Martin Amis | Appel Salon | February 22, 2018

[@infinitafenix3153]

I'd be listening to Amis for hours. Thank u so much.

[@SP-ki5gn]

Don't be put off by the music, it stops at 1:30 . An excellent interview.

[@hayleyanna2625]

Thank you for uploading this. I adore Amis. ❤

[@robertbusiakiewicz]

Thank you for uploading this Toronto Public Reference Library - I was so disappointed to miss this event and you've made my day by making it available here.

[@ramdularsingh1435]

A brilliant author along with a gentleman Martin Amis is ! He is one of those rare writing geniuses who deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature ! He too must be.....

[@jonharrison9222]

Do you write that badly on purpose?

[@SP-ki5gn]

@@jonharrison9222 Yes, bit of a cliffhanger.

[@eashton42]

This is wonderful. Very encouraging to see how sharp Martin's mind still is. Funny as hell, as always. His bit about Joyce had me laughing until it ached.

[@geoffreynhill2833]

Yes, interesting and highly intelligent although his speech gives the impression of being an alcoholic.🤔

[@UncleBoratagain]

One’s brain feels literally moistened while listening to such wisdom.

[@louduva9849]

Gross.

[@lordbunbury]

What a mind fuck.

[@kpm3983]

Beautiful conversation. Time to read!

[@JAK-c9q]

Would love to have heard the questions and answers!

[@johnjosmith42]

Oh wow, what a treat. thanks so much for uploading.

[@josephasghar]

Ah, this is delicious. MA given space to express himself to his fullest extent. I do miss his dry wit and economy. RIP Mart.

[@sinclairbroadcastnews4490]

I think he's a bit hard on Joyce -- Virginia Woolf too. A lot of us enjoy Amis plus those others. Of course, his comments are so witty you sort of go along with them, until later.

[@johnjosmith42]

This was wonderful. Any chance of posting the Q&A too please?

[@Johnconno]

Hope not.

[@maxfinucane5138]

Words cannot describe how good his writing is........

[@jonharrison9222]

Cop-out!

[@Broatch6]

clearly still hopelessly in Love with the Hitch. and they're not even gay. here's Hope for the Human race

[@mcomiskey7]

Rest easy Martin.

[@songwritersvillage4538]

Martin on excellent form....great

[@anthonyperry1933]

Dancing with words. Love him.

[@szh6778]

"Post-racial" in England and Canada. Insightful observation about the racial issue in the U.S.

[@inkwarp]

London Fields is a fantastic book

[@plekkchand]

"Only essentially frivolous people use puns". Like Shakespeare, Beethoven....

[@chriswoodcock2150]

martin`s lookin his age now..but still such an intellect..a razor sharp - mind..Brilliant....

[@williamsovie-y5j]

This is brilliant.

[@Broatch6]

Joyce. sorry if I've got it in for him but he never gave a shit about the reader... so iconoclastic. consistently malevolent. hilariously funny. endlessly educational

[@JasonHi]

The young lion ages, but retains his roar.

[@JoanneLight]

Speaking of Trump's word usage, he recently said, "anomynous" instead of "anonymous" and he said it twice!

[@sjjedinburgh]

Fantastic!

[@benjaminhooper6076]

love martin and always will, but i think the bit about stream of consciousness and Joyce is way too unartistic for me, surely there should be room for all styles, in some cases they're good in some cases they're bad. There's no rule. Also think about all sorts of other abstract or confusing writers there've been! I mean think some of the Kafka stuff! Not quite on his page here, I'm not sure it's great to care about the reader always! Having said this I do think true artists should be opinionated and draw their line in the sand creatively, and speak their mind, kudos to Amis for doing that and having an opinion. still one of the best!

[@UncleBoratagain]

I would have to offer, on the basis of this: never study a curriculum, but your own choices.

[@wgaule]

33:10 - He obviously doesn't watch the Simpsons

[@robertpoen5383]

"Big league" is an ideomatic baseball reference. If you make the big leagues, you're a great player. Opposite of "Bush League".

[@AleksandarBloom]

Social realism was detested by Nabokov. He also preferred Ulysses as the greatest novel of the century. Stream of consciousness can be found in books by Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett and Woolf which makes it one of the most important literary events and methods of the 20th century, and those writers will outlive even us. Disdain for it was always present among the plebeians.

[@CharlesDickens111]

Nabokov also hated Dostoevsky and Freud, but their ideas directly inspired stream of consciousness. It was an interesting literary fad - but it was undoubtedly elitist and smug and there is no way Joyce would have indulged in it had he not made his name first as a writer who made sense (Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist). Having attained fame, he was free to show off - which is what Ulysses was. An epic that proclaims loud and clear, "Look at me! I know stuff!" Joyce was a nervous, fidgety man with little self-esteem who did whatever he could to stand out and reveal himself as a special boy. He predictably let it all go to his head and hence produced that excessive monstrosity "Finnegan's Wake". Stream of consciousness was a phase of the post-WW1 disillusioned age that also dabbled in Dada and surrealism. Woolf softened it in her understated way, Faulkner made it pulse with Michelangelo-like energy, and they were fine writers like Joyce - but I do not think stream of consciousness a fine style in which to write. Sort of how Hitler was an excellent speaker, but what he was saying was...not excellent. Mass disdain of the stream of consciousness should not be shrugged off. Blaise Pascal notes that the opinions of the ignorant masses are very important as ignorance is the natural state of humanity, thus there is a deep root of truth in it. It takes years of "education" to make someone believe a red dot on a canvas is brilliant, but modern art galleries are usually empty. Everyone wants to visit the Sistine Chapel, however. This should tell us something.

[@kelman727]

Overpraise for it is common among pseuds.

[@tommygunhunter]

Woolf disdained Joyce's emergence in the genre, saying an upstart autodidact wasn't fit for such elevated form of artistic expression!

[@douglasmilton2805]

@@tommygunhunter Joyce had an excellent education at one of Ireland's best schools, Clongowes, University College Dublin and the Sorbonne in Paris. Virginia Woolf...didn't. She was madly jealous of Ulysses as her diaries show.

[@tommygunhunter]

@@douglasmilton2805 yea but it was his own voluminous reading that really enabled him to push the limits. It was a remarkable effort considering his circumstances with his eyesight and offspring issues although mitigated by his American benefactress!

[@matthewstokes1608]

I think Kingsley Amis - and Larkin - would have been vocally for Donald Trump. In the grand scheme of things I think they would have been decidedly so.I wish M Amis would discuss this - honestly.

[@sheiladineen9483]

I believe Kingsley Amis would regard Donald Trump as uncivilized.

[@matthewstokes1608]

@@sheiladineen9483 Brash and uncouth, too, perhaps...? I doubt it...There are far more pressing matters. Mrs Roosevelt considered Churchill the same (for stubbing out a morning cigar - smoked at the Whitehouse breakfast table into the yoke of an uneaten egg). I don't think uncivilized would count for much when the enemy of ALL western civilization stands opposed the man.

[@majawalk]

This is the most ridiculous comment I’ve read on KZbin in quite some time. Congratulations.

[@sankalpachakma]

But man, I love puns.

[@frankstein9982]

Amis' hilarious assassination of James Joyce and stream-of-consciousness, "and good riddance": 36:44

[@wgaule]

Yeah, but Joyce will have the last laugh.

[@kelman727]

Odd, given he praised Updike for how well he handled it in the Rabbit books.

[@lyndapierson6338]

a dream: me hitch and amis sittin at a bar on a third round of johnny walker black

[@louduva9849]

Sounds pretty gay.

[@lordbunbury]

Absolutely decimating

[@harleyshoaf4916]

America has the most generous immigration system in the world . Tell me would you have open borders ?

[@squid-squad]

Why the stupid music?

[@user-tj1jy5hr6q]

Why the stupid background music?!

[@HkFinn83]

22:00 Marts good old class hatred as strong as ever, as he with no sense of irony chides Americans for their contempt for the poor. Yes of course it’s working class Londoners who fill the ranks of journalism and politics and misuse the word decimate😒

[@muratisik6956]

The music is sooooo distracting.

[@tylerlately]

15:15 7:10 31:05

[@daveerwin6981]

He's turning more to the left as he ages

[@kelman727]

dave erwin ...?

[@carbonarapadrino]

Losing relevance like rotting fangs...

[@sue.F]

If Martin Amis were alive today… I believe he would be less left-leaning. He’d be sickened by the rise of his great hate - anti-semitism. He would rile against the censorship of literature. He would be grimacing at the mangling of the English language by the woke. I can only guess but cannot imagine him defending any of this.

[@jonharrison9222]

You would sound less unhinged if you actually had read Amis in his entirety.

[@sue.F]

@@jonharrison9222 I guarantee I have read far more Martin Amis than you, also like his dear friend Christopher Hitchens, he despised the Islamic fascists and the little yap dogs of the censorial left that accompany them.

[@matthewstokes1608]

“Big League” is a wonderful expression - it is so phenomenally American… It’s like Wrigleys… It is supposed to be what he means by it - like the big bold sharpie to write your signature. Surely it is clear, irreverent humor?

[@JoanneLight]

Once the usage of a word changes, you can't get it back. Case in point, now people say less instead of fewer and amount instead of number with countable nouns and I cringe every time I hear it. Sigh. "Fewer people" is so much less ambiguous then "less people" as is "number of people" so much more wonderful than "amount of people" (ugh!) Also "He ran more quickly than his brother." is so much more refined than "He ran quicker than his brother." but, alas, we will inevitable lose the former altogether, just as Martin Amis purports.

[@spiritualpolitics8205]

I like Amis as a writer, a brilliant commentator on Nabokov, etc., but he flails badly when stereotyping America along various axes. Here he acts like America has barely begun to assimilate nor invite in millions upon millions of immigrants from around the world. Similarly he is quite virtue-signally about America steaming with racial resentment, as if there haven't been large efforts at reconciliation and healing for generations in the U.S., nor many of good will not needing high-born British admonitions about how easy this should all be... Amis cannot resist signaling his social caste via downward-shaming the very poor he claims to extol, e.g. he is always projecting all the major resentments of American life on stereotyped red-staters, bigots, backwoods fools... No one but the coastal elites, particularly British imports, have ever wrestled with these questions and brought their moral sophistication to bear.

[@jonharrison9222]

You seem to suck at it. Too bad the accent telling you so makes you feel so inferior but that can’t be helped.

[@charlespeterson3798]

At what point does Amis begin acting the part of M.Amis master of everything irrelevant?

[@charlespeterson3798]

Got it. American medicine.

[@MB-dp1rj]

Interesting how much has changed since this interview...given that the NHS in Britain is almost broken and unable to address the populations needs, many hospitals have been adjudged as incapable of providing modern medicine, and there is even a push for delivery of that awful American model of private health care...and the dear fellow died in Florida of all places!

[@jonharrison9222]

Hence why you don’t vote for people who want to scrap the NHS.

[@CriticalDispatches]

What the holy hell would Martin Amis know about the mental atmosphere of anywhere? He's spent most of his life utterly detached from society. Probably explains why his books are so godawful. Amis shared a lot of the stupider opinions of his friend Christopher Hitchens, but not the gift of oratory to dress them up quite so passably.

[@Arareemote]

It is perfectly fine to dislike something dear fellow, but you would do well to learn that ignorance and a lack of understanding of something isn't any basis to criticize it.

[@CriticalDispatches]

@@Arareemote There was no ignorance there. I've read enough of his work and heard enough of his stupid, ill-informed opinions to make such a verdict. That you blankly assume I don't know anything about him betrays your own ignorance, old bean. The best thing Martin Amis ever did was to be Kingsley's son.

[@Arareemote]

​@@CriticalDispatches ​ I refer of course to your evaluation of his novels. While you can certainly find flaws within them and even dislike them. (As I do for a few of them too) it takes a certain level of literary ignorance to dismiss them as being entirely awful. Especially Money and Experience which are exceptionally well written. That's what I refer to when I say ignorance. Not your personal judgments of him. To those comments, though it should be noted funnily enough that he would agree with you, he can even be quoted sincerely calling himself "stupid and ignorant." In fact, the whole reason he avoided essays, was for the reason you had to research and know things. And I do agree he was very out of touch despite being an excellent and very astute critic of literature.

[@CriticalDispatches]

@@Arareemote It's not ignorance though. You are describing it as such because you seem to have an emotional investment in it. The sad fact is that British literature has been almost uniformly godawful since at least the 1950s. The Americans have utterly blown the Brits out of the water in that regard. Writers from that Oxbridge set are painfully dull - snobbish, establishment left-wing conformists masquerading as rebels. What follows after them, the Zadie Smiths and the rest, are even worse Their subject matter is unimaginative and self important, their metaphors tired and superficial, their prose mundane. They can't even do self-indulgence correctly because they're all so utterly dead inside. Boring, upper middle class time wasters. I will agree, however, that Money is not entirely terrible, but is very juvenile and empty - which emphasises the message of the book, but only coincidentally. I'm reminded of a passage from Dubliners when thinking about them: "...phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds," appealing to "an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios." But, of course, this is all purely subjective.

[@jonharrison9222]

Your stupidity is already showing; no need to run about screaming and waving it in the street.

[@string22]

Champagne socialist

[@Broatch6]

yeah well...check out a dopey socialist like corbyn...he's a useful idiot

[@mcoffely]

string22 the best kind of socialism.

[@bellahurley-skegg518]

"AT THAT DAY YE SHALL KNOW THAT I AM IN MY FATHER, AND YE IN ME, AND I IN YOU" (John 14:20)

[@anthonydc50]

Think it was Amis himself who asked why rich people should drink all the champagne.

[@kevbrowncanada]

string22 I'll take a champagne socialist over a root beer capitalist any day.