Tuesday 8th March 2016. Starting research on the next essay, which is due at the end of spring. I’ve decided to properly examine the connection between Menippean satire and selected contemporary US fiction, after taking the cue from Margaret Atwood’s review of Eggers’s The Circle (see earlier diary). I had something of a Eureka moment when finding an article which equated literary camp in the Firbank style (one of my pet subjects) with the Menippean genre. I think the former can be more usefully viewed as a sub-genre of the latter. They both use a similar approach – they both draw attention to surfaces, and in a playful way.

* * *

Thursday 10th March 2016. MA class at Birkbeck. This week we do David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, his last book of stories. Some of it I find hard going, particularly his long, drawn-out sentences with endless clauses. Vonnegut’s advice to ‘pity the reader’ didn’t apply to DFW. The story about suicide, ‘Good Old Neon’ now has an unavoidable autobiographical side to it. Funny how Wallace satirised brand culture so much, yet he became such a recognisable brand himself, with the long hair, the Lennon glasses, and the Axl Rose bandana. It’s certainly a distinctive look for a novelist.

I watch the news of the US presidential campaigns, and I wonder how much of Donald Trump’s success is down to his strong look, too. I think about him and Boris Johnson, and wonder if it’s to do with funny blond hair and a sense of being from a different planet. People are now bombarded with so many images every day, only the odd-looking can truly leave an impression. Weirdness is now a platform in itself. In which case perhaps now is the best time to launch some sort of new public career for myself (not politics, though).

* * *

Friday 11th March 2016. To the Leicester Square Odeon, for one of the smaller screens hidden at the back of a branch of Costa. This is where all the new films in London go when they’ve been out for a while, just before they come out on DVD.

(going by adverts, DVDs are still being made and sold, despite the closure of many entertainment shops, and the rise of Netflix. The new poster for the Carol DVD advises you to buy it at Sainsbury’s).

Along with the Prince Charles and the Odeon Panton Street, the smaller section of the Leicester Square Odeon is a Last Chance Saloon for those who like cinemas. I’m keen to mop up the rest of this year’s Oscar-winning films, so I’m here to see The Danish Girl, for which Alicia Vikander won Best Supporting Actress. Justifiably so: she’s one of the best things about the film. She plays Gerda Wegener, a real-life bohemian painter in 1920s Copenhagen, whose husband Einar underwent one of the first examples of sex reassignment surgery, and became Lili Elbe. Though, as it’s been pointed out by those who know the full story, the film isn’t always faithful to the facts. The cause of Elbe’s death, for one, is rewritten to suit the film’s narrative arc.

There’s a promising scene early on, where Gerda is working at her canvas, with a cigarette holder clenched in her mouth. Despite this she is still able to deliver a lecture to her nervous male sitter on the importance of the female gaze. Ms Vikander’s performance in scenes like this is one of liveliness, individuality, humour and nuance. Mr Redmayne, meanwhile, goes through Elbe’s changes from husband to woman with one unchanging emotion: Pained Martyrdom. He means well, but does the acting equivalent of walking on eggshells, not so much overly mannered as overly self-conscious. I wonder if he was hampered by realising that the wider climate of trans issues has changed, that people want to see more trans actors in such roles, and that this whole film now feels curiously out of date. One working trans actor, Rebecca Root, has a small part in the film as a nurse. But even she has said in interviews that she hopes The Danish Girl will be the last major film about trans lives without a trans person in the lead. It’s an issue that isn’t going away.

This week also saw the public coming-out by the Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski (after some odious doorstepping by the UK Daily Mail). Her co-directing sister Lana Wachowski transitioned a few years ago, and is listed in the Danish Girl credits for helping Eddie R with his performance. The trans journalist Paris Lees and the trans pioneer April Ashley were similarly brought on board. But of course, performance advice is not the same as writing the script or directing the whole film. April Ashley has since commented that Eddie R’s performance verges on a dated, pantomime idea of femininity: he ‘should not be dropping his eyelashes every two minutes’.

I’m convinced The Danish Girl will become as out-of-date as those early attempts by Hollywood to depict gay characters, such as the 1960s film The Children’s Hour. Back then, a pro-gay narrative could only be put before a mainstream audience if it meant scenes of emotional agony, tearful admission and an untimely death. Then as now, the road to compromise is paved with good intentions.

The film’s director is Tom Hooper, of The King’s Speech fame, which also rewrote history. But like The King’s Speech I have to admit The Danish Girl still works as a lavish and visually engaging costume drama. It does look wonderful, with its locations shot from very carefully composed angles, the better to resemble the paintings in the story.

* * *

Saturday 12th March 2016. To the Tate Modern for the exhibition Performing for the Camera. This has rather an ambitious brief: the relationship between photography and performance, from the invention of the camera to the present day. Even narrowing it down to images by artists must have been a headache. By its own nature it can only be a series of examples. The final room is so inevitable it curates itself: new artists who use selfies on Instagram to construct little fictional narratives. Cindy Sherman did the ‘fictional selfie’ thing much earlier, of course, and it’s good to see she’s given her due here. But it goes back to the 1920s too, with Claude Cahun’s androgynous self-portraits, and Duchamp in his drag persona, an image which made the cover of Mark Booth’s 80s book, Camp. Bowie was on the back.

I like the Yves Klein jumping-into-space photo, here presented with the two images it cunningly combined – one with Klein jumping above a gang of men holding a safety net, and one with an empty street. The join is utterly invisible, a 1960 version of Photoshop. It blurs the lines between illusion, hoax, and art. Elsewhere, Ai Weiwei drops a Han Dynasty vase, in three horrifying stages.

There’s lots of 80s Warhol here too. A 1986 copy of NME shows Warhol and Debbie Harry sitting with a home computer, for some reason (is one needed?). I love AW’s photo of Keith Haring body-painting Grace Jones. This is also a neat reference to the exhibition’s photos of Yves Klein’s 60s ‘happenings’, where women would roll around in paint as part of a public performance, while a string quartet played. Actually, going by this exhibition, 90% of 1960s happenings seemed to involve nudity.

The whole exhibition radiates with the idea that performing for the camera is essentially a fun thing to do, even when it’s art. The camera click still has the essence of novelty, whatever the age. For all Klein’s trickery, the creation of a posed photo is magic enough.

Wednesday 2nd March 2016. I listen to a Radio 4 documentary in the Archive on 4 slot: Skill, Stamina and Luck. It’s an account of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks of the 80s, and of the wider history of interactive fiction before and after them.

Pure nostalgic bliss for me, as I was an avid fan of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, 1982) and the many books that followed it, all published by Puffin Books. As the documentary points out, the books sold in huge amounts at the time, often beating Roald Dahl in the children’s bestseller charts.

In 1982, aged ten, I already knew that the ‘go to page 142’ format existed, what with the Choose Your Own Adventure series and others like it. I think the first one I encountered was a picture-based game book for small children, inspired by the maze scene in Jerome’s Three Men in A Boat, titled Three Men In A Maze (by Stephen Leslie, Transworld Publishers, 1977 – I have a copy today).

The Fighting Fantasy series was the first to add a proper gaming element, though, with dice to throw, battles to win, and SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK scores to maintain, each of these crucial words always in upper case. I wasn’t so keen on the battle side (and so never graduated to a Warhammer phase), and I was useless at painting Citadel Miniatures. But I loved making annotated paper maps of the little worlds in each of the books, with notes on how to solve them – ‘walkthroughs’ these would be called now. I was so proud of my map for Steve Jackson’s House of Hell (1984) that I sold copies of it to school friends.

One specific memory is queuing up at a Puffin Show at Chelsea Town Hall, April 1985, to get a signed copy of the latest title, Ian Livingstone’s Temple of Terror. They would always be called something like that: The Alliteration of Awfulness, The Preposition of Scary Noun, The Place of Stuff. I must have been first in the signing queue (such was my ardour), because I can distinctly remember Mr Livingstone telling me that Temple of Terror was not yet published, so I was getting the very first copy sold. I don’t think Temple of Terror was one of the classic titles, but if I’m ever called upon to reveal my Secret Geek Credentials, that’s my main card.

The Radio 4 documentary also revealed that there’s been a recent book on the history of Fighting Fantasy: You Are The Hero, by Jonathan Green. Part-funded by Kickstarter, naturellement. I’ve just treated myself to a copy, and am getting all kinds of Proustian rushes. ‘If you want to eat the madeleine cake, go to 24…’

* * *

Thursday 3rd March 2016. Evening: MA class at Gordon Square. This week’s novel is Erasure by Percival Everett. Quite hard to get hold of. The last UK edition from 2004 seems to be already out of print. Rather ironic, considering it’s a satire on literary ambition. In Everett’s story, a struggling black academic, raging in frustration at the absurdities of the world, deliberately writes a lurid, stereotypical ‘ghetto’ novel. This accidentally becomes a hit, forcing him to adopt a pseudonymous ex-convict persona in order to satisfy the public’s desire for the ‘real thing’ – as in their perception of ‘real’ blackness. Quite a timely week to do this book, given the controversy over the Oscars. Plenty of arguments with no easy conclusions, other than Everett’s book is impressive, and uproariously funny at times. He certainly deserves to be better known over here.

* * *

Friday 4th March 2016. To the ICA to see Hail Caesar! It’s the new Coen brothers film: one of their lighter, quirkier comedies in the style of Burn After Reading, as opposed to the darker likes of Fargo or No Country For Old Men. This one is set in the world of early 50s Hollywood, the era captured in That’s Entertainment, when actors’ whole lives were owned by studios, when fears of Communist threats were rife, and when mainstream films were at their most colourful and escapist. There’s extended clips from loving pastiches of such films, such as Esther Williams’s aquatic ballets, or Gene Kelly’s song-and-dance routines in sailor suits, or westerns that were really excuses for rodeo stunts and singing cowboys. George Clooney spends the whole film in his Roman centurion costume, having been kidnapped from the set of the title film, a lavish Biblical epic in the vein of The Robe.

Ralph Fiennes proves, again, that he really should do more comedy, while Tilda Swinton does her ice queen bit yet again, this time as a pair of identical twins turned rival gossip journalists. The plot is all very unlikely, and it does feel that it needs a rewrite to give it more of a sense of direction. But it also feels that to do so would mean cutting out so many enjoyable set pieces. In that sense, the film is a piece of indulgence, albeit made with the suspicion that the audience will be fine with such indulgence. Because it’s done as gleefully as this. I certainly enjoyed it.

* * *

Saturday 5th March 2016. To the House of Illustration in King’s Cross, for the exhibition Comix Creatrix: 100 Women Making Comics. It’s billed as ‘the UK’s largest ever exhibition of the work of pioneering female comics artists’. The House of Illlustration’s main exhibition space comprises just three gallery rooms plus a video screening room, so expectations of ‘large’ do not initially spring to mind. But as is often the case with the HoI shows, each room is so crammed with comic art, with lots of shelves of graphic novels to pick up and browse, that the time needed to take it all in can’t be so different to a blockbuster Tate show.

The message of the exhibition is simple: women have made comics too, and there’s more female creators than one might think. But the show also posits the theory that all female creators contribute to a distinct role in culture, like Mother Earth: the ‘Creatrix’. What’s certainly true is that the show proves how women have drawn every possible genre of comics and sequential art, often with their gender kept quiet or even deliberately hidden (in that JK Rowling way of a girl’s name being thought to put off boy readers). Until today I hadn’t realised that the Victorian character Ally Sloper was co-created by a woman, Marie Duval.

Some favourites in the show: an account from the US Saturday Evening Post in 1960, describing the working day of Dalia ‘Dale’ Messick, creator of the 1940s strip Brenda Star – Reporter. ‘The hi–fi is on full blast… if the music is appropriate, she jumps up and does a rumba. In meditative periods, she chews gum with popping sound effects.’

I also enjoy the exhibits by Tove Jansson (pencils for a Moomins strip), Posy Simmonds (an original page for Tamara Drewe), a strip by Kate Beaton, and one by Laura Howell, a contributor to Viz. Ms Howell’s strip is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in any medium: ‘Benjamin Britten and his Embittered Bitten’.

The only shortcoming is that other people seem to have finally found out about the HoI, so the rooms are much more crowded than they were at my last visit. Oh, the dilemma of wanting to tell the world about a favourite place, while hoping that not too many people actually listen to you and go there.

I once heard of a Time Out restaurant critic who said that a handful of really nice restaurants in London never made it into the magazine. The rumour went that the staff deliberately kept these heavenly places quiet, so that they could still secure a table. It’s like the way Jehovah’s Witnesses advertise a version of paradise that nevertheless only comes in a limited edition.

Thinking about it, Time Out is now like The Watchtower in another respect. Another free handout of suspicious provenance, one of the many unasked-for concoctions of staples and hope, thrust ceaselessly into the faces of commuters each evening, as they rush to catch the Tube to eternal damnation. Or Euston, as it’s currently known.

Sunday 21st February 2016. Tom’s birthday. I take him for lunch in Soho, at The Crown and Two Chairmen. Nut roast for me, fish and chips for him.  Tom’s a big Alan Partridge fan, so I’m also delighted to alert him to the new series of Mid Morning Matters, just released online (and how to view it gratis, via the ‘Now TV’ free trial). It’s pleasing that this now vintage comedy character can still be as funny as he was in the 1990s. The new series follows the classic sitcom tip of ‘less sit, more com’, where a fixed, claustrophobic location – a radio station’s studio – forces the writers to work harder at producing the jokes. Past examples of this are the Hancock episode where the characters are just sitting around at home, bored (‘Stone me, what a life’), or the similar Porridge episode (‘A Night In’). The format is even there in the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, where the gangsters are in a café, simply bickering over trivial subjects. This set-up may be more theatre than TV or film, but can be all the better for it. I’m convinced that the full-length film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa suffered from a need to crowbar in a cinematic, three-act story.

The new series of Mid Morning Matters still has plenty of plot; it’s just weaved into the dialogue as off-stage remarks. One detail is particularly up-to-date: at one point Partridge’s hapless co-presenter, Sidekick Simon, heads off to a job interview for a new website that ‘aggregates content’.

* * *

Monday 22nd February 2016. To the Birkbeck offices in Gordon Square for a meeting with my MA tutor, Grace H. We discuss my last essay. She advises me to take the option to submit my own question next time, rather than choose from the list. It seems I over-did the urge to say the things I wanted to say, rather than prioritise the question’s criteria. That said, I still came away with a distinction, so it’s not like I can’t tick the boxes as well.

* * *

Tuesday 23rd February 2016. Finishing my review of Eternal Troubadour, the new biography of Tiny Tim, for The Wire. One thing I cut for space is a reference to Bowie being called ‘the undisputed king of camp rock’ by Melody Maker in 1972, a term that ‘glam rock’ seems to have usurped. Six years earlier, the Red Bird offshoot label Blue Cat Records labelled a Tiny Tim single with the words ‘The Camp Rock Sound’.

Another favourite detail is the wording for a mid-60s poster, advertising a late-night bill that Tiny shared with Lenny Bruce: ‘Lenny Bruce Speaks For Money. Tiny Tim Sings For Love’.

Interesting to think of some novelty records as entryism. One-off curios to many, gateway drugs to some. As well as Tiny Tim’s ‘Tip-Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me’ there’s Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’. Ms Anderson is a productive performance artist, successful across the decades, yet for a certain generation of pop fans she’s just a quirky one-hit singer. The phrase ‘best known for’ demands the taking up of one specific perspective. It can sometimes be an unfair one.

* * *

Thursday 25th February 2016. Evening: MA class at Birkbeck. This week it’s Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I bring in Andrew O’Hagan’s review from the London Review of Books, which manages to praise Franzen’s novel while calling some of its stylistic elements ‘show-offy’, with others ‘pure millennial bullshit’. I suppose that’s one way of being balanced.

Afterwards myself, the tutor Joe Brooker, and some of the students go to the IOE student union bar for a quick drink; a much-needed bout of socialising for me. I order a small pizza and offer it around. One of the students, Serena, is Italian. ‘You do know this isn’t very good pizza, don’t you,’ she says. I reply that I hardly expect a student union bar to offer the height of gourmet food, and I’m just hungry.

Serena then suggests some Italian-approved places where one can definitely get decent pizzas. There’s the chain Franco Manca,  Il Piccolo Diavolo in Crouch Hill, and – her favourite of all – Rossella in Kentish Town.

* * *

Saturday 27th February 2016. To a third-floor flat in a pleasant part of Bethnal Green, for the latest attempt at relieving my back pain. This time, it’s an offer from Ms Maud Young to use her bathtub, so I can try out soaking in Epsom salts. My own place only has access to a shower. I think the last time I had a bath must have been in a hotel, which would have been at least five years ago. Afterwards I top up this rare experience with another suggestion: some spray-on magnesium oil, which stings.

Two books lie by the cistern in this shared flat: Douglas Adams’s and John Lloyd’s Meaning of Liff, and Mythologies by Roland Barthes. Toilet books are an interesting genre, though probably not one I can study at postgraduate level. The Barthes is, of course, not a typical toilet book, though it does serve the function of being something one can dip into at random. Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, with its structure of random fragments, might be a similar recommendation for the more bookish lavatory.

The Meaning of Liff is a classic toilet book, though. With its dictionary-like observations on wry commonplace predicaments, it’s like a form of stand-up comedy, albeit one read sitting down. When it was first published in the 80s, it seemed just another jokey and disposable tome firmly aimed at the ‘Humour’ section of bookshops. A book to be filed alongside the Sloane Ranger’s Handbook, the Wicked Willy books, 101 Uses For A Dead Cat, and anything by Nigel Rees. Yet The Meaning of Liff has long survived the usual expiry date for such books. Perhaps the respect for Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide books helps.

I mention this because today I’m also perusing a brand new toilet book, Get in the Sea! It’s the spin-off of a popular Twitter account by the very sweary Andy Dawson (aka Mr Profanity Swan), in which the objectionable aspects of modern life are instructed to go and away, well, just get in the sea. It’s the ‘get in’ which makes it unique. The words seem an unexpectedly careful, even gentle approach to what is otherwise an angry expression of disgust. A touch of the King Canute too, which keeps the tone of the book jokey and self-deprecating, rather than actually nasty.

Predictably, some of these fashionable irritations I agree with (chuggers, poverty porn TV, Jeremy Clarkson), and some I don’t (online petitions, cereal cafes, and Benedict Cumberbatch, though I do like the idea that Cumberbatch is thought to have ‘a face like an anagram’). In one case I find myself to be someone who must get in the sea too, as I am one of the ‘people who don’t like sport’.

Despite its status as a toilet book of the moment, Get in the Sea! might be valuable in decades to come as a slice of 2016 attitudes, just as The Sloane Ranger’s Handbook must now be useful for studying the 1980s. It’s another form of How We Used To Live. And indeed, how we used to swear.

Saturday 13th February 2016. To the British Library for the exhibition West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song. I allow an hour but it’s still not enough. This is something I forget is often the case with the big BL shows. The gallery numbers only a few rooms yet it’s always crammed full of intriguing displays, virtually all of them demanding careful consideration. As the staff usher the visitors out at 5pm, I glance in frustration at the items I have to miss, feeling somehow punished. It’s the last week of the show, too.

What I do see are craved Adinkra stamps from Ghana, used to hand-print symbols on fabric. One stamp is a star-like symbol, meant to ward off jealousy. The full translation is: ‘Someone’s wish is to see my doom’. All that in a star.

I’m also fascinated by a letter from Laurence Sterne to his friend Ignatius Sancho, the former slave turned London writer and composer. In 1766, while Tristram Shandy was published in serial form to huge acclaim, Sancho asked Sterne if he’d consider writing something to raise awareness of slavery. Sterne replied that, by a ‘strange coincidence’, the chapter of Shandy he’d just finished included ‘a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl.’

The novelist went on to affirm his solidarity: ‘If I can weave the Tale I have wrote into the Work I’m [about]— ’tis at the service of the afflicted—and a much greater matter; for in serious truth, it casts a sad Shade upon the World, that so great a part of it, are and have been so long bound in chains of darkness & in Chains of Misery.’

When Sterne’s correspondence was published in 1775, it aided the anti-slavery campaign and made Sancho a literary celebrity. When he died, he was the first African to receive an obituary in the British press.

* * *

Sunday 14th February 2016. Valentine’s day. I enjoy an animated GIF of an elderly William Burroughs talking to Alan Ginsberg.

Ginsberg: Do you want to be loved?

Burroughs: Oh… (lugubrious pause) Not really…

I think I’ve seen the full clip in a documentary. Burroughs goes on to add, ‘By my cats, perhaps.’ I don’t believe his not wanting to be loved, but it’s a good answer.

I also learn that February 14th 2016 is the ‘inception’ day in Blade Runner for Pris, the blonde ‘basic pleasure model’ android. As played so wonderfully by Darryl Hannah. I like to think of myself as a ‘basic pleasure model’ too.

Evening: I watch the Film BAFTAs, hosted by Stephen Fry, now pretty much the British Oscars. The Revenant triumphs, with Leo DiCaprio taking Best Actor. A mistake, in my view. His character is barely a character at all. He’s more of a generic everyman that a couple of unkind things happen to. First an unkind bear, then an unkind Tom Hardy. As far I remember, most of his performance consists of grunting, wincing and looking pained. I get enough of that on the Northern Line.

* * *

Monday 15th February 2016. Modern priorities. The big news story on the electronic board at St Pancras is that Stephen Fry has left Twitter.

Apparently, his quip at the BAFTAs about the Best Costume Design winner looking like a ‘bag lady’ produced something of an angry reaction from people on Twitter. For Mr Fry it was the last straw, and he closed down his account.

I sympathise, having just re-read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, now reissued with an extra chapter about the book’s reception. Essentially Ronson received Twitter attacks himself, for daring to call for empathy for people like Justine Sacco. Sacco was an American PR woman who posted a joke on Twitter, intended to mock ignorance over AIDS in Africa. Instead, it lost all context (context being the first casualty of social media). By itself, the tweet ended up looking like a straightforward racist joke. Thousands of people on Twitter roasted her alive. She was sacked from her job and spent a year rebuilding her reputation. Ronson’s book about showing compassion for such cases has now been seen by some – incredibly – as a defence of white privilege. Those who attacked Ms Sacco regard her as deserving of being ‘called out’. The trouble is, as the book puts it, ‘the snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche’.

This is what seems to have happened with Stephen Fry. Lots of people thinking that, because he’s in a position of privilege, he needs to be held to account for his public remarks. The problem is, Twitter can turn well-intentioned criticism into an out-of-control, disproportionate firestorm of raw hatred. People are not to blame: it’s really the fault of the medium. A virtual reality founded on a frustration of space – 140 characters at a time – can only engender a distortion of meaning. If I were firestormed with angry messages, I’d close my account too. Life’s too short.

* * *

Thursday 18th February 2016

Evening: seminar at Birkbeck on Jonathan Lethem’s inspired novel Motherless Brooklyn, about a detective with Tourette’s syndrome. We discuss it in relation to Sontag’s book Illness as a Metaphor. One essay on the Lethem book suggests Ian McEwan’s Saturday as an example of how not to do illness as a metaphor. McEwan’s hoodlum, Baxter, has a convenient neurological condition that screams ‘metaphor for violence!’ to the reader. Lethem’s protagonist, meanwhile, is a more fleshed-out character who is fully aware where his personality ends and his condition begins.

More interesting, though, is Lethem’s referencing of pop single remixes, such as the extended 12′ version of Prince’s ‘Kiss’. His Tourette’s hero, Lionel Essrog, hears the extra minutes of the Prince remix as ‘a four minute catastrophe of chopping, grunting, hissing and slapping sounds… apparently designed as a private message of confirmation to my delighted Tourette’s brain… The nearest thing in art to my condition’. It’s like a healing version of American Psycho.

* * *

Saturday 20th February 2016. The back pain persists. I go to a flat in King’s Cross to take up Ms Dorcas Pelling’s offer of massage therapy. This turns out to be a combination of reflexology, Swedish massage, deep tissue, and trigger point. Dorcas adds her voice to the conclusion of the osteopaths: muscular rather than spinal. Forty-four years of knotted tension. As I write this, I’m still very sore from the treatment. The pain of removing pain.

Sunday 7th February 2016. Days in a chilly city, feeling the nervous hints of climate change. Lots of freezing winter rain, but still no snow. Some confused-looking daffodils poke their heads up by the front of the house.

Mum forwards me a clipping from Country Life (issue dated 6 January 2016), as spotted by Cousin Jim. I’m mentioned in a feature by Matthew Dennison, about diaries. I’m the example of an online diarist, as opposed to a blogger. It’s flattering company to be in: not the other diarists (Woolf, Pepys et al), but the magazine. Going by the adverts, the Country Life readership consists of people who buy and sell English country houses, or who come from English country houses, or those who are just wistfully attracted to that world. I may be far from that world financially, but a part of me is drawn to it aesthetically, in my Vita Sackville-West, Brideshead-loving way. Every article ends with a little silhouette of a peacock.

The article suggests that diaries differ from blogs through the latter’s ‘anticipation of an audience, and in some instances, a commercial intent’. I’d agree with this. Diaries, even public ones, are about stepping out of the world to record an individual’s experience. ‘Blog’, meanwhile, in its original definition, is short for ‘weblog’: a log of things on the web. Early blogs discussed and shared web links. It was all about the linking. Soon the term ‘blogosphere’ appeared, and blogs were seen as units within a new internet community, a textual form of society. When comment boxes appeared in the early 2000s, these took the social aspect further. At this point I tried to join in; one of my misguided attempts to belong. I converted this diary from the raw HTML text it had been, and moved it onto the fun and shiny LiveJournal platform. People could comment on my entries, and did. I felt Part of the Gang. I was a blogger.

But I soon disliked the way comments became an expected part of the reading experience.  Of course people should be free to discuss an entry, but did it have to be in the same place? For better or worse, my style doesn’t work as part of an interactive experience. It’s too stand-offish, too aloof, too wary. In this sense, I suppose I am more of a traditional diarist rather than a blogger. I try to write to step out of the noise, not to join in.

* * *

Monday 8th February 2016.

I’m reading Eternal Troubadour, an extensive new biography of Tiny Tim, the dandyish American ukulele-playing singer, whose single ‘Tip-toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me’ became a huge novelty hit in 1968. I can’t help peppering the margins with exclamation marks: such are the unexpected anecdotes and revelations. Given the wealth of recent discussion about Bowie, it’s fascinating to note that Tiny Tim was often described as ‘camp rock’, a term that was soon applied to Bowie. I’m surprised to discover that the phrase ‘glam rock’ rarely appears in a magazine special on 1972: The Year In Rock, as culled from the archives of NME and Melody Maker. Presumably it came later. In 1972, artists like Bowie, Lou Reed and Alice Cooper are all questioned about the nature of ‘camp’ in their performances. The implication is that they may not ‘mean it’ when they perform – an accusation that Bowie is happy to confirm with his Ziggy Stardust persona.

Tiny Tim, however, did indeed ‘mean it’. He couldn’t help it: he was the same offstage as well as on. According to the book, his widow thinks he had a touch of autism. This made him difficult to work with yet endearingly honest. He had long hair before the Beatles, wore make-up before Bowie, and possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of American popular song, from wax cylinders onwards. A man of childlike gestures, dandyish affectations, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and some startling ideas about career moves, such as his late 70s attempt to appear in a porn film.

The book also states that David Bowie was ‘in the crowd’ for a Tiny Tim appearance at the London Palladium, 30th November 1969. This is a slight error: Bowie was actually on the same bill. There’s photos of them on the web standing in the same line after the show, waiting to shake hands with Princess Margaret. In one, Tiny is showing the Princess his shopping bag, which he carried everywhere, even on stage.

More camp connections: Bowie and Tiny Tim both covered Biff Rose’s ‘Fill Your Heart’, and both duetted with Bing Crosby on TV. Crosby to Tiny: ‘Boy, you could throw a Labrador through that vibrato of yours.’

* * *

Tuesday 9th February 2016.

To Printspace in Kingsland Road, a printing shop with its own gallery. It’s hosting a photography exhibition: Lost In Music, a huge collection of images from four decades of club culture, across the whole spectrum of music. I recognise some of the faces from my own past, at London clubs like Nag Nag Nag, Kash Point and Trash. Senay S has been to it the week before, and tells me I’m in it too, as seen at Trash in the early 2000s. So naturally I make the pilgrimage. But by the time I visit, the display with me in has been moved for reasons of space. There’s a lesson here about vanity, and about the past never hanging around long enough. Still, Senay took a photo when she went:

From www.lostinmusic.online/ (thanks to Senay Sargut)

* * *

Wednesday 10th February 2016.

I meet Mum at the British Library, after which we go for drinks at the Victorian Gothic bar next door, the Gilbert Scott. Mum has just been featured in her own magazine special, a supplement that comes with the current issue of Today’s Quilter. ‘Lynne Edwards MBE: 40 Years of Fabric, Quilts and Classes!’

* * *

Friday 12th February 2016. First essay back from the MA course: 73, which is a Distinction. Interesting that MA grades aren’t Firsts, Seconds or Thirds but Distinction (70 or above), Merit (60-69) or Pass (50-59). Same numbers, different names.

It’s the best mark I could have hoped for. A good start, but with room for improvement. The tutor feedback says I need to work more on engaging with theoretical works. I also seem to have (again) cut things out which I thought could be taken as read. I killed the wrong darlings. Must remember that it’s better to bash the reader over the head several times with one point, than it is to tease with a whole range. Variety is not necessarily the spice of essays.

Sunday 31st January 2016. I leaf through the Sunday Times in the Barbican Cinema Café. There’s a column by Katie Glass which typically makes me want to set fire to things. Still, the fact I read it through, and deem it worthy of comment here, suggests that to touch a reader’s nerve is still a connection of a kind. It’s called ‘trolling’ online, of course, but newspaper columnists have been doing it for decades.

Ms Glass’s subject today is her belief that going to university is a waste of time, though she’s at pains to reveal that she nevertheless holds a First in BA English. This is because of the news this week that several of the big UK firms are no longer insisting on a degree as a requirement for skilled employment. I received my own degree certificate in the post the other day, so the cliché about them not being worth the paper they’re written on rather sprang to mind.

True enough, Ms Glass goes for the cliché: ‘we know that these pieces of paper mean nothing’. Universities, she says, do not contain ‘the brightest minds’ so much as ‘those who went to the right schools and are good at passing exams’. She believes what really matters is ‘passion, commitment and hard work’. As if passing exams and delivering essays on time don’t require those things as well.

All she really learned, she says, was that ‘having an outrageous opinion could be rewarded, and later turned into a job’. Well, quite.

Being a professional wind-up merchant is now the quickest route to a media career. As long as you don’t mind being hated by strangers, you’ve got it made. There’s one young British writer who does this, Milo Yiannopoulos, who’s now starting to pop up more and more often on TV. What worries me is not so much his views as his appearance: thick bleached hair in a side parting, suits and ties, and a haughty camp voice. Someone on Twitter has already made the comparison. I suppose it’s another catcall to add to the list.

* * *

Tuesday 2nd February 2016. To the ICA for the film Youth, starring Michael Caine. It’s a very unabashed arthouse film, about an elderly composer staying at an Alpine spa hotel. The director seems content to line up a series of visually striking tableaux that may not always make sense, but which can be justified through their sheer originality. When the singer Paloma Faith pops up as a parody of herself, complete with a loud pop video sequence, it is impossible to judge where the film will go next. Paul Dano’s character soon turns up at the hotel dressed as Hitler, for no good reason, but no one is in the least surprised. It’s that sort of film.

Remote hotels are always good for a cinematic aesthetic: I think of The Shining of old, but also The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Lobster. Rachel Weisz, who is in both The Lobster and Youth, now seems to have an Arty Hotel Film career ahead of her. Mr Caine is very introspective and gentle in the composer role; he uses the same softer, middle class English accent he had in Hannah and Her Sisters.

* * *

Thursday 4th February 2016. This week’s MA seminar is on Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle. I give a short presentation on Margaret Atwood’s review for the New York Review of Books. She picks up on the significance of its names, and cites their various literary associations. For instance, the villain is called Tom, which Atwood links to both Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby and Tom Riddle – aka Voldermort – in the Harry Potter books. It’s difficult to think of many literary critics making such casual leaps of genre, but challenging genre always was Atwood’s bag. Like many of her own novels, The Circle can be reliably defined as science-fiction or speculative fiction, though again Ms A avoids such terms. Instead, she opts for classifying the book as an ‘entertainment’ (which to me suggests The Arabian Nights). She also puts the phrase ‘literary fiction’ within two telling inverted commas of her own, as if holding the words at arm’s length.

A term she does like, however, is ‘Menippean satire’, which she also applies to The Circle. I hadn’t come across it before. It’s a classical reference, after the Greek writer Menippus, denoting a playful, humorous satire of ideas and attitudes rather than a vicious attack on people themselves. The prime example is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Circle is more tongue-in-cheek with its ideas than with its style, though. In one scene, the heroine is summoned to a disciplinary meeting at work, solely because she had not been keeping up with her social media, and so missed the invite to a co-worker’s party. Thus Jane Austen is updated for the Facebook era.

Late evening: to the DocHouse screen in the Curzon Bloomsbury, for a French documentary on last year’s Charlie Hebdo killings, Je Suis Charlie. The original title is L’humour à mort, which I suppose could also be translated as Dead Funny. The film concentrates on the perspectives of the magazine staff, and includes archive interviews on the subject of mocking Islam, from the murdered cartoonists themselves. One staffer was protected by the office dog: she jumped on her master’s face after witnessing the head shots doled out to the cartoonists.

* * *

Friday 5th February 2016. Evening: To the plush Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, for an event called ‘Look Out’. It’s curated by the artist Sadie Lee, as part of London’s LGBTQI History Month events. The toilets have been rebranded as queer-friendly – a row of lockable cubicles. All the cubicles have a single temporary sign: a hybid Ladies / Gents figure, with half a skirt. I catch a performance by the drag queen Virgin Xtravaganza in one of the smaller galleries – the nervous attendants asking the audience to stand away from all the ornate cabinets and gilded furniture. Debbie Smith DJ’s in another room, surrounded by Boucher’s opulent paintings of scantily-clad goddesses. She plays ‘Je T’aime’, an apt soundtrack for finding French naughtiness in London. The Serge Gainsbourg record was recorded in nearby Marble Arch.

I go to the Great Gallery to watch David McAlmont’s band Fingersnap. He punctuates the songs with potted lectures on the paintings, having lately taken a degree in Art History at Birkbeck; I used to bump into him in the college corridors. Frans Hals’s Laughing Cavalier is on the wall immediately stage right. Growing up, I always thought of it as London’s Mona Lisa, such was its regular appearance in The Beano. Another much-aired masterpiece, Fragonard’s The Swing, is in a room nearby. An attendant tells me how it’s used in the Disney film Frozen. At which point, I hear a version of ‘Let It Go’, as tastefully arranged by the Jolly Pops Wind Orchestra, who are serenading the main courtyard tonight. Their repertoire also includes Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, and Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’. It’s quite an evening.

* * *

Saturday 6th February 2016. To the Tate Modern for Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture. By a neat coincidence, a huge Calder mobile makes an appearance in The Circle. A character explains that ‘This one used to hang in the French parliament. Something like that.’ I knew about Calder’s abstract mobiles, here with their floating gongs, monochrome leaf shapes and coloured discs. What I didn’t know about was his delightful wire sculptures of faces, figures and circus acrobats, from the 1920s. The Tate hangs them so that one can enjoy their projected shadows on the wall behind. One figure is of Josephine Baker, with breasts of steel abstract spirals. She really did get about.

Sunday 24th January 2016.

I am on something of a Gore Vidal tip, after watching Best of Enemies for the third time. Am delighted to find there’s another documentary on Netflix, United States of Amnesia, entirely about Mr Vidal’s life. I don’t always agree with his relentless cynicism – he even finds something negative to say about the election of Obama. But his wit and style is a delight. Vidal’s utterations on chat shows contain epigrams worthy of Wilde:

TV interviewer (on Vidal’s running for a Democrat candidacy in 1982): Did you like that experience? All the hand shaking?

Gore Vidal: Oh yes. I love that. I like crowds. I have depths of insincerity as yet unplumbed.

* * *

Sitting in the Barbican Cinema Café this evening, I am recognised from the I Am Dandy book. This time it’s by one of the other dandies within its pages: the pristinely moustachioed Johnny Vercoutre, there to see The Revenant (‘It’s very Boys’ Own,’ I tell him).

Getting out the dandy book at home, I see he’s on page 238. I’m on page 42, looking rather otherworldly in my chalk white suit. There’s whiteness around me too: the picture was taken in a snow-covered Parkland Walk, here in Highgate. Being a Douglas Adams fan, I can’t help feeling pleased by my page number’s association with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here, 42 means the answer to life, the universe, and Highgate dandyism.

Which Hitchhiker’s character do I most resemble? I admit to having Marvin the Paranoid Android moments. I recently caught myself grumbling about my inability to turn a high IQ (well, 141) into a decent income, before realising that this was all too close to Marvin’s catchphrase: ‘Here I am, brain the size of a planet…’ Mustn’t be a Marvin. He moans about his health too: ‘And me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.’

Of course, Marvin’s saving grace is that his depression manifests as a form of amiability, much like Eeyore’s does in Winnie the Pooh. Huggable depressives. In the film version of Hitchhiker’s, Marvin’s voice was perfectly cast in the form of Alan Rickman, who died the other day. He was an actor I was lucky enough to see on stage in the 80s, at the Barbican in fact. Back then he played another great huggable depressive – Jacques in As You Like It.  I don’t know if a recording exists of Mr Rickman doing the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech, but given his voice was so memorable, it’s easy to imagine it.

There’s a further Rickman connection here: one of his best films, Truly Madly Deeply, is set in Highgate. In one scene Juliet Stevenson walks out of Highgate Tube station, very close to where the I Am Dandy photo was taken.

* * *

Monday 25th January 2016.

Am finally exhausted with reading commentary pieces on David Bowie. The more original and personal pieces aside, the bandwagon is rather showing its wheels, often adding little more than affirming Bowie’s obvious worth. In some cases, the facts are not even checked (the BBC website seems to think Bowie acted in the film Cat People, instead of providing the theme song). What I’m not exhausted with is the man himself: the actual music and concert footage. I rewatch the superb BBC documentary, Five Years. Rick Wakeman is amusing about his piano part on Life on Mars, which he recreates on a keyboard for the cameras. He demonstrates the cleverness of the key changes, while admitting having not played it for decades. ‘It’s a joy to perform.’ He pauses. ‘I must go home and learn it properly.’

Shanthi S points out to me how Bowie in drag (as seen in the ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ vid) rather resembles Billie Whitelaw, she of Samuel Beckett fame. Indeed, it’s a shame Bowie never acted in a Beckett play himself: he’d have been perfect.

* * *

Thursday 28th January 2016.

MA class tonight: Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. An environmentally-themed novel, with lots of detail about working class farm life in the Appalachians. Some Hardy-esque elements: strong female characters with Biblical names, dreaming of affairs amid the sheep-shearing. Less Hardy-like are the references to the internet and Google, though the protagonist is too poor to have her own computer, despite being a twenty-something American in 2010. There’s a wry scene in which an environmental campaigner suggests the heroine cuts down on her carbon footprint by taking fewer flights. She and her husband have yet to travel outside of the state. It’s a neat illustration of media solipsism – the way one forgets how plenty of people in the US (and indeed the UK) still have none of the technological convenience enjoyed by the majority.

I look up the latest figures for adults without internet access. It’s 11% in the UK (6 million people), 15% in the US (47 million). It’s one reason why public libraries are still essential, with their free internet terminals.

Sometimes, though, such utterly offline lives might be enviable. I watch a programme tonight on internet abuse, ‘Troll Hunters’. Various recipients of malicious Twitter messages are shown tracking down their antagonists, then confronting them in person. What’s unexpected is the way one 40-something working-class man – his face blurred – is utterly unrepentant about his behaviour. He even claims a kind of moral defence. The people he attacks, he says, like the former MP Louise Mensch, are far more powerful than he is, so they need taking down a peg or two. ‘It’s all about destroying authority… The world owes me. If they block me, I move onto someone else.’

Certainly the programme touches on one unassailable truth about the appeal of trolling. It’s about wanting to feel powerful.

* * *

Friday 29th January 2016.

Another phone call from someone claiming to be from ‘the technical department of Windows’. They want to provide remote access to my computer so they can deal with ‘hacking’. Apart from anything else, the people behind these obvious scams don’t seem to realise that Windows is a product, not a company. This one hangs up at the slightest challenge.

Sunday 17th January 2016.

I’m reading Dave Eggers’s The Circle. It’s a novel that sounds an Orwellian warning about the rise of Google and Facebook. Much is made about the growing desirability of ‘transparency’. This is meant figuratively, in the sense of increased accountability. But it’s also implied architecturally, in the sense of modern workplaces tending to be cathedrals of glass. Buildings where the workers can be easily seen, and so easily monitored. The price in both cases is privacy.

Today I walk past the shiny new Central St Giles development, near the east end of Denmark Street. There is now a branch of Caffe Nero there, one so entirely made of glass that I don’t know where to put my eyes as I pass by. It’s like walking past a display case of knees and hands and lattes. I’m used to seeing this in stations like St Pancras (particularly with the all-glass Starbucks there), because of the obvious security concerns. But in a central London street it feels very odd, and very fragile.

One of my favourite things about the Harry Potter books is the idea of Diagon Alley, the secret wizards’ street in London. It seemed so deliciously believable, making imaginative use of London’s reputation as an unplanned patchwork of hidden worlds. Now, with the current trend for see-through developments like Central St Giles, the nooks and crannies can only disappear. A surfeit of glass undermines a site’s potential for secrets, intrigue, and magic. Transparency is a plot spoiler.

* * *

Monday 18th January 2016.

My review of Popkiss, the book about Sarah Records, is published in the new issue (February 2016) of the music magazine The Wire. Quite happy with it: it’s full of little points I hope will pique the interest of the casual Wire reader, someone who may be unfamiliar with Sarah. The death of Bowie is a reminder that music – of any level of success – never has a fixed reach. Never one generation, never one era, never one ear.

Bowie tributes are still appearing in the press. Some journalists use the U-word – ‘us’. It means well, but it makes me wince. Who is this ‘us’? Can you really speak for the entire human race? If so, who appointed you spokesperson? I find ‘you’ equally suspicious (‘you know how it is when you’re flying to Monaco in First Class…’). Even though it seems more vain to say ‘me’, it’s more honest and precise. Better to accept that all writing is vanity of a kind.

* * *

Tuesday 19th January 2016.

I meet with Shanthi S. in the NPG, and we wander around the National Gallery next door, taking in the free exhibition on Botticini’s sublime Assumption of the Virgin. I show S my favourite painting in the gallery, Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man (1550-5, with the pink curtain). We bump into Sophie Parkin, who is sitting right in front of the painting.

Then to the ICA for The Revenant – a mere £3 each. Currently the most talked-about film in town, having become a favourite for the Oscars. For all its technical innovation, it’s really a traditional Western, albeit a snowy one. The story is a simple one of survival against the elements, followed by revenge. There’s plenty of stunning set pieces, presumably enhanced by state-of-the-art CGI graphics: the bear attack, the white-water rapids, the gutting of the horse, and the Saving Private Ryan-like opening, as Mr DiCaprio’s party are besieged by Native American tribesmen. Whether or not Mr DC is putting in an Oscar-winning performance really depends on one’s definition of acting. He certainly suffers, but his character isn’t much more than that – just a man who has a terrible time. He grunts, he gasps, he crawls. He does things that regularly has the audience saying ‘Ouch!’, and ‘Goodness, that must be painful!’ and ‘Don’t hurt, though!’

There’s been a few articles which employ the irksome trend of adding ‘porn’ as a suffix. This seems to be a way of judging any film that a critic views as indulgent. The Revenant has been described variously as ‘pain porn’, ‘torture porn’, ‘wilderness porn’, and ‘forest porn’. Certainly all those elements are present in the film, and to an intense level, but calling them a form of ‘porn’ is helpful to precisely no one. Whatever happened to discussions of catharsis?

It’s also too long. My father used to judge films on the amount of times he looked at his watch. He once told me how he didn’t do this once during Lord of the Rings Part 3 – Return of the King, despite the three hour-plus duration. ‘That’s how good it was’. I’m afraid I checked my own watch four or five times during The Revenant.  For all its focus on immersion, it really doesn’t need two and a half hours to tell such a straightforward tale.

* * *

Thursday 21st January 2016.

To Gordon Square for this week’s MA seminar. The text is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs. There’s several witty scenes consisting entirely of overheard dialogue between middle-class liberals, on such topics as the state of racism after 9/11. To me, these come close to Ronald Firbank, though it’s a style better known from his disciple, Evelyn Waugh. According to DJ Taylor’s new book The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918 (which I’ve been leafing through), one legacy Firbank ‘bequeathed’ to fiction in the 1910s and 1920s is his ‘talking heads’ device. This is a depiction of a conversation as a long series of detached utterations, in which no speaker is named, and where there’s a sense of a satirical rhythm at play. The ‘chattering classes’ in action, then as now.

Not everyone in the seminar is enamoured of Moore’s use of humour for serious issues, though: one student even calls it ‘irritating’. This is always a risk, but it’s why I admire comedy, or comedy drama, over wholly dramatic texts. Comedy is hard to get right, but the best comedy can produce rich, lasting, soaring effects. Tragedy is closer to ground level.

In A Gate At The Stairs there’s also some scenes of violent death, and some occasionally grotesque imagery. But Moore manages to control the tone at every stage, and it’s never jarring. Knowing what happens also makes a second reading all the more rewarding: early details take on a pleasing new significance. It’s not a flawless novel, but it’s one of the best I’ve read in a long time, and it makes me want to read more of Ms Moore.

* * *

Sunday 10th January 2016.

Sometime during the late 90s, when Orlando were on tour. A catcall from a schoolchild, in my direction: ‘Is that… David Bowie?’

(Answer: Sort of…)

Today, David Bowie dies.

I was going to start this week’s diary with an explanation of a term I used last week – ‘queer’. One reader asked what exactly I meant by this, given it’s such a slippery term. ‘Do you mean gay?’ Well, yes and no.

‘Queer’ used to be a pejorative insult for gay people, from the early 20th century up to the 1980s. Then it started to be reclaimed by gay rights activists as a positive term, particularly as a more defiant and politicised form of identity.

Today, though, I have to admit it’s more complicated. I tend to use it to mean a look or attitude that plays with conventions of gender and sexuality, but also with an anti-authoritarian air. I forget, though, that some people (particularly young people) now identify with ‘queer’ as a separate identity away from gay, hence the use of ‘Q’ in the community acronym of ‘LGBTQI’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex).

In academia, there’s also queer studies and queer theory. These tend to denote a certain troubling of conventions in society by non-heterosexual activity, a scrutinising of what ‘normal’ means – ‘to queer’ as a verb. ‘Queer’ in this sense is a spanner in the works, a critique, a pointing at the core from the margins. It is the moment in The Wizard of Oz where the man behind the curtain is paid attention to.

All this has a direct connection to David Bowie. He is a good example of someone who was not necessarily gay but who definitely could be read as a queer icon. His lasting relationships may have been with women, and he was more or less content with his gender, but he very much put out and amplified queer signals in his work, and these were of incalculable importance. To those looking out for such signals, they were nothing less than a lifeline. Whether it was the dress he wore on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World, his use of androgynous make-up and homoerotic poses in his Ziggy Stardust phase, or his dragging up in the Boys Keep Swinging video, Bowie was queer enough.

He could be explicit about the q-word in his lyrics, too. There’s the following line from his 1993 single ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, written for the BBC TV adaptation of the Hanif Kureishi novel. I’ve only now realised that it also nods to the Lou Reed song ‘Vicious’:

Screaming along in South London / Vicious but ready to learn / Sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer / Sometimes but always in vain

* * *

This week, the wealth of coverage of Bowie’s death provoked a couple of grumpy letters in the press. Complaining about an excess of Bowie articles in the Independent, one reader wrote, ‘Anybody under 40 probably didn’t know who he was’. Another saw little value in ‘pages of nostalgic outpourings about musicians… I suggest your editors stop trying to relive their youth.’

I find this fascinating, partly as a study of sheer solipsism, but also as a gauge of the way culture and celebrity are subjective. To whom does Bowie’s death matter, and can this be turned into a proportionate amount of news coverage? What have people heard of? What do people care about? To quote ‘Hello Spaceboy’, ‘it’s confusing these days…‘

Certainly, the disgruntled letters are disproved by the content of the articles. True, there’s been lots of greying nostalgia (which I have no problem with), but there’s also been tributes by young musicians and artists too. Among those who cite him as an influence are La Roux, Grimes, Janelle Monae, Florence Welch, and Desiree Akhavan, the thirty-year-old director of Appropriate Behaviour, my favourite film of last year. She says, ‘I listen to ‘Modern Love’ at least once a day. It happens to contain the secret to successful filmmaking: ‘It’s not really work / It’s just the power to charm.”

As it is, I don’t think the media coverage has been excessive at all. At least, not compared to the last Royal Baby.

Besides, music connects directly to the emotions. So when a popular musician dies, there’s obviously going to be lots of emotional expression. Why is that hard to understand?

As for my own favourite Bowie songs, there’s the aforementioned ‘Buddha of Suburbia’, released at a time when he was considered to be artistically treading water. I remember it sounded then, as it does now, as vintage Bowie, pure and simple.

I adore Hunky Dory, particularly ‘Changes’, and ‘Queen Bitch’. I love his Plastic Soul phase, especially ‘Young Americans’. From his 80s commercial pop phase, I’m fond of ‘Modern Love’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’. I love the way the former is used in the 2012 film Frances Ha, while Greta Gerwig is running through New York (itself an homage to the 80s film Mauvais Sang).

Though I’ve never tried to explicitly resemble him aesthetically, I know there’s a subconscious influence at work. I bleach my hair. I have a dandyish, Modern Weirdo look. Ergo, I owe a debt to Bowie.

It’s also important to remember he wasn’t perfect. Despite some of the more messianic pronouncements this week, Bowie was never a sacred cow. His late 80s albums and Tin Machine records (late 80s to early 90s) were given an extremely hard time by the critics. Bowie survived as long as he did by being a first-rate manipulator of as much information as possible – as evidenced in the way he kept his illness secret. He couldn’t stop the bad reviews, but I noticed how he played down his flops in the authorised V&A David Bowie Is… show.

Something else, then: he welcomed and encouraged praise. He liked being a star, and took himself seriously as one. What’s commendable is that this is a more honest trait than the false modesty which society usually requires (Oscar Wilde was another expert, Lady Gaga is a current example). Make no mistake: most people who make art do want praise from as many people as possible. It’s not selling out or vain, it’s basic self-validation.

What isn’t in question is his cultural influence. If the message of the Beatles was ‘all you need is love’, Bowie’s was ‘all you need is curiosity’. Another line from ‘Modern Love’ springs to mind: ‘But I try…’

He tried so many different styles and looks and genres and personae, and kept trying. Why did he do all the acting roles too (some of which, again, were better than others)? Why is he there at the beginning of The Snowman, introducing a children’s cartoon? Because he liked to try things. He tried. That’s inspiring in itself. I rather liked him.

* * *

Monday 11th January 2016.

I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs (2009). It’s a witty post 9/11 tale of Midwest America. Some favourite lines:

‘Death would come to me – I knew this from reading British poetry’.

‘Having no dog in the race doesn’t keep people from having extremely large cats’.

* * *

Thursday 14th January 2016.

MA class tonight, on The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I’m intrigued that it’s dedicated to the son McCarthy had at the age of 65, and so comes with an older parent’s fear of not being able to see their offspring reach adult life. The Road is so relentlessly bleak and grim that I can’t say I enjoy it, though I do admire it.

* * *

Friday 15th January 2016.

To the Maritime Museum in Greenwich for the exhibition Samuel Pepys – Plague, Fire, Revolution. The one exhibit it doesn’t have is Pepys’s actual diary, due to his will forbidding it from leaving his old Cambridge college. But what is does have is a richness of everything else from the era: animated presentations of the Great Fire, excerpts from the diary on touchscreens, Charles 1st’s ornate gloves from the day of his execution, a pair of green glass spectacles Pepys wore when he thought the diary was making him blind (it wasn’t), and the shorthand codebook he used to encrypt his writing. When a Victorian scholar came to decode the diaries for the first time, he spent years trying to work out the code from scratch. It’s hard to imagine how he must have felt when he finally noticed the codebook was there too, just inches away on a different shelf.

Something I have in common with Pepys, and indeed Joe Orton and Kenneth Williams: not only diarists of London, but of spells in Tangier too.

* * *

Afterwards, dinner with my brother Tom and friends. We try the new Jamie Oliver restaurant in Nelson Road. Quite pleasant, food agreeable. The restaurant has the feel of a converted warehouse: spacious, high-ceilings, exposed brickwork, plenty of room. Perhaps a little too spacious for midwinter, though, and many of the diners keep their coats on.

Modern eating. My veggie burger arrives on a wooden chopping board, with the chips in a small tin pail.

Tom’s friend E teaches photography to schoolchildren in East London. ‘It’s hard to get them to do any work. We’re trying to get the examination board to accept selfies.’ This is not meant as a joke.

Taking selfies and using social media is a form of work, though: the work one must do in order to keep one’s friends. The problem for teens is when the need to fit in eclipses the need to do well at school. The technology involved may be new, but the dilemma is eternal.

Monday 21st December 2015.

Mum comes up to London for the day, and we do our own metropolitan version of the family get-together. First: to Somerset House Ice Rink, now a favourite symbol of Christmas in twenty-first-century London, as immortalised in the opening of Love Actually. Unfortunately today it rains like mad, and the ice rink is waterlogged. But this doesn’t stop the skaters, and they carry on gliding through the puddles.

We stick around at Somerset House to have a look at the current exhibitions. I’m delighted to see there’s a Tintin show, Tintin – Herge’s Masterpiece. Every inch of the gallery walls and windows are covered in Tintin illustrations. There are detailed scale models of scenes from the books, including a dolls’ house of Marlinspike Hall.

Then to the Courtauld next door, for Soaring Flight – Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, and Bridget Riley – Learning From Seurat. I always wonder how Ms Riley managed to create her 60s works without getting dizzy. A mere five minutes of her op-art canvases unsteadies my sense of reality. Though admittedly, that doesn’t take much.

We revisit some of the Courtauld’s permanent collection too. Paintings as old friends, world-famous masterpieces, right here by the ice rink. The Van Gogh self-portrait, Manet’s barmaid, Modigliani’s nude, Monet and Cezanne’s landscapes, Degas’s dancers.

Lunch in the top floor café of Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road, then a spot of book browsing, moving onto in Waterstone’s in Trafalgar Square. We’re impressed by their Book of the Year, The Fox and the Star by Coralie Bickford-Smith. It’s a beautiful children’s picture book, printed in blue cloth hardback on thick, high quality paper. Ms Bickford-Smith is a book designer by profession – her work can be seen in the Penguin English Classics range. Hers is an ornate and symmetrical  style that nods to William Morris’s woodcut designs for the Kelmscott Press, but also to Jan PieÅ„kowski’s more recent silhouettes. With The Fox and The Star Ms Bickford-Smith not only writes the original story, but illustrates, designs and typesets the finished object as well. Even the credits for the font and the paper stock have a touch of the exotic: ‘set in Agfa Wile 12pt/15pt, printed on Munken Pure Rough’.

Waterstones are also making a small point here about the current role of print books in a digital age. 2015 saw them withdraw Kindles from their shops, while the sales of print books rose for the first time since the rise of ebooks. Significantly, although The Fox and the Star has clearly been produced using the latest digital design and publishing programs, the end product is entirely physical; there is no ebook edition. In this sense, print is the ultimate upgrade of digital. The page is a screen that finally stops moving, and the viewer can finally relax.

Ms Bickford-Smith’s story is a simple fable for small children, about a young fox coping with the loss of his friend, the Star. But it lends itself to wider readings of grief and personal bereavement, particularly when one learns that the author was inspired by the loss of her mother at an early age.

Mum treats me to a copy. Later, I peruse the pages at home. My own reading of the tale is inevitably bound up with thoughts of Dad, and I get a little weepy.

By 4pm on this Shortest Day, it’s completely dark. We take a busy Clipper boat up the Thames to Greenwich, taking in the lights of the city. Then a further ride, this time on the Emirates Air Line cable car link, which spans the Thames from the O2 Dome in Greenwich to the Royal Victoria Dock in Newham. It turns out to be easy to just turn up and get a whole car to yourself. No queues; in fact, barely anyone on the thing at all. The moment when the car first ascends from the terminus and soars high above the water is the most heartstopping one. It swings a little in the wind, which is unnerving, but only a little.

We take the DLR and tube to Liverpool Street, where I see Mum off on the train to Suffolk.

* * *

Thursday 24th December 2015.

Adventures in youth slang. In a branch of Pret today, a young man at the table next to me says his companion, ‘I find that so jokes‘. As in funny. I knew about this usage from the internet, but thought it was confined to the enclaves of cyberspace. This is the first time I’ve heard it said aloud. But it’s still yet to appear on Gardener’s Question Time, I think.

I attempt to see a film in the evening with Shanthi S, but we’re thwarted by her news website employers, who force her to work late. She has to work on Christmas Day as well, via her computer at home. The news must not rest.

All the cinemas in London seem to shut down completely on Xmas Eve after 6pm, but we have a pleasant time with cocktails and food at the Dean Street Townhouse in Soho (see previous entry).

Shanthi reminds me how in New York it’s common for people to go to the cinema on Christmas Day, often combining it with Chinese food. There’s nothing like that in London. Many pubs, restaurants and convenience stores are open, but certainly no cinemas. The transport system still shuts down completely on December 25th – the only day in the year when it does. Even in 2015, London is essentially a Christian city.

* * *

Friday 25th December 2015.

Christmas Day, spent in Highgate. Rainy, windy, cold and overcast. I phone Mum for a chat in the morning, then brave the rain to walk up to Waterlow Park, for my traditional feeding of the ducks.

The rest of the day is spent in my room, hacking away at the essay, while swigging from a large bottle of Baileys. My Christmas lunch is a microwaved carton of ‘White Christmas’ soup from the New Covent Garden Soup Co. Plus Quorn cocktail sausages. And lashings of back pain (currently seeing a GP, trying treatments).

Still, I’m grateful not to be one of the thousands in Northern England affected by devastating floods. I think about how we’re now getting close to 2019, the year that Blade Runner is meant to be set in. A film in which the future means constant heavy rain.

* * *

Saturday 26th December 2015.

I upload a diary entry that was meant to be a few words, apologising for not writing a diary entry. It ends up ballooning into 1500 words.

Evening: to the Curzon Soho, a cinema that proudly advertises itself in its window posters as a ‘Force Free Zone’. Its three screens are showing a diverse programme of films, none of which are the new Star Wars. There’s Carol, Grandma, the Peggy Guggenheim documentary, The Lobster (still), and Ice and the Sky. I plump for Grandma, a low-key indie road movie in the vein of Little Miss Sunshine and The Daytrippers.

Grandma stars Lily Tomlin as a grumpy lesbian poet (in her first leading role since 1988’s Big Business with Bette Midler!). She drives her pregnant granddaughter around various locations in order to raise the money for an abortion. It’s a simple conceit, but full of wit, poignancy and thoughtful characterisation; with jokes that rely on the audience knowing who Simone De Beauvoir is.

* * *

Monday 28th December 2015.

Evening: To Vout-O-Reenee’s for Atalanta Kernick’s birthday drinks. Lots of queer, dapper ladies, and women from the 90s London music scene. I chat to the writer Ngaire-Ruth, Debbie Smith (AK’s partner), Harris (one of the Drakes, a performance group of besuited butch women), and also to Ms Shir from Israel (which she refers to as ‘the land of blood and honey’). Plus Alex, the (straight male) drummer from the band Nightnurse. He’s now in Department S, of ‘Is Vic There’ fame. I discover that he also pops up in Shaun of the Dead, as a zombie on a daytime TV talk show. Indulge myself with the bar’s ‘Dunkin Donut’ cocktail: milk, cacao, Kahlua.

* * *

Thursday 31st December 2015.

New Year’s Eve. I stay in by myself. Again, by choice. Again, to work on the essay. I discover the true sound of NYE in residential city streets: the constant revving of pizza delivery mopeds.

In the essay, I suddenly find myself using the word ‘ekphrastically’. At which point it’s midnight, so I take a break, open the Prosecco, and watch the fireworks at the London Eye, via the internet. Far better than being surrounded by drunken people who don’t know what they’re doing. Here’s to choice, difference, and 2016.

* * *

Sunday 3rd January 2016.

I finish the essay – with a fifth draft – and deliver it online. Celebrate by watching the new Sherlock film, the Victorian one, which is superb. Also enjoy Charlie Brooker’s 2015 Wipe, his satirical review of the year. It ends on a pessimistic note, but I take comfort from the knowledge that Mr Brooker’s style of ‘loner grumpiness’ is now a necessary fabrication. It’s quite funny that he has to keep up the image of the angry, lonely outsider shouting at the TV from his sofa, when these days he is married and has children, and indeed a successful TV career. I worry, though, about my own grumpiness. I’m heading into a new year, still without any sense of a ‘career’, still very much feeling like a outsider. And yet Ms Shanthi said to me this week, when I was apparently acting in a bar like I owned the place, ‘You’re more like Hugh Grant than you think!’

* * *

Tuesday 4th January 2016.

To the ICA cinema to see Joy, the new David O. Russell film, starring Jennifer Lawrence. As was the case with Mr Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, it also has Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro, and the same mix of quirky plot details with straightforward realism. The quirky plot in this instance being the tale of a young woman who invents a self-rinsing mop. There’s a little of Frank Capra’s ‘American inspiration’ style in this particular mix, though, and thanks to Ms Lawrence being so utterly likeable, it all works. Indeed, I come out of the cinema with a real sense of warmth. It’s also a nice companion to Carol, being another Christmas tale of a woman finding out who she really is.

* * *

Thursday 7th January 2016.

First class of the MA’s spring term. I’m now on a module that’s specifically about contemporary US fiction. This week we study Paradise (1997) by Toni Morrison. It uses elements of mystery and magical realism, much like Beloved, but with a much larger cast of characters. As a result, the reader has to do a fair amount of work just to work out what’s going on – the narrative can switch perspectives and even historical eras, halfway through a sentence.

* * *

Friday 8th January 2016.

I finish reading Diana Athill’s Alive Alive Oh! Some new words: she calls Highgate ‘a bosky place’ (leafy, wooded). As a child she wore ‘jemimas’ – overshoes of waterproofed felt. ‘Galoshes were considered sissy, whereas jemimas, although they looked much more old-womanish, were perfectly acceptable on manly feet’.

Also, she expresses the unexpected luxury of having to use a wheelchair, especially when visiting art exhibitions. ‘The crowd falls away on either side like the Red Sea, and there you are, lounging in front of the painting of your choice in perfect comfort’.

On life advice at 98: ‘Avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness’. And on her innate sense of not wanting to be a mother: ‘I remember thinking when looking at a small baby, ‘I’d much rather pick up a puppy.”

* * *

I look back over the previous year’s diaries. I think I saw more films than ever – it must be close to a hundred. In which case, here’s some Favourite Things of 2015. I recommend them all.

FILMS OF 2015 (FICTION):

1. Appropriate Behaviour
2. Birdman
3. Carol
4. The Falling
5. Inside Out
6. The Lady In The Van
7. London Road
8. Mistress America
9. White Bird In A Blizzard
10. The Lobster

FILMS (DOCUMENTARIES):

1. Best of Enemies (Gore Vidal)
2. Do I Sound Gay? (campness as identity)
3. Beyond Clueless (US high school films)
4. My Secret World (Sarah Records)
5. Regarding Susan Sontag

NOVELS:

1. St Aubyn – Lost For Words
2. DeLillo – White Noise
3. Carter – Passion of New Eve
4. Abrams & Dorst – S
5. Hamid – Reluctant Fundamentalist