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Maybe I missed it last time, but there's now a little plaque honouring Brodsky at Zattere, overlooking Guidecca. Such details aside, the Venetian experience remains entirely resistant to change. Any variants are generated by the season or the particular nature of the festivities that happen to be in progress while one is there. The opening of the Art Biennale – that's what the fictional Jeff, a journalist, is there for – permits no variation at all. The artists in their respective countries' pavilions or featured at the Arsenale change, but the experience always conforms to an identical template. I went back this year for the first time since 2007, curious – and more than a little anxious – about seeing it through the latest literary prism (my own). Narcissistic? Of course. How could it not be in a city built on water and perpetually gazing at its own loveliness: an endless succession (this is McCarthy again) of reflections, echoes and mirrorings?

Jeff is way down the art totem pole. That is a major difference between us. I am not on the totem pole at all, and am completely dependent on my wife, who works at a London gallery, for access. She had got me accredited as a journalist, but I had no intention of filing anything. Obliged, at the place where Anselm Kiefer was launching the latest in his fleet of rusty u-boats, to give the name of the publication I worked for I honestly admitted my status by writing "Plus One". Over the first of many bellinis, at the first party of many parties, I said to my wife that, like people who ask a magician to keep doing a trick until they see how it is done – thereby destroying the magic that provokes this desire for serial repetition – we had surely come one time too many.

As usual a lot of the art was garbage ("a waste of one's eyes"), but there were wonderful things too. I suspect that the garbage-mediocrity-greatness ratio is as fixed as the Venetian experience itself; all that changes is the complexion of the component parts (less porn this year, a bit more politics?). And the great things are all-redeeming – in a setting that, in any case, requires no redemption. Such as? The huge bamboo spiral thingy built by Doug and Mike Starn, towering over the neighbouring Guggenheim like some Asian remake of Tatlin's unmade Monument to the Third International. There was a party there, and we ended up perched at the top, swilling bellinis, marvelling at the health and safety implications of our precarious yet stable nest.