From: I. Zelnik
Category: Amis
Date: 8/31/99
Time: 10:41:04 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.6
Long ago and far away (when I wore a younger man's thong), James Diedrick expressed his distaste for the teary bathos that waterlogs *The Information*. In my opinion, that bathos reached its definite nadir when Martin-Amis-the-narrator invited you to shed hot opalescent tears for...Martin Amis. What a piece of work is Mini-Mart. Amis got so carried away with Richard Tull's self-pity that Amis ended up indulging his own self-pity. No---I take that back. It's far more likely that the reverse happened. Since Amis is a devoted Method writer whose bedroom doubles as a candle-lit shrine to Stanislavski and The Mystical Genius That Is Charlton Heston, my guess is that Amis used his own self-pity to magically conjure Richard Tull's self-pity.
(By the way, did you see what Elia Kazan said about Lee Strasberg and Strasberg's quack horseshit? Strasberg's concentration technique for achieving The Method reminded Kazan of nothing so much as the spectacle of someone sitting in an orgone box and collecting cosmic orgasm-rays. And by the way, did you know that Saul Bellow once did a few sessions in an orgone box? I kid you not.)
Where the fuck was I. Oh yeah. Have you ever read Julia Phillips' showbiz confession where she shits on everyone from Steven Spielberg to her own mother? It's called *You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again*. Julia says to Robert Redford: "Beware the short man." Redford replies to Julia: "Beware the fat man." You should beware the bitter malevolence of both shorties AND fatties, obviously. But I gotta go with Julia this time out. Beware the orgiastic self-pity of a Mini-Mart. Here's my nomination for Amis's all-time ickiest passage. It's from *The Information*:
"It so happens that I know quite a lot about dating---down at that end of the scale. As a man who stands five-feet-six-inches tall (or 5' 6-&-a-half inches, according to a passport I once had), I know about dating and size. In my early teens I was at least a foot shorter. My mother kept telling me I would 'shoot up'. I was still asking her, at the age of twenty: 'What's all this about me shooting up?' (It never happened; but I grew; and I have no complaints, any more, about five-feet-six.) Thirty years ago my very slightly older but very much taller brother would sometimes arrange foursomes for my benefit: my brother's girlfriend would be asked to bring a girlfriend along---or a sister. And I would wait, in a doorway, while he made the rendezvous and then reported back, saying, 'Come on. She's tiny'---or else (shaking his head), 'Sorry, Mart.' In which case I would perhaps follow him at a distance and watch him rejoin the two sixty-inch giantesses at the entrance to the milk bar or under the lit portals of the Essoldo or the Odeon, and then numbly make my way home in the probable rain."