Awful writes put boring limits on things. Whistler’s painting, which he called ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 ‘ became a painting of his mother once it was written up in a catalogue. Vasari gave a name to Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa’. Maybe those writers thought they were being helpful.

A couple of years ago the owner of Annabel’s nightclub decided to rename a Picasso ‘Annabel’. Nothing helpful about that, unless one of the club’s patrons for some reason needed reminding where they were. His tangle with culture reminds me, though, of something I see happening, more often than not, if I turn to the ‘culture’ pages of any national newspaper (particularly the Guardian). It’s not entirely a straightforward connection, maybe more the reverse: as if someone had tried to rename Annabel’s Picasso.

I mean … attempts to dress up some high-intensity, of the moment, close-at-hand experience as something special. As if someone who finds themselves at Annabel’s every night thinks, after a glass or two, maybe a line or two, that where they are is super-important, a phenomenon, what matters, is laden with significance. Who would argue with them? Aren’t they, in that moment, surely, at the very least, a god?

I wouldn’t recommend this line of thinking.

If culture is being cancelled anywhere it’s in black and white, on the pages of newspapers that tell us they are all about thinking. This writing is not about thinking. Thinking is often difficult. It complicates life before it simplifies it.

Guardian writers, for example, look at where what you write about comes from and what it does. What’s its effect beyond some brief narcissistic fandango you might feel because of its nostalgia, the way it might hopelessly lunge at a target commonly identified as hate-able, or the way it avoids complicating your life.

Here are some words that you could use as a guide of what to cancel from your output:

Netflix.
Amazon.
You.

Please write something that will somehow upset most of your readers.

Kafka wrote that we need ‘books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.’

I think Kafka often used to fall about laughing when he read his writing.

The truth is sometimes terribly amusing.