From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 8/4/99
Time: 8:59:57 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.6

There is a song lyric called *The Boxer*. Written by Paul Simon, who's even shorter than Amis. Most of *The Boxer* is a first-person narrative. It's a confession of despair & self-pity spoken by a washed-up loser in the entertainment business: "I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises. All lies and jests. Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." But the final part of *The Boxer* shifts into a third-person narrative: "In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade. And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down and cut him till he cried out, in his anger and his shame: 'I am leaving, I am leaving.' But the fighter still remains."

The narrational shift in *The Boxer* could possibly be interpreted as a psychological defense-mechanism on the part of the narrator. The boxer's defeat is too painful for the boxer to narrate in the first-person. So he objectifies himself with a third-person perspective in order to gain the necessary distance from himself. That technique was also used by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges said to Paul Theroux: "When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else."

My favorite Martin Amis joke does the opposite narrative trick. It goes from third-person to first-person. *The Information* begins with an impersonal third-person narration. But on page 43 (American version) or page 63 (limebag version), Amis-the-narrator manifests himself. He materializes in a playground. Probably a playground just like the one in a Philip Larkin poem called *Afternoons*, where "something is pushing them to the side of their own lives". Amis sees a boy directing hand gestures at Amis. Amis misinterprets the boy's gestures as the sign language of a deaf person. But the boy is simply spelling out his name with his fingers. So Amis says: "how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don't know *anything*? When I can't read childish capitals in the apologetic fog." It's one of those self-referential jokes. It's a confession of cluelessness. Just as *Night Train* is a confession of cluelessness.

From: Mats Wilander
Category: Amis
Date: 9/2/99
Time: 7:13:31 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.126.131

FROM *THE CRYING OF LOT 49*: "And leaving them and their purses intact, the highwaymen, in a cracking of cloaks like black sails, vanished back into their twilit mountains." [Page 158.]

FROM *NEXT, PLEASE* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "Only one ship is seeking us, a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence."

From: Mats Wilander
Category: Amis
Date: 9/11/99
Time: 6:10:37 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.126.131

Comments

[Poster's note: Welcome back, my friends, to the Philfest that never ends. And to think I could've spared myself all this miserable Larkin shit by jumping off a bridge years ago. Philip Larkin once said: "Man's greatest talent is for ignoring death." WRONG. Man's greatest talent is for ignoring ME, Mats Wilander. Am I bitter? Sort of very. And leave it to Mike Hoolihan to get the whole fucking thing backwards. The question isn't: "Why do people kill themselves?" The real question is: "Why the fuck DON'T people kill themselves?" Mini-Mart said in an interview that suicide is something he could never do. Well, that's only because Mini-Mart has never found himself waking up at 3 o'clock in the goddam morning and staring down the sights of Mats Wilander's shitty-ass so-called life. Martin Amis has never found himself drawing a bead on Mats Wilander's information. I'm talking about that fuzzy topspinned electric-yellow information that bonks you on the head in the middle of a Great White Night for the purpose of informing you that you're a pathetic washed-up smackball has-been. What the fuck does Amis know about suffering anyway? Amis never suffered a day in his life. Amis doesn't know dick about suffering. Amis doesn't know dick about Philip Dick either. But I do. Philip Dick once wrote a book in which he renamed himself as "Horselover Fat". The reasoning behind it is: "Philip" (derived from "Philippus") = "horselover" in Greek. "Dick" = "fat" in German. I noticed that in *Time's Arrow*, Martin Amis transposed his name in a similar fashion. "Martin Amis" = "Tod Friendly". "Martin" = "warrior" in Latin. "Tod" = "death" in German. "Amis" = "friend" in French.]

TOD FRIENDLY: "The figure in the white coat and the black boots. In his wake, a blizzard of wind and sleet, like a storm of human souls." TOD FRIENDLY: "The tutelary spirit of these dreams is no longer the man in the white coat and the black boots: it is a woman, a woman the size and shape of a galleon's sail, who can forgive him everything." PHILIP LARKIN: "Only one ship is seeking us, a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence. In her wake no waters breed or break." [From *Next, Please*.]

TOD FRIENDLY: "The moon I actually like looking at. Its face, at this time of the month, is especially craven and chinless, like the earth's exiled or demoted soul." TOD FRIENDLY: "The sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes." PHILIP LARKIN: "The moon is full tonight and hurts the eyes, it is so definite and bright. What if it has drawn up all quietness and certitude of worth wherewith to fill its cup, or mint a second moon, a paradise?---for they are gone from earth." [*The moon is full tonight*].

TOD FRIENDLY: "And the self has opened up, also. We're not just surface anymore but voluminous and deep-sea, with our wiggling flora, our warped fish." PHILIP LARKIN: "If my darling were once to decide not to stop at my eyes, but to jump, like Alice, with floating skirt into my head...she would find herself looped with the creep of varying light, monkey-brown, fish-grey". [From *If, My Darling*.]

TOD FRIENDLY: "Irene *seemed* to relent. Her shape descended and she settled herself beside me, in awkward abundance, and my hand reached out to the white pulp of her shoulder. Astounding proximity. Never, never before..." PHILIP LARKIN: "Never such innocence, never before or since, as changed itself to past without a word---the men leaving the gardens tidy, the thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer: never such innocence again." [From *MCMXIV*.]

TOD FRIENDLY: "Stop it. Stop the train! I somehow thought I was in a state of full ordeal readiness. Ready for continued descent---but on a modest gradient." PHILIP LARKIN: "In this dream that dogs me I am part of a silent crowd walking under a wall, leaving a football match, perhaps, or a pit, all moving the same way. After a while a second wall closes on our right, pressing us tighter. We are now shut in like pigs down a concrete passage...By now we have ceased walking and travel like water through sewers, steeply, despite the tread that goes on ringing like an anvil under the striding A." [From *Traumerei*.]

TOD FRIENDLY: "John and I returned to our new home, but it was difficult, at first, to take any pleasure in the place (the vast skylight, for example), John's state being what it was." TOD FRIENDLY: "Hamilton, it turns out, despite his observances of the Wellport era, has no great liking for churches. He sits in the first pew he comes to and leers at the door every twenty seconds with the frowsiest of sighs...Above our head, an unregarded observatory of light." PHILIP LARKIN: "Rather than words comes the thought of high windows, the sun-comprehending glass". [From *High Windows*.]

TOD FRIENDLY: "Something ails the ship's engines...Often, for days on end, we can only wallow helplessly or make grand clockwise circles...And I quite like it, the sense of suspension, far from land and the means of doing harm. At night, while John's impatient body sleeps, I listen to the waves loosely slapping at the side of the stilled ship." PHILIP LARKIN: "A white steamer stuck in the afternoon". [From *To the Sea*.]

TOD FRIENDLY: "Out on the ramp beneath the lights and the arrows of rain and the madhouse tannoy squawking *links* and *rechts*: fathers, mothers, children, the old, scattered like leaves in the wind." PHILIP LARKIN: "We slowed again, and as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled a sense of falling, like an arrow-shower sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain." [From *The Whitsun Weddings*.]

TOD FRIENDLY: "He pauses for a moment, in the field...He has to act while childhood is still here, before somebody comes and takes it away. And they will come. I hope the doctor will be wearing something nice, something appropriate, and not the white coat and the black boots, which surely...Myself." PHILIP LARKIN: "There is an evening coming in across the fields, one never seen before, that lights no lamps." [From *Going*.] PHILIP LARKIN: "Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields." [From *Days*.]