Martin Amis: fire away!

That seems tl;dr. Should I actually r it?

Anybody here
Seen my old friend Martin?

That seems tl;dr. Should I actually r it?

It was the most interesting such thing posted in this thread IMO.

yeah it was a very nice read, thanks for sharing it the pinefox

What I remember of The Line of Beauty is that its characters often saunter (along pavements) or dart (into and out of rooms) and occasionally linger (over light lunches): all things I think that would have boiled the piss of Martin Amis in the 80s.

For all the talk about keeping the dictionary open at all times, meticulously crafted sentences, etc., etc. I find myself as a writer responding much more to Elmore Leonard's famous 10 rules:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

That piece is something: Martin Amis had THREE layers of generosity?! Come on, now..

Cheese, guava, almonds

fwiw I'll buy that Amis was probably a nicer guy in person than he came across as (and made strenuous efforts to come across as). Who could be like that full time in public and private? Only truly rarefied titans of misanthropy like Ginger Baker can pull that off

No comparison to Pope. Pope was a foot shorter.

Nice piece. 'Devout' is well-chosen. A more generous way to look at the canon-hugging and status anxiety and the effortfulness of his weaker prose.

Lol at Ginger Baker comparison.

did he become a nicer person with the new fangs or

heh

Another hack tribute. This one was so desperate to get his tribute in he got it published in Norwegian

Here’s my tribute to Martin Amis 1949-2023 for @Vinduet touching on his influential style and unorthodox way of writing fiction (in Norwegian for now but some things transcend national and linguistic boundaries)https://t.co/urs4z2efnI

— Leo Robson (@leorobsonwriter) June 6, 2023

Fixed teeth transcend national and linguistic boundaries.

Picked up Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory', as it seems a little bit like Amis' Experience. Nabokov writes about his father a lot, though by no means exclusively so. Feels like -- both in The New Statesman piece above and the John Self piece where he talked it as the book for people who hate Amis -- that Experience could be the book that lasts as the white, Oxbridge-educated, middle-class hacks who cared to pay a tribute have been trying to sell it a bit more than some of his later novels, say.

Reading the Nabokov I could see why. Both were prickly, nasty people, who grew up well, but in these memoirs they write about things you are not going to be that nasty about. Get quite jaded about that attitude. Can't you be tender about people you made up?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/16/martin-amis-ian-mcewan-and-anna-wintour-honoured-in-kings-birthday-list

Amis's posthumous knighthood surprises me as

a) I have never heard of a posthumous knighthood
b) he writes in EXPERIENCE, I think, of knighthoods being ridiculous (at least he says that Sir David Hare's is)
c) if he didn't want it, he can't now turn it down. Or had he already agreed to it?

I believe that David Bowie refused honours. What if Bowie had been posthumously awarded them in Summer 2016?

I would also say
d) After Savile died we were told that he couldn't posthumously be stripped of his knighthood as it ended with his death anyway.

the ‘martin amis faked his death’ conspiracy theory starts here

Amis accepted it, apparently they told him about it last month. & they have dated it to the day before he died because the convention is still that knighthoods don’t apply posthumously (can’t change that or Charles might have to officially revoke that of his hero savile)

So the idea is amis is officially retroactively a Sir for one day and then not, it’s v pointless

or the knighthood killed him

It would be great if it had that effect on all recipients

a sudden nerve twinge made charles slash instead of dub, rip martin

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