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I was all set to crow and self-backpat about finding out that the fabulous and deeply kewl HOT PRESS folks in Ireland had done me the massive honour of including my novel THE HELLHOUND SAMPLE (published by Headpress, buy a copy today if not sooner!) in their 2012 Annual’s Top Ten Books of 2011 … but then bad news derailed me.
Much as I hate to disagree with the late and much-missed Fran Landesman, it ain’t spring … but winter … which hangs you up the most, because it’s the time when you end up saying goodbye to too many people who matter. F’rinstance
… in the last few days, we’ve had to say hail and farewell to both Christopher Hitchens, a great polemicist who gave maximum value even when he was totally WRONG (as he was about Iraq), a powerful ally when you agreed with him and a worthy adversary when you didn’t … and to Etta James, who was pretty much the greatest female R&B singer this side of Miss Ree Her Own Self, the mighty lungs and soulful sensibility behind epochal songs like I’d Rather Go Blind and Tell Mama.
One anecdote for each: I met Ms James just the once, very briefly, during that odd period in the early ’70s when Chess Records had been sold to the GRT corporation and was uprooted from Chicago and relocated to New York. She’d not been having a great time of late (despite having just issued the magnificent Come A Little Closer album) and was actually THIN for just about the only documented time in her life. She told me that she’d actually written I’d Rather Go Blind herself, but had been persuaded to copyright it in the name of a man she was seeing … who’d then left her and continued to collect royalties not just from Ms J’s original but from the Chicken Shack cover version which had been a hit in the UK a few years earlier. Hoarse-voiced and chainsmoking, she was NOT a happy bunny. Later years saw her restored to physical and vocal health and receiving the props and acknowledgement she so richly deserved.
As for Hitch: I recall an epic confrontation with the massed forces of UK Trotskyism at the Bookmarks shop when a debate on Iraq became the verbal equivalent of a barroom brawl. Hitch, ciggy in one hand, wineglass in the other, was standing on a chair, taking on all-comers, quoting huge slabs of Trotsky from memory and defending his indefensible position with such enviable erudition and eloquence that you had to admire the sheer verve, style and conviction of the performance … even though he was TOTALLY WRONG.
His final ‘performance’ – an interview with Richard Dawkins – can be found in this week’s New Statesman, guest-edited by Professor D.
A world without Hitch and Ms Etta is smaller, colder, drier, duller and a LOT less soulful.
A world without Kim Jong-Il, on the other hand …
Maybe the Cosmic Balance is attempting to realign itself.
