From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/20/99
Time: 8:44:50 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.112
FROM *I LIKE IT HERE* BY KINGSLEY AMIS: "Bowen went back to the front of the house, no very great distance, and turned off the gramophone. 'You came, you saw, you conquered me', Sinatra sang. 'When you did that to me I knew somehow th----'. You tell us how, a part of Bowen's mind recommended. Another part was reflecting that to cut Sinatra off in mid-phoneme was no such uproarious fun as it was with the men who did the religion at five to ten on the wireless, but it was nice all the same. It was only a pity that Sinatra could never know."
FROM *A MOUTHFUL OF AIR* BY ANTHONY BURGESS: "Kingsley Amis, as I noted earlier, is one of the few novelists with a technical interest in the processes of speech. In an early novel of his, *I Like It Here*, he has a character who, switching off the radio, cuts off Frank Sinatra 'in mid-phoneme'. This is not quite right: he should have written 'in mid-allophone'. For, though we may study phonemes, we cannot strictly pronounce or hear them. A phoneme is realized only through its allophones. It may be a unit of speech, but it is totally abstract, an idea rather than an event."
FROM *KINGSLEY AMIS* BY ERIC JACOBS: "Now, unusually for him, Amis strays from his own code so far as to become just a bit boring himself. Someone remembers that the polymathic Anthony Burgess once took him to task for committing a solecism. When Amis had written that stopping a record interrupted Frank Sinatra 'in mid-phoneme' he was wrong, according to Burgess. What Amis should have said was 'in mid-allophone'. This linguistic reprimand has been quoted in a newspaper review and it gets mentioned in passing, which launches Amis on a robust account of why he happens to be right and Burgess wrong. Amis's defence is long, intricate and, well, not only unintelligible to the non-experts around him but not very interesting to them either. He lets himself be carried away for several minutes until the others begin to look almost as disconsolate as he does when confronted by a bore and even start to whisper among themselves. Amis pulls up short."
FROM *LONDON FIELDS*: "The telephone rang. Guy crossed the room and picked it up. A brutish silence, followed by a brutish phoneme---some exotic greeting or Christian name, perhaps. Then the dialling tone."
FROM *THE INFORMATION*: "Anyone who shared the common belief that the decline of British tennis was a result of the game's bourgeois, garden-party associations would have felt generally braced and corrected, at the Warlock Sports Center, to hear the ragged snarls and howls, the piercing obscenities and barbaric phonemes which made the wired courts seem like cages housing slaves or articulate animals in permanent mutiny against their confinement, their lash-counts, their lousy food."