So, I finished writing the book. Teasers and matters arising may show up here. This is the chapter list:
- The Cold World
- Written In Blood
- The Aesthetics Of Dejection
- A Sermon In The Name Of Death
- The Brain Of Ulrike Meinhof
“Written in Blood” is on Hopkins, “…Dejection” is on Coleridge, although there’s quite a bit of Larkin in both for some reason (well, this won’t surprise anyone who knew me as an undergraduate, not that many people who who did read this to my knowledge - where are you all, anyway? Where are your blogs? Don’t tell me you’ve all grown up, you spineless renegades!). “…In The Name Of Death” is on Xasthur, with a bit of Britney. Annoyingly, the YouTube clip of the video for “Everytime” spliced with “The Eerie Bliss And Torture Of Solitude” seems to have been removed, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it once existed and was awesome. “The Brain Of Ulrike Meinhof” diagnoses the RAF as the executioners of West German hedonism; the moral of the story is, roughly: if you don’t want your kids to turn into terrorists, help them find something bigger than happiness to pursue. Hmmm, I really should send a copy of this to Roger…
Meanwhile, I’m in a right old state: I’ve been up since 3AM with severe abdominal pains, although these finally seem to be fading, and intermittent vomiting. Generally speaking, when pain makes you cry, you know it’s bad. But maybe the worst is over; I’m off to see a GP later, by which time the whole thing will probably have sorted itself out. I will say one thing: NHS Direct is bloody good. Almost un-UKishly good, in fact - as I said about the superb hospice in which my late grandmother spent her last days, it’s like living in a first-world country. Or a country one could conceivably imagine having survived the second world war. It’s still there, underneath it all - and by “it” I mean, I think, people.