From: Jezzaroona
Category: Amis's Contemporaries
Date: 9/5/99
Time: 1:42:19 PM
Remote Name: 195.44.201.92
Eh oh!
From *Vineland*: "In rolled a little robot fridge, with two video screens side by side, each with an image of a cartoon eye that shifted and blinked from time to time...stopping in front of Prairie, humming and flexing small electric motors, it recited its contents. 'You said "designer seltzer," what's that?' 'Another stage in the marketing philosophy of the mid-1980s,' replied the mobile cooler. 'At the moment I have Bill Blass, Azedine Alaia, Yves St.Laurent -' 'Fine!' Prairie a little high pitched, 'that'll be, uh -' and *pow* there was stylish seltzer, stone cold in its YSL-logo container in the essentially Reagan-era fashion colors of gold and silver."
From *The Temporary*: "He opened the fridge and was rather pleased to see a bottle of beer in it, for a moment having no memory of actually buying one. Its further contents - margarine, milk, a yellow sqaure of cheese sealed in plastic, something leafy on the lower shelves - reminded him of his trip late the night before...where he had...bought the beer with the intention of its meeting him the next evening in precisely the manner it was now doing. The bottle had been lukewarm and dusty when he took it from the market shelf, but in the cold sunlight of the fridge had been transformed into a green frosted icon, which in turn elevated the items around it to a more appealing plane."
PS - I'm talking in a seminar on Sunday (12th Sept) at Jackson's Lane Community Centre in Highgate - 2.00pm-3.30pm - and thought I should at least mention it to the Londoners on the site. Don't know how I'd feel facing one of them in the flesh!! (Really I want Geoff to turn up so we can - as Gooch "Big Mac" McCracken puts it - dry hump in the backroom). For your info.: I'm talking with Margret Drabble's daughter and the Head of Development at Curtis Brown (lit. agents) about: "Everyone's Got A Novel In Them." So it goes.