Martin Amis: fire away!

I suspect his novels wouldn't work for me the way the used to (except the ones I didn't like the first time round, like Yellow Dog or Night Train, which would work exactly the way they did), but I still maintain 'Experience' is a nifty, slightly mad, bit of wonderfulness.

yeah EXPERIENCE is fantastic. his best book since MONEY.

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

"koba the dread" is awful stuff, maybe worth reading only for all the moments where MA inadvertently proves what a first-class dick he is. my favorite: the part where he oh-so-seriously says if he had to choose he'd much rather be incinerated at hiroshima than die in a work camp.

also gripping character study of stalin: did you know he was a BAD MAN? who did BAD THINGS?

I put it down after 30 pgs, gagging on his naivete. His best buddy Hitchens took him to task for this a few years ago in a published review.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/09/hitchens.htm

To be fair, I too would rather be incinerated in a nuclear blast than die in a prison work camp.

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

-- caek, Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:32 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

lol yes -- i think hitch, mart, and kingers go to see 'beverley hills cop' and only KA digs it. obviously KA could be a dick but some of the stuff in that book is win.

One of the big differences between père and fils - Kingsley was always unashamedly into popular culture. He even wrote a James Bond novel - I'd be kind of interested to see what that's like! Hard to imagine Martin doing that. (Although now I think about it didn't Martin write a book about Space Invaders or something)

kingsley's book *about* bond (i haven't read the bond novel itself) is really good.

MA has written about popular culture -- iirc the space invaders thing is the name of a collection, which includes an essay on same -- especially hollywood: 'money' is partly based on his experience as a screenwriter. his critical books have interviews with speilberg and de palma, and maybe madonna -- i can't remember so well, suffice to say he was less at ease with this stuff than kingsley.

Martin says in Experience that Kingsley called one of the Terminator movies "a flawless masterpiece" as they exited the theater together.

A "flawleshhhhh mashterpieshe" more like

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

-- caek, Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:32 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

!

And this was also the period when what had partly been a put-on — the persona of the reactionary philistine — began to rigidify into something real and permanent. Kingsley became the very sort of person he used to make fun of, declaring, for example, that England’s best living writer was Dick Francis and that henceforth he wanted only to read books that began, “A shot rang out.” Christopher Hitchens says he thinks that the process of self-ossification was pretty much complete by 1984. “I remember that Martin, Kingsley and I all had dinner, and then we went to see ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ ” he said a few weeks ago. “Naturally, you couldn’t go to anything French or Japanese or Polish. All through the movie Kingsley was laughing with what we assumed was pretend mirth, and afterward he announced, ‘Yes, an absolutely flawless masterpiece.’ Suddenly it became clear he wasn’t joking and that he meant to defend the virtues of the film with absolute fidelity. It was a very striking moment — the sense that the face had grown to fit the mask and that the pose had become himself.”

lol aging. my dad sort of hardened and narrowed his viewpoints in his 60s, not as flamboyantly as kingers but recognizably similiar, i think most people go thru this if they're lucky enough to live that long. to be honest I feel this happening already with regard to my musical tastes and I'm still in the spring of middle age.

also via google:

—Get your hair cut...Get your hair cut.
This suggestion was being offered to the television set, more particularly to the actress Linda Hamilton every time she appeared on screen. We were watching a tape of The Terminator (again). An old science-fiction hand, Kingsley was a great fan of The Terminator, and seven years later he would make no secret of his admiration for Terminator 2 ('a flawless masterpiece'), which I took him to at the Odeon, Marble Arch.
—Martin Amis, Experience

I suspect the "philistinism" was there more or less from the start. After all his very first novel Lucky Jim rips into academia, pretentiousness, preciousness etc., vs the joys of binge-drinking...

how did that business with that eagleton chap end?

rough sex

ewwwwwww

I haven't read Koba the Dread, but isn't there one particularly egregious section in which Amis compares the screaming of his baby in the middle of the night to the screams of gulag prisoners?

It's in the Hitchens' thing linked above:

"The sounds she was making," I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That's why I cracked and called Caterina [the nanny]."

You couldn't make it up

Thanks, should have checked that. It's the nanny bit that really makes the quote, isn't it.

It's sort of comforting to know that Kingsley never had to witness Terminator 3.

David Cameron = Gwyn Barry

I wonder what he thought about T2?

I guess we'll never know.

another great moment comes when amis breaks down the way trotsky phrases something in his autobiography and goes on for like three pages about how subtly it proves how heartless and inhumane the man was -- evidently oblivious to the fact that he's reading a translation, not trotsky's actual words.

i dunno why everyone hates him, or why they love him so. but i read his interview in gq this month. hes an interesting figure. agreed with some of his points. his main problem with muslims becoming more religious though seemed to be that pre 9-11 he was able to fuck "muslim talent" (his words) and now since then, men like him (white upper class poshos?) have found it harder to do.

perhaps that has been the biggest downfall of the war on terror? less muslim women sleeping with old white men?

I read a piece a while back where he summed up his position as something like: 'for multiethnicity; against multiculturalism'. I think that was probably a better way of putting it.

he's been married for 15 years. well, 25. so idk if he'd openly talk about shagging other women. i guess he's making a general point.

A historical point in his case, I think - he did go on about former girlfriends in the piece I read.

yeah i know hes not really talking about himself, more his 'successors' perhaps.

"'for multiethnicity; against multiculturalism'. "

that makes sense.

it makes some kind of syntactic sense i guess

seems like hes saying hes fine with ppl of all diff races, just as long as its a bit more monocultural.

The novel Amis is currently working on, State of England, will, he believes, "be considered as the final insult" to his country. The story of a violent criminal, Lionel Asbo, who wins the lottery, it's "a metaphor which translates well, I think, our state of moral decrepitude: a huge reward for no effort".

Lionel Asbo.

lolsome piece generally
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/18/martin-amis-england-moral-decrepitude

London Fields was the first novel I read that accurately portrayed modern evil. I thought: this will date quickly, like Hangover Square, and it has... but for that novel alone Amis has to be recognised as a great writer, despite his dire Islamophobia and general reactionary vibe.… pic.twitter.com/9UhAaceFT6

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) May 20, 2023

Reading several old (Amis) reviews of Mailer et al today reaffirms an old assessment. Most people agree that Amis was uneven and flawed as a novelist. But he was, at his best, an unusually brilliant book reviewer. Such a humble trade, but I've seen few better at it, again and again. Eventually, understandably, he left it behind, but perhaps his most consistently outstanding work remains in this occasional genre.

Indeed.

Liked what he wrote about Ballard for example.

'Dead Babies' was a good read. The obsession with teeth was pretty creepy.

I haven't read a lot of his stuff, but his takedown of Hannibal by Thomas Harris is brilliant.

xp huh that’s funny you should say that. I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t really know his work at all but one of the reasons I get major bullshitter vibes off him is from the piece he wrote when Ballard died. It was iirc mainly a personal remembrance and fine, quite touching even, but I’ll never forget the thudding wrongness when he got around to the work and praised the “creaminess” of JGB’s prose(!)

i only read the Rachel Papers, London Fields, the Information, and Time's Arrow, but I love all four of those novels. RIP grump.

Hmm. It’s been awhile but the thing I seem to remember him writing was something like “the way to get the hang of Ballard’s prose is to realize he has no sense of humor.” Maybe this was even in an old introduction to High-Rise. It’s sort of almost unfair but basically true at the same time. If he has a sense of humor it’s totally deadpan as if you are not quite sure that he is in on the joke or not like, say, Adam West.

Given that Fosse won the Novel today I should bring up this tweet.

Where, like Fosse, we have some deployment of repetition

Anyone who says Martin Amis wasn’t a stylist is, frankly, an idiot pic.twitter.com/orr7Q0ieLe

— Max Lawton (@maxdaniellawton) September 1, 2023

*Nobel