Martin Amis

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INTERVIEWER

Do you need complete isolation to write or is it more portable than that?

AMIS

I can write in the midst of—not very conveniently—but I can make progress in the midst of the usual family clamor. But it has to be said, perhaps with some regret, that the first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone, most fully alive when alone. A tolerance for solitude isn’t anywhere near the full description of what really goes on. The most interesting things happen to you when you are alone.

-- Martin Amis at The Paris Review

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Breaking Bad

I finally finished "Breaking Bad". If it were not for Netflix, I might never have gotten around to it. When the show first aired on cable, I was not in the mood for drug criminals. I had recently tried "Sons of Anarchy" and felt turned off on the theme of bad guys ruling the roost. That was a mistake on my part. However, I cannot complain about my timing. These were some good weeks for me to be happily lost in a five-season show. It helped to get me through Lorie's extended stay-over, and it helped to nurse me through my week-long illness.

The final episode was a work of poetic beauty. I had actually thought the show was losing it's way by the end of the fourth season. The storyline was becoming too wild and loose, and the actors were getting greedy for Emmy awards, with the acting becoming so overwrought and over the top that it was becoming a burlesque. It looked like a case of a show becoming a victim of its own success, being made to run too long. However, they really worked on the closing, tightening up the storyline and putting some soul back into the acting.

I am going to miss it. It is not easy for me to be swept away by a TV series. The chemistry rarely comes together for me. It is hard enough for me to fall for a movie these days and care for just the couple of hours. I am back in a Shakespeare mood, and this will give me something to watch over my meals, but it is not the same thing as being absorbed in a new story and new characters. It is like losing a longtime girlfriend and having to hit the single scene again. You cannot expect lighting to strike twice, at least not right away, probably not for a long time.

Academia and Loving Literature

We have a nice excerpt condemning academia's treatment of literature. I imagine that the humanities have felt some pressure to make their subject more sciency and 'difficult-seeming'. Of course, this might be why others feel that literature should not even be part of academia in the first place. Let book lovers join book clubs!

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In his 1991 essay “The Academic Zoo,” Joseph Epstein commented that “the contemporary university is a place of deep conformity, despite its … appearance of being an Elysian Field in which the spirit is allowed to roam freely.” And in his 1954 comic novel of the academy, Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell got it right with a typically Jarrellian epigram: “The really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it.” Part of that loyalty is a self-satisfied devotion to writing badly. Epstein speaks of “the vast amounts of hideous prose required to do the job” of the academic, and this is why it remains nonsensical to read academics on the topic of loving literature: not only because their mission is to usurp and debase great books, but because the thing that is lovable about literature is the very thing they are incapable of approximating, never mind replicating.

How can one say with any surety that academics don’t sufficiently love literature, and why, per Lynch’s inquiry, does love even matter in literature? Nobody can tell for certain what moves in another’s heart, but any engaged reader can tell exactly what’s on the page, and the reason academics are indicted for having no love for literature is because their prose is incapable of giving pleasure. Pleasure is the test, not only for literature but for criticism too—pleasure en route to wisdom. Criticism that does not attempt creativity, that does not aspire to meet imaginative literature on equal footing in the manner of Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde, will fail both to register now and to be remembered later. In forsaking pleasure taken and pleasure given, academics have forsaken much indeed, including any claims they might make on love. They will never admit to taking no pleasure in literature, but don’t bother about that. The evidence is right there on the page—it always is.

-- William Giraldi, "On Loving Literature" at The Virginia Quarterly Review

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