From: StephenP
Category: Amis
Date: 7/12/99
Time: 8:54:08 AM
Remote Name: 195.171.125.1
I dreamt about Jarma again. I was charging along an American highway in the dark, been driving for hours, bladder bursting. The old white-hot cannonball in the lap scenario. I pull up at a petrol station and dive for the toilets. The door, to my horror, is locked. From inside, I hear a wobbly tenor giving voice to an ancient Lithuanian folk song. I can wait no longer and go all over the floor. Jarma emerges, furious and devoutly drenched from the assiduous sluicing he's been giving himself in the newly-installed shower chiz, wheeling himself along in his makeshift trolley. He sees the mess I've made, draws a pistol and shoots me three times through the head.
Actually, I made that up. It was a way of satirising his grand plan of shower installation, because I believe it to be foolish. I did dream he stabbed me a while ago, though.
At the risk of incurring our gnaediger Professor's blue pencil, may I chip in with a toilet anecdote? I justify it on the grounds of insight into transatlantic relations, a subject close to Marty's heart. Also life imitating art, in this case John Self.
A few years ago I was transferred to work for a month in my company's Chicago office. Easter fell during this time, and a charming young lady from the office invited me to Easter dinner with her family.
This family lived in real Blue Velvet-style burbsville, all front lawns like putting greens and smiley firemen. They were the most unbelievable family, the parents incredibly overbearing and maniacally Christian, the brother was Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest post-lobotomy.
Dinner time came, after many long prayers and dutiful silences. The atmosphere was unbearably forced-polite, the weather astonishingly hot. And the food...
It was a huge watery gammon covered in pellucid fat, served with mushy peas, sweet potatoes topped with melted marshmallow, for god's sake (how do you people EAT this shit?), and pink blancmange (jello?) ON THE SAME PLATE.
After two portions, the second at my hosts' solemn insistence, I knew I was going to barf imminently. I asked where the toilet was, and to my horror, they indicated a flimsy sliding door about four feet away. Like the most enthusiastic bulimic, I pondered on how best to muffle the explosion which was surely to follow. Mortified with nausea and embarrassment, I decided to kneel with my head actually inside the toilet bowl to minimise the impact and resultant racket.
I had not bargained for quite how revolted my stomach had been by those American culinary atrocities. The gush of vomit was thick and copious and at porcelain-endangering velocity. The contents of the toilet bowl emptied back out over my face, hair and flimsy white t-shirt.
I dabbed myself down as best I could with a hand towel the size of a postage stamp, swallowed hard, and with a sickly smile rejoined my hosts at the table, my t shirt blotchily transparent with water and stuck to my chest. I wasn't invited back...
To polish the great Diedrick's pommes, may I respectfully point out that pace Burchill's satire, it was the meisterwerk 'Understanding Martin Amis' ("a 'Seven Types of Ambiguity' for the nineties") which first poked fun at Marty's apparent desire to slaughter his entire family when the bomb goes off. I think the phrase big Jim uses was, like, 'Don't they have a say in the matter?' (By the way, Teach, you never finished your tale of literary hobnobbery here in old Blighty. More please.)
Finally, three questions: what are we going to do to celebrate the great man's 50th this year? (Any idea of the date, Jules my poppet?) Ed's place?
Two, a site-relevant literary trivia test to cheer up poor Craigie. Where's this quote from: "Not for Cadwallader and all his goats"? Who says it to who?
Last, can Jarma (or anyone else) find online the New Yorker article by Amis mentioned in the Moss interview where he goes to see Four Weddings with Salman Rushdie?
I'd better go now before I bore poor Geoffers to death.