Julie Burchill joins Twitter - at last!

Madame Arcati is delighted to see that Julie Burchill has joined Twitter at long last. Its brevity and range suit it to guerrilla warfare and instant reaction - as well as the occasional schmooze. In the old days this site relied on Google spiders and a few darlings in the media to mention me when I fed them a tale or two. Now I have only to post something and link it to social media and Arcatistes flood in like sewage.

Dame Julie (why not?) is to be found at the charmingly named @boozeAndFagz page. Her current post has to do with the peculiar India Knight, her even more peculiar partner Eric Joyce and the silence of mainstream media on the subject of his recent conviction for what the BBC calls "a child sex offence".  Read Burchill's piece here. 

Julie Burchill - join Francis Wheen and help fund her book (61% there!)

Julie Burchill

A while back I (along with others) received an email from the divine goddess Julie Burchill. She was seeking my financial support for a book she wants to publish called Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philosemite - about her adoration of the Jewish race. She had signed up to a crowd-funding publishing outfit called Unbound - if an author can find enough loot via backers (ie interested readers with cash) to sponsor their book, then they, too, will find themselves between covers.

But why would an award-winning author such as Burchill take this route to publication? Have commercial publishing editors entirely taken leave of their senses in their crazy pursuit of Yuletide instant bio, supermarket soft-porn and the celebrity chef TV tie-in?

In a promo video on the Unbound site, she says she wanted to write the book her 'own way'. More to the point, as she revealed in the Telegraph recently, she was put out that publishers had had the gall to demand she submit a sample chapter of 6,000 words. The very idea!

Even more to the point, and In all probability, editors were nervous of the theme. Suddenly the prospect of lucrative wall-to-wall media coverage of the title and its outspoken author paled by the fear of an upset.

How times have changed. Many years ago I couldn't find a publisher for my novel Farce Hole (an 80s-set fashion satire, due to be republished as Vicki Cochrane's Astral Chronicle) despite rave reader reports. Then one day the late Sheridan Morley drew my attention to a new publisher called Citron (now defunct). Even Martis Amis and Fay Weldon were singing its praises. For a nominal fee to cover marketing (I think around £100) this print-on-demand cooperative, with exacting editorial standards, brought out my book. It sold several hundred copies - 25 alone at a Kinky Fiction Night reading at Waterstone's in Oxford Street.

Oh, but the snobbery! I remember the idiotic Jason Cowley, now editor of the New Statesman, sniffing about Citron being a 'vanity publisher' (even though it was nothing of the sort). The Jasons of the day decreed that author talent had to be determined by flaky souls in publishing offices - from whom bookish journalists took their cue, in their anxiety to be seen not in the wrong.

And now look. Famous authors everywhere are finding and funding new ways to sideline the redundant Snipcocks - who gives a fuck about vanity? Why Julie is not self-publishing Unchosen as a Kindle e-book I do not know. And how close is she to publishing Unchosen? She has 61% of the necessary funding as of today - I'm sure she'll soon hit her target. The likes of Private Eye's Francis Wheen, Candida Lycett Green, Barbara Ellen and Paul Burston have made a contribution.

We'll see if Madame Arcati feels so generous.

To watch Julie Burchill's video for Unchosen, click here

Barbara Hulanicki: The Brighton Biba show, and Hurricane Isaac

Barbara Hulanicki.
Visit her website here

I do hope that Miami resident Barbara Hulanicki survived Hurricane Isaac - I hear a rumour she bravely stayed at home despite attempts to shoe-horn her out to safer climes, while other ever-greens outside (OK, trees) gave their best Exorcist impressions. She'd better have survived because she's scheduled to head to Britain shortly for the 'Biba and Beyond: Barbara Hulanicki' exhibition in Brighton, which starts September 22 and runs through to April 14, 2013. Details here.

In the 60s Hulanicki founded the seminal Biba store which helped revolutionise fashion and style. By the mid-70s, what had started as a mail-order business had metamorphosed into a vast departmental store in the old Derry & Toms building in South Ken, drawing a million 'post-war baby' shoppers a week, as well as stalwart style queens like David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful. 

Biba: The Musical (2009) gives an endearing flavour of Biba-world, even if not countenanced by her - watch the video below. Hulanicki explains how the past inspired her creative work in this fascinating 'My V&A' video, here.

I've had the pleasure of meeting Barbara on two occasions - at the launch of a film about her at Kensington Roof Gardens and then at Molly Parkin's 80th at the Chelsea Arts Club in February. Behind her huge shades she's quite an enigma - I was quite convinced she's Scorpio; but Google says Sagittarius. 

Incidentally, she is not connected to the reincarnated Biba; and now designs for, among others, George, Asda - click here to see her collections.

Reward Showbiz™: The 10 most pointless celebrity books and TV shows

I'm a great follower of reward showbiz™ (© Madame Arcati 2010) - gigs bestowed upon slebs only because they have a name. Many showbiz or media projects are dreamt up simply as an excuse to get a star to front them. Such projects have three essential characteristics: 1) a star; 2) a journey, quest or list; 3) pointlessness. Here's my latest top 10 rewardees:

1. Joanna Lumley for Joanna Lumley's Nile, a new four part series on ITV1 starting this week. No earthly reason why the Nepalese goddess should be associated with this river, but it's an opportunity to wallow in cultivated mellifluousness as she bears her polished teeth at familiar sights - such as a lookalike camel - in various gurnings of rapture. Oh look, there's a pyramid.

2. Quentin Letts for his throwaway read 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain. The Daily Mail's right-wing attack dog is a professional frother who appears to favour a return to Feudalism and the use of the rack. An utterly pointless addition to the listerature genre - he is after all part of the problem.

3. Michael Palin and his various TV/book tie-in travels, from the Sahara to his Hemingway Adventure. Nothing in Palin's career quite prepared us for the unedifying sight of a perfectly credible comic actor turning into a Phileas Fogg freebie tart. If he has shed new light on any part of the globe do let me know.

4. Andrew Marr for History of Modern Britain. Any excuse to get this gesticulating barker on the box. Rest assured, his "history" will be referenced by no serious scholar; it's just a loafer's guide to event whatnots, the sort of crap Reader's Digest might have once published for leisurely reads.

5. Jeremy Paxman for The Victorians: Britain through the Paintings of the Age (book and TV series). What does he know about art? The book was substantially written by someone else in any case. A great vanity juggernaut to keep a familar face on the screen.

6. Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman for Long Way Round: TV series and book. A chance to ogle at two leather clad arses in different international locations. Shamelessly the book's publisher writes on Amazon "The fact that those men are figures with notable film connections ... may be the reason the book got written ... but so what?" How sad are the punters?

7. Richard Hammond for all his TV shows but Top Gear. TV looks for any excuse to have him either blowing up things or testing things that may blow up, all because he nearly got himself killed once. Each promise of doom leaves us cruelly tantalised.

8. Sophie Dahl for Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights (book/TV show). A Nigella Lawson copycat  - famous surname + food erotica. The book boasts Dahl's "Matisse-like line drawings" destined for no public exhibition. Only two years ago or so she was presented as the great white hope of literature after a spell as a waif on catwalks.

9. Peter and Dan Snow for 20th Century Battlefields (book/TV series) - lanky father and son become visibly excited in the historical presence of slaughter. Where's a swingometer when you need one?

10. JLS - for all those fucking endless music rundown shows they've been fronting since they didn't win The X Factor but went on to become the show's biggest boy band stars. Testicle hugs and downward spastic finger thrusts conduct their guides to Michael Jackson and others. The tiny one especially requires treatment.

Meow meow: A diary fragment from Brighton

A friend writes ...

To Brighton. The club was on the seafront and called Fragment [Volks] I think. I was comforting a 6ft 8in black gay guy who was weeping over his man. "It doesn't matter how many men I rim, I can't get him out of my head." "Stop rimming them" I said. "It only makes it worse." Weeping like a baby he was. Next minute he was up throwing himself on the dance floor with his best mate - who had polio. He was in a wheelchair and had a harelip. Ooh the characters in Brighton!

Meow Meow feels like a cross between coke and ecstasy but without the "edge". It was perfectly nice, made me talk nine to the dozen and love everyone. The guy in the wheelchair was a real ungrateful bastard. I put some meow meow on my finger and shoved some up his nose to cheer him up. His response? "You're a bit stingy with that aren't you?" Cheeky fucker.

 I was dancing to drum and bass (which I hate normally) dancing for four hours in four inch heels and I felt no pain! I went with my toyboy although he's my ex now. We didn't leave the club till 7am.

Christmas books: Madame Arcati's supremely discriminating gift guide

The white beard you can keep, but Madame Arcati is happy to recommend a few books as gifts this Christmas. Unlike certain other media types who take their cues from old buddies in orthodox publishing, Madame Arcati does not discriminate between the self-published and the unself-published and the vanity published: I do not need the approbation of mediating editors to tell me whether a book is worthy of publication. I'll decide, thank you.

My few titles come under two categories: the recommended are under Tomes for the Tights (aren't stockings rather Joan Collins these days?) and the worthless mingers under Tomes for the Cheese Grater (I was shocked to learn that the slave kids of Haiti are punished by being forced to kneel on cheese graters). As I wrote in the below post, shredding a pointless book with your cheese grater (1) promotes wellbeing and (2) creates debris useful for rodent litter or snow in one's Nativity tableau (vivant or toy), as recommended by a reader who put Madonna's Sex book to this excellent use. All Tights titles are hyperlinked for easy purchase; all Cheese Grater titles you can find for yourself. So ....

Tomes for the Tights

Roger Lewis' Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as it is Lived is an absolute must this Yuletide - by far the funniest memoirs published in years. Even his father's terminal "bum cancer" is framed by comic poignancy - ideal for those contemplating copping out at the Dignitas death camp in Muslim-hating Switzerland.

As comic, but set exotically, is Duncan Fallowell's travel book Going As Far As I Can, the pb of which came out in August. We head for the trog-world of New Zealand in the company of a merciless champion of Western secular culture: the resultant clash of aesthetics (and phwoar of cock-cockings) is both pyrotechnical and exhilarating. DF's prose is the bastard child of an aristo-plebby one-nighter. Reading him is like being fucked at an egalitarian orgy.

As creator of the cock-cunting and cunting-cock neoligisms, it's only right then that Madame Arcati recommends the German title Vulva by Mithu M Sanyal.  The vulva is one of history's Cinderellas - feared, ignored, abused. Yet today we have the designer "yoni puppets" to pat and stroke. What could these be? Well, learn German and find out and delve into the history of the vulva, bitches.

An Arcati fave is the ever notorious Farah Damji and her glorious, playfully-titled autobiography Try Me. It is both mea culpa (frauds, darling) and breathtaking tease: in one chapter she mocks the naive for falling for her pose in the redemptive confessional: as if! Its dishonesties are likely subtle, between the lines; in grey areas. Her story as told feels broadly true. Media, sex, drugs, slebs, jail - they're all here. Trashy novel content in classy narrative.

And for total teeth-chattering joy do buy Jonathan King's memoirs 65 My Life So Far, which I shall review shortly. How could I not like a book that favourably name-checks this blog on p570? We all know what JK was done for: over-worked cock-cunting newspaper scrotes have decreed a persecution. Yet this book is an immense surprise: gossipy, revealing, insightful, scandalous, huge fun. A recommended gift for the multi-millionaire maiden aunt who refuses to die and whose legacy you impatiently await. She'll die usefully with a pre-rot rictus on her wrinkled mug. You won't be charged with her homicide.

Me: The Authorised Biography by Byron Rogers is the blissful tale of how one of Britain's most stylish writers became the object of an intense infatuation: Does Mr Rogers have a cock as big as that of his former employer, Prince Charles? The title may or may not reveal all.

For cookery lovers, may I introduce you to the Rt Hon The Countess of Shannon alias the global mystic guru, Almine. A few years ago Almine gave up her life of ermined British privilege and turned into an international goddess served by angels. So who better to pass down tips on puff pastry? She has two titles: Cooking with Class and Memoirs & Meals (click here). Makes Nigella and Delia look like the raucous lower class cook Mrs Bridges in Upstairs, Downstairs.

Shena Mackay's The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories was released in late 2008 but who cares? A more wonderfully surreal short story writer you will not find: her quirks are encoded not manufactured: queerness and peculiarity run through her soul. She is most otherly. I want more, more, more.

Philip Hoare's Leviathan gets it wrong on sperm whales - no,they cannot swallow a grown man. Never mind. His prosaic quest to commune with the warm blooded spurters of the seas helps to cutefy the whale kingdom: a species to be protected must first have the ah factor.

Interior designer Nicky Haslam's memoir Redeeming Features reports that Wallis Simpson's Edward was once a bisexual drag artist and that Lord Snowdon cock-cocked with the author. Wallis herself may have been hermaphrodite because her maid once whispered that the old girl's knickers were stained with urine always at the front. Gorgeous society flim-flam in which people merge at times with their stylish inanimate objects. So that at one point I became convinced Tallulah Bankhead was a wallpaper.

For the less demanding, Katie Price's novel Sapphire should not be scorned: her ghost writer Rebecca Farnworth is as smart as they come, weaving in sly digs at her subject (Katie Price aka Jordan) in a fictionalisaton of the tabloid-trimmed life that requires dark orange model flesh topped up daily by 18-minute sessions in a carcinogenic sunbed. Simply mindlessly thrilling, dearies.

A few months back I reviewed the novel Dazed & Aroused by handsome male model Gavin James Bower. I hadn't read the book and still haven't but I don't see why that should inhibit me from recommending the British version of Brett Easton Ellis' Glamorama. Your OK!-reading brats will adore it - I believe Kate Moss has a walk-on part, but I don't know. Perhaps someone will confirm or correct.

And finally, the "psychic barber" Gordon Smith has a book out titled Why Bad Things Happen. Why was my pet pussy run over by a cripple in his fucking cripple car? That question is not asked or answered, more's the pity (for that's what happened to my Prudence aka Pruce), yet this famous medium tries to shed light on the question of misfortune's purpose, with insights on the next life. Derren Brown is a very poor substitute for this sort of thing.

Tomes for the Cheese Grater

Clive James' The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years is fatally hobbled by its author's incessant need to remind us of how brilliant/famous he is. Whether working through Linguaphone to read a classic in its original tongue or telling us why he deigned to take a phone call from Tina Brown, his book reeks of a clever juvenile wanker locked in a mirrored closet.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution is Richard Dawkins' latest piece of propaganda against faiths - even though his brand of science is akin to faith, such is his messianic zeal to mix facts with popular theories. Though Dawkins reviles all divination, he has never researched such lowly topics as palmistry or mediumship. Very scientific!

Some time back I wrote an affectionate item about a strange little one-man industry called Chas Newkey-Burden. He churns out about half a dozen books a year - many of them in the genre of listerature. Since then the Julie Burchill once-time co-writer and right-wing squirt has foolishly picked an argument with me, so the first casualty of this is all his books. Let's see:  Simon Cowell: The Unauthorised Biography; Amy Winehouse: The Biography; Michael Jackson: Legend 1958-2009: all manically churned mayfly productions that suffer expiry after a brief fuck of publicity. The sound of a writer is tap tap. The sound of Chas is snip snip.

Illusionist Derren Brown is quite a talented caricaturist as his book Portrait demonstrates. However, his demeanour irritates me. He should not be encouraged.

Worst, most successful writer in the world Dan Brown released The Lost Symbol this year as part of his mission to keep Tom Hanks busy. His quasi-mystical thrillers are rutted with awful clangers: is the Pope a Protestant?

Most pointless book ever is The Atheist's Guide to Christmas by Ariane Sherine. Silly cunts like Richard Dawkins, Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown, Ben Goldacre, Jenny Colgan, David Baddiel, Simon Singh, AC Grayling, Brian Cox and Richard Herring contribute their tips both serious and not. Yet for most, Christmas is already just a secular exchange of gifts, with carol song as sentimental soundtrack to retail park festive forage. No real need for a Church of Atheism, then.

Though a late 2008 release, foodie tome Table Talk: Sweet And Sour, Salt and Bitter by the Sunday Times writer AA Gill affords an opportunity to remind people that he recently shot dead a baboon, to see what killing a primate was like, or at least he made this claim in a restaurant review. The minor Twitter controversy this provoked must have disappointed the fathead ligger.

Stephen Fry in America (pb out last May) and its TV series may have persuaded the cultural Zelig to piss off to LA. If he goes, re-cut 'n' paste this under Tights. Job well done.

I detest family photo albums so why the pompously titled Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare should be an exception I do not know. Should it not be titled Snapshots in History's Footnotes? The cover pic of young handsome Gore is very Freeman's catalogue: longevity is his undoing.

Last and least, a title can ruin a book for me. Ant and Dec's Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story is very Mike and Bernie Winters. Get it out of here!

Julie Burchill: 'I failed to out George Michael!'

To think, George Michael tried to out himself to Julie Burchill many years before his cop cock-cocking loo encounter. And she didn't notice!

"My first interview when I left NME was with George Michael," she tells Platform. "It was ten years before he came out as gay and was just about to break up Wham! Our chat was this big deal for The Times where he was hoping to re-introduce himself as a singer songwriter.

"I met him again after he was busted in the toilet and revealed he was gay. He said, 'Did you not understand what I was trying to do in that interview? I really wanted to come out and I thought that was the opportunity to do it, but you just didn’t notice.' I asked him what it was I 'hadn’t noticed' and he said, 'Do you remember that I stood there with one hand on my hip? And when the tea arrived I said, "Shall I be mother?” Did you not think that added up to something?'

"I thought he was just being friendly. He said he was camping around and I was totally oblivious. He’s adorable."

Julie Burchill: What she actually wrote about Cosmo

The London Evening Standard last week published a polite corrective from the goddess Julie Burchill in response to some nonsense from her second ex-husband and Sunday Times film critic Cosmo Landesman. Alas, the original draft of the letter was somewhat less polite. Here it is:

"I was amused to read my former husband Cosmo Landesman's remark (Londoner's Diary) that I hadn't read a single book for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize I was recently honoured to be on the judging panel of - because, apparently, I have 'never read a book.'

"If the ignorant tool had not been such a dullard during our decade-long marriage then perhaps I would not have been so eager to finish off the complete works of Patrick Hamilton/Oscar Wilde/Graham Greene during many a numbing night. Didn't he notice? No, but then it took him two months to notice I'd run off with my teenage editorial assistant!

"Oddly unmoving though it is to have my literacy dissed by a man who writes English as though it is his third language, I would have expected him to have had more respect for the talented Jewish writers whose books I so thoroughly loved reading - especially for the late Fred Wander, whose breathtaking, heart-breaking account of the Holocaust, The Seventh Well, was the deserving winner."

Michael Gross and the furious Social Empress of New York

Is it the case that the uncrowned "Social Empress of New York" has waved her sceptre and decreed that a book she finds either embarrassing or inaccurate or both should be ignored by Anyone Who Cares What She Thinks? That it should in effect be allowed to die by ordained silence? Who knows?

The Empress in question is Annette de la Renta, the book, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, and its author the legendary, the inescapable, Michael Gross. His oeuvre includes non-fiction bestsellers Model and 740 Park.

Mrs de la Renta is the wife of the - omg!, gimme the grandest-sounding adjectival phrase, please - multiversal fashion designer Oscar. They are among the society Caesars and Cleos of America (NY in particular) - with the tragic ends missing, respectively. Apparently. They're so huuuuuge that even American Vogue editor Anna Wintour over-arches her back into an ageing stoop as she scrapes about in their presence. Not even the newly refurbished Hubble telescope can fully capture their social enormity. There isn't a lens big enough!

So, when this goddam writer Gross produced his sensational NY museum history book, which does not portray Annette (the sometime guardian of the late Social Empress of New York Brooke Astor's estate, and a trustees board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in an entirely approved light, all hell broke loose. Museum types raged for and against Gross' book: indisputably, Gross had hit a raw nerve about a national institution. And Annette threatened legal action - she could sue yet in the US or turn libel tourist.

Suddenly, promised book reviews did not run, scheduled interviews did not appear. All this in the Land of the Free. No writ has been served as I write.

Was she offended by the stories about her and her late, wealthy philanthropist mother Jane Engelhard or was she aggrieved by Gross' impertinence in delving into Oscar's well-known sexual past? Or all of the above?

Annette de la Renta is rich enough and powerful enough to hire the best lawyers to speak on her behalf. I spoke with Michael Gross about the affair. (If you want more background, read Jesse Kornbluth's excellent report, click here)

Michael, my dear. You're imagining that sections of the US media have banned coverage of your book, aren't you? You've got sensitive?

"No. I did a fascinating interview with Daphne Merkin, a celebrated writer, for a publication-day story on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's web site, that has still never appeared. I also know of at least one reporter who has received a warning letter from Mrs de la Renta's lawyers saying the book is 'full of misinformation' and another, at another newspaper, whose story on the book was killed by an editor who said that they would cause the book to be withdrawn and/or corrected and the newspaper would be left 'holding the bag.' I also know of several reviews that were scheduled and then mysteriously postponed. I hesitate to be more specific since I fear that the reporters and editors who have filled me and my publisher in on what's been happening (or more precisely, not happening) might themselves be at risk of retaliation."

You're saying the New York elite have closed ranks against you in defence of their Empress?

"I know that the New York elite - call them the 4,000 - love to know and discuss things no one else (ie, the public, the great unwashed, the NOCD types) knows. Much of what is in my book is no surprise to them. Many of them were my sources.

"That said, I suspect that the core issue here is not this or that nugget of revealing information but rather something larger and perhaps more threatening, my exposure of two things: the way things really work behind-the-scenes in a great American cultural institution - which no one involved wants revealed - and the picaresque saga of Jane Engelhard, whose riveting life story still has holes in it, despite my attempts to fill them, but which is nonetheless told in full for the first time in Rogues' Gallery. Both she and her daughter have battled every attempt to shed light on this saga - battles referred to in the book."

Is this just about the de la Rentas - or have you also upset the cultural snobs by telling the unauthorised and all-too-human story behind a national treasure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

"The sad fact is that the sort of people who create and sustain historical repositories like the Metropolitan do not want their own histories, or those of the institutions, revealed. Otherwise, why would they repeatedly obstruct researchers and make a mere book like mine into an object lesson, a warning to any who might think of following a similar path of crumbs?"

I understand the de la Rentas' friend Anna Wintour made her feelings known ....

"I ran into Anna Wintour at Graydon Carter's Monkey Bar shortly before the book came out. We have 'crossed swords' before, beginning when she was the editor of British Vogue and began an interview by instructing me in no uncertain terms that I was not to refer to her as Nuclear Wintour, so I was not surprised when she gave me a look I can only describe (by paraphrasing a designer) as 'standing in a strapless dress next to an open icebox.'"

As Kornbluth writes of the matter: "A rich woman has used a two-ton gorilla to threaten a writer, and, for whatever reason, silence has descended." If Annette de la Renta's legal threats are intended to chill interest in Gross' book, then they may well have succeeded for now.

But would it not make more sense, and be more in keeping with the freedom-loving spirit of the US, if she published a statement of rebuttal for all to see? What is unacceptable is the suspected exercise of informal social power to, in effect, banish a book to obscurity, and with the acquiescence of a generally gutless American media. Tina Brown - when will you become the mouse that roared?

For a great read, order a copy here.
Michael Gross website

Would you like to be Madame Arcati's guest-cunty?

Ever a slave to fashion, and what with Steven Spielberg guest-editing Empire next month and Alastair Campbell guest-godding at the New Statesman, I think it is time that this blog had its own guest-cunty to run things for a week. Here's my wish list (but feel free to apply for consideration of this prestigious placement via comments with your thematic proposals):

Sandi Toksvig: I think she should be everything really: Doctor Who, Fern Britton's replacement, even the next Superman. There is nothing this woman cannot do, and certainly Madame Arcati would be the beneficiary of her all-knowingness, her all-talentedness.
Sandi is my candy


Katie Price: She's great value because of her genius for feuds. Despite her best endeavours to fail, she succeeds at everything she tackles, even humbling the likes of the egregious Julie Myerson with her books sales. Plus she looks moist.

Jason Cowley: He'd be great because the first thing he'd do is find a guest-guest-cunty. This way Alastair Campbell might get his mitts on Madame Arcati and call for a new war against someone.

Kevin Spacey: A man of kwalli-tay for sure, as his current ad for American Airlines confirms. What that man doesn't know about the poshest seats isn't worth knowing, and of course he's a connoisseur of dynastic genius as well as of rich women with sexy chauffeurs. Him as guest-cunty would be like a delightful sip of absinthe over a leather bound copy of Debrett's. Keyser Saucy!

Sebastian Horsley: Readers would soon be up there on Seb's Best Brothels Guide and his etiquette rules on asking a prostitute for a 3 squirts for 2 discount. He's most amusing, most inflammatory.

Sebastian, my whore

Sharon Stone: A personal fave, she'd fill the blog with extracts from her unpublished short stories and red carpet pics of herself from the world's major film festivals - attendance of which being her principal career right now. But could I afford her and would she make special demands (such as daily deliveries of scented Interflora bouquets to her Madame Arcati Prose Suite at Claridge's)?

Verne Troyer: A wit, an observer, a philosopher. A naked pic would be compulsory. Erect.

Christopher Lee: A fund of thespian anecdotes, but never mind. This would be an opportunity for him to respond to the scandal of his missing knighthood and slag off the Queen and PM.
"Sir" Christopher

Will Self: Enlarge your vocabulary with one of the wisest men on the planet. And like Katie Price, he's quite carnivorous and gets into feuds. Will I ever forget what he once said about one of Julie Burchill's exes, the gun-loving he-man, Tony Parsons?

Julie Burchill: Speaking of whom, can you imagine? I can only dream....

Duncan all over

Duncan Fallowell: My darling would expose you to polymathy with comic edging. His would be a mystery tour of music, mayhem, literature, obscure art exhibitions in Auckland and torrid encounters with intense, attractive persons (in Russia).

Julie Burchill's foot is still attached to leg

Met up with the goddess Julie Burchill and a few others last night for a drink at One Aldwych. Her foot is repairing nicely (not amputated as certain dead tree amateur hacks claimed) and she's just sold a short story to the the Sunday Times Magazine. Cathy Galvin (I think the dep ed) has introduced fiction which is great: might even make me read the paper again. "I'm not spiritual, I'm religious," Burch told me. I said I'm the other way round, as I am in lots of respects. Love to my two new young friends, the hairdresser and his PR girlfriend. I predicted they would live in New York after they told me that's what they wanted. I must be psychic.

Julie Burchill and her 'foot amputation'

Holy Moly writes: "Best rumour sweeping medialand this week was that Julie Burchill had had her foot amputated because of gout! A mole spoke to Julie and thankfully it wasn’t true. Who starts rumours like this?!" Indeed.

It was Madame Arcati who (I think) first reported that Julie had a foot encased in an air-pressure plaster cast (not because of gout) and she had a 5% chance of amputation if the condition didn't improve in a number of months (see original story on labels). I saw it myself down in Brighton. I'm sure she'll be OK.

Quite how that got turned into an amputation story I don't know but I suspect some semi-educated employee of the dead tree media is responsible.

Sebastian Horsley: 'Fancy a fuck, Madame?'

Sebastian writes ...
Oh I'm so clever, I wish I could sleep with myself. Fancy a fuck Madame Antarctica? Or would you mind lying down while I have one?
Sebastian Horsley x

My Dear Sebastian,
How our sexual interlude transpires is a mere matter of detail. But I am having a bromance with Julie Burchill, and I'm thinking of a betrothal to Molly Parkin - it's not that I'm a starfucker or name-dropper, but one has to factor in all other considerations as my Moon is in Pisces. Though I have noted your aperçu: "People who believe in astrology were born under the wrong star sign." Still, Madame welcomes all-comers if they're interesting ....
MAx
PS And you are.
Duncan Fallowell naked

Julie Burchill: A few hours with a Brighton goddess

An extraordinary lunch with Julie Burchill at a Brighton restaurant today. In attendance: her husband Daniel Raven (he could only stay an hour or so: such a sweetheart: looks about 25), the Guardian writer Zoe Williams (atheist, feminist), the novelist John Niven (Kill Your Friends), Julie's vicar The Rev'd Canon Dr Gavin Ashenden ("Gavin") and Julie's long-term friend whose pen name is Gina McKinnon (a Leo with Moon in Gemini) ....

I'm afraid to say Julie Burchill and Madame Arcati bonded on sight. She has a hyper-developed social personality that beguiles and intrigues and which (I sense) probably does not accurately signal what she may end up thinking or writing: but it is a personality designed to be inclusive or collaborative and collusive in the moment. She is a seducer. I became part of a group concern about the plastic air-pressured contraption on one of her feet (not for gout after all: there's a 5% chance of amputation!), I was drawn into (but not persuaded by) her world view on Islam and Christianity (and she thinks a black Archbish of Canterbury would carry greater weight internationally than Old Beardie), I was touched by her adoration of my septum and chin dimple (her septum is well developed too: a sign of a high sex drive, I think) and I loved the way she tenderly rested her hand on mine while engaged in vigorous conversation with John: she wanted me to know I was not forgotten.

But it so happened I was talking to Gavin who fascinated me with a lecture on how Hollywood has somehow got North Moroccan Sufism all wrong: it's all to do with repetitive romance syndrome: movies just can't get out of the romantic loop in human relationships. People fall in love and then ... fin. It's a kind of cultural infantilism. I intend to persuade an intelligent magazine to get him to write on this topic: his theme incorporates celebrity and glamour and spirituality: I mean, think of the cover lines, cunties. To read him click here. Or read this.

Julie is a sensitive and probably psychic; certainly she's highly intuitive: she accurately named the sun signs of the three guests who asked her. It should be said that she appears to have little time for astrology or clairvoyance, as a late-life Protestant. "You shouldn't talk to the dead," she said to me when I mentioned a wonderful medium I have just discovered. She did not ask me idiotic questions about the real me. She did not probe too much. She intuited that the mask is a psychological component, not something to be ripped away. To my surprise she did not really gossip at all. She has done so much yet travels light as a personality. Few anecdotes, no boasting, no name-dropping. "I've just made the most of myself," she said simply when I pointed out she's one of the very few genuine stars of journalism.

After the lunch we got cabs to her apartment in Hove. She has drawers full of her many books, and DVDs of Sugar Rush. Her bookshelves have a disproportionate number of titles by (Julie's sometime co-writer) Chas Newkey-Burden, such as his Paris Hilton bio, among works of greater weight. She has even a rather good library in one of her washrooms. She has two cats, but have they ever been petted? I would love to be their petter.

"What's your blog about?" asked Gavin. Julie replied for me: "It's about righteousness." Not my word, but I like it.

Julie Burchill and Madame Arcati and a Brighton venue

Lunch with Julie Burchill and her husband tomorrow and some other people down in Brighton. What to wear? Which persona to adorn? My psychic suggested I shouldn't meet her right now - it didn't feel right - but I exercise my right to independent action and will honour my RSVP. Remote attraction is an interesting thing: what does one imagine will embody the alluring attribute? An idea morphs into 3D flesh and .... Well, we'll see.

Julie Burchill's pal Chas Newkey-Burden, king of listerature

"It is a great and glorious tradition the world over - to vehemently state one thing and then do the exact opposite," begins the Amazon synopsis of Julie Burchill's latest book Not in My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy. In the light of my announcement of my death and now resurrection within a week, I know exactly what she means. She gives a splendid interview to the Guardian today, here we go. She only got £2k for the book serialisation in the Mail. I blame Gordon Bown and his four planets in the secretive, furtive 12th (Piscean) house. His baleful influence turns everyone into a skinflint. Forget about David Miliband. Too prissy.

However it is Julie's co-writer, a male hack called Chas Newkey-Burden, who on this occasion interests me more. He appears to be the Carol Vorderman of the stocking-filler tome, an auto-churner of disposable literature, or listerature. To take 2007 as an example, he produced: Arsenal: Premiership Player Profiles; The Reduced History of Dogs; Paris Hilton: Life on the Edge; Great Email Disasters; and The All-New Official Arsenal Miscellany.

I marvel at such industry. And he must be quite savvy to be a pal of La Burch. Earlier this year he became the instant biographer of Amy Winehouse. Ahead of us are Help! I'm Turning into My Dad and The Dog Directory: Facts, Figures and Profiles of Over 100 Breeds.

His name - Chas Newkey-Burden - seems marvellously throw-away, too. "Here lies Chas Newkey-Burden" - no, it doesn't sound right, does it? It's not a name for a tombstone etch. Chas suggests impatience to me, an irritation with anything long-winded; so he adopted a nice fleeting sound for a first name. Nothing too formal, like. I think I may have to interview this will-o'-the-wisp of modern publishing. I am fascinated by industrial dervishes. I must examine his horoscope if not his oeuvre.

Will Self - 'Tony Parsons focus-groups his novels'

Will Self

Novelist Will Self gives Tony Parsons (“you know, Julie Burchill’s old [ex-] husband”) a good slagging in a highly revealing interview with Rob McGibbon on the Access Interviews website. Says literary Self of schlocky Parsons’ fictive methodology: “He focus-groups the plots of his books to discover if they’ll play with his target audience and he writes accordingly, like New Labour ... If I did that I wouldn’t be a writer, I’d be making disposable razors.”

In a wide-ranging conversation, touching on subjects as diverse as drug porn and his new novel The Butt, Self also lacerates the Observer over the time in 1997 he was caught snorting heroin on Prime Minister John Major’s election campaign jet. The Observer fired him for this outrage but he nonetheless describes it (and The Guardian) as “hypocritical" because the paper had “marketed me as a drug user … as a latter-day Hunter S Thompson.” Of that time he admits, “I was mentally ill.”

To see the interview click here

Tony Parsons: 'Mmm, I just lerve guns. Yum yum'

The hideous Tony Parsons pens a paean to guns in British GQ. “The first time you hear gunfire is like losing your virginity, but without the sex,” he writes. Excitingly he finds himself caught up in a “violent coup in Southeast Asia”. Bang, bang. In a tropical place (as opposed to British streets) “there is no denying the glamour of guns”. Thinking of his big butch soldier daddy who fought at Monte Cassino he reflects: “My father always thought me a lesser man than he because I had never heard that sound [gunfire]. And he was right. I have no doubt at all that he was right. We are forever lesser men than those who have heard the guns because we have not been tested.”

I should have thought that marriage to the goddess Julie Burchill would have sufficiently tested his sentimental sense of masculinity, hewn from comic books and John Wayne movies and the midget Norman Mailer and his big-cocked sense of his own big cockedness, now just another husk of nothing. Masculinity as defined by Parsons can only be sustained at the expense of others: it draws its energy parasitically from dreamt challenges made flesh. Someone else must lose something for masculinity to feel fulfilled. At its lowest it is expressed in domestic violence. At its most handsome, it resembles George W Bush. The sense of redundancy it trails behind itself is explored in a huge literature of bitter and disappointed experience, so easily forgotten by copycat sons of copycat men who wank in front of mirrors.

Come on Tony, throw a sheet over the triptych and give your over-used cock a rest.

Julie Burchill writes ....

Julie Burchill emails me: "Just read your piece about me ... to be fair it was I, not little Helen from the Telegraph, who did the drugs during our spree. She did vomit though! x"

Julie Burchill - Big Sis for Big Bro?

I hear that Julie Burchill is in talks with Grazia magazine to become its Big Brother correspondent. An excellent development if the right money can be found. She's the true champ of chav-dom - I'm only surprised Heat hasn't snapped her up.