Vale Clive James

[Bramblethorn]

Australian-English writer and TV personality Clive James has died. He had a fantastic turn of phrase, once describing Arnold Schwarzenegger in his body-building days as "a brown condom filled with walnuts".

As a kid I laughed myself silly over his "Unreliable Memoirs" and his year-in-review recaps were a staple of our Christmas holidays. But my favourite of his writing is The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.

 

[ElectricBlue]

A fine poet, too.

One of Australia's cultural icons. The weekend papers will be full of heartfelt obituaries.

 

[Handley_Page]

His quiet manner of delivery, the way he 'carved' words & sentences to his aim, is something to remember well.

 

[SamScribble]

I must re-read Brilliant Creatures - see if it's still as funny as it was the first time. I suspect that it will be.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

Clive James's Obituary in the Washington Post


He had no American counterpart.

“When England loses Clive James,” critic Dwight Garner wrote in the New Republic in 2013, “it will be as if a plane had crashed with five or six of its best writers on board.”

Mr. James, who said “all I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light,” seemed incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence.

I'll admit that I didn't know of him, but he seems fascinating. And the bit I underlined strikes me as high praise for a writer. It makes me wish I had been more familiar with his work.

 

[SamScribble]

I'll admit that I didn't know of him, but he seems fascinating. And the bit I underlined strikes me as high praise for a writer. It makes me wish I had been more familiar with his work.

Try some of his poetry, Belle. It's up there with the best IMHO.

 

[where_is_RUTH]

A mellifluous voice.

Akin in delivery with Willy Rushden, Windsor Davies and Richard Burton.

 

[Rustyoznail]

From "The Age" newspaper

Clive James: a selection of his best one-liners

When everything has left you, you are alone. When you have left everything, you are lonely.

As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.

Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.

On Arnold Schwarzenegger: He has a body like a condom full of walnuts.

On Barbara Cartland: Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

On George W Bush: Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.

I’m not off the hook, but the hook is holding me upright; and it doesn’t even hurt, which makes me a lot luckier than some of the people I see at the hospital.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

And one to boot, clearly not a one-liner:

I still haven’t forgiven C.S. Lewis for going on all those long walks with J.R.R. Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs. In fact it would have been ever better if C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

Try some of his poetry, Belle. It's up there with the best IMHO.

i will, thanks.