Headline, March21, 2013

'''MARTIN AMISS : THE MOST

 DAUNTINGLY BRILLIANT BRITISH 

NOVELIST''​'

''The business of writing about writers is more ambivalent than the end-product normally admits,'' Amis wrote in a 1983 interview with Bellow for the Observer. ''As a fan and a reader, you want your hero to be genuinely inspirational. As a journalist, you hope for lunacy, spite, deplorable indiscretions, a full-scale nervous break down in a mid-interview. And, as a human you yearn for the birth of a flattering friendship........''

And why wouldn't you? Amis is, after all, the most dauntingly brilliant , the most distinctive, and the most divisive British novelist of his generation. A generation that also includes Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes among others. His writing, if you will forgive the obligatory passage of genuflection, is unmistakable: the repetitions, the italics, the lurid metaphors, the livid similes, the noirish, flickering, neon-lit plots, the obsessive avoidance of cliche, the use of French phraseology.

It is potent, virile, vigorous, scatological, eruptive. A seriocomic satirist, furiously moral, his theme are the biggest ones: death, love, the death of love, money, art, literature, movies, television, drinks, drugs, decadence, decay, criminality, celebrity, pornography, murder, modernity, the under class, the Sturm and Drang of the city. America, class, bad taste, nuclear war, totalitarianism, the dying planet,  -the whole entropic enterprise. Plus of course, himself: MA, Martin Amis, son of Kingsley ''the king''.

Recently, he has spoken publicly about the deleterious effects of ageing of work even on the very greatest of writers. ''Oh, yeah,'' he says, ''I am in a real funk about it, sort of paranoid. I'll horribly alert to signs of it.''

''I have a feeling that this age will be remembered as a gerontocracy gone mad,'' says.

''People live much too much long now. They do. There should be booths on every street corner offering a drink and an assisted suicide. I think people will take them up on it.''

''These multitude of demented old wrecks who no longer have a thought in their heads. And it is very difficult to get out of life. You have to be very determined. You're trapped in life 

Martin Amiss then turns introspective on England: ''I think it's self-hatred. A sort of wildness to do with marginalisation. I think it must be tied up with Britain's demotion in terms of world power. The ideology that started in the Seventies - it's got a million names, levellism, multiculturalism, realtivism, that taught us that we didn't like empire, we were ashamed we ever had one.''  

Most respectful dedication Arianna Huffington. She's just so extraordinary! I hope to welcome her and her daughter on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless