Martin Amis: fire away!

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