Clive James

This is ever so sad. He's too ill to even go home to Australia.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18532310

I spent a week last spring reading his essays.

That is sad.

What did you make of the essays, Alfred? I read him a bit too much in youth, I think, so it's been a few years since I've just enjoyed his work; but there's an enthused, plain-speaking love for culture, with jokes, that I loved him for.

I like the second and third memoirs - Falling Towards England and May Week was in June - a lot. I go back to them a bit - virtually comfort reads.

As an enthusiast of the man of letters tradition, I loved James' casual erudition. The essays on Lawrence, Nixon (quite contrarian), Vidal, Twain, and Wilson are top drawer.

yeah, there aren't many who can manage that now - huge range, no hint of the schoolroom, easy style.

My dad had Falling Towards England and I must have read it ten times in my early teens.

hey it's ok he's doing alright

i dug cultural amnesia

So is he going to Australia or wot?

Which essay collections did you read Alfred?

The comedian Chris Addison said on Twitter: "Clive James is the best kind of intellectual – one who doesn't let you know that's what he is. A genius and a one-off.

ugh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=109-5Q5S3tU&feature=related

So is he going to Australia or wot?

A fate worse than...

Like his TV work (or what I remember of it) than what I've read -- guess I came across when I knew much of what he was being enthusiatic about, whereas it could have had a much bigger impact if I had read it in my early teens like ljubljana.

1000x better than Stephen Fry, who kinda occupies the same space.

Ironically enough, all of that foreign TV that Clive + his audience used to poke fun at was merely a crystal ball into what British TV would be like 10-15 years later - the Japanese et al were years ahead of us!

Which essay collections did you read Alfred?

Reliable Essays and Cultural Amnesia

isn't he a mad racist these days?

lol, really? Last thing I read was some awful thing about how he fell in love with Diana blah.

More a crotchety old reactionary I think, pretty much how he was always going to end up

Prob'ly has some sort of beef with Islam or something predictable like that

Or immigration

hence his wish to get back to Sydney, he feels guilty about taking British jobs

And being a strain on our public services

Enjoyed watching some of his old Postcard From.. series on YouTube

The Rio one was great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzCo1038QK4

The Cairo one less so, but of topical interest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8FvwoAZvVY

might be my fave james/atkin song. their stuff can be kinda hard to embrace. not broadway and not really singersongwriter, but a mix of show/folk/rock. wordy obviously and sometimes this is a detriment. plus, pete not exactly the most charismatic of singers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrUosW8Z7KE

i don't know if someone else singing this could make it less cumbersome. possibly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Butt2hVdyzg

but that's what their style was like. topheavy. and melodically not very interesting. i dunno, maybe you had to be there. i always want to like the albums, cuz they always SEEM interesting and literate and all that, but they needed an editor and better musical ideas.

My only awareness of him as a song lyricist is a vague memory of him travelling to Nashville and attempting to write a hit country song

for me, his I'd rate his general output:

1. TV Documentary maker (I also used to like him on recapping the year's highlights on New Years Eve)
2. Essayist (as collected in Cultural Amnesia)
3. Autobiographical novels (as he himself termed them)
4. No interest in his poetry, let alone set to badly sung English folk music

The Dante translation is good.

I believe he also produce an enormous amount of newspaper TV criticism, but I've never read any of it. Are there any worthwhile collections of this?

yeah, him and atkin put out 5 records in the 70's. all lyrics by James. i don't think a whole lot of people remember them.

Campari, I own this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393051803/ref=pe_175190_21431760_3p_M3T1_ST1_dp_1

thanks Alfred, that looks right up my street - will definitely order.

I've never been impressed by his poetry, but, as an essayist, I'd love to read his thoughts on Lowell & Larkin, et. al. The other sections look good too. I've heard high praise about his Dante translation from other people too, but was put off by the NYT review which said it was somewhat pedestrian or words to that effect. Might have to reconsider.

On second thoughts, they might have said it wasn't as pedestrian as it ought to have been, attenuating what Eliot praised as its demotic simplicity by adding too much explanatory detail. One or the other.

'Visions Before Midnight', 'The Crystal Bucket', and 'Glued to the Box' are collections of the TV review articles he wrote for the Observer newspaper.

Good interview: http://www.channel4.com/news/clive-james-jon-snow-television-dante-video

Turns out he is a a climate change denier, respect has evaporated

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/climate-alarmists-cop-a-clive-james-savaging/news-story/8fd487fe508156874eceb9822fa4cdd3

The actual essay is paywalled and I can't be arsed to work around it.

consider the source too tho - the oz is v right wing and anti climate change

He wrote the the essay for the Oz.

Sick and tired of old white guys who are going to be dead before this really hits pontificating in their decrepit ignorance.

Speaking of which I had to have a rant at the ABC this morning for giving airtime to that evil fuckwit Nigel Lawson. These wrinkly, cess filled reactionaries need to shuffle off stage.

Is Clive James actually terminally ill? Feel like he's been dying forever

By his own account he should be dead by now. Irony is medical science is keeping him alive, regular transfusion of immunoglobulin, I believe.

Interestingly enough not leaches, ginseng and mystic incantations.

(xp) First thing I thought was, "Is he still here?"

Obviously I don't want the guy to die, in case there's any confusion,

In April 2011, after media speculation that he had suffered kidney failure,[42] James confirmed that he was suffering from B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and had been in treatment for 15 months at Addenbrooke's Hospital.[43] In an interview with BBC Radio 4 in June 2012, James admitted that the disease "had beaten him" and that he was "near the end".[44]

This is interesting,

DNA analysis has distinguished two major types of CLL, with different survival times. People with CLL that is positive for the marker ZAP-70 have an average survival of 8 years, while those negative for ZAP-70 have an average survival of more than 25 years.

knew he couldn't have died yet: he's very highly regarded by the uk punditocracy, who think he's both smarter and more learned and cultured than they are (they're probably mostly right there, but it;s very low bar) and are also impressed at his ease with popular culture -- which he paid early public attention to, with his poems-to-music (which were often comments on topical things) and his TV columns, which were widely regarded as erudite and insightful...

when his time comes there's be a LOT of fuss abt him

i wish him well with his health of course but i've never had any time for him at all, he's a nuisance

he has an entry in the early editions of the nme book of rock i think (subsequent editions include him under pete atkin, his co-composer: "the abjding impression is that the duo are finally clever, but dull -- that the humour is just to cerebral and contrived to be actually funny")

He was in fAvour of john howard and the tampa lies/refugee abuse business, so fuck him

Plus he had a decades-long affair, got found out, his wife left himand now his kids won't talk to him

That all sounds about right re: CJ. In my formative years he always seemed a smug pompous bore who laughed at his own jokes. In our house the top Aussie entertainment was The Paul Hogan Show, which I have never re-watched since I was a kid - but it seemed hilarious at the time.

pleasingly he actually had a role in the sex pistols appearance on tony wilson's so it goes: he sometimes co-presented, and was deputed by wilson to keep the lads in order, which panned out exactly as you'd expect -- he was mocked and harassed by siouxsie sioux and probably had his wallet nicked by jonesie

lol I just had this exact conversation a week ago w someone (ie: wait isn't he dead, he's been "dying" for like eons, fuck him anyway)

I remember his TV shows being based around 'let's laugh at foreigners and their craaaaaazy TV shows, you won't believe the rubbish they watch!' Little did we know that British TV was just lagging behind and we'd catch up with the rest of the world eventually, and arguably outstrip them, re. z-list celebrities eating kangaroo testicles etc

can anyone who knows Italian vouch for his translation of Dante?

But then I think he also used to have serious bits in the show, like a smug Oxbridge "That's Life!" or something.

lol yes, the few times i watched those shows i was basically always thinking why don't we cancel c.james like NOW and just stream these insane japanese gameshows directly, THEY LOOK GREAT

"Endurance" was the Japanese show - yes, we took it and turned it into shit (i.e. I'm A Celebrity...)

I remember his TV shows being based around 'let's laugh at foreigners and their craaaaaazy TV shows, you won't believe the rubbish they watch!' Little did we know that British TV was just lagging behind and we'd catch up with the rest of the world eventually, and arguably outstrip them, re. z-list celebrities eating kangaroo testicles etc

― Punnet of the Grapes (Tom D.), Sunday, June 4, 2017 1:01 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was that show not in fact a catalyst in things moving in that direction. Since it was the first exposure and its popularity showed that things like that might well be watched.

Possibly, Clive must be mortified, as he seems to be about so many things in the 21st century.

He still has a column in the Guardian Weekend magazine btw.

I remember reading him 35 or 40 years ago in the Obsevrver along with Sue Arnold and Hunkin.
Hadn't heard this negative stuff about him before.

Never heard about the climate change denial thing but he's been talking a lot of garbage about Islam and refugees for years - from before his never ending terminal illness.

omg hunkin! i have not thought abt him for years

fun fact: over the doorway of the nme offices when it was in carnaby street -- this is like 1983? -- there used to be a hunkin-esque automata piece that shuddered and clanked away (i don't think it was anything to do with nme, it was just some carnaby street thing)

i can't find a good example of his automata, but they looked exactly like his cartoons except made of wood:
http://www.lm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/portrait_tim-hunkin_01a-rentadog-cartoon-copy.jpg?w=488&h=386

We should have a Tim Hunkin thread. I had the collected observer cartoons and all his secret life of machines on video and the cabaret mechanical theatre was the best.

I'd do a thread but it's bedtime.

let's change this title of this one

(sorry alfred) (tim hunkin's translation of dante is impeccable IMO)

I picked up a Hunkin book for 1p plus p+p from Amazon. Looks like it contains all of Rudiments of Wisdom from 73 to 87 but doesn't say so on the front cover. Just says the complete r of w from the Observer magazine on an inner page. & on the back which I don't think you see on the Amazon page.
It's called Almost Everything There Is To Know by Hunkin. It's a magazine sized paperback and 363 pages long. I'm assuming that reproduction is about the same size it originally appeared in the magazine but writing seems really small. At least it's in b+w which I heard wasn't true in the book compiled as Rudiments of Wisdom which Amazon reviews describe as badly coloured in so difficult to read.
So this seems to be the best way to get things. Do wish it had dates of first appearance listed somewhere. It's organised alphabetically so hard to tell. Probably not significant but would be nice to know.

Hours of fun for everyone.

His memoirs are super funny and insightful, as were his TV reviews. I'll mourn him a lot more than most of the ppl on this thread, it seems.

Cosign on the memoirs and TV crit - as a kid I loved his snark as a TV presenter although it kind of palled after I grew up, I almost felt like it was insulation against ever genuinely enjoying anything.

Also he'd have some guest like Jerry Hall on and then simper and drool like a fool

Lol @ nme offices being in Carnaby street in 1983 upthread

Plus he had a thing about Princess Di, which seemed ironic at the time, because no-one like her then, but obviously wasn't.

His Postcard From... docs are all on YouTube - I think they're his best work, the least jarring mix of the silly and serious sides. Some of the 2000s lit crit and "Cultural Amnesia" are excellent too.

At the very least, he is a very, very good joke writer, and generally a force for good. His ocassional and awful not-all-men-ness and climate change views stick out because they're so poorly thought through - I don't care about whether I agree with him about everything or anything, but it's annoying when he doesn't make the effort.

has any public figure with a terminal illness nevertheless clung to life as long as clive james has?

Wilko Johnson was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer about the same time I believe.

Wilko, 2012. Clive, 2010, fwiw.

Wilko less annoying in the course of this gruesome Who Lives Longest competition though.

wilko's terminal cancer ended up dying before he did tbf

Actually, I do agree his Unreliable Memoirs was very good. bits of Cultural Amnesia too, although he also used it to defend Australia's horrific refugee abuse, so fuck him for that.

Clive James is very right wing these days - or perhaps he always was and I just wasn't paying attention. A couple of years ago he had a letter in the TLS praising Tony Abbott as a prime minister destined for greatness (he was our Donald Trump, for non-Australians).

It strikes me that the generation who left Australia for fairer shores in the 60s had a strangely reactionary streak, given that they were supposedly fleeing the conservatism of Australia of that era. Barry Humphries is/always has been right wing, Germaine Greer is increasingly sketchy these days - I don't know what Robert Hughes's politics were, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn he leaned to the right

Hughes was in favour of bull fighting and possibly Fox hunting. Acted like a prick sometimes.

Yes I can imagine him getting all Hemingway with the bullfighting

Actually, thinking about the reactionary streak of Aussie intellectuals of that generation, I guess it's pretty analogous with the rightward turn of a similar British cohort, ie Hitchens, Amis, McEwan et al.

Yeah, Robert Hughes acted like a racist shit when he was done for dangerous driving in Australia because the judge was of Indian background

A couple of years ago he had a letter in the TLS praising Tony Abbott as a prime minister destined for greatness

greatly reduces clive's standing as an intellectual, given abbott was clearly a laughably incompetent bigot before he'd even got started.

Barry Humphries is/always has been right wing

only recently heard about his transphobic comments.

Germaine Greer is on that train too: http://time.com/4290409/germaine-greer-transgender-women/

i don't get why people are so angry about someone else transitioning, it's not anybody's business

has any public figure with a terminal illness nevertheless clung to life as long as clive james has?

The Longest Goodbye continues...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/05/clive-james-books-overrated-all-magic-realism

In April 2011, after media speculation that he had suffered kidney failure,[44] James confirmed that he was suffering from B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia and had been in treatment for 15 months at Addenbrooke's Hospital.[45] In an interview with BBC Radio 4 in June 2012, James admitted that the disease "had beaten him" and that he was "near the end".[46] He said that he was also diagnosed with emphysema and kidney failure in early 2010.[47]

In a BBC interview with Charlie Stayt, broadcast on 31 March 2015, James described himself as "near to death but thankful for life".[49] However, in October 2015, he admitted to feeling "embarrassment" at still being alive thanks to experimental drug treatment.[50]

Until June 2017, he wrote a weekly column for The Guardian entitled 'Reports of My Death...'.[51]

Normally I would imagine it would be weird to realize that every person you come in contact with is thinking, "I thought you were dying?" but Clive James has never struck me as someone who pays much attention to what other people are thinking.

stopped reading after his first answer where he jokingly reps for his own latest bag-o-shit written on the edge of death (apparently) book on Larkin and then he reps for Anne Applebaum.... Next!

more like jive claims amirite

*APPLAUSE*

Suspect his longevity is just to fuck withe dead pool crew.

I’m tempted to see if his Clive James on TV show from the 80s is on youtube, I’d imagine it hasn’t aged well.

He certainly hasn't aged well.

This particular column is bad - ridiculously self-promoting. Perhaps almost-death makes that seem acceptable.

he's always been like this though

Clive James’ postcard from London is a delight. He visits London in 1991 - even though it looks a lot like the 80s - and remembers what it was like 20 years earlier.

Victoria Wood sitting on a park bench talking about bedsits
Terence Donovan driving around in a convertible Rolls
Peter Cook riffing on the blue plaque to Karl Marx in Soho and reminiscing about The Establishment nightclub (1962-1964)
James on King’s Road fashion: “the revolution became a trend, which became a uniform, which became passé”

On West End tourists: “Young people from all over the world slowly realising that all they’ve got to look at is each other. They’re drawn by the legend of Swinging London, little knowing that in those days it was an indoor city. The streets were empty. The action was in nightclubs you couldn’t afford to go into.”