Posts Tagged ‘Ian McEwan’

Britlit’s bad boy is coming to town: Martin Amis reading and colloquium on Monday, May 7

Friday, May 4th, 2012
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Not happy in León, Spain, 2007 (Creative Commons)

Martin Amis is celebrated as one of the leading writers in English today. In Britain, he is almost as famous for his pyrotechnic quips and spats, which regularly launch front-page media frenzies.

He will give a reading at Stanford at 8 p.m. on Monday, May 7, in Cemex Auditorium in the Knight Management Center. Amis will also hold an 11 a.m. colloquium the same day in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.

Amis has written a dozen novels, as well as a memoir, two collections of stories and six nonfiction works.  His next book, Lionel Asbo: State of England, a satirical stab at England through the story of a violent criminal who wins the lottery, will be published by Knopf this summer.

Amis was foremost in a circle of writers who rose to prominence in the 1970s, including the late Christopher Hitchens, Clive James, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Craig Raine and Ian McEwan. He has had high-voltage quarrels with at least two of those figures. The one with best chum Hitchens healed seamlessly: “My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May,” he said in an interview.

He is also famous for being one half of an unusual team, a hereditary novelist. His father, Sir Kingsley Amis, has been called the finest English comic novelist of the postwar era; he wrote 20 novels, six collections of poetry, and other works.

Everblooming friendship

The elder Amis, who died in 1995, was also his son’s earliest critic, lamenting the “terrible compulsive vividness in his style.”

Martin Amis recalled to the New York Times, “He was always saying, ‘I think you need more sentences like ‘He put down his drink, got up and left the room,’ and I thought you needed rather fewer of them.”

As a writer, Amis is known for his lifelong love affair with the English sentence, which he calls “a basic rhythm from which the writer is free to glance off in unexpected directions.”

Amis considers the English sentence as the essential building block of good prose, telling the Paris Review in 1998, “Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etc. But I don’t feel the deeper rhythm there. I don’t think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it’s the only way they can write.”

Charles McGrath of the New York Times said that a typical Amis sentence “tends to be maximalist and attention-grabbing, a riff with all the speakers turned up high.”

Here’s a sample from his most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow:

They walked down steep alleyways, scooter-torn and transected by wind-ruffled tapestries of clothing and bedding, and on every other corner there lurked a little shrine, with candles and doilies and the lifesize effigy of a saint, a martyr, a haggard cleric. Crucifixes, vestments, wax apples green or cankered. And then there was the smell, sour wine, cigarette smoke, cooked cabbage, drains, lancingly sweet cologne, and also the tang of fever. The trio came to a polite halt as a stately brown rat – lavishly assimilated – went ambling across their path: given the power of speech, this rat would have grunted out a perfunctory buona sera. Dogs barked. Keith breathed deep, he drank deep of the ticklish, the teasing tang of fever.

The barbed comments have often distracted from the prose.  In February, Amis created a literary kerfuffle when he said that only “serious brain injury” would make him write for children.  He has tangled with critics Terry Eagleton and Tibor Fischer, columnist Julie Burchill, and others.

“What is important is to write freely and passionately and with all the resources that the language provides,” he said in the Paris Review interview.

“You’re always looking for a way to see the world as if you’ve never seen it before.   As if you’d never really got used to living here on this planet.”

Procrastination: Jonathan Franzen’s superglue solution, and Victor Hugo buck nekkid

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010
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Better with clothes on, I expect

I am supposed to be writing a wise and insightful essay on a poet over the next few days.  Supposed to be.

James Surowiecki’s recent article in the New Yorker points out the basic irrationality of procrastination.  We know we need to cut the grass, pay the traffic fine, study for the exam, meet the deadline, finish the essay …

Of course, writing is 90 percent procrastination, and I find I have to lock myself into solitary squalor as the dishes pile up, putzying about the house in bathrobed anxiety, letting phone calls roll to the answering machine, looking up random words in the dictionary, seeking for odd small tasks to distract (giving the pills to the dog, taking coffee cups to the kitchen).  But there are only so many snacks one can prepare for oneself; and too much caffeine to jack oneself up to a simulacrum of creativity might eventually require medical intervention.  Above all, I must be careful that I don’t do anything that appears to be work.  That will successfully justify non-writing.  And of course, one must limit checking email to only 25 times every half hour.  Katherine Ellison, who (ironically enough) has just published Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention, knows what I am talking about:

I finally had to acknowledge that I was helpless in the face of my addiction, which has had me, especially in recent weeks, tapping my e-mail “refresh” button like a lab rat trying to get cocaine …  Why labor over a metaphor when I can check my moment-to-moment ranking on Amazon? Why struggle with a transition when Google Alerts may be telling me at this very moment that my book was featured on yet another tiny blog?

What makes it all worse is that my publisher has encouraged me to leap into the mind-sucking Internet vortex: to put up a Facebook page and post on it regularly, to join LinkedIn, send e-mail “blasts” and tweet away. And this raises a particular problem, in that my book chronicles my yearlong effort to curb extraneous distractions so as to focus on what’s truly important.

She points out that bestselling novelist Jonathan Franzen has confessed to using superglue to block the Ethernet connection on his computer. Ellison has resorted to an internet-blocking program called Freedom, which, for a one-time fee of $10, will shut off your portal to the outside world for up to eight hours.  Wizard Fred Stutzman has sold his program to more than 75,000 people.  His new program, Anti-Social,  shuts off your access to top time-wasting sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, StumbleUpon, EHarmony, DateHookup and OkCupid.

Surowiecki tackles the problem at its roots:  Why do we procrastinate?  He calls it “a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict”:

… the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control. Ian McEwan evokes this state in his recent novel Solar: “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.” Similarly, Otto von Bismarck said, “Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.”

My metaphor, the internal parliament, has been stolen.  I’m sure of it.  I’ve been saying that for years.  It will never be mine again. Maybe I should think of filing a lawsuit today.  That’s what I should be doing today…

All is forgiven, however, when Surowiecki drops this gem:   Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.”

Back to work…

Postscript 12/29: The trick, I think, is to learn to procrastinate faster