by: David Free
From: The Australian

December 10, 2011 12:00AM
LET’S start with the good news. Clive James’s leukemia, whose diagnosis was widely reported earlier this year, is officially in remission.
Moreover, his COPD – the chronic lung condition that has had him in and out of hospital during the past 18 months – is “under control” .

“On the downside,” James tells me, “my right eye has almost packed up and I have cataracts in both.” He is scheduled for an eye operation early next year.

James’s Job-like run of health disasters during the past two years – he also has suffered a kidney failure and a near-fatal blood clot – hasn’t stopped him from writing. Indeed, he seems to have taken these scares as a cue to hurry up, not slow down. But they have imposed some drastic restrictions on the 72-year-old’s social life. He isn’t allowed to fly, for instance.

…”Not being able to get to Australia without carrying my weight in oxygen is a depressing prospect, especially at a time when I might have to miss the Warne-Hurley wedding,” he says.

And even with his cancer in remission, James must pay regular visits to a clinic for blood infusions. “My immune system is being successfully replaced with an immunoglobulin drip-feed that encourages reading for at least a couple of hours a week.”

All this means that James, at the moment, can’t be interviewed except by email. This isn’t a bad arrangement when you’re interviewing one of the wittiest writers in the world. It will, however, make it hard for me to throw in the standard references to the man’s physical appearance, the firmness of his handshake and what kind of beverage he leans back to sip on while considering his answers.

Improvising, I offer James the chance to provide a scene-setting description of himself. “Surprisingly hale and hearty-looking for someone described in the newspapers as being at death’s door,” he replies. “Clive James gives few outward signs of feebleness to anyone who did not know him when his energy was unimpaired. When he sets the kitchen on fire, as old men are inclined to do, he is a little slow at getting to the blaze. His eyes are a bit screwed up, but he hopes to get that fixed.”

It hurts to think of James as an old man. If he is one, then those of us who grew up with his books and television shows must be growing old, too.

James sailed from Australia to Britain in 1962, age 22. While studying at Cambridge he wrote and performed for the Footlights, where his fellow thespians included future Python Eric Idle, future Goodie Graeme Garden and the eternal firebrand Germaine Greer, with whom he had attended the University of Sydney.

After graduating, James established himself as one of the most stylish and influential London literary critics of his time. When the young Martin Amis began publishing book reviews in the 1970s, his father Kingsley would read them back to him in an Australian accent, convinced his son had fallen under James’s stylistic spell. At the same time, James was attracting a broader audience with his weekly TV column for The Observer. He gave that up in the early 80s, when his booming career as a TV performer began to present a conflict of interest.

In Unreliable Memoirs, his much-loved book about his Sydney childhood, James called himself the Kid from Kogarah. The name stuck, and even now it still suits him. Sick as he has been, James retains a boyish eagerness to take on new projects. An internet enthusiast, he runs his own multimedia site, which he is constantly restocking with fresh links and material. Earlier this year he went back to writing a weekly TV column, this time for Britain’s Daily Telegraph. When a nasty reflaring of illness put him flat on his back for much of the British summer, he continued to file the column from his hospital bed.

These days James is up and about again. He spends half of each week writing in his London apartment and the other half in Cambridge with his wife, their two married daughters and his young granddaughter, who has made several touching cameo appearances in his recent poetry.

“My routine used to be four days in London and three in Cambridge. Now things are more even because all my clinics are in Cambridge: eyes, lungs, oncology. So I write a bit more at home and get in everyone’s road. They are very nice about it.

“Illness has scrambled my timetable because there are some kinds of writing that are affected more than others. My TV column is fun to do and pays for the groceries, which is important to me because I don’t like living on my pension if I can avoid it. A poem still, as always, puts in an appearance when it is good and ready. But between those two extremes there are the long critical pieces that I write for The Atlantic, and I can only say there was a time when they would have come more easily.”

As James pushes on with these ventures, a couple of bigger projects have just come to fruition. A book of his radio commentaries, A Point of View, appeared in November. Hot on that book’s heels, Australian company Madman Entertainment has just released The Clive James Collection, a three-DVD set of documentaries James made for Britain’s ITV during the 80s.

The DVD release comes at an important time for James. Having narrowly dodged death twice in two years, he has been intensifying his efforts to get his back catalogue in order. At his website, he and his cyber team are busy uploading the text of his out-of-print books, so that the oeuvre, when the time comes to leave it behind, will be as shapely and complete as possible.

“I do aim to get all my books on site before the pearly gates swing open before me, or swing shut behind me or whichever it is, and it would be satisfactory if I could do the same for any TV work I value. At my age you don’t really want to lose anything.”

James, who retired from the TV industry in 2000, has always viewed his best TV stuff as continuous with his literary output. But there was a time when his TV fame threatened to compromise his reputation as a writer, and especially as a poet. “I can only wonder,” he wrote a few years ago, in an essay called The Velvet Shackles of a Reputation, “if my name as a poet might not have made quicker progress had I been less notorious for the other things.”

Some of the other things James was notorious for are on display in the new DVD. In one program he dons a tight red tracksuit to participate in a Japanese game show. In another he pulls on a pair of togs, jumps into Hugh Hefner’s swimming pool and interviews a trio of glistening playmates.

But there is plenty of serious stuff, too. There is a riveting hour-long interview with Roman Polanski, who is hair-raisingly frank about the sexual assault charges that made him flee the US. “I like girls of this age,” Polanski explains. (The girl was 13.)

James, who says that interviewing celebrities is “a soul-stealing activity to be good at”, believes his most valuable TV work came in his travel documentaries, known as the Postcards. “I think some of my best writing is in the Postcard programs. Practically every one of them has at least one paragraph of commentary that has me lounging around admiring myself.”

Certainly, James’s way with words is the unifying element of the documentaries. It keeps them fresh, even after 20-odd years. Consorting with various lethal beasts while on safari in Kenya, James says in voice-over: “It was time for breakfast, but we wanted to eat it, not be it.”

I ask James if some of his stunts for the TV camera, in Africa and other places, weren’t a bit rash. It would have been a shame, I suggest, if we’d missed out on his late poetry because he was too keen to get into a two-shot with a charging rhino.

“I’m glad to hear that some of the TV action work looks dangerous because we were fairly careful to make sure none of it was. If I’d had any Steve McQueen tendencies, they would have been quelled by the producers, whose closest connection was with the insurance company. Such was my concern with my own safety, indeed, that I would rejig even the mildest stunt so that I was scarcely even in it. My literary future was safe, believe me.”

Perhaps the key work in James’s literary future was the monumental Cultural Amnesia, published in 2007. Reading that book, one can understand why some critics think of James as a paradoxical figure, or even as two separate men. Can the James who wrote such a polymathic survey of the West’s high and low culture – a book J. M. Coetzee called “a crash course in civilisation” – really be the same man who jumped into Hefner’s pool, surfacing remarkably close to the awesome chest of Miss January?

Well, he is the same man. The paradox, when closely examined, isn’t a paradox at all. The plain fact is that James is a born performer. If he weren’t, his serious writing wouldn’t be so absorbing. He is constantly looking to entertain you with the texture of his language. Cultural Amnesia looks like a brick but it reads like a breeze because James’s prose is driven by the same crowd-pleasing instinct that animated him on the Footlights stage and on TV. With James, you can’t have one thing without the other. And what’s so bad about having both?

Does he miss performing? “I do indeed. I always tried to keep the volume level down, but basically I was the kind of restaurant guest who would perform for the waiter. “The cruellest deprivation, since I got sick, is that I can’t go on stage and do my 1 1/2 hours. Perhaps one day. Unfortunately it takes quite a lot of puff, which I’m short of.”

Sadly, this lack of puff has also taken the wind out of a couple of long-meditated books. For years he has spoken of writing a big novel about the war in the Pacific, the war in which his father died when James was five. This work, James now says, “is reconciling itself to never seeing the light of day”.

A sequel to Cultural Amnesia is a more realistic prospect, although at the moment, James says, the project is “mainly a pile of notes”.

There is better news for fans of the memoirs. To date, the original book has yielded four sequels. James now says that “a sixth volume, incorporating all my medical disasters, is such a potentially hilarious prospect that I don’t think I can much longer resist it”.

The original Unreliable Memoirs has gone through more than 100 printings and sold more than a million copies. Did James sense, while writing it, that he was in the process of striking gold?

“No, I never felt I was on to something special when I was writing Unreliable Memoirs. I was having so much fun I was on automatic pilot. Today, I tend to obsess about a dangling participle on the last page. Now that the book has become a school text I want it to set a good example.”

Consulting my own copy of the memoirs, I’m damned if I can find the dangler in question. Instead I find myself succumbing, yet again, to the ravishing cadences of the book’s conclusion. Dangler or no, those closing pages of James’s book contain some of the most lyrical writing about childhood ever done, anywhere.

“Secretly,” James admits, “when I give myself time, I am very pleased to have written a book that will undoubtedly outlast me, unless they cancel the latest print run on the day I croak.”

Emboldened by James’s candour on the mortality question, I ask him if he minds what posterity will think of him. Would it bother him, for example, if he was remembered more for his prose than his poetry?

“I’d be grateful to be remembered for anything,” he says. “By the way, who’s going to tell me?”

The Clive James Collection is available now via Madman Entertainment.

A Point of View (Picador) was reviewed in these pages last week.

If you have nothing better to do on the following days, and are in the area, come along and support Hazel and the appeal.

The study showed only 55% of chemistry and physics students were in jobs related to their degree. Photograph: F1 Online / Rex Features

Only about half of all science graduates find work that requires their scientific knowledge, a study has shown, casting doubt on the government’s drive to encourage teenagers to study the subject at university.
A study showed 46% of engineering students and 55% of chemistry or physics students were in jobs related to their degree six months after graduation.

The researchers from Birmingham University analysed data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency on students who graduated from UK universities in 2008 and 2009. About a quarter of engineering students were in roles that did not require a degree six months after graduation, and 12% were in sales or admin work, the researchers found. Engineering and science degrees are among the most expensive for universities to run.

The study – Is there a shortage of scientists? A re-analysis of supply for the UK – argues that there may be too many science graduates for the labour market.

Ministers from all political parties and the Confederation of British Industry have argued the opposite for many years.

The government has protected the funding of places on science, technology, engineering and maths degrees, while spending on other courses has been cut. The Council for Industry and Higher Education told ministers in 2009 that it could not “stress too forcibly our concern at the critical shortage of graduates and postgraduates with science, technology, engineering and maths capabilities”.

Could this be the result of our politicians really have no business advising pupals what subjects they should study? Could it be that the advice they have been giving is based only pm a hnch that advising young people to study the sciences is right.  It certainly goes down with the electorate.

Emma Smith, professor of education, equity and policy at Birmingham University and one of the study’s authors, said the drive to boost the number of science graduates might have led to “too many people studying science for the labour market to cope with”.

She said that while it was possible that the problem might lie with the quality of science graduates, it was more likely that the scientists were not in work related to their studies because “the shortage thesis is wrong and there are no jobs waiting for all of them”.

She added: “It is astonishing … that so few new graduates go into related employment. The figures suggest it is not easy or automatic for qualified engineers to get related employment in the UK, despite the purported shortages.”

 I’d argue that there is a much wider problem, a cultural problem, illustrated by Darling’s implied parallel with the leadership of RBS before the crash. We know, or say we know, how good decision-making works. It should be fact-based, deliberative and tested by real arguments. This means it needs people who have the knowledge to engage and the self-confidence to challenge assumptions. In theory, a cabinet of ministers who are there because they have parliamentary support and have risen through past successes should provide just that – a table full of people with the facts in front of them, able to say “no, prime minster”.

 In theory, just the same should apply to the management of big companies, including banks. Around the boardroom table, independent-minded people with business records of their own, are able to cross-question CEOs and managing directors. New ideas are thrashed out. Mistakes are honestly debated and learned from. If things go too wrong, then the wider electorate can call a halt – the real electorate in politics, and the shareholders in business. It’s a theory of public life most people sign up to…..

 I cannot say that in forty years of working in manufacturing  I much come across the theory that’s put into practice. In fact in recent times, and probably because people, for reasons that I hardly need  spell out, I see they bully-boy tactics prevail more than they ever did.

In his autobiography published on Tuesday, the self-declared Darth Vader of the Bush administration pays tribute to the former Labour leader. Not only was BlairAmerica’s greatest ally during the Bush years, says Cheney, but his speeches about the “war on terror” were some of the most eloquent he had been privileged to hear.

If  Cheney’s praise were for anyone other that our deliriously serf-righteous ex PM, then we’d expect it to be ignored. Blair is what he ever was – a man covinced that his own feelings about how right he was about prosecuting the “war on terror” – is likely to wallow in Cheyney’s approval.

Nothing about Cheney has changed either.

He regards the invasion as justified, seeingIraqas a nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. “With the benefit of hindsight – even taking into account that some of the intelligence we received was wrong – that assessment still holds true,” he says.

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*The 565-page autobiography  In My Time by Dick Cheney is published here tomorrow.

The controversial Tory initiative to set up free schools received fast-track public funding after fierce lobbying from education secretary Michael Gove‘s inner circle of advisers, according to leaked emails.

Civil servants were urged that the New Schools Network (NSN) – a charity providing advice and guidance to set up the schools – should be given “cash without delay”, in a disclosure which will heighten concern over the government’s lack of transparency about the wider free schools programme.

The charity, which is headed by a former Gove adviser, was subsequently given a £500,000 grant. No other organisation was invited to bid for the work.

The award was made after an email from Dominic Cummings, a Tory strategist and confidant of Gove, called for: “MG telling the civil servants to find a way to give NSN cash without delay.”

Cummings went on to work for the charity on a freelance basis.

Sent after the election last May, his message goes on to say: “Labour has handed hundreds of millions to leftie orgs – if u guys cant navigate this thro the bureauc then not a chance of any new schools starting!!”

Tucked away in a corner of page 7 of the same paper there is this:

Andrew Lansley’s bill contains a clause designed to give autonomy to NHS commissioning groups. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters

One might be tempted to call both Messrs. Gove and Lansley devious, if it were not for the fact that one has never been in any doubt about how far they will go to promote their agendas.

Katha Pollitt: ‘Voters have shot themselves in the foot’

 Americans angry that the Obama administration bailed out Wall Street have voted for Republicans who will privilege high finance and big business even more. Americans outraged that the Democrats did not cure double-digit unemployment flocked to politicians who think the unemployed don’t want to work. Young people, who won expanded access to higher education and healthcare under the Obama administration, stayed home. I know it marks me as an elitist to suggest that American voters are less than wise or well-informed, but yesterday’s results really do seem to me like a textbook case of shooting oneself in the foot. If they really think the Republicans will help them they are in for a big surprise. On the other hand, if they voted Republican out of ideology then they will get exactly what they paid for: a crueller, more selfish, and more unfair America in which they themselves will be poorer, sicker and more alone – except possibly in their heads.

• Katha Pollitt is a columnist for the Nation

I’d like to suggest that voters in the UK may have done something akin to this when they went to the polls last time. For once, I really cannot say “only in America.”

Francis Collins, Director of the United States’ National Institutes of Health, guides us through the upheaval in his new book The Language of Life – DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine. As he puts it, “We are on the leading edge of a true revolution in medicine, one that promises to transform the traditional ‘one size fits all’ approach into a much more powerful strategy that considers each individual as unique and as having special characteristics that should guide an approach to staying healthy. But you have to be ready to embrace this new world.”

This seismic shift toward genetic personalized medicine promises to give each of us insight into our deepest personal identity – our genetic selves – and let us sip the elixir of life in the form of individually tailored testing and drugs. But can we really believe these promises?

Genetic personalized medicine isn’t the only important new development. Commercial ventures like private blood banks play up the uniqueness of your baby’s umbilical-cord blood. Enhancement technologies like deep-brain stimulation – “Botox for the brain” – promote the idea that you have a duty to be the best “me” possible. In fact, modern biotechnology is increasingly about “me” medicine, the “brand” being individual patients’ supposed distinctiveness………..

Read the complete article here.

Illustration by Zhou Tao (ShanghaiDaily.com)

Jazz singing suffers from too many people trying to be someone else -usually an Ella, Billie or Frank – when the trick is to be yourself, and nobody makes this point better than the marvellous Christine Tobin on ‘Tapestry Unravelled’ (Trail Belle). Singing to Liam Noble’s strong but understated piano, Tobin revisits Carole King’s classic singer-songwriter album Tapestry in almost its entirety and,without offering any grand alterations, makes each song her own through her distinctive vocal tone, her honesty and an obvious depth of feeling for songs such as You’ve Got a Friend and – look out Aretha – (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.

It may come from the pen of a long-time admirer of Tobin’s, but I would maintain that is a more or less accurate summary of what she actually achieves on this album.

Jazz UK issue 94 August/September 2010 Download as pdf

This song, which was written in the last decade of the twentieth century and which I first heard on the Pete Atkin album Winter Spring  gives lie to the to those who suggest that a song written in the popular idiom is generally at a loss do full justice to serious subject matter of this kind.

This YouTube ( “with”, I was reminded by an interested party,  ”the last verse edited off for some reason”), gives the listener a good idea of what can be achieved when the composers are in the business of being serious about what they write, as James and Atkin are  and have always been.