Intimations of mortality

Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here.

Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Two years ago, lest we forget, Cultural Amnesia came out — all 900-odd pages of it. Now here’s Clive with another fat wedge of ‘essays’, some of which are essays, and some of which are more recognisable as old book reviews and feature pieces for newspapers. In the section marked ‘Handbills’ he reproduces pieces he’s written to promote his stage shows; in ‘Absent Friends’, addenda to obituaries.

It seems rather a monumental way of presenting ephemera, but it emerges piecemeal in this book that James is starting to hear the guy with the scythe and the persistent cough. He’s thinking about how he’ll be remembered. He’s building monuments to himself.

He says of his website (‘the first personal fully fractal multi-media archival-critical instrument on the Web’):

I would never have started building the site in the first place if I hadn’t thought that the day had arrived for getting things together.