
Clive James Got It Right - Vigier
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/clive-james-got-it-right
======
Neil44
One of my favourite Clive James things was the translation of Dante’s Inferno
he did. Instead of the usual ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ he came up
with ‘Abandon your hopes, they are what got you here’. Subtle genius.

~~~
Akinato
Damn. Haven't heard that one before but it's quite poignant.

------
m0nty
If you like to read, read Clive James. He is perfectly at home discussing
anything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to George Orwell, and his essays are
just beautifully done.

Sadness that he died, but he knew it was coming, was grateful the sentence had
been deferred for 10 years, and died at home surrounded by "his family and his
books". A good end to a brilliant life.

I think this is his final interview:

[https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/qa/2019/11/clive-
james-...](https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/qa/2019/11/clive-james-my-
earliest-memory-roar-rain-my-back-yard)

~~~
mikhailfranco
_Chronicles from a Death Foretold_

Fortunately also a Death Postponed.

~~~
mikhailfranco
P.S. He hated magical realism - sorry Clive!

 _The most overrated books almost all emerged simultaneously from a single
genre: magic realism.

I can’t stand it._

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/05/clive-james-
bo...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/05/clive-james-books-
overrated-all-magic-realism)

------
AndrewStephens
I've always been a Clive James fan - his silly TV show "Saturday Night Clive"
was appointment viewing in my household when I was a teenager. And his
fantastic end of year New Years specials were great as well.

Later I read some of his written works. His book companion to his TV
documentary series "Fame in the 20th Century" was by turns wry and thoughtful.

I am not normally a poetry kind of guy, but this is hilarious:
[https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html](https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html)

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tezza
In 1991 Clive James did a Television New Year review.

Part of that was the cultural phenomenon of Terminator 2.

They show the scene where Sarah Connor escapes her asylum cell only to round
the corner and run bodily into Arnie. Sarah panics and primal screams.. Arnie
gets out the shotgun and blasts the T1000...

then the camera cuts back to Clive James who said:

"... and that was just The Love Scene"

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bitwize
His Mission: Impossible description reads like an entry from a certain site
that deals in commentary on Hackernews posts:

> A disembodied voice briefs the taciturn chief of the Impossibles about the
> existence—usually in the Eastern European People’s Republic—of a missile
> formula or nerve-gas guidance system stashed away in an armoured vault with
> a left-handed chromosympathetic ratchet-valve time lock. The safe is in
> Secret Police HQ, under the swarthily personal protection of the EEPR’s
> Security Chief, Vargas. The top Impossible briefs his black, taciturn
> systems expert and issues him with a left-hand chromosympathetic ratchet-
> valve time-lock opener. . . . A tall, handsome Impossible, who is even more
> taciturn than his team-mates, . . . drives the team to the EEPR, which is
> apparently located somewhere in Los Angeles, since it takes no time at all
> to get there by road and everyone speaks English when you arrive.

Brilliant.

------
munificent
As someone trying to revive my artistic sensibility and get back to making
music, this hit home hard:

 _> Writers who are not romantic about the wrong things will never be romantic
about the right ones, either._

It's virtually impossible to make art while listening to the nagging voice
telling my I might look foolish doing so.

~~~
chrisweekly
Yeah, gotta find a way to ignore that voice. As a starting point, consider
making art nobody else can see/hear/experience. Also, the book "Creative
Confidence" is a great read.

~~~
yesenadam
_Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative_ is a
great book on similar themes. (The sequel _Show Your Work!_ is also good) Also
_Creating a Life Worth Living_ had a huge impact on me - it's full of
interviews with creative types of all kinds, and talks about how many
different ways/styles of structuring your time and life there are, and how to
find one that works for you.

When I was a jazz musician in my early 20s, I did a lot of negative self-talk
on gigs. "Oh, that was awful! Oh yuk, Argghh that sux. Nooo...Terrible" etc.
It made me sound terrible. Self-torture. Then I read a book _Effortless
Mastery_ , from which I learnt _Never criticize yourself on gigs. The time for
that is when you practise._ And since then I never do that. I just enjoy
myself and play. It really changed my life. And also learning about _loving
yourself_ \- realizing that it's all too easy to be careful about treating
other people well, always being kind, while being extremely mean to yourself.
Louise Hay's _How to Love Yourself_ is _the_ book on that subject, I think.

~~~
munificent
Thank you, all of those are right up my alley. I added them all to my to-read
list. (Of course, the hard part is setting aside the time to actually read
them...)

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niccl
I knew him first as a lyric writer. The article mentions Beware of the
Beautiful Stranger, which really is wonderful, but some of his other lyrics
are pure genius, too.

I highly recommend the albums Beware of the Beautiful Stranger and Live Libel
if you're in to slightly folky music with insanely clever words.

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vixen99
Can thoroughly recommend his 'Cultural Amnesia' with its highly eclectic
collection of thoughts on almost 100 people as disparate as Louis Armstrong,
Terry Gilliam, Hitler, Mao, Kafka, Fellini, Beatrix Potter, Sartre, Tacitus,
Thatcher, Wittgenstein and Stefan Zweig.

------
runevault
I picked up his Poetry Notebook back in 2015 but never managed to find the
time for it. As I've begun exploring poetry once more anyway, it is long past
time to finally read the book. Rest in peace and thank you for giving so much
of yourself to the world.

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pfdietz
Now that he's been remaindered, I wonder who his enemy was.

