Martin Amis

Martin Amis does look very good, though. In an awfully old-fashioned way. He's a Dead White Male bewildered to be alive.

He needs to go back to his roots.

all his novels are rubbish.

that said, two/three years ago i *loved* experience and then liked the war against cliche. i need to reread them in the hope they're rubbish; if not he remains an excellent journalist and a terrible novelist.

Take away Money, and they're almost the same. But TF's collection of short stories (What's it called? Don't Read This If You're Stupid?) is worse than anything MA's done. Including his collections of short stories, if you can believe that.

i can't usually even finish a SENTENCE by amis

Shit, you're in trouble. That explains everything. I love Martin Amis's sentences. That's his talent. No-one writes better sentences. He just can't put them in the right order to make a great book (apart from Money).

cz whenever i read a rave review it always quotes one of two lame things: a sentence the reviewer really likes which i think is k-lousy, or an insight into pop or politics which the reviewer thinks is amazing and i think is either trite or just wrong

(amis has always had a complete tin ear for pop culture as far as i can tell, and is — in certain quarters — raved abt by ppl whose ear is actually worse) (he also hasn't the faintest idea when it comes to politics but i'm not really bothered by that as neither have loads of ppl i like lots)

i have tried to start several of his books but not got far before i put them down in puzzlement, really: when's the good stuff start?

(rachel papers i got furthest with)

1) Martin is good, but not as good as Kingsley.
2) Martin's good enough to be somebody, but he wouldn't be who he is if he weren't Kingsley's son.
3) Given what a badass Kingsley was, however, it's astonishing how good Martin actually is.

Yeah, but there's never just the one thing to anything. To add to you: "he wouldn't be who he is if he weren't Kingsley's son and didn't write so well". Or: "he wouldn't be who he is if he weren't Kingsley's son and didn't seem so unbothered by the whole palaver". Or: "he wouldn't be who he is if he weren't Kingsley's son and didn't look so cool".

I dunno, in most cases, and specifically this one, it's less interesting to say, "he wouldn't be that if he weren't..." than it is to say, "he could be this if he were..."

I like 'im; I just like dad more, and like a select set of fathers and sons, I find it almost impossible to isolate the former from the latter, even in idle consideration.

That was exactly the feeling I got when reading the two M.A. novels I've read (London Fields and The Information).

I didn't like 'The Rachel Papers', the lead character was too much of a shithead and not nearly as clever as Amis probably thought.

I liked his justification for Primo Levi's suicide in afterword to Time's Arrow, but that's still not enough to make me want to read the rest of it.

i saw newsnight review - that guy from causalty should be on every week.

Tibor Fischer is v good, although as his novels progressed he showed worrying signs of disappearing up his own arse.

(everyone else: apologies for intrusive advert)

I was quite the Amis fan as a nipper. I think it's undeniable that his prosody has been one of the more vivid aspects of postwar Eng-lit . Nevertheless I often find myself wondering: wouldn't he have been better if he'd decided to become the missing link between late Larkin and early Peter Reading? He has a great lyric gift for disgust, and that's mostly what keeps his novels alive. It's just when he starts floundering with characterisation, plot, moral significance, etc that things go awry. Maybe if he'd been content with writing riffs rather than getting in the ring with Mr Bellow, we might be happier with his writing.

That said, 'Money's is still the best English novel of the 80s.

JtN is OTM re: Money. It's foul but brilliant. I liked the excerpt of Yellow Dog that was in last Saturday's Guardian. That said, I enjoyed Tom Paulin talking about the book on The Late Review much, much more.

http://eaton-terry.blogspot.com/

friday 29th august entry.

haha also yes: if "experience" had been called "my struggle" i wd certainly have got round to reading it by now

BUT. I do enjoy 'Dead Babies', the ridiculous but wonderfully taut 'Other People'(one of the few times he's ever convinced me he's writing of London rather than about it in a condescending fashion) and even much of 'London Fields' and the cheerfully misogynist 'Rachel Papers'. But 'Money' I just thought was interminable guff- and I was reslient enough to finish 'Experience' (great on Kingsley, insufferable on 'my pal Saul' and the occasional cod-profound musings.

"None of us would...?" yes, Colin, sperm vs egg and all that... this is intensely naive. INTENSELY. God, Brian's even allowing that Amis IS a decent, funny, engaging writer... WHEN he's not being horrifically self-indulgent, which is one of the most striking hallmarks of the writer who got notice before he paid his dues. Amis fils would have a more consistently good body of work, let's face it, had he had to claw; consequently, he might have been almost as famous as he is in his half-baked state. And believe me: when he's writing his best, I enjoy him loads and loads. But lacking Amis pere we might've been spared certain cases of novel-bloat, not to mention the fricking hand-wringing essays about the bomb. (i.e. the aforementioned "must be deep! must be important!" prob.)

And "paying dues"... "consistently good body of work"...!! I thought you were some kind of punkstress Ann! You sound like a pub rocker!

I am imagining Ann writing a rejection letter to Vladimir Nabokov:
"This is all very lovely, Mr N, but have you put your hours in on the city desk of the Minsk Tribune yet?"

I didn't know that, but it seems you're avoiding the point: did he do it before he was a success? Did he do any word-by-word, labor-heavy editorial stuff, or did he read submissions? There's a world of difference between things like copyediting, editing journalism copy, top editing, picking stories, etc... Most important, was his own work held up to intense editorial scrutiny before he was given the waving checkered flag? Of course, there are roughly four gazillion variables that go into the making of a set of writing skills. And for christ's sake listen to what I said above: I LIKE MUCH OF HIS WORK. I JUST THINK THERE WOULD BE MORE GOOD, LESS BAD, IF CERTAIN OF THOSE VARIABLES HAD BEEN DIFFERENT IN HIS CASE. Were I a less menial editorial employee and had bigger decisions to make, I WOULDN'T reject Dead Babies. I MIGHT reject Money, or if I already knew what Martin was capable of (hm, so the leg up only helps one at first?) I'd make the little snot go back and rewrite it.

PS I love Nabokov, so don't start!

Oh and Bri, I YAM gonna start on Nabokov, re: Kingsley yelling at Martin for idolizing him. Go Kinsgley, even though I like Nabokov too -- TO READ. Not to emulate, because only Nabokov can do Nabokov. At all. I mean, obviously you shouldn't try to utterly copy anyone, but there's really not even anything you can learn as a writer from Nabokov. You just read it and go, "Nice job being Nabokov, Nabokov! Back to Planet Me now..."

One reason for my reaction doubtless is its regular reference to me.

Mark S is right to say that I say things about sentences.

Cozen is nice to say that I would like to say something about sentences via an interesting sentences.

Lara is nice to say that I would not be likely to write a bad sentence about good sentences.

I do recognize Amis's sentence gift. But I think we need a way of recognizing his at least occasional excellence at that, and his very frequent absymality in other departments, at the same time, or even in an interrelated nay 'dialectical' way.

The Nipper has a point, though presumably the disciplines of good prose and good verse differ.

Mark S is also right to say that Amis is terrible on pop culture. This point has been more extensively made by the Nipper (private conversation, outside a pizza takeaway place once upon a time). It is very important NOT to confuse Amis's apparent 'wallowing in the grime of the real' with a... real... commitment to the complexity of the real - which would include eg. 'the popular' in its many forms. He is fundamentally out of touch in some ways; though that looks a crude criticism.

My problem with Amis is not so much the one about him not being able to string together a novel. It is more of a ... moral problem. I think he relentlessly writes nasty books about nastiness and is never satisfactorily called to account about what this suggests about the basic nastiness of his imagination. Debates about whether or not he can write good sentences can be a smokescreen behind which, or in the midst of which, he makes his escape from... moral criticism as above.

It might be important to find a way of criticizing Amis's nastiness which was not foolishly moralistic or pre-Wildean. The nastiness, I maintain, is basic to the writing (I don't know about The Man), and his aestheticism and mandarin persona has allowed him to escape serious censure on this. On that Front Row interview he evens said that people who don't like his work are 'people who don't like novels of sentences'. This is plainly false.

I like how Toby noticed the inanity of the 'yellow world' comment.

I like N's Money comment.

London Fields is, I'm afraid, abysmal. It made Gravity's Rainbow rise in my fiction chart.

(sigh) It's just too easy to skip over somebody's point when they're using deliberately absurd rhetorical devices, isn't is? Let me be a bit more prosaic. Show of hands: how many have read as much of Kingsley as of Martin, if you've read any KA whatsoever? Bonus points if you learned Amis pere was a writer while reading this thread.

Self-professed Nabokovians such as Amis (M) would be particularly sensitive to the cruel & sadistic partialities of narrative structures, and in the contest between those structures and the character apparently confined within those structures (Amis more or less directly asserts that he's addressing this in Money).

His novels are concerned with facing down cruelty and sadism, rather than embracing them, but have to practise in part what they preach against, while also trying not to appear to be preaching. Is the objection that he oversteps a mark in doing so?

Neil W makes his point well, but I don't agree that MA is really facing down nastiness. I feel that he is in love with nastiness, and pretends to be facing it down so he can continue with his affair.

I thought more about the Nipper's prose / poetry point, and thought: maybe genre and 'moral imagination' are linked. Maybe Amis is more of a natural novelist than people think, because that genre allows more nastiness than poetry. Then again, maybe the discipline of lyric poetry would have shaped or shown a different moral imagination, and we would have seen a less nasty, more appealing writer. So I think the Nipper's hypothesis is fruitful.

He comes over as a tremendous cock as a person, but pffft, who doesn't.

maybe just coz i'm not british but i take lots of pleasure from this all. i mean viciousness and revulsion are always as much an impact as any, but someone who can keep ppl. reading thru them instead of turning away -- thats what makes it really work.

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/LoginPage.asp?P_Article=7786

Apart from and after all the rest of it, I am awfully tickled by this sevenmonthold paragraph of mine:

I thought more about the Nipper's prose / poetry point, and thought: maybe genre and 'moral imagination' are linked. Maybe Amis is more of a natural novelist than people think, because that genre allows more nastiness than poetry. Then again, maybe the discipline of lyric poetry would have shaped or shown a different moral imagination, and we would have seen a less nasty, more appealing writer.

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Ballocks, 'Money' is obv his best. As for all this 'famous dad' stuff -- that wouldn't have kept him afloat any longer than his first book. He's capable of awful guff, but 'YD' is tempting me. I've hated all his stuff since 'The Information', but... here's hoping.

I also like the story in Heavy Water about poets being Hollywood movers. "Twill Be - the sequal to Tis. And the prequel Twas."

I like Other People too, although I thought Sartre was a little harsh on it.

The rot set in when he decided he was a serious writer with something to say. "Money" was pretty dire, and subsequent books progressively less readable (apart from "Experience", which I thought an interesting and occasionally moving read, but then I'm a lot more interested in Kingsley than Martin.)

I loathe his firecracker sentences. I don't even like it when Bellow does the same thing, and he does it with much more imagination and panache. KA was on to something when he said something along the lines of "why can't you write a sentence like They finished their drinks and went home

The Pinefox's comments about "nastiness" strike a chord with me although I also feel a bit uneasy about it. Nabokov is obviously a hero, particular Lolita with its formal dazzle and *nasty* content (although Amis doesn't come close to having the technical skill to pull that off).

Also he feels that he's working in a tradition where the artist's function is to startle the bourgeois out of its complacency (while himself epitomising bourgeoise complacency). I think this is a rubbish justification for art, and I'm not saying it excuses the nastiness but it does make me wonder how much of it is a reflection of MAs personality and how much of it is conventional or PR, like heavy rock bands who say they are into Satanism.

I think we may have discussed above (or on Nabokov thread?) the possible distinction between MA's nastiness and VN's. I am prepared to believe with Rorty that there's moral purpose in VN's masterpieces. I don't think I am prepared to grant MA his moral purpose.

I am interested in mark s's problems w/ Amis and pop culture, also Hitchens and pop culture -- though I think he overstates them; fact is very few writers of any kind of Amis' age (or indeed Sinker's) are up on pop culture.

Also wtf is up with all this Kingsley revisionism? I've only read 'Lucky Jim' but it's tearible (v. sexist, only occasionally funny), and ppl seem to think it's his best!

Should I?

amazing

no-one else see him on c4 news

I saw him

yeh me too!

It is the first time I've seen what he actually looks like. I'd imagined him fat, for some reason. He certainly has an unnerving demeanour. Almost demonic, but not quite energetic enough.

I liked at the end when he was kind of staring at the table and peter snow thanked him and he gruffly said "thanks" and wiped or scraped his upper lip w/ his thumb or something funny like that

I didn't like what he said about "disproportionate" responses to Iraq. That seemed to be the least rational thing he said. Was he going to bite his nails at the end or was he just getting ready to throw his microphone into the sea?

ha xpost - oh so THAT's what happened

money is funny

Whatever unimportant gesture it was, it looked like pure evil.

his "nastiness" is great, btw

I'm going to read this thread now, because I know almost nothing about Martin Amis. That interview frightened me into thinking I ought to find out. I was frightened. Imagine having him at a party!

MONEY is hillarious yeah. So is RACHEL.

the Information is really hilarious!

Did he say anything interesting? I saw him live once and he was excruciating. He pontificated on "the pornography of the quotidian", and then informed us that "Salman says 'pussy is bullshit'". Put me right off him, so it did.

he's a total wank

crosspost

apparently spain translate the same number of books into to spanish that the arab world have translated into arabic in the last thousand as if that means anything

He didn't really say anything interesting, no. I caught the end of the interview so I wasn't sure why he was doing it in the first place (mopping up some sort of controversy, I presume, from the way it went).

Snow: Are you Islamophobic?
Amis: No.
Snow: Do you think you are morally superior to followers of Islam?
Amis: I keep an intellectual distance from all religions.

THIS IS NOT AN ACCURATE TRANSCRIPT.

They're just bits I remember.

not to spanish osted spanish

Yes, I caught a bit of what RJG said as well. I was lost, but thought it was because of joining the interview late.

It was funny when he was claiming people were stupid for not reading his essays properly and stuff.

Snow: Are you your father's son?
Amis: *lots of waffle*

terry eagleton said, in the intro to his new book, that martin's dad was an old racist and that so is martin

they both teach at manchester university, I think

MA gets so much shit for being the son of KA, it's ridiculous.

is the "story"

(Koba The Dread. Laughter and the Twenty Million is the only book by Martin A. that I've read. Not the most typical of him, I suspect.)

Oh. Thanks, RJG. I shall investigate further.

"Amis: I keep an intellectual distance from all religions."

fair enough, innit?

cathy sez:

hearing what he said about translation into arabic, I thought "that
sounds like bollocks". so, after 30 seconds googling, I discover that,
yes, it is in fact bollocks.

here is the relevant bit from the article:

Amis bemoans the "extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture," and claims
that "present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish,
annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past
1,100 years." There is no source for this fantastic claim. But setting
aside the obvious, which is that Islamic culture is far more
linguistically diverse than the Middle East, let us instead focus on
translation in the Arab world. In 2002, the UNDP's Arab Human
Development Report revealed that the 22 countries of the Arab world
together translate only about 330 books annually, fewer than the
nation of Greece.

Yet this report (and Amis) fails to point out a few other facts: a)
the number is based on a count of copyrighted books, which is only a
portion of what is available on the market in Arab bookstores-the rest
are pirated translations; b) many educated people in the Arab world
read second languages (in Morocco, for example, every high school
graduate is fully bilingual or trilingual) so they can read in other
languages beside their own, making translation unnecessary for many
titles; c) literacy in the Arab world remains far lower than in
Europe, and so the lack of translation is a direct result of the lack
of readership, as opposed to any intrinsic "incuriosity" of Arabs; and
d) the United States, which has far higher literacy rates and an
enormously successful publishing industry, manages to translate - wait
for it - about 330 books per year.

the whole article, by laila lalami, is here:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/laila_lalami/2006/09/post_376.html

he was bad.

eagleton is a fucking nut too, but it was bad.

jon snow was also bad.

the whole thing is awful and they should all stfu.

xpost

second paragraph obviously begs quite a few questions but yeah.

i mean "translation rates are low because of state censorship and widespread illiteracy" is kind of terrible. but then so is "islamic culture is incurious".

Wow, Mr Amis appears to be quite silly! But I'll do more reading, just to be sure.

I did think, during the Channel 4 thing: ROBERT KILROY SILK.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2190208,00.html

i wouldn't read him as a political thinker. that would be a bad idea--yet 'ironically' he's less of an insane ranting warmonger than his old mucker christopher hitchens despite never even pretending to be left-wing as 'the hitch' did. they've beefed a fair amount in the last few years.

but i guess for context check the reaction to his uh slightly 'disproportionate' 'koba the dread', which basically said all western intellectuals 1930-2002 were card-carrying stalinists. that pissed a lot of people off -- eagleton, who was in fact a stalinist, among them -- and so this sort of turns the tables on him.

haha, cathy said "I hope he goes the way of ... robert kilroy silk!" and in her pause I thought she was going to say theo van gogh

(Haha! Pls say hello to Cathy. )

(hello)

No, he's no political thinker - in fact he's a prime example of how the privileged can completely lack any self-awareness. 'Koba the dread' is pretty good though. Plus I'm in favour of reactionary winding up academia and the chattering classes as a matter of principle, such is their smugness and self-certainty.

on the news they had that terrible independent columnist saying 'omg it's MARTIN AMIS and everyone hangs on every word he says, so he should say such things...' and i don't really know what planet she's on. he has a relatively small public and the rest of the world goes about its business. arguably via writing lots of textbooks eagleton has a bigger influence on da yoot than amis.

but i do think he's relatively self-aware -- and actually enjoys being asked wife-beater questions so he can complain about it later. i mean the quotes from the interview that eagleton used were momus-101 trolling.

Good point about relative influence. Amis has none in the world at large, but he might have a role in shaking academic opinion up a bit. I mean, his views are hardly extreme - it's only to the likes of Eagleton that he's a racist and a fascist, but most academics think the same, at least publicly. And, like you say, those views do have some degree of influence. If the likes of Amis encourage a few academics to be a bit bolder, that's a good thing. Even if Amis is a tosser.

Almost as irritating as Tom Wolfe, but I like (what I've read of) their books all the same.

he's not as much of an out-an-out conservative as wolfe, and i don't think any of his novels are as racist as wolfe's. amis is, as i say, fairly self-aware about what he's doing. cf having a character called martin amis in 'money'.

MA gets a lot of his anti-Stalin juice from Robert Conquest, an old right-wing pal of KA. Conquest was one of the first academics in the UK to expose/critique Stalinst war crimes.

Experience is the only one of his books I really love, and, like most autobiography, it's great fiction.

Poll potential here.

MA gets a lot of his anti-Stalin juice from Robert Conquest

Well he does openly and frequently reference Conquest in Koba-teh-Dick.

koba the dread is frustrating because there's a great idea in there - the glamour and deep (or maybe shallow) appeal that trotsky (and to a lesser extent lenin) holds for a certain kind of western intellectual. the fact that virtually every western history of the russian revolution plays up lenin/october and downplays kerensky/february is pretty symptomatic of that, as is hitchens' reverence for trotsky.

but amis just completely throws away that great idea and wastes the book on stalin, completely destroying the point of his book because stalin was NEVER the focus of guys like amis sr.; they either cherished the soviet cause (i.e., lenin) or the coming revolution (i.e., trotsky). so instead of attacking the root of western pro-soviet feeling (i.e., the october revolution), he spends 200 pages quoting all the books he's just read.

Of course Amis is self-aware. Painfully (& for the reader, often, hilariously) so. If you don't get this from his novels, he hammers it home in 'Experience'.

He's one of the most honest writers (& interviewees) I can think of. He knows he comes across as a tosser, but he's willing to pay that price for trying to do something new.
How many other British novels of the 70s/80s have the same creative energy of 'Success', 'L Fields' or 'Money'? How many young writers these days would think "My heroes are Joyce, Nabokov & Bellow & I'm going to try & take them on"? He may have failed (& freely admits to it), but was at least willing to try (to strain towards profundity) in public.

yeah

kingsley used to argue with him over his writing on nuclear weapons, complaining that he devoted pages to the issue but never actually came up with anything approaching a solution. he has the same problem now with islamic fundamentalism.

Pretty painful interview. The whole thing is a clusterfuck, confirmed by the involvement of the awful Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I lost all respect for Eagleton when he wrote a nigh-on incomprehensible review of that Dawkins book about god in the LRB.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,,2214479,00.html

the hitch weighs in.

the bennett article (and before that the eagleton article) was so bad that i kind of give hitch the benefit of the doubt here.

A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen. The "out" groups are all made up of generalised amalgams and there can be no exceptions.

I got this far and stopped reading.

Bennett article still less embarassing than Chris Morris trying to clown Amis with sixth form debate tactics

Jeez, the first paragraph of that Hitchens article. It's like when people say "I'm not homophobic because homophobic literally means..." etc etc.

Hitchens: 'One would have to have a capacity for fantasy of something like that order to believe in the Ronan Bennett universe of modern persecution where "...those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists." In which known world is that happening?'

----

Martin Amis: 'Accordingly, given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is obliged to plump for the Saudi, thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine with the following tenets: it is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal.'

given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden

Poll?

http://www.herobuilders.com/images/HB0016_sm.jpg vs. http://www.vicalecorporation.com/images/HB0015_sm.jpg

Osama's got the reach there.

George has a bindi though.

Is Texas part of the Netherlands these days?

Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another.

Bennett unable to tell difference between races and nationalities?

i think that just about works. race and nationality are basically mutable, and anglo prejudice against the irish -- not a stable national category over time -- has been basically 'racist'.

Also Bennett (and possible Eagleton I dunno) does actually bring up the Irish, so it's fair enough of Hitchens to respond using that example.

I agreed with the main thrust of the Bennett article even if its tone was cringeworthingly handwringing, pompous and a teeny bit self-aggrandising.

Thought Bennett article got better after its awful opening gambit.

haha i didn't read beyond opening gambit.

Doesn't anyone think Amis deserved to be called on this? Indeed on his whole schtick post Sept 11 2001?

he has been called on it numerous times, usually by dipshits like eagleton tho.

the thing of it is: who goes to creative writers for cogent or intelligent political commentary? he is a fool to get caught up in it, in a way, because he's out of depth.

and it is a literary spat, really, unless you think the name martin amis has much suction in, like, politics, or even among the nation in general.

http://unspeak.net/any-ethnicity/

'the thing of it is: who goes to creative writers for cogent or intelligent political commentary? he is a fool to get caught up in it, in a way, because he's out of depth.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2214328,00.html

See first letter.

His dad would be so pissed.

(UK and US usage.)

x-posts

I agree that Eagleton's a dipshit, but I think Bennett's right to say that he seems to have got the flack for criticising Amis' views, which seems unfair.

I don't expect cogent commentary from Amis or other writers; but the fact that they are able to air their views via the media means that they should be taken to task for talking bollocks. It's just a shame that Eagleton and Bennett are the only two high profile people to have done so, at least AFAIK.

yeah i'm also still scared to read the amis original. weak excuse: i'm sort of more interested in the... institutional structure of this kind of argument. these things get said in the press every day, but when creative writers (bennett is one too) square off, *then* it becomes something to talk about.

i'm not defending amis on this score because, while i don't think he is advocating strip-searching middle eastern-looking folks at airports, he's clearly pretty hardline. scanning bennett, he's equally bad at this kind of thing: the historical parallels between now and the immigration scare of 100 years ago just don't track.

when it's a substantive issue, like terms of detention without trial, the guardian is scared to use flamethrower language, for reasons that should probably go elsewhere. but when it's a novelist talking saloon-bar bullshit, they go all out.

xposts

haha i thought pete's link wd be an amis stan. mcewan does much better than amis.

Even the last line of the McEwan letter? FFS doesn't that actually confirm Bennett's point about painting a religion of x millions of people in such broad brush strokes? Especially when Bennett acknowledges that Muslim bigots should be called out in the same way as bigots of any other stripe?

I dunno, the last paragraph of McEwan's letter is nearly as bad as 'Saturday'.

x-post

(Maybe I come from an idealistic place where, yes, I *do* want to turn to authors for cogent political debate, and I'm not really sure what makes them any less qualified than, say, David Aaronovich, to provide it).

Ah, but Matt, don't you know that 'When you ask a novelist or a poet his or her view of the world, you do not get a politician's or a sociologist's answer. You may not like what you hear, but reasoned debate is the appropriate response, not vilification by means of overheated writing, an ugly defamatory graphic, and inflated, hysterical pull-quotes.'?

Love somebody defending Amis by accusing his opponent of 'overheated writing'...

Even the last line of the McEwan letter? FFS doesn't that actually confirm Bennett's point about painting a religion of x millions of people in such broad brush strokes? Especially when Bennett acknowledges that Muslim bigots should be called out in the same way as bigots of any other stripe?

-- Matt DC, Wednesday, November 21, 2007 12:19 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

mcwean's last line is "I wonder whether Ronan Bennett would care to expend so much of his rhetorical might excoriating at similar length the thugs who murdered - in the name of their religion - their fellow citizens in London in 2005." i don't think that confirms what bennett says -- how does it?

not only that but bennett sort of pulls back from the "muslim bigots should be criticized like all bigots"; he continues:

British Muslims I have spoken to now talk about feeling "deluged" by hostile comment. Hardly a day goes past when they are not lectured and scolded by writers claiming to be the champions of true liberalism. Muslims who argue for Muslim schools are criticised by journalists who send their children to Christian or Jewish faith schools. Muslim women who choose to wear the niqab are upbraided by powerful politicians who claim to feel "intimidated". Those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are antisemites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists.

some of that is true; the bit about faith schools is iffy (i had thought we secularists were against all religious schools); the bit about "true liberalism" is snide, because again, true liberalism *is* secular in the end; the "choosing to wear niqab" bit is evasive; the war thing is ridiculous -- i know amis said that stupid bush-vs-osama thing, but come on, srsly? i'm against the war and haven't once felt that i've been called a moral relativist (i'm not) or an al-quida supporter (i'm not).

I *do* want to turn to authors for cogent political debate

yes but not Amis!

Chuck Klosterman?

I *do* want to turn to authors for cogent political debate

background to me not wanting to do this: am studying men like eliot, pound, waugh, auden, greene, at the moment, in other words BOXCAR! NO NO NO.

Yes that Bennett para was particularly dodgy, but my point was that why are the July 7th bombings relevant here? Does Ian McEwan know whether or not Bennett condemned them? With everyone in the world's media condemning an obvious atrocity, is it even necessary for him to have done so? It's 'Have Your Say' level of debate.

(Next up - "If Eagleton and Bennett like Islam so much why don't they go and live there?" - Will Self)

why are the July 7th bombings relevant here?

they're the whole context of the argument. amis's original remarks were a momus-like "imagined response" to the planned airplane hijacks of 2006 (no-one charged for them, they may be bullshit).

bennett removes the actual bombings, the failed bombings, and the possiblity that there are people who would commit more bombings, from the argument. obviously those things are all fuel for islamophobes, but in a discussion of islamism in britain, you have to be able to talk about them somehow. i think you have to be able to talk about them in the same way that you have to be able to talk about faith schools being a terrible idea.

bennett's 'hamburg cell' is this weirdly bland version of how the 9/11 bombers became the 9/11 bombers -- it might be interesting to compare it with amis's atta story (which i haven't read -- tbh i don't rep for any post-80s amis).

Martin Amis pwned by Chris Morris, yay!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2216701,00.html

I dunno, it's not very good really. And that's his second attempt at Amis -- he made a tit of himself a few weeks ago in the first one, pwning himself in effect.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/17/martin-amis-iran

I'm kind of pumped for this, but I'm really not sure about the Italian castle, and I'm also wondering whether MA has entered Bob Dylan territory with his critics, where they start crying 'return to form' with every new piece that comes along, and, although the new pieces may well have certain praiseworthy qualities, they are being praised for things they used to do and not for the things they do now.

A bit of a lazy review as well -

He's had a go at Americans called Russia and women called He and one of the problems with all these characters is that they have sounded too smart, too Mart.

I'm not sure this is true - as woof and a couple of others have pointed out elsewhere, it feels more like the need he feels for importance which has hamstrung his recent stuff. 'Too smart, too Mart' is great with his criticism and comic stuff, but it's not smart or Mart enough when it comes to politics and surface profundity.

Also, that 'too smart, too Mart' line, is a good example of a critic getting infected by the prose of his subject - which in a backhanded sort of way shows the great strength of MA - his incredibly potent literary voice. It's so catchy.

So yes, looking forward to this I think.

I'm also wondering whether MA has entered Bob Dylan territory with his critics, where they start crying 'return to form' with every new piece

idk about that.

think he shd stop doing interviews rly -- i haven't read a book of his since 'experience' but all the nonfic has been fine. it's just he comes off as a nobber in interviews.

Yep, agreed. Was more thinking about how critics approach him in that 'is he as good as he used to be?' sort of way. I think his criticism is great, and his journalistic stuff too. There's a sort of weird fascination in watching him enter into this weird media pact to maul his personality by saying utterly dumb things in public. I mean, end-of-a-heavy-night-in-the-pub sort of things. Strange.

nothing says new york in 1981 like... gang of four and joy division

apropos?

this adaptash of 'money' on now

i think the book's good

this is kinda pointless though

i figured it wd be wrong so I let Mrs V watch some shit about WAGS on BBC3. Did i see Nick Frost playing Self?

yeah

i think we should have met the character 'martin amis' by now and we haven't, and there isn't one credited, so i think they've bottled that

nick frost isn't quite right, but none of it's quite right

vincent kartheiser is good casting

films of books where the "plot" is the least important part of the book are never a good idea as far as I can remember.

Saving myself for My Winnipeg at 10.

What channel's it on?

bbc2

BBC2. I'm watching and it kind of sucks, but in a less fun way than the Boy George film sucked.

HM, I'm here to tell you that Joy Division were DEFINITELY played in NYC clubs in the early '80s and without those clubs we wouldn't have New Order, either.

don't think it works for the vibe of this thing. i mean, i don't think joy division works in clubs anyway, but not the kind of places this dude is going to, ie handjob joints.

and gang of four were kinda congrous with that ze records/mutant funk etc stuff

yeah but that is not this guy's world!

Usually I love calling bullshit on music supervision but enhhhhh, not here. They are doing it right and NYC clubs were a lot more sexual, even for heterosexuals, before HIV.

However I am not being very able to get into this thing, whatever its vibe.

Mark Lawson talks to notorious literary bad boy Martin Amis about his life and career.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00sjccw/Mark_Lawson_Talks_To_Martin_Amis/

just watched money on iplayer... bit meh, tho the guy playing fielding goodney is spot on. history mayne is otm about the music, soundtrack should be a bit more aor, dire straits or something.

what kinda music played in 80s times sq strip clubs and "handjob parlors" - jeez I wouldn't know (blushes)- maybe a radio set to WCBS-FM for endless Billy Joel/Frankie Valli?

I expected this to be bad, and indeed, I realize, I wanted it to be bad, maybe even needed it to be bad and untrue to the novel. But it's really not that bad, certainly not as bad as I think I may have hoped, and in the end I was left feeling: that was oddly true to the novel.

I suppose one reason that bothers me is, if this was true to the novel then the novel can't be that great, cos this can't be that great.

I'm not such a diehard Amis fan that I can't admit my man's inconsistencies or acknowledge a non-fan's objections but double-ugh @ at this "review" that barely mentions the book.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/books/review/Carter-t.html

a few differences from the book: in TV version:

* Self's facial hair
* no Amis character, but David Ames as Martina's neighbour
(no Fenton Akimbo either)
* the old fellow in municipal rompers' line gets given to the old black geezer who picks JS up somewhere across the river in NJ or Queens (who may not even exist in the book)
* JS doesn't get out of the cab at the start till he's reached the hotel
* Fielding here greets him at the hotel and they plan the film - in fact it's like this is showing their PREVIOUS meeting, BEFORE the book starts
* the tennis match doesn't take place on a public court in a hotel with the world champion preceding them
* Martina has become a therapist
* Ossie is dark not blonde
* Selina mentioning JS's parents in her fantasies - don't think she does this in the book
* Selina claiming to have been to Norwich and Brighton, rather than Stratford upon Avon
* the pub is now The Queen's Head - an odd change, this
* don't think that in the book JS protests that his mother wouldn't have liked the pub revamp (which is now a retro-1980s dimension)
* in fact I think that here, the mother maybe left the family (?), whereas in the book she died when he was young
* no Alec Lewellyn

N Frost sometimes does capture the character's coarseness quite well. But his voiceover is somehow way too refined: basically it sounds like a 2000s middle-class person (slumming it slightly), not a 1981 working-class bloke on the make.

The music thing is indeed ambiguous. MA knows almost nothing about music so there is effectively none in the book (and of course no contemporary postpunk / New Romance or anything).

It's not surprising that the retro BBC2 people wanted to put a load of period music in. And though that's kind of crass, it's also kind of apt - it restores something that MA just couldn't get to. (But if 'Relax' does turn up in part II then it's anachronistic as was 'Modern Love' in the Royal Wedding drama - shocking.)

But equally, as has been said, the music here (not all of which is diegetic) is more obscure than you expect - not a load of Wham or whatever but stuff that is definitely not like the character, but maybe does give it a bit more edge. On balance I think probably a good thing.

N Frost sometimes does capture the character's coarseness quite well. But his voiceover is somehow way too refined: basically it sounds like a 2000s middle-class person (slumming it slightly), not a 1981 working-class bloke on the make.

― the pinefox, Monday, 24 May 2010 00:54 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, frost's voice is way off. one of the first things that came to mind.

Never read him. Was hoping this TV adaptation might get me to see past the circus surrounding the guy but I gave up after 20 mins.

Way upthread:

I liked his justification for Primo Levi's suicide in afterword to Time's Arrow, but that's still not enough to make me want to read the rest of it.

What was that? Seems ridiculous to even offer one.

He was really really depressed.

I've actually read/liked TA but don't remember anything that stupid in it, must've blanked it out.

maybe biggest change is loss of Literature as reference point. Book has references to the following, excised on TV:

Martin Amis
Kingsley Amis
James Fenton
Philip Larkin
Gustave Flaubert
James Joyce, probably
Vladimir Nabokov, arguably
John Ashbery
Herman Melville
William Shakespeare (very prominently)
Charles Baudelaire
F. Scott Fitzgerald
George Orwell (major motif!)
William Faulkner

-- that's the main level that's gone, along with most of the literary style?

also they cut the lines about

- would that be the *real* Tracer Hand, sir?
- I wouldn't go that far

very impressed by pinefox's recall of the book

in the end, you can't really film amis's description of needing a piss. you can do little bits in the narration, but you'll never get the voice. a lot of people don't *like* the voice, but he undeniably has one.

iirc only one bellow has been adapted

know there's a film version of SIEZE THE DAY w/ robin williams shudder

always thought gene hackman would've made a great HENDERSON THE RAIN KING

That Seize The Day isn't real, is it? If you're filming Bellow I'd've thought Augie March would be the obvious choice.

you could do it, but you'd lose p much what is distinctive abt bellow -- powers of description epecially

plot + bits of narration = ehh

yeah - imagine WATCHING moses herzog mentally write his letters

I haven't seen the TV thing yet but I read "The War Against Cliche" a couple of weeks ago and was surprised and impressed by how fine a critic MA can be. His favourite writers are not mine but almost every piece had stuff in it that struck me as fresh, subtle and perceptive.

On the other hand I re-read the first 100 or so pages of "Money" to see if I liked it any better than I did last time. Alas I didn't. Its faults seem - unusually for a reread after an interval of a few years - almost exactly as they did first time around. I have a particular problem with the authorial voice, the glory of the novel according to several TV previewers over the past week but in my opinion something of a mess.

The technical problem for Amis is that Self as narrator has to convey the world seen by Amis-as-satirist despite being a buffoon who misses the meaning of most of what's going on. That needed a bravura display of controlled irony. Amis barely attempts it. Self is chronically lacking in awareness when it suits Amis (usually when Self is the satirical target). But he's also given regular access to insights and modes of expression that can only be Amis's own. It's not good enough for Self to miss the significance of what he notices if he keeps noticing stuff that only a much more perceptive person would notice and describing it in a way that only a much more articulate person would describe it.

Maybe I'm being overly conventional in minding about integrity of character. Perhaps there's a post-modernist or other theoretical justification for Self's fluctuating sensibility, so that he can be an idiot when Amis wants to mock idiocy, a thinly disguised alter ego for Amis when he wants to make clever points about the "modern world". But I find it jarring and unsatisfactory.

I reread the first 150 recently and enjoyed it. Might watch the adaptation and push on tonight. I think you're right about those problems with the voice, but it doesn't bother me hugely - Self is clearly a bit of a bodge as a character, and acts as a place to jam in Amis how-it-is, hold-your-attention observation and description a lot of the time, linking the comic or strange set pieces. But Amis hasn't really ever found such a good outlet for his energy - splitting the oik and writerly sides, as in London Fields, leaves him stiff in places, silly in others.

Is there some clever meta-thing that accounts for Self's inconsistencies? I'm dumb about that kind of stuff, get really bored with the 'but don't you see - he was killed by *the text*' side of Amis.

I've had my eye on 'War Against Cliché' for a while - it looks sharp, but on the other hand I've bought many a review compilation and never read it. It's a genre where enjoyment never really matches anticipation in my experience.

Woof - I enjoyed your cyst story elsewhere, it deserved more attention.

Haha ty Ismael. I was content to leave it as a jolly pick-me-up anecdote on a darkening thread.

I've stopped reading review compilations more or less. Used to love them. Think maybe the internet has sated my appetite for opinions.

It's all true about the voice, but surely not a PROBLEM - if seen as a logical problem then the book collapses utterly (this character couldn't possibly write like that); it's just a CONCEIT which is utterly artificial - you have to take it or leave it.

I think it works once you accept this. But I also admit that the book is unappealing or flawed in other ways beside this (eg MA's problem with plot, narrative, motivation - another thing he blithely dispenses with).

(+ it's true, as said so often before, that MA's criticism is better than most of his fiction)

(ps / ie FrankieMachine - I agree with what you say as description, just think you need to ignore it as 'problem'. I don't really think it needs a very complex theoretical explanation either, though MA does hint at this - idea that the author in the text is writing the character - in ways that are not very good or satisfactory, maybe best ignored)

So saw a chunk of it last night but got restless - that problem of watching an adaptation of something you've read a wodge of recently, just sitting there thinking 'oh yeah, this bit'.

Impressions - Kartheiser dead on, but Frost is wrong - too matey-likeable maybe, none of that rushing panic and collusive confession that's in the novel-Self voice. Not getting self-hatred from him.

Big difference in feel for me comes from lack of money: there's no real surface density - not enough clutter, signage, streets, people, noise, passing chaos. We're sort of left with a Play for Today about John Self, which isn't really Money's draw.

War Against Cliche is fantastic - one of his three most enjoyable books imo (the others being Money and Experience). The perfect balance of erudition and zings. The essay on Ulysses and the slow evisceration of Thomas Harris's Hannibal are particularly magnificent.

Sticking it to Thomas Harris takes some nerve, true.

He doesn't stick it to Harris, to be fair, he sticks it specifically to Hannibal. If it were just another dud thriller Amis presumably wouldn't care - he's angry because Hannibal is so cynically bad when the earlier Lecter books were very good (at least for genre fiction - Amis's qualification, not mine).

HANNIBAL is a very odd book, maybe even a very bad one (tho' it's a bit rich the author of NIGHT TRAIN slagging other ppl's genre fiction), but i don't think it's cynical - almost the reverse, in fact - it's painfully personal and 'sincere'.

Lynskey is pretty plausible re 3 best books (though I like one or two others also - and if you're going to include WvsC then why not The Moronic Inferno, much of which is stunning?) - but wrong about the Ulysses essay, which is very arrogantly bad.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article7112173.ece

this is interesting

amis is quite right that the novel has nothing to do with thatcherism/reaganism

http://www.newstatesman.com/television/2010/05/money-self-amis-novel

Rachel Cook otm. Couldn't make it past 15 minutes, just terrible. The book is all about spiritual/stylistic excess - which makes that crummy post-Spaced acting school of bumbling Brit-bathos precisely wrong for the adaptation.

the music for money is totally wrong. it opens with funkadelic of all things. for a drama set in the 80s. and it has fucking gang of four in it. very odd. all very credible but totally ill chosen. its pretty stagey, which i dont actually mind, but nick frost is a bit too ricky gervaisy.

what with the royal wedding and the riots, 'money' was an eerily prescient glimpse of 2011

i just got the letters of saul bellow and there's a pic of marty and saul on the beach w their wives and i have to admit, MA looks p gd w his shirt off, quite dashing, so for the first time ever i understood why ppl rated him so

posted this on ilg but it could do with a wider audience

http://www.themillions.com/2012/02/the-arcades-project-martin-amis-guide-to-classic-video-games.html

http://storms.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8345157d269e2014e860c3554970d-800wi

http://storms.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8345157d269e2015390b00063970b-800wi

WHY DOES MOOMIN AMIS HAVE 4 EARS

is the first image meant to be anything in particular?

is the first image meant to be anything in particular?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Wimpy_Kid

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/books/martin-amis-the-biography-by-richard-bradford.html?adxnnl=1&ref=books&adxnnlx=1355141126-TFNGSRzDfWcZ4sjk4C+pGA&_r=0

this review of the new Amis bio is cracking me up

Reading “Martin Amis: The Biography” is like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves.

The problem, in part, is with Mr. Bradford’s prose. You’re only a few pages into “Martin Amis: The Biography” before you begin confronting sentences like this one, in which words come together as if to commit ritual mass suicide: “Becoming a full-time novelist has no predictable effect upon one’s psyche but it is not too absurd to contend that since we elect to spend much of our conscious existence filtering perception and reality through an oblique variant upon language, a good deal of what we routinely apprehend and recollect is touched by our stock in trade of conceits and distortions.”

The flaws, like the veins in a chunk of Stilton cheese, are pervasive. Mr. Bradford strains to make sometimes far-fetched links between Mr. Amis’s life and fiction. He quotes Mr. Amis poorly, quite a hard thing to do. He makes declarative sentences of the sort you consistently quarrel with in your head.

Martin Amis: The Biography

just listening to this hack talking about Ballard on R4. And there was the bit were he says he + Deborah Orr were around his gaff, the poor bastard.

i heard he was tin-eared

nothing but

could you imagine Martin Amis and Deborah Orr turning up at your house, though? Just to indulge you all night long cos your such a ledge!

Kazuo Ishiguro winning the nobel is very good, mainly because it will absolutely lacerate our boy here.

Is there some feud between them? Or is it just that Amis seems like someone who angles and expects himself to be the next Englishman to get the prize?

Latter I expect.

Or rather, I don't think he ever expects to win a nobel prize, but is likely to be incredibly envious of any of his boomer british writer d00d peers getting one.

The Nobel almost always seem to give a lot of literary scenes around the world their due -- I think this was the turn of the very boring London literary scene. So Amis will never get it now.

just listening to this hack talking about Ballard on R4. And there was the bit were he says he + Deborah Orr were around his gaff, the poor bastard.

― calzino, Thursday, 5 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The advocacy of Ballard by Amis has always been amusing to say the least. What is the reason for it?

Almost willing to entertain the idea that Ballard is terrible because of this - or that at least there is something wrong.

This blog piece addresses some of the connections between Ballard and Amis Senior and Junior:

http://www.ballardian.com/gerund-hunting-amis-vs-ballard

I only ever read The atrocity Exhibition, decades ago. And only know Ballard through film adaptations. But next to Amis, even Toby Young might start to seem likeable. well actually fuck no to that.

I think Ballard is probably over-rated as a stylist but I haven't much wanted to re-read him for the last 20 years

and he comes across as a bit of a nob in interview, quite trenchant and do-you-see?

I wanted to add - I think ppl like Aldiss and Ballard, who were in some ways quite conventional, middle class men, were flattered that a 'respectable' literary author like Kingsley Amis was taking an interest in their work at a time when Science Fiction had almost no literary or social cachet in Britain.

amis wrote an essay in the early 80s where he tore into ballard but later -- for whatever reason -- reversed his opinion and became a stan

(lol i really only remember this bcz of the petty feuds it caused among minor nme hacks at the time) (none of them me)

I guess Ballard seems more obviously didactic to me than Aldiss or Moorcock, or else I feel like he's trying too hard with his dystopias so that they end up reminding me of Adam and Joe taking the piss out of Chris Morris

lol iirc the Adam and Joe take-off of Morris was literally about a Dead Baby(ies)

there's the Amis connection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ2KJtiNZ0U

could go either way.

Went to see Out Of Blue yesterday. Knew almost nothing going in - certainly didn't know it was based on an Amis book! - just felt like a noir.

It's a truly terrible film. The most basic pop science mainstays - we are made of stardust, Schroedinger's Cat, paralell universes - get introduced like they're cutting edge insights beyond the reach of mortals, characters vomit exposition at the protagonist like NPCs in a video game, the investigation relies heavily on said protagonist just walking around random places picking up objects (also very video game-y). The film's grasp of what True America is like makes Three Billboards seem like a Charles Portiss novel. At one point the protagonist says "The Eels, they're a cool band" and an Eels song starts playing on the soundtrack.

My question: is the Amis novel anywhere this pitiful? I'm guessing the Eels thing at least has to be a new addition, but that aside?

oh there's also a wealthy war hero father and the film truly expects us to feel surprise when it turns out he's dodgy

It’s the only Martin Amis book I’ve read (many years ago) and I didn’t hate it but it made no impression on me at all really, which is pretty much how I feel about the film. A lot of the more annoying things are the filmmakers’ additions I think - I was sure the schrödinger’s cat thing must have come from the novel, assuming it was less of a cliché when it was published, but I was talking to my friend (who has read the book but not seen the film) and he told me that doesn’t come up at all. I’m also pretty sure they made it more plotty (I don’t remember mike’s backstory being much of a thing in the book) and the clumsy references to various noir are new (the book is pastiche but not terribly done iirc).

Overall I was disappointed cause I really liked Morley’s previous film

characters vomit exposition at the protagonist like NPCs in a video game

This I think is from the novel, istr mike being a bit like Amis attempting an oedipa maas type character.