From: Ed
Category: Amis
Date: 7/6/99
Time: 5:14:38 PM
Remote Name: 194.230.18.175
...& pepper, because I'm a seasoned traveller.
Not my joke - Alexei Sayle's. Enjoyed Perry & Croft's as well this week...Waiter: 'A nice aperitif madam?' Mrs Slocombe: 'And they're all my own too!' No? Well it's just me & BBC Prime out here...
I started the S Times Nabokov article with great expectations but gave up after a while, concluding that the art of biography has become intimately linked with tabloid expoism. I've been disabused of any abiding affection for W B Yeats in recent weeks; Byron & Keats fell by the wayside a while ago...Lewis Carroll was of course a pervert...as it appears is Nabokov now (surprise surprise!?). Bertrand Russell...what a bastard... And as for Mr Mars... I'm waiting for (or have I missed?) the slating of Wilfred Owen; then I can just become the alcoholic I've always wanted to be...
Heavy Water: State of England - sheer modern literary genius; Straight Fiction (very good - what were we having that argument about anyway?); Let Me Count the Times - interesting forerunner to Richard's The Info impotence. But otherwise? Underlines the decline of the short story & the novelistic talents of MA (spare me from his poetry). It was the same with Self...hit rate of about 20% in the short story form.