I’d decided not to re-publish an old post about Martin Amis, until I discovered a David Barrett article on Standpoint. I was defending Amis’s writing long before it became fashionable to deride him for being, as some would have it, “a really lousy writer”, “talentless” and, heaven forbid, “really annoying”. But if Barrett’s examples from Amis’s body-of-work are unconvincing, it’s incumbent on the haters to dazzle us: specimens from his superiors should be so incandescent that quotes by a talentless and lousy writer would shrivel and turn to ashes in our hands. I challenge anyone to do that by posting examples of inarguably better writing than the ones Barrett quotes. In the long silence inevitably to follow, here’s what I said about London Fields.

When, three years before his death, the British playwright and author Harold Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, in its citation the academy said, “Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles.”

Memory is highly selective and mine still gives me drips in a bucket, a sound cue in Pinter’s play The Caretaker (this poster is from a Salt Lake City Theater production, but the look of that bucket and the bald head trigger further memories).

Not only did I once occupy a room in a house in West London, it was later my job as light and sound manager at the English Theatre of Hamburg to play this sound effect every night for around three months.

It might seem a stretch mentioning Thomas Pynchon’s psychedelic gumshoe tale in the same breath as Mervyn Peake’s gothic trilogy Gormenghast, but bear with me. By the time you get halfway down page 369 of Inherent Vice you no longer care that you don’t remember the significance of many characters, where they overlap and why; in a hazy panorama, not all the detail can be grasped at once.

I’d like to be able to play ‘Donna Lee’ the way Jaco plays it. If that makes me a ‘Jaco clone’, so be it. I’m honoured to have lived on the same planet as someone who felt and made music the way Jaco did. And even though I never met him I miss him every day. I have friends I don’t feel that way about.

If you’re not familiar with the Strawbs and their music, you’ll be surprised to learn that not only have you missed the 30th anniversary of the band, they’ve released at least 31 albums and are still playing live and releasing albums today. Formed in 1963, as the Strawberry Hill Boys, at that time they were a folk and bluegrass band. What is considered to be the band’s first album was released in 1968. Dave Cousins spares more than five minutes of his time to talk about his music then and now.

If you never bothered to buy ‘Two Against Nature’ or ‘Everything Must Go’ or ‘Kamakiriad’ or ‘Morph The Cat’ or ’11 Tracks of Whack’, where you do get off demanding this band plays ‘Rikki’ or ‘Do It Again’? Buying a ticket doesn’t make it a private gig. If you really want to hear ‘Rikki’, stay at home and put the record on. Or hire a Steely Dan covers band to come and play on your birthday. This is the real deal.

Robert McAlmon was driven by an uncompromising urge to publish writers who were undervalued or ignored by the big, commercial publishers. By 1925 he had published, some for the first time, Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Norman Douglas, Djuna Barnes, Havelock Ellis, Edith Sitwell, William Carlos Williams, H.D., James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Gould, Marianne Moore, Marsden Hartley, Wallace Stevens, Kenneth Burke, Glenway Wescott, and Kay Boyle.

No one in their right minds goes to see a David Lynch film expecting something light, but Inland Empire tests even the most experienced and open-minded. Shot entirely on digital video it is, to quote Laura Dern in the film, “some pretty heavy shit”. But then, if you have to watch someone else’s nightmare, it might as well be one directed by David Lynch.

Alan Bennett’s work has guided me gently through life. I remember his black and white face from the telly alongside Peter Cook’s and Dudley Moore’s in the 1960s. I don’t remember the 1970s, and the 1980s are best forgotten. But he made a ‘comeback’ in the 1990s, when Talking Heads reminded me of ‘home’; I received the VHS tapes my mother sent to me in Hamburg as though they were Red Cross parcels.

‘Requiem’, a poem by the late Kurt Vonnegut, from ‘A Man Without a Country’, 2005, read on KCRW Bookworm, Thursday 6 April 2006.