From: Ed
Category: Amis
Date: 9/2/99
Time: 3:16:13 PM
Remote Name: 194.230.192.165
Porn? Death? ???!??? Good stuff. I would have thought McCrackers's worst crime was his current ubiquity (or monoquity, or whatever the correct word is). Personally I'm in educated awe of Gooch's continous parallel critique. (Anyone interested in my dissertation on the existential rapprochement between Prevelakis & Sartre, with reference to the Camus's humanism? No?, well I thought not.)
I've been on a lot of planes recently & so doing a bit of reading. By way of Hornby's About a Boy, which some attention-seeking, brain-dead, self-styled reviewer seeks to compare favourably to MA on the inside cover, I come to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (glad I know what that means now). I started out with the opinion that Frank Kermode's assessment of it as the best novel (he had read) since WWII was nonsensical & finished it feeling like Jim! at the end of London Fields. Fabulous; Joyce, Yeats, Amis, Jarma in one glorious godless gobbit. I have to share this sentence with anyone who hasn't come across it already:
'What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?'