I don't recall…

If like me - and you're all like me, aren't you? - you'll have been stunned by the incidence of Alzheimer's Disease amongst those running the country or producing newspapers. Tony Blair, David Cameron, Osborne, Hunt, Dacre, the Murdochs - clearly they spent the early 90s eating British Beef and their brains have the consistency of Swiss cheese.

But how forgetful are they really? Well, one hardworking chap has done the analysis:

Being a politician        2.48% average    8x worse than the average person 

Being Prime Minister   3.77% average    12x worse than the average person 

Being involved in the Jeremy Hunt affair 5.94%  nearly 20x worse than the average man on the street 

Being a senior Murdoch Employee  5.77% 19x worse 

Being on the Government side in that deal 6.74% worse

Obviously I'm not an epidemiologist, but this looks statistically significant to me. Clearly being in the Establishment is bad for your health. And for the public sphere:

So government ministers, and their civil servants and special advisors involved in the Hunt affair have memories that are over 22x worse than  the average person. One government witness on their own had 58 memory failures, as many failures of memory as the total in the whole of the of the first module. or a rate of one memory failure every fifteen questions. 

Who has the worst memory? From this graph (click to enlarge), it's Jeremy Hunt's advisor Adam Smith, followed by Andy Coulson, with James Murdoch and David Cameron rather suspiciously close together. As the author points out, it's rather worrying for various other people that Rampaging Rebekah Brooks appears not to be relying on the Ernest Saunders defence - she'll be spilling the beans, we hope.

 More fine analysis here. Which brings us to the Readers' Poll: are our leaders liars or seriously mentally ill? Answers on a postcard…

The Death of the Author. Live.

The Death of the Author is a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes which posits that the author's intentions and context shouldn't be taken into account when reading a text: meaning is repeatedly created in the space between the words on the page (expressed in a language which predates and survives the author) and the reader's interpretation(s) rather than fixed. An author might try to constrain interpretation, but it's hard to do: the reader might be 200 years later, in a completely different context. Not that authors don't try: read Susan Suleiman's excellent Authoritarian Fictions for some examples.

However, the Death of the Author means something slightly different today. I've just ordered Terry Pratchett's new novel, Snuff. The title alone is redolent of death - snuffed out, snuff movies - and the work is a fantasy take on the murder-in-the-library country house crime genre. As a fan and admirer of Pratchett's increasingly leftwing satire, I'm sure it will be a winner.

But - I'm increasingly aware of a personal and public interest in Pratchett that impinges directly on the Death of the Author. Pratchett announced some time ago that he's contracted Alzheimer's disease. He's made documentaries about its progress, spoken movingly about the need for euthanasia, and donated large amounts of money to research. What concerns me is that there's a morbid interest in the books that isn't literary. I'm starting to feel that we aren't reading the books, we're reading the author, searching the text for indication of Pratchett's mental decline - perhaps a narrowed vocabulary, maybe a looser plot. It's like rubber-necking a car crash.

The problem is that I can't ignore it. If I didn't know about Pratchett's condition, I'd read the book and judge it by comparison with his previous work, with other authors, with my own mental conception of a successful novel. Now, I'm forced to read the novel in the prism of Alzheimer's, and I resent that. I'm not a purist Death of the Author critic: I'm interested in the context of a work's generation, but I'm finding it hard not to read Pratchett through the novel, as though it's an index of its author rather than a discrete work of art, which I'm sure he'd hate too.

We can hardly blame the media for milking all the pathos it can out of the situation - one could hardly expect vampires to swear off a drop of the red stuff - but I don't like it one little bit. When's the decline coming? How much editing is needed before publication? Will the publishers wring him dry or do the decent thing when the time comes? The clock's ticking. It's Celebrity Literary Deathwatch - and we're all hooked. Ugh.