About dead famous people

It’s all starting to feel a bit 2016 again, as on successive days we have to process the deaths of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama, three people who in their own very different ways, channelled their art as much into being themselves as into doing or making stuff. We still have the music, the movies, the art but not the blonde locks, the raised eyebrow, the fact of living in a psychiatric hospital. And of course we have the vexed question of how important each was, how much bandwidth the media should devote, why they get more column inches than, say, the Belgian lobber of custard pies Noël Godin or the bodies being pulled out of the Nepalese mud.And in the midst of this (specifically, between Dolly and Tim), I go to a celebration of someone who pushed off a few years ago, Martin Amis. Well, some were celebrating him but there was a ghost at the feast, albeit one who‘d been invited. Will Self (for it was he), held court for about 40 minutes in a Soho bar, laying into what he…