Martin Amis: fire away!

I think the women of 70s/80s haute bohemian London were def into him but maybe he just really put the effort in.

He has been described as having Mick Jagger like looks in one of The Guardian write-ups.

yes I think that's a traditional comparison - a mini Jagger. He might even use it himself? (with some irony tbf)

btw happy to be corrected on the point of women being very into Amis - not my experience generally but I can think of a few exceptions

i think the jagger thing was coined by someone else, clive james? 'a stubby mick jagger'.

lol the hacks not shy of using it

I think (I don't remember it as published by Lit Hub) this was the piece where several, mostly young, writers from BAME backgrounds talk about the impact of Zadie Smith's writing on their own.

https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-zadie-smiths-london/

Being about 4 foot tall never stopped HG Wells wowing the literary laydeez.

lol the hacks not shy of using it🕸

xps
I could see a piece like that about Amis published in the early or mid 90s; the writers might be young but would likely not be from a BAME background.

Hmm interesting, might have a hunt around to see if there's anything online.

Tom D’s references to his height making me think of a certain Twilight Zone episode.

I've just read a couple of Amis's earliest reviews of Ballard. I'm surprised how harsh they are. I had thought Amis much more dedicated to Ballard, already. Maybe he became more that way later. A 2001 note to the CRASH review implies that.

The note also states that Ballard's stories '*are* hard SF, and they constitute the best hard-SF short stories ever written' (p.96).

Ballard's stories are not hard SF.

Who wrote that note?

Who wrote that what

how much cream

Amis wrote the note, to his own earlier text.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrbFQEcpJ3A

Although come to think of it maybe by creaminss he was making a comparison to a pint of Guinness.

Traven sat on the veranda, gazing with a glazed cornea over the creamy head of a pint of Guinness, past the gleaming bones of the dead Alsatian and into the leafy grean darkness of the gymnospheres in the distance.

Martins lay on his back in the anonymous NYC flat, surveying the old concern of rug & gut & gum, wincing from the pain that radiated from the hole in his Upper West Side, distracted by the beat of his tom-tom ticker, in his mind's eye envisioning the upcoming transfusion and resection in the gleaming Curry Hill laboratories of the DNA boys.

v. good article

https://newrepublic.com/article/172883/martin-amis-let-readers-joke?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter

mini Jagger

Got the moves like Amis

Some valid appreciation in that New Republic article but is it cowardice, closing ranks or some sense of misplaced respect that so many articles are ducking the 'bigtoed arsehole' phase of Amis' life?

Yes, that's right: 5ft nothing, looked like Jagger and had famously big toes.

don't know how this is ducking

His most overtly political writing was his worst;

You want her to engage with his "worst" writing?

Why do all the examples in the paragraphs after the phrase "a brilliant prose stylist" in that New Republic piece suck so very, very hard? I could pull open a random airport crime novel and find a sentence on any page that would give me more pleasure as a reader than any of Amis's "look how clever I am! look how many words I know! oh, and look how much smarter you and I are than these people I'm writing about!" mini-tirades.

Why do all the examples in the paragraphs after the phrase "a brilliant prose stylist" in that New Republic piece suck so very, very hard?

Because you're not into Amis, and that's ok if you're not into Amis, and he's not for you?

You want her to engage with his "worst" writing?

I liked the article well enough but it seems fairly representative of a failure not to talk about the 'bad writing' so much as at least acknowledge his very public bigotry and particularly his Islamophobia.

I am still trying to recall the time in the 80s and early 90s when this guy seemed to be Our Guy, and his representation of what is now an Old Weird NYC seemed to be the next evolutionary step after, say, Bright Lights, Big City.

Hmm, Money and Bright Lights, Big City were published the same year, 1984.

Some valid appreciation in that New Republic article but is it cowardice, closing ranks or some sense of misplaced respect that so many articles are ducking the 'bigtoed arsehole' phase of Amis' life?

Or until it's determined whether or not his former agent will be taking on new clients.

Amis's agent was famously Andrew Wylie, so pretty sure the Jackal won't need to be touting for new business.

Reading Amis on Murdoch, Wilson, Burgess, Ballard, Weldon -- he was, as reviewer, such a student of what was then 'contemporary fiction'. He read huge amounts of it, including the books in between the ones you actually see him reviewing. If you were writing a study of 'post-war British fiction', that era that has become curiously dim ('novelists no-one reads anymore'), Amis would be an important source, one way or another, though not necessarily reliable on his own.

His relation to all this work is interesting. He is writing about elders, in a way. He's usually respectful, often affectionate, though often very critical. He usually quotes in detail, shows attention to texture. Later he would stop reviewing things that were current in this way, and he said some time that he wouldn't read younger writers.

When he reviews John Carey on Donne (1981), he indicates that he's already whole books by Carey on Milton, Dickens and Thackeray. Most of us haven't. He expresses quite finely and clearly the problems with reading the poems as direct expressions of emotion, which Carey appears to say they are.

On Ballard there's an odd inconsistency in that his earliest reviews are so harsh, and indeed he says things in every review that seem heavily negative, and yet he still declares himself a devoted follower.

The bad 2001 claim about Ballard's SF is expressed much better in a 1981 review, where he says 'hardcore' SF not 'hard SF' (a different thing, I fear), and more precisely states that 'His early stories [...] remain as good - as direct and logical - as anything by Fred Pohl or Arthur Clarke' (p.104).

On the whole the early reviews, pre-1990, form a marvellous body of work in itself, even if he'd never published fiction.

His feelings about Ballard mirror his father's maybe? Loved the early organic and psychic cataclysms, disliked the later 'social' turn, and bringing the earlier SF processes closer to the contemporary.

bad last clause...

'..and applying the processes from his earlier SF to the contemporary world'

I think he admits in his review of the Cronenberg adaptation that he was "haughty" about Crash as a kind of critical fancy dress because he couldn't adequately express his "nervous dismay" at the book. Each of his Ballard reviews seems to be apologising for the previous one.

Note on p.110: 'I see I am quoting my father here'.

But he keeps reading Ballard in detail - he doesn't give up on the work at all.

I'm reminded btw that Ballard reviewed a good KA collection of short SF stories, amusingly, about 40 years ago.

Gimbel is right - there is this odd dance with the Ballard reviews of echoing each other but correcting each other also. But certain features - 'Ballard's total humourlessness' - remain constant. And he repeats the phrase 'the motion sculpture of the highways' on pp.104, 112. Now I'd be surprised if he didn't also use it in a novel.

xp

That, and the comment his dislike about seeing penises on screen makes me wonder whether he had some sort of deep psychological sex horror. ofc it might just be good old-fashioned english class prudery (or is that the same thing?). and Crash is partly designed to elicit that response. still, i'm running with it.

What comment?

xp
makes sense - weird sex disgust is one of his strongest areas imo, and there is a corresponding odd prudery

OK, you weirdos persuaded me to give The Information a chance.

literature's mick jagger: nasty prudish and short

The tributes from hacks keep coming in.

HELL YEAH. https://t.co/5GDpwGzCHx pic.twitter.com/2bVodQfpH7

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) May 24, 2023

ah, i thought i'd seen it itt, but it was from the paywalled FT piece:

"What magnificent prose and what a peculiar personality underneath it. Amis wrote a long feature on the pornography industry for Tina Brown’s Talk Magazine in 2001 and only at the end confessed to his horror of seeing pricks on screen."

https://web.archive.org/web/20230522223450/https://www.ft.com/content/c0df7ab3-8512-4241-8a14-89a787ffc1fb

"magnificent prose"
"bits"

none of these fvcks can write

i guess bits wd work if leslie meant it like "it's a bit" (ie it's a sustained type of comedy performance) but he doesn't

expand the war against cliche into the straps and heds ppl