Books

Reading Philip Roth's 'The Human Stain'. It is obviously a very good book; it is positively an avalanche of words conjugated in very fine ways. My problem is I just finished a comparatively shlock thriller which I could hardly put down which was put together all the more simply, and well, I thought it was just better. That book was Robert Harris's The Ghost. In The Ghost, Harris also says just about everything I've picked up in all that heavy theoretical stuff that I've also been trying to read by people like Zizek and Badiou, but he's saying it in a very different way. This enigma is further complicated by the fact that Zizek in particular spends most of his time deconstructing popular narratives such as Kung Fu Panda and Enigma (Harris's first major success) and making statements like 'I feel it imperative to swear in public, but never in private'. In this sense Zizek is as much a media parody as the fictional ex- Prime Minister in the Harris book. I'm not sure Harris would admit to reading Zizek, but what if he did- what kind of circle would that make?

An added intrigue is that Ewan McGreggor plays me in the film version of The Ghost. It's my flat and my whisky glass he sips from, and when I read the book, he even uses the same pen as me.

Another is that sat across from me in this quite trendy bar at five in the afternoon in Berlin (for once there are no mothers with buggies) there are two cunts from Clapman or therabouts talking about wife-swapping in Russia in accents reminiscent of Martin Fucking Amis.

'She was from Moldavia (sic)- she had fucking enormous tits!'

One of them is called Rupert.

They sell crap to Russian supermarkets, they clearly enjoyed public school, they wouldn't even get Harris if they read him because it's not in their personal interests to do so, so it's back to THEIR human stain, and possibly me swearing in public if they fuck me off for much longer.