AUGUST 3, 2012
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ONCE UPON A TIME, in a realm called England, literary fiction was an obscure and blameless pursuit. It was more respectable than angelology, true, and more esteemed than the study of phosphorescent mold; but it was without question a minority-interest sphere.
In 1972, I submitted my first novel: I typed it out on a second-hand Olivetti and sent it in from the sub-editorial office I shared at The Times Literary Supplement. The print run was 1,000 (and the advance was 250 pounds). It was published, and reviewed, and that was that. There was no launch party and no book tour; there were no interviews, no profiles, no photo shoots, no signings, no readings, no panels, no on-stage conversations, no Woodstocks of the Mind in Hay-on-Wye, in Toledo, in Mantova, in Parati, in Cartagena, in Jaipur, in Dubai; and there was no radio and no television. The same went for my second novel (1975) and my third (1978). By the time of my fourth novel (1981), nearly all the collateral activities were in place, and writers, in effect, had been transferred from vanity press to Vanity Fair.
What happened in the interim? We can safely say that as the 1970s became the 1980s, there was no spontaneous flowering of enthusiasm for the psychological nuance, the artful simile, and the curlicued sentence. The phenomenon, as I now see it, was entirely media-borne. To put it crudely, the newspapers had been getting fatter and fatter (first the Sundays, then the Saturdays, then all the days in between), and what filled these extra pages was not additional news but additional features. And the featurists were running out of people to write about—running out of alcoholic actors, ne’er-do-well royals, depressive comedians, jailed rock stars, defecting ballet dancers, reclusive film directors, hysterical fashion models, indigent marquises, wife-beating footballers, adulterous golfers, and rapist boxers. The dragnet went on widening until journalists, often to their patent dismay, were writing about writers: literary writers.
This modest and perhaps temporary change in status involved a number of costs and benefits. A storyteller is nothing without a listener, and the novelists started getting what they can’t help but covet: not more sales, necessarily, but more readers. And it was gratifying to find that many people were indeed quite intrigued by the business of creating fiction: To prove the point, one need only adduce the fact that every last acre of the planet is now the scene of a boisterous literary festival. With its interplay of the conscious and the unconscious, the novel involves a process that no writers, and no critics, really understand. Nor can they quite see why it arouses such curiosity. (“Do you write in longhand?” “How hard do you press on the paper?”) All the same, as J.G. Ballard once said, readers and listeners “are your supporters—urging on this one-man team.” They release you from your habitual solitude, and they give you heart. So far, so good: These are the benefits. Now we come to the costs, which, I suppose, are the usual costs of conspicuousness.
Needless to say, the enlarging and emboldening of the mass-communications sector was not confined to the United Kingdom. And “visibility,” as Americans call it, was no doubt granted to writers in all the advanced democracies—with variations determined by national character. In my home country, the situation is, as always, paradoxical. Despite the existence of a literary tradition of unparalleled magnificence (presided over by the world’s only obvious authorial divinity), writers are regarded with a studied skepticism—not by the English public, but by the English commentariat. It sometimes seems that a curious circularity is at work. If it is true that writers owe their ascendancy to the media, then the media has promoted the very people that irritate them most: a crowd of pretentious—and by now quite prosperous—egomaniacs. When writers complain about this, or about anything else, they are accused of self-pity (“celebrity whinge”). But the unspoken gravamen is not self-pity. It is ingratitude.
Nor should we neglect a profound peculiarity of fiction and the column inches that attend it: a fortuitous consanguinity. The appraisal of an exhibition does not involve the use of an easel and a palette; the appraisal of a ballet does not involve the use of a pair of slippers and a tutu. And the same goes for the written arts: You don’t review poetry by writing verse (unless you’re a jerk), and you don’t review plays by writing dialogue. Novels, though, come in the form of prose narrative; and so does journalism. This odd affinity causes no great tension elsewhere, but it sits less well, perhaps, with certain traits of the Albionic Fourth Estate—emulousness, a kind of cruising belligerence, and an instinctive proprietoriality.
Conspicuous persons, in my motherland, are most seriously advised to lead a private life denuded of all color and complication. They should also, if they are prudent, have as little as possible to do with America—seen as the world HQ of arrogance and glitz. When I and my wife, who is a New Yorker, entrained the epic project of moving house, from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, I took every public opportunity to make it clear that our reasons for doing so were exclusively personal and familial, and had nothing to do with any supposed dissatisfaction with England or the English people (whom, as I truthfully stressed, I have always admired for their tolerance, generosity, and wit). Backed up by lavish misquotes together with satirical impersonations (“cod” interviews and the like), the impression given was that I was leaving because of a vicious hatred of my native land and because I could no longer bear the well-aimed barbs of patriotic journalists.
“I wish I weren’t English”: Of all the fake tags affixed to my name, this is the one I greet with the deepest moan of inanition. I suggest that the remark—and its equivalent in any language or any alphabet—is unutterable by anyone whose IQ reaches double figures. “I wish I weren’t North Korean” might make a bit of sense, assuming the existence of a North Korean sufficiently well-informed and intrepid to give voice to it. Otherwise and elsewhere, the sentiment is inconceivably null. And to say it of England—the country of Dickens, George Eliot, Blake, Milton, and, yes, William Shakespeare—isn’t even perverse. It is merely whimsical.
The phrase “American exceptionalism” was coined in 1929 by none other than Josef Stalin, who condemned it as a “heresy.” (He meant that America, like everywhere else, was subject to the iron laws of Karl Marx.) If that much-mocked notion still means anything, we should apply it to America’s exceptionally hospitable attitude to outsiders (and America has certainly been exceptionally hospitable to me and my family). All friends of the stars and stripes are pained to see that this unique and noble tradition is now under threat, and from all sides; but America remains, definingly, an immigrant society, vast and formless; writers have always occupied an unresented place in it, because everyone subliminally understood that they would play a part in construing its protean immensity. Remarkably, the “American Century” (to take another semi-wowserism) is due to last exactly that long—with China scheduled for prepotence in about 2045. The role of the writers, for the time being, is at least clear enough. They will be taking America’s temperature, and checking its pulse, as the New World follows the old country down the long road of decline.
Martin Amis is the author, most recently, of Lionel Asbo: State of England.
This article appeared in the August 23, 2012 issue of the magazine.
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16 comments
I did this journey in reverse 11 and a half years ago, though I am not a writer and not nearly famous enough -- or at all -- for anyone outside my immediate circle to have commented. In America, many people I know had little if any ability to process my moving overseas. America is the chosen land and everywhere else is full of people who are descended from people who lacked the gumption and good sense to move there. So why leave? As for England, I meet two kinds of people here, at least among those who are curious enough to ask the inevitable question when they hear my accent. Both ask 'Why did you move here?' but the inflection marks each side of the debate. Some emphasize the word 'here'. Those are the ones who believe England is an utter failure at everything and that America is the place where everything is Disneyland or Las Vegas. Who would want to leave Disneyland for dreary Britain. Those who emphasize the word 'why' express a more ordinary curiosity. The tendency expressed in the emphasis on 'here' seems to dominate the press in this country. To judge by the way in which headlines appear every time any part of the British establishment makes the tiniest slip, one must conclude that 'we are utter failures' headlines must sell papers. It is that tendency, noted by almost every foreigner I know of who moves here, that must animate the reactions mentioned in this piece. The tendency strikes me as masochistic. I fear it has spilled into other areas of British life. The seeming inability to see why they should not gut their social services and infrastructure just because they had a banking crisis goes hand in hand with the inability to acknowledge that for the decade preceding the crash, they enjoyed a more vibrant economy than the United States, with better employment numbers, better growth and more widespread prosperity.
- bungler
August 9, 2012 at 3:55am
The preemptive insult. An unusual calling card. But so very British. If Fitzgerald can go to Europe to chronicle its decadence and decline, why can't Amis come to America to chronicle ours. Amis came along too late to chronicle England's, which had already been done exceptionally well by Waugh anyway. A warning about Americans: unlike the British, who seem to enjoy their misery, Americans have no tolerance for it. So cheerio to your British friends, and welcome to America; even if we are in decline.
- rayward
August 9, 2012 at 7:37am
America is decline is a myth and I don't understand why Amis is buying into it.
- noga1
August 9, 2012 at 9:00am
The circular human nature to romanticize the past through the gauzy lens of fuzzy remembrance is something that Americans and Britons exceed at. We clamor for the halcyon days that link to certain moments in our youthful lives when things were more "innocent" and "less complicated" than they appear to be today. Surely I can romanticize and let my eyes glaze over as I recall my youthful exuberance in growing up in the late 70s and early 80s but that is only because I was so completely unaware of how bad things were back then. Economic malaise, environmental degradation with our crying Native Americans in TV commercials, Reaganomics, nuclear proliferation, energy crises , crime, Deep Throat, American Graffiti, failed hostage rescues, Banana Republic invasions and airline highjackings. I wonder how many Britons pine for the days when England was for the English? And England was a more Thatcherish version of today? Do the aging British get nostalgic when watching 'Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner' or 'Peeping Tom', do some of them still refer to the UK as the Fifty-first State? I romanticize my grandmothers England in a different way because my visions are painted by her yarns of her youth, so my understanding is two generations removed and distilled through the U.K. pop culture that skips the pond. I listen to claims of decline in America and I wonder what people mean by that....decline. World Power decline? Manufacturing decline? Educational decline? Financial decline? Cultural decline? Usually when we speak of decline it tends to land upon the latter. "We've lost our way", 'We've no moral compass anymore", "the pop culture is destroying families and breeding violence", etcetera etcetera. America has never been a cultured society (in the Old World culture sort of way) and never will be. America excels at hucksterism and snake-oil salesmanship. Regardless of how much our aging Politicians and Tea Party cheer squads clamor for the days of yore, America spends every waking hour hellbent on reinvention and newness. Despite our moments of genius in the Arts can America honestly say that the art of Jeff Koons is worthy of canonization? Can we legitimately claim that the works of Bret Easton Ellis will be forever entombed in the annals of the written word? America apes what came before us in an effort to grasp at a sense of culture and refinement. Perhaps it began when Washington built his Mt. Vernon estate, not from stone, but from wood cut to look like stone and dressed in 18th century American stucco (a mixture of paint and sand).Dressing for success is our motto. I'm glad that Amis has chosen, oh so momentarily, the American shores for his current home but I suspect he will cross the pond once more for home. It will be refreshing to see Amis' take on America and American culture in general. And like other critical expats before him, Amis will, with biting tongue illuminate the dark underbelly of America that makes America so very American. As the American band Devo noted humans are in a state of devolution. The American invention the Shake Weight marks the finality of that devolution.
- singlspeed
August 9, 2012 at 10:38am
Good point by both Noga1 and more elaborately by singlespeed who unfailingly writes thoughtful, interesting comments. Nice riff on romaticizing the past, sir or madam.
- basman
August 9, 2012 at 1:51pm
I could live without the dark underbelly. To me it isn't "American," it's anti-American, the shadow of our devils. I find it hard not to see the US as being in decline precisely because the devils are becoming mainstream. Journalists don't challenge this, try to act as though it's all Business as Usual, the GOP is just Eisenhower, even though that's manifestly no longer true. The Tea Party, the far rightward swing of the GOP, the hatred of the poor, jingoism, violence, corporate ownership of elections, right wing think tanks writing legislation, what's not to love. Even a young girl's leotard is under attack - FOX is attacking Gabby Douglas for wearing a pink leotard during her brilliant victory at the Olympics. They think she should have been draped in parts of a flag, our beautiful young athletes have been attacked for not being sufficiently jingoistic and yes, they USED THAT WORD. Give me a break guys. This is serious and so are the endless outright lies about things like Obamacare (death panels anyone?) (that's just for starters); attacks on women, ignoring the arts, especially public teaching and funding thereof; schools failing to teach reality based science; people regarding the value of life only insofar as what it might be "worth" in dollars - unless of course it isn't born yet in which case it's VERY valuable even in a petri dish. "Right to Lifers" threaten family planning clinics, people burn mosques, shoot Sikhs in their temples, the gun lobby is completely intransigent and thousands of Americans die every year to gun violence but - what's more important? GUNS. Guns are more important than lives and profits are more important than animals, than the air we breathe, than the soil itself. Plutocrats write laws, anti-union, anti-woman, anti-environment laws that are passed off as state legislation - nobody thinks there's something wrong here? Increasingly I don't recognize my country. People taking Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan seriously? And Santorum? Romney - who the heck IS he - he's pandering to the very fringes of the far right - why is this appropriate for a Presidential candidate in the United States of America? Our hateful anti-immigration attitudes target people based, really, on their appearance. We exhibit cruelty toward the sick and the poor - we've become notorious for starting wars - of course this has been going on since Vietnam, the war thing I mean. Look at Latin America, little known or largely ignored adventures - the plutocratic leaders of some death squads, rich Salvadoran families, may have funded Bain Capital and this doesn't bother anybody? Surely it's worth some investigation? Surely it's ok to talk about the 1980's now instead of mindlessly worshiping Ronald Reagan? Oh yeah - our business model, the anti-Robin Hood: vulture capitalism in place of creative businesses - companies stripped for their assets, workers out on the streets, no replacement for their jobs. There are creative business people in the US but all too many come from rich, entitled families and sharp enough to save key industries like steel they were not. Nor will they help power green energy or support initiatives to fix our infrastructure - rather, heavily vested as they are in oil, gas and coal they're continuing ripping the tops off mountains and drilling in pristine waters which all too often are destroyed even as the US believes in dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden 6000 years ago but refused to deal with global warming, mass extinctions and pollution? And meanwhile they'll ignore existing infrastructure and the need for jobs and threaten to shut down the government if the rich don't get more tax cuts. On the human rights from we have the TSA, which will put innocent travelers up again the wall and take butter knives from pilots even as white supremacists are armed to the teeth - thanks to the gun lobbies, the 2nd Amendment has become something the Founding Fathers wouldn't recognize - would they really want us all to have arsenals of AK-47's? And anyway the "well-regulated militias" were supposed to defend the nation not attack its core values... We have toothless "leftists" and dangerous and shameless liars on the right; apologists for the oligarchs - you bet we have a problem here. The so-called middle, working and poor people own an increasingly small and shrinking percentage of America's wealth, the top 5% are rolling in it and yet, want to pay even less taxes and raise them on us. Yet discussing this is referred to as Class Warfare. It just Isn't Done, it should not be discussed except quietly, in closed rooms. Problems; I sure hope they aren't fatal. I love this country but it's scaring me. We watched a movie last night about the murder of Medgar Evers. That was when I was 13. A few months later JFK was murdered. 30 some years later they FINALLY convicted the KKK a******* who done it. Read some posts on the right wing blogosphere and tell me we're beyond that kind of hatred yet? Who am I kidding. You can read racist screeds on Yahoo, antisemitism, slander of Muslims or anybody who is different. Women are called "sluts" on national radio by a leader of the Republican Party. High profile businesspeople and politicians claim Obama isn't American, they call him The Food Stamp President, just for starters. Meanwhile more and more Americans fall into poverty, through no fault of their own. So many of our children really have no chance, old people - people in late middle age facing retirement - are damned as "entitled" and threatened with the loss of everything - and young people are saddled with debt and can't find decent jobs. Meanwhile the corporations make record profits and American workers, despite everything, are among the most productive and hard working in the world. So give me a break guys. The Big Lies by themselves are an indication that we're heading off the rails. Constant repetition of Big Lies by our "leaders?" Real, honest to goodness, oft-repeating big lies? 24/7 propaganda stations? What does that sound like? Martin Amis, have at it.
- Sophia
August 9, 2012 at 2:23pm
You're right, singlespeed. America keeps reinventing itself. We'll be in revolutionary mode from start to finish. The reason is that we are perpetually inventing and selling things. But that doesn't mean we're not in decline. Newness often means crappiness, as you suggested. Planet Earth is an experiment, as is American democracy. There is nothing in the Universal Cards that says that either is destined to survive, to be a successful experiment. Galaxies, planets, and civilizations come and go. Yes, We Are Devo. The fact that the GOP, a collection of Neanderthals, has such power in this country is absolute proof of that. As a student of history, I've known for some time that England produces the best historians, in almost every field. That's because they are comfortable in their own history, as bloody as it could sometimes be. The average American spits on history. That's oldness, something to toss into the trash. And, yes, Amis will probably cross the pond back to England one of these years. I hope it's because he'll be worn down by the incessant selling in America and not because he's been mugged or carjacked.
- magboy47.
August 9, 2012 at 2:24pm
I think a myth can be both a false story and also an explanatory frame that tries to answer unanswerable questions of origin and meaning. One of the items of evidence for America in decline as a myth more of the second type is that it started life about five minutes after the Puritans went ashore at Massachusetts Bay. The Puritan sermon that takes its name from the Old Testament, the Jeremiad, was a well known formula by the 1650s. The minister would mount the podium on election day (election sermons were important events) in Boston or Salem or New Haven and lecture the faithful about how the high moral tone and the religious dedication of the founding generation (!) were being watered down if not abandoned by the soft relativism and materialist greed of the children and grandchildren. Unless they realized their errors, it was all going to hell in a handbasket. After the Civil War, Americans in general became less receptive to the Jeremiad, which is a kind of doom-laden glare directed at optimism and adaptation, but one can see its traces (sometimes quite striking ones) in debates about politics, culture, morality, technology, etc. There are both left and right wing versions of it.
- ironyroad
August 9, 2012 at 2:35pm
Sophia's version of doom and gloom exemplifies nicely ironyroad's point. America leads in every field and subject that anyone would care to mention. Music, art, technology, science, literature, medicine, etc etc. A bubble bursts in America and the whole world is shaken. China's ascent is real and fast but consider from which low point in started and what it is based on. Its ability to provide cheap labour. How long can it sustain such cheapness, as the life quality of its own population improves it is inevitable that the attractiveness of cheapness of labour will gradually decline. So Chinese economic ascent has its own expiry date stamped on it. In the meantime, the best minds in America are working on providing solutions to every problem that bedevils our globe. The best minds also gravitate towards America. Why is that? If China is the next big thing, why aren't the best minds immigrating there? In a list of the best 25 universities in the world, America holds 16 slots. Next comes the UK with 5 slots and then Canada, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Japan with 1 each. Surely that means something? Watch Charlie Rose's series about the research of the mind. The most research that has provided better understanding about how the mind works and how to help those who suffer from mental disorders is done in the US. Surely that means something. There are so many factors and variables that determine the greatness and vectors of a country's evolution. In America, there is a mixture of talents and skills, an essentially immigrant society that is driven towards excellence. Where else in the world can you point to such a mix? Why would anyone assume that today's immigrants and their children in America are any less invested in their success and future than those in the nineteenth and twentieth century? Where in China do you see such exuberance, verve, curiosity? I don't see how it is possible for America to decline. Maybe a few centuries from now, when it has become so culturally homogenized that stagnation will set in. Maybe not even then. China will be able to compete, maybe, if and when it becomes a real democracy. If that happens then why worry about the ascent of China?
- noga1
August 9, 2012 at 3:38pm
Dunno that he's actually that wrong. I did the same move myself in 1972 (not as a novelist!). I've done pretty well, mainly because of the hospitality and the opportunities here. We do not get much of either in England. Here, it's "hello and what can you do?" There, it's "yes, and what do you want?" A good move. Good luck to him.
- pjbvb
August 9, 2012 at 5:11pm
I readily confess that I owe great deal to American hospitality and opportunities too. I'm a later transplant than pjbvb but it's a similar story for me.
- ironyroad
August 9, 2012 at 5:30pm
"I don't see how it is possible for America to decline. Maybe a few centuries from now, when it has become so culturally homogenized that stagnation will set in. Maybe not even then." noga1, You're getting a bit silly. A few centuries from now there won't even be a recognizable human race. Cisco Systems is proudly displaying in TV ads faulty factory machines that diagnose their own problems and then physically repair themselves. By 2400 and even before machines will have physically replicated themselves, probably by the billions. We are already enslaved by machines. Think what it will be like when they are multiplying themselves in underground caves and then clunking out into the sunlight, armies of them, to terrify us. There are 3 colossal problems to consider in the future of America and the earth: 1. Gross overpopulation (partly due to curing diseases), along with dwindling resources. 2. Massive, maybe even tactical nuclear, wars to prune the world's population. 3. Authoritarian or dictatorial governments to manage overflowing populations. In 300-400 years we will have a long-standing, perhaps dictatorial, world government. That will be the only way to survive in a grossly overpopulated and under-resourced planet. America may be remembered as a wonderful experiment that flourished in all the respects that you mentioned. And I agree with your tacit premise that we are the greatest nation ever. But we are devolving. Again, I give you the power that the GOP and its Neanderthal minions have to bring down our economy and then tie up our government, preventing our economy from recovering. This stubborn stupidity is a result of of the fear of being overrun by other people, at home and abroad. Our growing worship of guns is another sign of this devolution. But America is still great, as you eloquently demonstrated. I'm going to enjoy it while I can. BTW, you forgot to mention the incredible flourishing of every kind of music under the sun in America. It's definitely one of the things that makes us great.
- magboy47.
August 9, 2012 at 5:46pm
magboy47, my imagination does not bend towards that kind of nightmarish fantasies. Perhaps a different scenario will unfold with Mars being colonized by humans and offering somer elief to an over populated world, the way the discovery of America offered relief to Europeans from over population, and plagues. I believe it is doable :)
- noga1
August 9, 2012 at 6:13pm
"Amis came along too late to chronicle England's, which had already been done exceptionally well by Waugh anyway. A warning about Americans: unlike the British, who seem to enjoy their misery, Americans have no tolerance for it. So cheerio to your British friends, and welcome to America; even if we are in decline." There is no such ting as a definitive chronicle. Chroniclers are made by the times they live in and write about (hence the Chronos) in chronicler). I also doubt that Amis came here to bring us tidings of our decline. I did heartily approve of the opening of his lament: "ONCE UPON A TIME, in a realm called England, literary fiction was an obscure and blameless pursuit. It was more respectable than angelology, true, and more esteemed than the study of phosphorescent mold; but it was without question a minority-interest sphere. In 1972, I submitted my first novel: I typed it out on a second-hand Olivetti and sent it in from the sub-editorial office I shared at The Times Literary Supplement. The print run was 1,000 (and the advance was 250 pounds). It was published, and reviewed, and that was that. There was no launch party and no book tour; there were no interviews, no profiles, no photo shoots, no signings, no readings, no panels, no on-stage conversations, no Woodstocks of the Mind in Hay-on-Wye, in Toledo, in Mantova, in Parati, in Cartagena, in Jaipur, in Dubai; and there was no radio and no television. The same went for my second novel (1975) and my third (1978). By the time of my fourth novel (1981), nearly all the collateral activities were in place, and writers, in effect, had been transferred from vanity press to Vanity Fair." The now of now time, though, has changed and it includes both vanity fair and vanity presses or would we call them vanity digital presses. What do you get when you cross digital vanity with digital fair? A Martin Amis essay
- arnon1
August 10, 2012 at 12:23am
Martin Amis's best friend, Christopher Hitchens, moved to America years ago and according to the stories told by his friends, loved America fiercely, for being genuinely egalitarian. This fact must have been a factor in Amis's decision, apart from all the family stuff. Moreover, if you follow Amis's public confrontations with the British leftist crowds that used to be his natural habitat until 9/11, you will find that he has been vilified and called any kind of name, from racist to Islamophobe. Seems like British literary circles cannot forgive him for not joining the anti-American, anti-Israeli chorus, and have done their best to make him feel out of place in his own native land. And he is not someone to keep his mouth shut just because it would have been politique to do so. Why should he? Here is why I trust Amis and distrust his detractors: "Amis... last month took up the post as professor of creative writing at Manchester. Applications for the master of arts course which he is teaching were boosted from 100 to 150 by the news of his arrival. He is teaching two subjects – the novella and the works of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, two of his favourite authors. When his appointment was announced, Amis gave an insight into what he would be teaching students. "If all this does turn out to have a theme, it'll be, 'Don't go with the crowd, don't do anything for the crowd, don't be of the crowd or with the crowd," he said." Maybe the crowd proved to be too much, too toxic, even for him. I don't know that I blame him. All you need is take a look at the British much celebrated paper, The Guardian, to realize how far the crowd is willing to go. http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2012/08/an-horror-by-any-other-name.html So yes, I believe Amis when he says that family circumstances forced the relocation but the campaign of vilification must have made it seem more desirable than it should perhaps have been.
- noga1
August 10, 2012 at 5:32am
When I was in my 20s, I read Kingsley Amis (especially Lucky Jim) and fell madly in love with his writing. So naturally I inherited Martin, though as I slide into senility it's a little harder to consummate the passion. Wherever you go, I hope it goes well for you, Martin. I am a long time gloom and doom by nature person, so I am surprised to find my life has gone fairly well for all these years. When Magboy rings another bell on collapse of the human race, my instincts quiver that the bell tolls for our vicious race, sooner rather than later. Too bad for my granddaughter, as she is turning out fairly well. Cockroaches, coyotes, starlings, grizzly bears, and great white sharks hang in there; your time to rule is coming up fast.
- skahn
August 10, 2012 at 9:23pm