Sweet, though it always struck me as sort of lonely and past-tense. I am forever on the lookout for love poems that depress me, don't you know.

We are hitting the clubs tonight, a sad phenomenon, at the end of which I invariably end up tired, sitting in a corner chair, making uncharitable observations about my peers. I go anyway because, we are hitting the clubs tonight and I am glad for the company, glad for something to do. Besides, my contacts glow under the ultra-violet lighting and I never pass up an opportunity to look like a freak.

George Stephanopoulos was on Letterman last night. Being, I guess the term is smooth, with all the personality of a dish rag. "They should have Chris Hitchens on afterward, just to get that taste out of your mouth."

The critics heaped unfavourable reviews on Frederic Raphael, foolish me to ignore them. Having never known Kubrick on a personal level, having only read half of Raphael's recollection, having only the smidge of a clue, I think I can safely conclude that the critics were too kind. When someone undertakes to write a memoir for a man he hardly knew, there is always the tendency to write more about the author than the subject. This, of course, wouldn't be such a disaster if the selling point of the work weren't so heavily based on being "an intimate, unusual memoir of Stanley Kubrick" and also if the narrator had a charming enough personality to fill 186 pages (it feels like it's a lot longer, believe me). Frederic Raphael has one doozy of a personality, a word that comes to mind is: abrasive. Abrasive like cheap kitchen scrub...

`S.K. has come as near as he can to being a present absentee; he may challenge England with his work, but never with his person. He makes as little noise as possible; you might say that he was hiding not only from life but also from the angel of death, who will get no hints from him on finding the way to Stanley's address. A man who hides resolutely from death is obliged to mimic death itself; to lie that low is to imitate the dead.

`I'm tempted (too often?) to argue that any Jew involved in the arts is concealing - even as he displays - the sense of alienation which came of the Holocaust. Civilization's most moral citizen is the hypocrite; its best art is camouflage.'