Bookbag: Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis

He nails authenticity to something hard:

After I had confessed in the courts, I could hardly wait to write a book confessing the real truth behind the mere court one. A bare six months after my book was out–and reviewers everywhere applauding the way I had bared myself utterly–I began to have the feeling tht I had said nothing at all about what really mattered. I sat down and wrote a kind of 'private' confession (it was later published) that sought to go behind its predecessor. Within a year, that, too, struck me as meaningless. Indeed, I began to feel that far from stripping myself really naked, each confession only covered me with stil another petticoat. I began to think of confessions in term of infinite regression--the very act of making one would cause another to pop up behind it.

Great British satirical minds think alike? If being authentic/confessional/natural is only a pose, then the only thing to do is give ourselves up to roles. I wish more people were willing to make the leap. It would make conversation so much more colorful.

More Dennis, this time just for fun:

When I was being pubescent, both my parents were killed in a railway accident. Dr Shubunkin tells me that this is the railway accident that has carried off thousands of obtrusive parents ever since Stephenson introduced 'The Rocket': before then, he says, it was done with landslides. I wish he had been present to point this out to me when I looked down on those poor, mutilated bodies, fully-clothed for once. It would have made all the difference to know that these corpses were expressions of an old literary tradition and not my parents at all.