Crikey - Daily reviewJun 2, 2014
by Helen Razer
I was 15 when a boy at school lent me Clive James’ great document of mild folly, Unreliable Memoirs. I never gave it back. In fact, I still have this near-dead 1981 edition with its insides full of notes — chiefly my exclamation points and the phrases “yes yes” and “SO TRUE” — and a jacket full of better praise pulled from magazines that have long since ceased to publish.
After years of irresponsible use, my always-woeful eyes are beyond ophthalmic hope, and they no longer find use for books. Every word they read is digitised and magnifiable, so it just seemed silly to keep all but those titles useful as decorator items or keepsakes. One day I threw all teen reading that had not moved me to sentiment or rage in the charity bin. There is a St Vincent’s in south-east Melbourne still trying to move a lot of Rosa Luxembourg and Garfield. I didn’t chuck The Communist Manifesto, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Bell Jar, Fear and Loathing, The Second Sex or Clive, though. They all remained, for one reason or another, important.
It didn’t strike me until “this death’s door stuff“ re-emerged in the days leading up to the critically ill James’ farewell performance this past weekend in London what odd company he’d kept. The chipper kid from Kogarah surely had no business with revolutionaries, suicides and drug-addicted visionaries from an American hell. But the winking relativism of a man who seemed to want nothing more extraordinary from the world than nice manners and better poetry has survived with me for 30 years
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After years of irresponsible use, my always-woeful eyes are beyond ophthalmic hope, and they no longer find use for books. Every word they read is digitised and magnifiable, so it just seemed silly to keep all but those titles useful as decorator items or keepsakes. One day I threw all teen reading that had not moved me to sentiment or rage in the charity bin. There is a St Vincent’s in south-east Melbourne still trying to move a lot of Rosa Luxembourg and Garfield. I didn’t chuck The Communist Manifesto, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Bell Jar, Fear and Loathing, The Second Sex or Clive, though. They all remained, for one reason or another, important.
It didn’t strike me until “this death’s door stuff“ re-emerged in the days leading up to the critically ill James’ farewell performance this past weekend in London what odd company he’d kept. The chipper kid from Kogarah surely had no business with revolutionaries, suicides and drug-addicted visionaries from an American hell. But the winking relativism of a man who seemed to want nothing more extraordinary from the world than nice manners and better poetry has survived with me for 30 years
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