on a plinth in a square, much to my distress. . .must. . .reach. . .point) and discretion. Both of these are important if you want to be able to live with yourself and hold onto your friends (squander your cash, be rash, just. . .). Truth activity must be monitored closely. You can't just assume that, as a fundamentally nice person, you're going to trundle along the path of niceness with no hands and saying "ooh look, a curlew". No. You must. . .suddenly slip into the second person, which is rarely to be used unless you wish to avoid saying 'one' which is pretentious and archaic, or if you want to be accusatory in your tone.

Um, you have to take care. And read more Jay McInerney. And then wonder what happened to Tim McInernney. Oh, he did 'Notting Hill'. Bummer. No one deserves that.