From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/15/99
Time: 6:24:13 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.118
I'm curious to know if Jezzaroona himself coined the word *involuted*. It's such a butt-lovely term! It reminds me of James Joyce's *inscape*. (Which I assume means "interior landscape".) By the way, is anybody on this site ever gonna get around to reading *Ulysses*? Read it for me so I don't have to. And go to the bathroom for me while you're at it.
Jim Murphy's objection to the filmification of *London Fields* reminds me of a similar gripe that was articulated by John Simon (the renowned film critic and intergalactic ass-crack). John Simon said: "No great, or very good, novel should be turned into a movie. High quality in any genre is so wedded to form that divorce spells certain disaster. But there is a kind of novel that no one, not even the biggest fool, should even consider transposing to the screen---yet that is precisely the kind of enterprise that tempts the biggest fools. I mean the novel that is pre-eminently a word construct, that lives first and last by its linguistic wits, by its verbal architectonics and pyrotechnics."
Please note that Simon's objection shouldn't pertain to *London Fields*. Because *London Fields* is not pre-eminently a word construct. Nor is *London Fields* a great novel. Nor is it a very good novel. What *London Fields* is is a terrific self-referential conceit with a fabbadelic prose style. The only thing wrong with *London Fields* is the fact that it's saddled with a badly-conceived cartoon vamp character who happens to be afflicted with *terminal symbolitis*.