You mean your club doesn’t have a dirty great, broadsheet- sized, full-colour intellectual quarterly? Really? Mine does. Clever Giuseppe Mascoli, who’s been sprucing up Blacks in Dean Street a bit lately, has a hand in The Drawbridge, a really quite amazing pinkish newspaper full of the kind of tousled sociopaths you used to see only in The New Left Review.
A roster that includes cheeky Slavoj Zižek, cuddly John Berger, prickly Noam Chomsky and bloody Gerry Adams (plus loads of other lefties, situationists and topers you’ve heard of). Fair takes the breath away.
All, I’m reliably assured, were chivvied into producing copy (this issue’s theme is ‘Failure’) because they are members and no money changed hands. This I don’t believe. If Gerry Adams is a member of Blacks it’s definitely news to me: I’ve seen various former Pythons, a few think-tankers and billions of media types at Blacks, but definitely not Noam Chomsky. I wonder if they’re doling out honorary memberships in return for contributions…