From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 8/24/99
Time: 10:41:01 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.6
SAMSON YOUNG SEZ: "When Incarnacion flushed me out I moved back into the sitting-room to find the large walnut table---previously bare but for a bowl of potpourri---infested with new gongs and cups and obelisks (dug up by Incarnacion from some bottomless trophy chest) and about a dozen photographs of Mark Asprey, making acceptance speeches, being fawned over by starlets, or in frowning conversation with deferential fellow bigbrains."
"Incarnacion has adoringly divided his mail into two stacks: the love letters and the royalty checks."
"Incarnacion gives the odd smile now. She isn't exactly communicative yet; but on occasion she can be induced to discuss, or haughtily enumerate, the achievements of Mark Asprey."
"Mr Asprey, relates Incarnacion, is endearingly keen to pay a flying visit to London. Of course, at a single snap of his fingers, he can put up at a top hotel, or find a bed with any number of heartsick glamour queens---but Mr Asprey would find it far more agreeable to stay right here, in the place he calls home, and where, in addition, Incarnacion can bring all her powers to bear on the promotion of his comfort. She is altogether sympathetic to this sentimental yearning of Mark Asprey's. In fact I get thirty-five minutes on the primacy of home, with its familiar surroundings and other pluses. Incarnacion herself suggests that I could conveniently return to New York. For her, the symmetry of such an arrangement is not without its appeal."
"Incarnacion relates that Mark Asprey was hardly to be seen here at the apartment. Her own eyes retreat and soften with a lover's indulgence as she talks of the kind of demand in which her employer constantly finds himself. This leads her on to explore one of life's enigmas: how some people are luckier than others, and richer, and handsomer, and so on."
"It occurs to me that certain themes---the ubiquitization of violence, for example, and the delegation of cruelty---are united in the person of Incarnacion. There is, I believe, something sadistic in her discourses, impeccably hackneyed though they remain. I wonder if Mark Asprey pays her extra to torment me. She has been giving me a particularly terrible time about the stolen ashtray and lighter. And I'm often too beat to get out of her way. Endlessly, deracinatingly reiterated, her drift is this. Some objects have *face value*. Other objects have *sentimental value*...It takes me half a day to recover from one of these drubbings."
"Incarnacion was in the study. She seemed to be looking at my notebook. Another thing. The toaster-like photocopier---I thought it didn't work, but there it was with its light on. It hummed warmly."
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FLOYD SCARABELLI SEZ: I figured out why Mark Asprey's maid is named *Incarnacion*. Because she's an incarnation of Asprey. Incarnacion & Asprey both treat Samson with condescending contempt. Each of them is both a bully and a braggart. (One thing I've noticed about Earthlings is the fact that bullying and braggadocio tend to be paired personality traits. Most of the bullies I've encountered are also braggarts. And most of the braggarts I've encountered are also bullies.)
It's already obvious that Incarnacion is a *radfahrer*. (A *radfahrer* is an ass-kissing bully. It's a German word. So it's straight from the horse's mouth.) It's also true that Incarnacion is a mystically-dull bromidic gasbag. Nor do I deny that she is additionally a snoop, a hideola, a supernova obnoxoid, and a dressed-in-black Spanish sartorial cliché.
But she is also something else. And I coined a term to describe her most endearing trait. Incarnacion is a *power-vicarian*. She is an impotent peasant asshole who vicariously identifies herself with power in order to feel powerful herself. She identifies herself with Asprey to engorge her own ego. She's a proxy-braggart and a proxy-bully for the predatory ego-gratification of both herself & Asprey. Incarnacion is a smelly repulsive piece of human garbage who deserves to drown in a vat of her own diarrhea. I wish her agony & death. And I feel the same way about all the real-life Incarnacions out there. Including those soccer-fan pigs that Amis never gets tired of insulting. The power-vicarianism that is rampant among the soccer-fan pigs has not gone unnoticed by Amis.
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MARTIN AMIS SEZ: "The crowd cannot join with the team in skill or athleticism, but they can be part of its will. I have felt the ugly and atavistic lusts of the football fan, and they disquiet me. Nationalism doesn't explain it, though it gave me harsh pleasure to see those Germans with their faces in the mud. The ref had to help some of them to their feet for the restart; they were gone, dead. And the powerless man, by giving his identity to the Jupiter of the crowd, has helped administer this slaughter. Soon he must return to the confines of his mere individuality. But for 90 minutes---90 seconds---he has known prepotence." [From *The shock of the Nou*.]
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ALGIS BUDRYS SEZ: "My father was transferred into the Lithuanian diplomatic corps after about 1927, and he and my mother were stationed in East Prussia. We always lived in a hostile environment. The only two people that I could talk to intensely day after day were my mother and father. Everyone else around me was a German. They were nice pleasant people, very neighborly, and very loving toward this very Aryan kid. I had ash-blond hair---not merely blond, it was white---and I had these enormous blue eyes and these wonderful clean-cut features. That was before I got to weighing 250 pounds. I spoke German with such an impeccable East Prussian accent, and carried myself like a little soldier, they doted on me. And then they did something that completely changed my life.
"Adolf Hitler drove by our house a couple of times, and they went insane. Hordes of German housewives and househusbands, people that I knew, who were all living in the same apartment complex together, were tearing themselves psychically to pieces all over the sidewalk, just watching the man go by. They weren't simply shouting or clapping their hands or going 'hooray', they were going through an animal frenzy to the point where some of them were having what I guess were epileptic seizures. Others were defecating in our bushes, couldn't control their bowels. I was four years old. I remember a guy hopping across our lawn with his pants around his knees, tugging desperately at his underpants, trying to get to a bush. And men and women rolling on the ground, writhing, clutching at each other. A hell of a thing to see. I'm four years old and I suddenly realize that I know absolutely nothing about the world except that it is populated entirely by monsters---werewolves." [From Charles Platt's collection of interviews called *Dream Makers*.]