Talking in the Library Series 1 - Martin Amis
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2017
- Martin Amis has achieved such celebrity as a stylish icon of his age-group that the coverage in the media threatens to cloud the picture of his clean-edged originality as a master of the English sentence, of which he has reinvented every part while further focussing its melody and rhythm. Celebrated among his friends as one of the great talkers at the lunch table, he has rarely enjoyed talking on television, which he finds intolerably artificial. But when he talks in my library, with a drink and a roll-up to hand, it's a different matter.
![Christopher Hitchens - [2007] - 'No Laughing Matter' with Martin Amis](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4-5xXDvORf0/mqdefault.jpg)
After reading and watching him in such interviews over the years, I now feel as if I have lost a friend. RIP
It occurs to me that MA never seems more content than in the company of other writers. This is a delicious half hour.
RIP Martin Amis.
Farewell to an old and better world
Love how they can jump from topic to topic seamlessly. They don't skip a beat.
''Style is an expression of perception''
This is just an excellent and charming conversation
21:00 The little nod and "I'll settle for that" delivered in pure Hitchens style.
Or Amis.
You do know he, Clive and others had a regular literary lunch at the Bursa Kebab House, don’t you?
Greatly enjoyed this, especially when they talk about Larkin. A certain amount of eye-rolling exasperation (inevitably, given Larkin) but ultimately love and respect for a great poet. And a complete absence of the rancour which seems to be becoming almost compulsory these days.
It's amazing how many mannerisms he shares here with C Hitchens. They do say that people begin to behave like each other when they spend time together.
They really were Very close, d'you follow me?
They both died of esophageal cancer 😔
You can tell that Amis hung around Hitchens alot. They have similar mannerisms.
Nabokov and Vidal imitations.
Loved it. Thanks for posting this.
Thanks for putting this up. CJ really is the person that speaks to me most directly.
Thank you for uploading this series!
Really need to listen to this next time ...
in North Face Of Soho clive james describes the weekly meeting of wits in london which he launched and where amis was king wit.
in this conversation the two, many years later, are still competing - naming names and quoting like mad.
james seems a bit pissed - keeping up and, characteristically, showing off his erudition. it may be as close as we'll get to seeing what
those weekly 1970's brainfests were like.
They had three beers before lunch each on a working day and leered at passing women.
Perfect!
this is good stuff thanks
Come on, Celine's "Voyage" is amazing.
Admire both writers! I like that Amis defends Borges from James’ attack on his character and supposed complicity (“Cultural Amnesia”) indeed, he was much more forgiving of his fellow writers than James. Today, we can only imagine two blokes publicly guffawing at the fellatio scene in “Portnoy’s Complaint”, how ironic they then moved on to the subject of censorship.
So many Hitch mannerisms in the Amis boy. But who influenced who? Both are great observers. Which one was the climber? It seems reasonable to find Amis innocent in this matter. Perhaps the more interesting question is which one deployed the resulting charm to greatest visual effect. Amis is deep and encyclopaedic. Hitch was more visible, and arguably more watchable.
I'd say Hitch was encyclopaedic himself.
I think Hitchens was more erudite than Amis. In his 'Inside story', Amis recounts with admiration how the Hitch gave him an impromptu lecture, on the origins of the first world war, starting his exposition with the battle of Kosovo in 1389. There's a wonderful essay by Hitch entitled 'Lightness at Midnight', were he implies that Amis's reading was deficient in the general area of Stalinist Communism, and even instances a couple of books. Also Hitch was superior in the way he summoned and marshalled facts, to deploy them effectively in an argument.
And Clive took apart Hitchens’ quaint insistence that all would have been fine had Lenin lived.
I never knew fellatio and rococo are pronounced like that. Wonderful discussion.
They aren't
@@arthurriordan5760 they are, in Italy
It's upto you. I've always pronounced it like fell-eh-shio
what year was this?
Can anyone list the Russian authors they were talking about in the beginning?
@hoop loopooiikk thanks man 🤝
Does anyone know what year this is? Mid 90s some time...
2001, I think
I fear for the youth of Hong Kong. They really believed in the righteous power of democracy and the right to be free. And they believed the West would share their indignation and assertiveness. How they must be suffering.
They may be the last true resisters. But if the rumours are true that they were funded by Soros (as is often apparently the case), then they were set up as mere entertainment for the psychopathic elites, and ultimately as a lesson for the rest of us.
This all began on the public stage when Kissinger met Mao in 1972. They’ve had us all sliding down the gift chute into China ever since.
Peace, until THEY make the alternative inevitable
Quite talkers both of them are.
There not brain dead OMG! hyperbolic Americans mate.
That is how interviews normally work, yes…
Larkin will be remembered, that’s the difference here - after all the ltut-tutting.
Caring about injustice, cruelty and hypocrisy? Never stopped us loving TS Eliot. But the cruelty, ignorance and bigotry does greatly diminish Larkin. It's an astonishing gap in his sometimes extraordinary imagination. Those who reduce it to tut-tutting miss the whole point of literature. He'll always be best known for the contradiction.
@@lizziebkennedy7505 It does not diminish him at all to some of us - so stop speaking from your prurient, tame little perch of sanctimonious conformity, woman.
@@lizziebkennedy7505
You would have to be fairly asinine to think the venting in Larkin’s letters affects the poems.
Moments of this sound like Dudley Moore and Peter Cooke doing "Martin (not Derek) and Clive"...
Does Clive mention Jayne Mansfield and lobsters at any point?
Had exactly this thought.
My Struggle. 😂
Clive James needs to fucking interview himself and not waste anyone else's time.
OH GAWD. I'll shut up.
The idea of a man of Amis' accomplishments critiquing a man of Joyce's is laughable.
By that standard who is permitted to criticise a titan such as Joyce? Perhaps half a dozen are on his level and they're all dead.
@@QwidgyboManyeh that was a bizarre comment. By that logic there’d be no such thing as criticism
@@QwidgyboManAnd many of them also viewed Joyce's 'masterpieces' unfavourably. Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley spring to mind first, even Nabokov another great stylist, but I would need to reconfirm his views as it's been awhile.
fellartio
He took his father's opinion very much on board, maybe too much. That you don't mimic the pronunciation of other languages if you're speaking English.
@@ianparker9231 but in doing so, is entirely mispronouncing the word...thus making him look rather silly billy in the process.
Martin references this in his memoir Experience funnily enough. That his Father always used to pronounce words in a rather peculiar way that as kids they could never understand. One day they asked Kingsley and he talked about not relying on spelling pronunciation and instead speaking words according to their natural rhythms. He considered it the posh or upper-class way of speaking. Martin does his too, a great deal.
Nadezhda Mandelshdam never wrote a good book. I disagree.
Not that I give a flying F#CK, but what was the remark by James on Borges and the context. He goes from some a lickspittle in Russia to Celine with some offhand slight with a Castilian accent for god's sake. Poor Argentina. Poor U.K.K.
Jeez, awful jumped up creeps.
Yeah, I’ve always preferred your work too
Waiting for your collected works sometime soon.
Cannot do it. James puts Borges and Celine in the same sentence, before or after they scooped half his brain out? As for Amis, always the lowest form of wit..."My father". He is the librarian. Ah well.
Chill out Charles