Max Porter

We are in a shouty place.

And I think from shouty places only come rushed or hasty or improper, unstable conclusions.

I think a society has to talk in depth about its things, right from social policy all the way through to novels.

So I am interested in reviews.

With this book I knew that it would bother people and I was interested in to what extent it would bother people if they didn't know a lot about Francis Bacon.

And I'm afraid since it's come out I've become quite entrenched and quite stubborn about this.

It pisses me off a little bit because I think that we live in an extraordinary time and actually with a single click of the mouse button, you can find out a lot about Francis Bacon.

It would only take you about 20 seconds to find out the basic facts of his life and immerse yourself quite quickly in what a Francis Bacon painting is.

He didn't have a huge amount of range.

In a 60-year career, he painted lots of pictures that are more or less the same.

Their bodies pinned to space.

they're one or two faces or bits of meat chucked in an empty made-up interior you know.

so you can see what Bacon is.

you can also see where he died.

you can see some of his lovers like he's very very famous.

i didn't go esoteric.

i went right to the most baggage heavy painter i could find.

that was the point of the exercise you know was to get this famous person up and gasping on their deathbed to deal with fame and reputation.

So the idea that a book needs to be all the time pleasurable, all the time totally understandable, all the time totally transparent, and that we must have nothing difficult or opaque, it's a bit like the attack on pretentiousness.

And you know, there's that wonderful book called On Pretentiousness, which quotes Jarvis Cocker saying, pretentious?