From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/14/99
Time: 7:59:09 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
[Poster's note: The following article is from *The Telegraph*. From November 5, 1995. But it wasn't in *The Electronic Telegraph* archive. I found it in Lexis-Nexis. James Diedrick spoke of Mike Hoolihan as being Amis in drag. Nicola Six is another semi-mouthpiece for Amis. Julie Clinch said that Nicola Six seems more like a female impersonator than a woman. I myself think that Nicola resembles nothing so much as a *fembot* (a female robot). Or maybe a *houri* from Islamic heaven. Or maybe a toilet-seat-staining fecal-erotic poopatrix from The Geoff Norcott Collection. Whatever the heck she is, she took a perfectly good book and shot it straight to hell. So I guess her biggest victim was Amis himself. He should have named her *Symbolina*.]
*FAVOURITE LINES*
Continuing our series in which well-known people choose a short poem they particularly admire, the novelist Martin Amis, selecting *Bright Star* by John Keats, explains: "This late sonnet is the quintessential Keats poem. The octet is classical, lapidary, high-style; it is perfect. The sestet is a concerted flirtation with vulgarity and cliché---and the final couplet is itself a swoon, a whimper, an abdication. It could be said that the contrast suits the poem's argument, but the lurch in quality is extreme. Still, that was Keats. All his aspects and facets are present in these 14 lines."
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art---not in lone splendour hung aloft the night and watching, with eternal lids apart, like nature's patient, sleepless eremite, the moving waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's human shores, or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors; no---yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, to feel for ever its soft fall and swell, awake for ever in a sweet unrest, still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, and so live ever---or else swoon to death.
KEITH TALENT: "The lover looks to the star as an image of, of constancy. What Keith---what Keats is expressing here is a yearning to be outside time. Suspended with his fair love. But I think the uh, movement of the poem gives a little twist to that reading. The star is identified with purity. The clean waters. The newly fallen snow. Yet the lover must be bold. He must come down from the heavens, and enter time."
NICOLA SIX: "Exactly, Keith. The lover knows he cannot escape the human sphere, with all its ecstasy and risk. 'Swoon to death': for the Romantics, Keith, death and orgasm are equivalent."
KEITH TALENT: "Yeah, well, same difference."
NICOLA SIX: "The first eight lines really are quite beautiful, but I can't help feeling that the sestet is terrible tosh."