luka
Well-known member
Ben Elton is a good comparison.
Cronenberg does Martin Amis
- Thread starter michael
- Start date
jenks
thread death
Re-reading The Information. Reminded again of how funny he is, also how ambitious he is, the ear grabbing voice but some hadn’t worn quite so well - the scenes with young black character, 13, sound tone deaf, he’s writing about what he doesn’t know. However, when he’s riffing on literature, jealousy, marital sex, but most particularly, aging, he’s very good indeed.
shiels
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Just before the male’s climax the couple separated with jittery haste. Then she knelt in front of him. One thing was clear: the cowboy must have spent at least six chaste months on a yoghurt ranch eating nothing but icecream and buttermilk, and with a watertight no-handjob clause in his contract. By the time he was through, Juanita looked like the patsy in the custard-pie joke, which I suppose she was. The camera proudly lingered as she spat and blinked and coughed…Hard to tell, really, who where the biggest loser in this complicated transaction – her, him, them, me.
shiels
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Money is very funny. It’s like corpsey said before you’re just reading for great description, what happens doesn’t matter much . I do have to push myself through it and at times the prose does feel try hard and fussy but he does keep paying off. I do love sour posh English cunts at times
shiels
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You do seem enamoured with that self assurance, same in Hitchens. This kind of public intellectual that’s lost now. There is something about these depressed posh boys that is fascinating, the arrogance and odd vulnerability together. I don’t agree with them on most things but I do really enjoy how they think and talk
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
It depends really, on how boring and wrong people are but I do find self assurance attractive, magnetic. Because I lack it! There's a Chekhov story about a shy loser who by way of a mix up kisses a beautiful woman who intended to kiss someone else, and anyway he notes that because he so lacks self assurance he has a hypersensitive eye for it in others, and envies it
I'm enamoured with Lukas self assurance for example...
Anyhoo, it isn't so much Amis's self assurance as his humour and precision and originality that I enjoy.
But yes I suppose the arrogance is a part of that comic tone. A sort of sneering ironic distaste for things.
Also one reason I like Flaubert.
Inside every cynic is a sentimentalist I believe Flaubert says somewhere.
I'm enamoured with Lukas self assurance for example...
Anyhoo, it isn't so much Amis's self assurance as his humour and precision and originality that I enjoy.
But yes I suppose the arrogance is a part of that comic tone. A sort of sneering ironic distaste for things.
Also one reason I like Flaubert.
Inside every cynic is a sentimentalist I believe Flaubert says somewhere.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Earlier today listening to dickens, to great expectations, I was thinking about "characters" and wondering if I knew any
And it seems to me that being a "character" means being unselfconscious about things, which in my (relatively) highly educated middle class social circle is not so commonplace
(Ofc nobody is completely self aware, far from it, and so in other people's eyes perhaps IM a character... Along the lines of Eeyore and Jeffrey Dahmer)
And it seems to me that being a "character" means being unselfconscious about things, which in my (relatively) highly educated middle class social circle is not so commonplace
(Ofc nobody is completely self aware, far from it, and so in other people's eyes perhaps IM a character... Along the lines of Eeyore and Jeffrey Dahmer)
shiels
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Do you mean that characterisation is always a kind of simplification, limits and boundaries and blind spots
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Yeah I was thinking this after I wrote that... A "character" is somebody you don't know very well, who has a surface-level "flavour" or something.
Perhaps I'm just doing my usual self lacerating middle class thing...
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I wouldn't say I get Eeyore vibes from you. In the original A. A. Milne stories he's the most passive-aggressive cunt in all of literature, always insisting he's "fine" while making it abundantly clear to the other characters that he's not.