Don't even get me started on Julie Burchill. I feel nothing but sheer embarrassment for her. Yet, still I find myself drawn to reading her column (for column read narcistic attempt to make readers some how jealous of her talent/wild child past/amazing sexual prowess, and failing always). In short I admit I have fallen under her spell and must always read what she writes just so that I can be satisfied that I am still truly and completely against everything she stands for. Grrrrrr.

>Don't even get me started on Julie Burchill. I feel nothing but sheer embarrassment for her. Yet, still I find myself drawn to reading her column (for column read narcistic attempt to make readers some how jealous of her talent/wild child past/amazing sexual prowess, and failing always). In short I admit I have fallen under her spell and must always read what she writes just so that I can be satisfied that I am still truly and completely against everything she stands for. Grrrrrr.

How familiar this sounds - but then I realized the only way to fight it was to stop buying The Guardian on Saturday altogether (or at all where possible).

Her column is the ultimate in Lazy Journalist Slagdom - simply write some simplistic incendiary sixth form arguments about anything - stick them together in a rambling yet smug and self satisfied way and there you are. She should be nailed into a box with Richard Littlejohn, Gary Bushell, the Hitchens brothers and Charlotte Raven and thrown over a large cliff, preferably one coated with razor sharp crags above a very deep, shark infested inlet of water.

Not very sophisticated I know - but then I'm not being paid large amounts of money from a supposed 'quality' broadsheet.

Al well said, I totally agree.

My girlfriend bought Burchill's autobiography �I Knew I Was Right� (only a £1 from a discount store) and I did have a little read of it. It was pretty dull stuff. It read as if it had been written during a long taxi journey. She obviously couldn't be bothered with it and only thought of it as a good way to get some money from a publisher for a holiday. I have never read anything by Burchill since (although I do concede that Burchill has real talent and wit. She just can't be arsed to used it.)

As for Christopher Hitchens I think he's marvellous. He's funny, cruel, intelligent. His �The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice� was brilliant. It was very pleasing to see the old crow being pissed on.

"use it"

Why didn't I pay more attention at school?

If Burchill has real talent and wit I have yet to see it - anyone who has ever written for The Daily Mail surely must lack either of these qualities - especially the former. I wouldn't write for that Little England piece of shit if I was offered enough money to offset the national debt of Brazil.

Brief note on Hitchens - I thought his attack on Mother Theresa was highly dubious - shades of surprising people with your interesting opinions: "I bet you think Mother Theresa's a saint. Ahhh! I don't. ahhh! she is really evil - she is against birth control, and once met Ceacescu. Ahhh! Do you see?" His attacks on Clinton during the Lewinsky affair were unforgiveable - he's got this pseudo-Marxist hang-up about "liberals" that drives me nuts - all the time he was shovelling shit on Clinton he was giving succour to Ken Starr and his gang of new right cronies on both sides of the Atlantic. Christ - the guy had an affair and lied about it - along with most of Hitchens' own mates I shouldn't wonder. I also saw Hitchens on Newsnight once alleging - no *declaring* - that JFK tried to start World War III during the Cuban Missile crisis. Hitchens' grasp of politics and history is as spectacularly cockeyed as that of his loony right brother - the fact that he passes himself off as a leftie is no excuse.

Sorry - a little less brief than I intended...

I don't agree but nevertheless it was well put and you make a good point about the Clinton sex scandal.

Has anyone heard the one about Julie Burchill threatening to leave the Guardian unless they gave a column to her equally talentless 'partner' Charlotte Raven?

Oh, do keep up. Neither of them are lesbians anymore.

You're not trying to tell me that their relationship was a cunning PR ruse designed to shift the focus away from the fact that neither of them can write? Next thing, you'll be telling me that Chris Evans didn't really go out with Geri Halliwell. Or there's no Santa Claus.

La Burchilla now has a young boyfriend to whom she refers constantly in her Guardian column. I find her irritatingly wrong 1/3 of the time, and right on the money 2/3 of the time. I'd do her hard, on principle. Especially if Charlotte Raven could be tempted back for a three-way.

>La Burchilla now has a young boyfriend to whom she refers constantly in her Guardian column. I find her irritatingly wrong 1/3 of the time, and right on the money 2/3 of the time. I'd do her hard, on principle. Especially if Charlotte Raven could be tempted back for a three-way.

Physician heal thyself! You are a sick, sick man. And Julie 'I knew I was Right' Burchill has never been right about anything. Ever.

Hey, I never said I would enjoy it. I'm just morally obliged to do her because I think she's cool.

>Hey, I never said I would enjoy it. I'm just morally obliged to do her because I think she's cool.

Does this mean I now have to sleep with the dead body of Carl Sagan?

BTW - my best mate thinks she's cool too. Why do you?

What's that, lassie? You've taken lots of drugs during the last ten years? My, what an impressive dog you are!

I think Burchill's retort to fashion designer Katherine Hammet was pretty funny. Hammet said to Burchill: "Don't you find that the working class are always so well dressed?" And Burchill replied: "Yes that's because they can't afford your clothes"

That's the gist of it anyway.

Julie Burchill has no right to call herself working class. Do people have such an incredibly short memory that they can't remember her relentless championing of Thatcher in the 1980s (from the vantage point of a stool in the Groucho Club, I'll be bound)?. All this shit in her column about how capitalism killed her father and the paeans to Bartlett Pears, Ideal Milk and Tizer just won't bloody wash. It's all just too little, too late.

Sorry. All these Ken Loach films I've been watching are having an adverse effect on my critical faculties (not to mention my blood pressure). I think she's great really and her tribute to the People's Princess bears comparison with any biographies written by Lytton Strachey and Boswell.

Ah, yes, I may have to refine the "moral doing" rules a little.
2/3 of the time I find myself violently agreeing with her column and the way she expresses herself with some brio. Sadly, she is horribly wrong 1/3 of the time (ie supporting Thatcher and thinking Stalin was great, somewhat ... ah ... contradictory). I also admire her hatred of Tony Parsons. Although I've heard his novel is quite good.

This thread is veering dangerously towards giving Kolumnfuhrer Burchill some credit.

I don't find her spiteful tone of argument at all convincing - it's frequently petulant, and juvenile in its attempts to shock - totally "Ahh. Ahh. Do you see?" - this is perhaps the most perceptive observation L&H ever made. Moreover, her articles are totally devoid of structure. More than once I have been reading through her column only to find the argument wander off down the road - the only thing holding it together is the bile with which it is delivered. And to dress that up as intelligent, quality journalism is shameful.

But in actual fact, I think the Grauniad are doing something much more reprehensible - they love printing Julie because she's "controversial" and generates letters: "she's provoking a response - look - that must mean it's popular" - not when people stop buying the paper altogether to avoid her it isn't. BTW - Barney, your original instincts were correct. Burchill's "I'm working class, me" act is sickening - I don't care if she really is or not - people who drone on about something that much in such a cliched way must have "issues".

This has all got out of hand...

JB is shit and always has been. That's all you need to say.

I knew I was right!

Sorry.

>ie supporting Thatcher and thinking Stalin
>was great, somewhat ... ah ... contradictory

In what way?

>This has all got out of hand...
>
>JB is shit and always has been. That's all you need to say.

Yes - but I felt much better explaining she was shit at length. Point taken though...

Um ... the Thatcher/Stalin thing ... they are quite different and not at all the same except in the minds of 1980s poetry-writing sixth-formers, as L&H would put it.
Not that I agree with a thing she did. B*tch stole my milk. Um, the milk I had at playtime, that is, not the milk I lactated. Because I didn't, the photos were mocked up in Photoshop, and anyone who says otherwise is a big liar.

She was on holiday this week and so didn't write her usual column, praise the lord!

>Um ... the Thatcher/Stalin thing ... they are quite different and not at all the same except in the minds of 1980s poetry-writing sixth-formers, as L&H would put it.

I was kinda sending that sort of thing up. Imagine it in the voice of Rik from the Young Ones. I thought about putting "Note: satire" on the next line but then I thought, hey, I haven't got all day to sit here adding extra lines to messages. And now look at all the extra typing I've had to do to explain all this.

As for the milk, it was always a bit warm and cheesy at my school anyway. Pour bottled smegma down the necks of children, that's what Labour used to do, oh yes.

Oh! You were kidding. Sorry.
My milk was always warm too. My SCHOOL milk, that is.
I once did a statistics course where they analysed the evidence that school milk was good for kids and found it was deeply flawed (basically, I think, the teachers gave the poor kids extra, or something). I am surprised that there weren't fewer kids dying of milk anthrax or something.

Rickets was a socialist conspiracy invented by Michael Foot. Then Tebbit came back with homosexuality, a ridiculous concept, and look how many people fell for that. People are so gullible!