Julie Burchill, classic or dud?¿?¿?¿

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

Someone had to do it, and that someone is me....I read, or rather tried to read her column in thiz weex Guardian Weekend, but gave up, because it was crap, and GUESS WHAT?¿?¿?¿ Yes, she doesn't like film actors much.....!

I think 90% dud, because *occasionally* she'll come up w/some outrageous/amusing statement which makes her remaining 10% quota classic (or something)

eg writing in the 1980's mail on sunday that britain should leave nato, and join the warsaw pact (imagine the response of yer average mail reader to THAT)

putting speed in the old hippies she had to interview's tea, to get over their reticence when she ws with thee NME

The downside is that her style and subject matter is repetitive & predictable. She is smart, but NOT SMART ENOUGH, 'though she thinx she is. AAaaand..... banging on about how PRoLe one is sounds pretty rich coming from the ex-queen ov thee groucho, and Mrs Hacksaw's No.1 fan thru the eighties.

What the hell, she's still less repellent that to-knee-par-sunz.

Whatever, fire away.....

― Norman Fay, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Every now and again I read her column to remond myself why I hate her unfortunately I haven't done so recently and I can't bring myslef to go scouting round the gaurdian website to find out.

― Ed, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Eerie experience: when I bought the Hear'Say issue of Marie Claire (which obviously I did because MC is a highbrow mag and wd have an interesting perspective on the Popstars phenom, NOT because K, M and S had their kit off on the cover), I read the "intersting perspective" and thought RIGHT ON! This reads just like ME!! Someone must have been reading my ILM ranting re Hear'Say!!! Hurrah!!!!

Byline time: Julie B. Well, till that moment I wd have said, I have hated her for 20 years she is out of my system her work means nothing to me go away and bother me no longer. Only she isn't out of my system: cuz I suddenly find here we are thinking exactly alike. Brrrrr. She's SO lazy tho. She never goes to the world for the story. All she does is read the paper and respond to THAT.

"Guy Ritchie got that scar falling of his pony and cutting himself on his silver spoon" = a funny line.

― mark s, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

She has a lot of bad habits as a writer...like the way she always has to get digs in about Tony Parsons or her other exes. Can be funny the first couple of hundred times you read stuff like that, after that it becomes tedious and sad. But she certainly isn't the first writer (and definitely not the last) to be guilty of this crime.

Every time I read something by her I can see the potential that was there, but was never fully realized.

― junichiro, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

she uses the word 'smorgasboard' in every single article. ever.

― matthew james, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Excellent points made defending film violence vs. film sex, and I like the anti-work thing. Unfortunately not enough material to spread over a weekly column, thus too many repetitive variations on the theme "I used to have fun but I'm grown up now, and anybody who still does is pathetic". (i.e. "Now that I don't live in London anymore, anybody who still does is..." etc etc)
'Boy Looked at Johny' - CLASSIC!

― tarden, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

she can be a good writer, but agreed re: lazy. the endless talking about tony parsons and nme is boring (like anyone cares about either of those things!).

in the end though, she is in thrall to an outdated concept of CONTROVERSY! (that isn't really very controversial at all). sadly, this makes her steven wells with talent.

― gareth, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Oh god, I read that thing she wrote in Marie Claire about Hear'Say (though I didn't actually buy the stupid mag, it was passed on to me by someone else). It made me shudder (in a bad way). Reading her stuff is like driving past a car crash, I know that reading it will piss me off but cannot stop myself. Maybe it's more like picking a scab, actually.

― Emma, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

I vehemently dislike her prose and will slag her off to anyone - and then she'll come out and write an article full of fantastic ideas. I think her problem is the problem of most columnists - what to write about. If flashes of inspiration are only coming out every two or three months then what does she fill the other 9 weeks with? Pap, bitterness and tedium about her exes.

― Pete, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

steven wells with talent

....A concept too alien for me to assimilate into my poor brain....

x0x0

― KaY_WRaD, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

I agree that she's repetitive. I've lost count of the number of times she's argued that actors and actresses are basically doing the same job as a prostitute. Sometimes I want to beat her around the head, and sometimes I want to shake her hand and nod. But given that most similar columnists make me want to scuttle the whole damn island and watch it sink slowly into the sea if this is what passes for debate in the public sphere, I guess she can't be that bad.

― alex thomson, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

I read her essay/article collection titled Sex and Sensibility. Sharp writer, entertaining, glib (not a bad thing), and points against: has or had peculiar obsession w/ Jim Kerr's penis.

― AP, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Doompatrol == Julie Burchill shox0r!

― Richard Tunnicliffe, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Quick Burchill quote from her collected columns which you can now buy in bookshops: "advertising, like the IRA, may have started with straight forward motives". What kind of a comparison is that?

― Pete, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Strangely, I haven't read many of her articles but I have read her autobiography. There's a brilliant moment where as a girl she chucks a fit at a pair of girls and then bursts into tears because they were tearing pages out of a library book. That however is all I can really remember.

― Tim, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Now that anecdote just makes me think that she invented it in order to illustrate what a brainy, outsider, intellectual kinda chick she has always been. Yuck.

― Emma, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Classic for lunacy, ie that advertising/IRA quote.
Dud for occasional rabid man-hating, gibbering about being working class (does anyone really care about that kind of thing anymore?).

― DG, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Andrew, Burchill's not the only one with a thing about Jim Kerr's knob. It's an apocryphal London lazy journalist factoid that it is the largest in pop, like the thing about Marc Almond and the pint of spunk stomach pump-out.

As to her writing, the working class thing is perhaps a normal media obsession because if you do make it 'inside' from a blue-collar background, it's difficult and rankling not to notice the Daddy, Buy Me A Pony element amongst your colleagues, who are always mystifyingly promoted despite The Obvious. Having said that, she certainly encouraged enough of the fuckers to work on the modern review for £50 per article.

― suzy, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

nine months pass...

She may no longer be a 'hip young gunslinger', but she does still have her eyes open. She is vicious, rude, vulgar and sharp, but also points me in new directions. She recently wrote an article about an internet magazine called 'flow', "For women who bleed!" ( flowmagazine.co.uk ) which was an eye opener, and I am now a fully signed up 'Essex feminist'. Check it out, and you'll see why Burchill is a classic.

― seth vibert, Wednesday, 24 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

um i thought that that article was actually CRITICISING "Flow".

― katie, Wednesday, 24 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I read Burchill's "fax war" with Camille Paglia on her website and I felt a profound pity for her. I have rarely seen anyone take such a sustained intellectual beating as Burchill had ministered by Paglia, yet she didn't seem to realize the extent of the damage. Why Burchill posted this exchange on her website makes as little sense of marrying Tony Parsons - at least she realized that at some point.

― Brent, Wednesday, 1 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

six years pass...

Julie Burchill's grown up and become a 'Christian Zionist'. As a consequence, she's much braver than those money-grubbing atheists:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/religion.anglicanism?commentpage=1

― moley, Monday, 18 August 2008 00:00 (sixteen years ago) link

Ooops sorry - it's already been posted here:

"Mad" Julie Burchill: C/D

― moley, Monday, 18 August 2008 00:01 (sixteen years ago) link

two years pass...

"I was certainly beautiful when I was 25; now I am 52, I am most certainly not."
....and how

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2024655/Face-ladies-NEVER-pretty.html

― Proger, Thursday, 11 August 2011 08:09 (thirteen years ago) link

beauty is actually a very structured aesthetic ideal, which even six-month-old babies can recognise in photographs

say what you like about jools, she puts in the research and isn't afraid to engage with the complex science of the thing

― full on... mask hysteria (history mayne), Thursday, 11 August 2011 08:14 (thirteen years ago) link

she wildly overrates her 25 yo self btw. i've read that exact sentence from her five or six times and i barely read her stuff.

― jed_, Thursday, 11 August 2011 08:15 (thirteen years ago) link

She has about 6 themes she constantly regurgitates, her mythical beauty being one of them. I thought she was being ironic for years, but she looks back on herself as some sort of Helen.

― Proger, Thursday, 11 August 2011 08:29 (thirteen years ago) link

Good to see JB engaging with the most important issue de nos jours, i.e. herself.

― Neil S, Thursday, 11 August 2011 08:58 (thirteen years ago) link

Occurred to me this morning that early Burchill had something of the Rebekah Brooks dead-eyed nihilist about her - though obv not uncompounded by ginger
http://thefilter.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/julie_burchill.jpg

― Stevie T, Thursday, 11 August 2011 09:01 (thirteen years ago) link

duh - compounded

― Stevie T, Thursday, 11 August 2011 09:01 (thirteen years ago) link

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.