Just caught Russell Kane on ‘Live from the Apollo’ and looked on Youtube. Very funny observations about his Essex homeland. Highly recommended.

• Some more from Comedy Rocks

Period piece from 1960. Interesting for the light it throws on manners and class and the shift to multiculturalism. A couple of Caribbean prisoners, an Aussie, some proto-mafiosi and a suave American (who I see is played by Sam Wannamaker).

If this were being made today, Clive Owen or Tom Hardy would be starring and it’s doubtful whether they would improve much on Stanley Baker’s swaggering and glowering. Unfortunately, the plot is standard issue – there’s an attractive love interest, Margit Saad (exotically German), but no snappy dialogue and little tension in the scenes. The snowy field where Bannion stashes his loot must have been an influence on the Coen brothers in Fargo, so maybe that’s as much of a legacy as the film needs.

Perhaps, this was gritty for the time, but gritty is grittier these days and this kind of thing has been done to death (and better) since then.

Sad to read about the death of John Gross which I somehow missed last year. After buying the OUP book of aphorisms some time after its publication in 1983, I went on to become interested in ethics and, more generally, philosophy. Gross was obviously a fan of the laconic Italian writer, Cesare Pavese and I read This Business of Living with much interest.

On a lighter note, I was interested find this anecdote about JG’s chairmanship of the Booker Prize in 1971:

After the success of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Gross was in demand. In 1971, he chaired the third Booker prize. It was not the happiest of experiences. One of the judges, Malcolm Muggeridge, resigned halfway through because he felt most of the entries were ill-written and pornographic. He was replaced by the critic Philip Toynbee. When time came for the judges – Antonia Fraser, Saul Bellow and John Fowles, in addition to Toynbee and Gross – to decide on a shortlist, a split emerged over whether VS Naipaul’s In a Free State was a full-length novel and therefore eligible. Gross, like Fraser and Toynbee, insisted it was, whereas Bellow and Fowles saw it as stories, albeit linked ones. Gross endeavoured to bring the dissenters on side by circulating a questionnaire. Although both remained vocal in their disagreement – Fowles said afterwards that Gross viewed him as a rogue elephant in the matter – the view of the majority held.

And this touching memorial from his son, Tom Gross:

REMARKS BY TOM GROSS AT THE FUNERAL OF JOHN GROSS

January 14, 2010

My father was an exceptional person. I have known that all my life, of course, but nevertheless I have been taken aback by the outpouring of grief and admiration for him in the last three days, including wonderful letters and emails from all over the world and magnificent tributes in the press on both sides of the Atlantic, and in continental Europe too.

My father had an outstanding intellect. But because of his modesty I hadn’t quite realized to what extent his intellectual prowess went back to his earliest days, until reading some of the tributes this week.

On Wednesday, in The Times, a Mr Derek Taylor wrote a letter to say that he had been at the Perse school in Cambridge with my father. Mr Taylor wrote: “There was a school debate one day in 1946. The speakers were always sixth-formers. But John was 11 at the time and astonished the audience by standing up to make his point, quoting for his purpose the Russian Foreign Minister of 1927. It was a moment not to be forgotten.”

And yesterday in The Times, Gillian Tunkel wrote: “I have never forgotten the comment that John’s English teacher wrote to John’s parents at the end of one of John’s essays when John was 14: ‘I am not sufficiently equipped to mark this!’”

People who didn’t know my father, might have assumed that someone as erudite and bookish as he was, might somehow be deficient in common sense or worldly wisdom. Nothing could be further from the truth. He had unerring judgment and good sense in matters great and small.

He was unfailingly kind and sensitive too. He was always courteous and patient. I’ve never heard him be rude to anyone. He was immensely generous in every way, especially with his time and with his knowledge and advice. He would spend hours on the phone with people he hardly knew who had rung to pick his brain. And, as one of the many friends who have written to me said, he never looked over anyone’s shoulder at a party.

He remained friendly and totally unpompous to the end. Two days before he died, when I was urging the staff at St Mary’s, Paddington to do all they could to comfort him, a West Indian nurse said to me “Oh we all know about Mr Gross. He is the best conversationalist we’ve ever had here”.

My father’s intellect was also in tact until his final days. When he was almost unconscious, one of the doctors said to him: “Mr Gross we are moving you now, from the Samuel Lane ward to the Zachary Cope ward”. And my father, with his eyes still shut, suddenly mumbled “Ahh, Dr Zachary Cope – the famous abdominal expert who wrote an article about Jane Austen’s last illness.”

My father loved London. He delighted in taking visitors round tours of the East End, and literary and other places of interest elsewhere. As one American friend, Roger Kimball, wrote to me yesterday “John knew the city as well as any London taxi-driver – better in fact, because he could not only take you to any address you named but he also knew what had happened there from the time of Julius Caesar until the day before yesterday.”

My father loved literature and theatre, and all things English, but – without being religious – he had an intense sense of Jewishness too, hence his childhood memoir A Double Thread, and his groundbreaking study on the uses and misuses of the character Shylock over the last 400 years.

He also had a very happy temperament and a great zest for life. And because of this, after my sister has spoken and after the rabbi has offered the final prayers in Hebrew and said kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead — as we say goodbye to my father, we will conclude with an uplifting song (Tumbalaika) that my father liked in Yiddish — the other ancient language spoken by Jews of east European origin, the culture, literature and theatre of which my father adored almost as much as he did English literature.

(One of the last lively conversations he had just before Christmas, when he was rushed to hospital by my mother, was to show visitors, with the greatest of pleasure, a rare Yiddish edition of Oscar Wilde.)

Everything will be duller, and sadder without him.

He was also, of course, a fantastic father. I couldn’t have asked for a better father, and I feel privileged to be his son.

So, THE FINKLER QUESTION won the Booker prize for the very amusing Howard Jacobson. I will pick up a copy after finishing the good, but distinctly unfunny DEATH OF A MURDERER.

From a recent interview in The Telegraph:

“I think you have to lack confidence, to have some sense of being not quite at home in the world, to even think of being a writer. If you’re David Beckham and you’re handsome, people love you, you can kick a ball around, you’re not going to think ‘I’d like to write a novel’. What for?”

Quite so.

And this on infidelity (rather more forthcoming than the ‘hesitant’ James Salter):

Infidelity is another recurrent theme. Hasn’t that worried his wives?

“They’d be mad not to wonder. I mean I ruined my first marriage. That wasn’t the ruination of my second marriage. My third wife [De Yong] who has read my novels, naturally wondered what kind of man she has. I’m not my heroes, I have not led the life that they have done. But I led sufficiently an unreliable life to cause people pain. I don’t have any desire left to do any of that.”

Not that Howard should be giving himself too big a pat on the back. It’s got to be a little easier to steer clear of temptation at 68 than it was at 38 – unless you’re a character in one of Philip Roth’s late novels.

Review: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon | Books | The Guardian

Dostoevsky sees France as under the sway of its smug, hypocritical bourgeoisie, while England is massive, industrial, infernal, apocalyptic. Its crowds fascinate him, as in this striking portrayal of binge drinking, Victorian-style: “On Saturday nights working men and women celebrate their sabbath all night long, guzzling and drinking like beasts … The beer houses are decorated like palaces. Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly. Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility.”

Andy Gill: ‘Why I hate Coldplay’ – Features, Music – The Independent

In the event, the album is almost exactly as I expected, if a tad shorter on Big Anthems than the previous three. The rhythms are a bit busier, and a bit more ethnic, and Chris Martin’s little falsetto catch – one of modern music’s most irritating tropes – has been rationed out more parsimoniously. (Thanks, Eno!) Pop’s favourite Brianiac has ensured the sonic prerequisites are all in good order. And in a few cases, the songs do seem to be about things, rather than just anaemic expressions of emotional indulgence and limp consolation, like X & Y. Things like death, and war, and power. It’s… not much, really, but not so little as to be completely worthless. It’s the new Gold Standard of Average Music. And given the competition currently battling for that dubious honour, this is no mean feat. Almost an achievement, in fact.

and this one – without knowing the back catalogue, I would guess there are scores to choose from:

By 2005′s X & Y, the band had shifted slightly from outright self-pity to broader misgivings, a move marked by the shift from first-person to second-person in songs like “Fix You” and “A Message”, cunningly enlisting their audience as co-mopers through songs of solace articulating vague, windy concerns – “I’m scared about the future and I want to talk to you”, “When you feel so tired and you can’t sleep/Stuck in reverse”, etc – invariably resolved in mealy-mouthed platitudes like “I will try to fix you” and “You don’t have to be alone”.

There’s no real sense of grappling with the social or political causes of the problems, just a bland emotional poultice applied to the wound. They’ve become the sonic security-blanket for millions of fans, their tracks sweeping by with the epic solemnity of state funerals, their huge, heartbreaking chord changes sucker-punching you with emotional logic while sapping any anger or political engagement – in the existential sense – that you might otherwise experience. Instead, Chris Martin offers a consoling arm around the shoulder and a nice cup of tea. But rarely can a claim have been less borne out by circumstance than “I will fix you”: with Coldplay, it’s never more than cold comfort.

In this respect, the band’s name is one of the most appropriate in rock. It’s redolent of pale complexions and dead emotions: whenever I hear it, it always evokes a glassy-eyed fish on a fishmonger’s slab, ice melting from its scales. Ironically, it was coined by Tim Rice-Oxley, who had stopped using it for his own band as he considered it “too depressing”. Rice-Oxley was apparently invited to join Coldplay, but instead chose Keane, which suggests a serious frying pan/fire interface. Still, at least it wasn’t Snow Patrol or Athlete, the weediest of the Coldplay copyists trailing in the band’s wake.

I posted on The Times website when Coldplay last released an album. I’d been lassooed by the catchiness of the tune for ‘Fix You’, but felt aggrieved that the lyrics were that feeble:

‘Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones’
from ‘Fix You’

It’s easy to pick holes in pop lyrics, but surely an intelligent UCL grad like Chris Martin could come up with something better than this? For all their fastidiousness in the studio it’s clear that Coldplay aren’t above lazy, hack work where it matters most.

Despite its anthemic karaoke-ready tunefulness, it was inevitable that someone was going to have a pop some point. It’s like Tibor Fischer’s famous mauling of Martin Amis’s novel Yellow Dog. Sooner or later someone is going to point out that the emperor’s au naturel.

In fact, the New York Times critic was measured: he made explicit the influence of Radiohead and U2 and noted the wheedling tenor/falsetto that Chris Martin uses to emote the limited and self indulgent ‘Coldplay’ palette of emotions.

Chris Martin told the New York Post that he was devastated by New York Times’ review. I’m not suprised – selling millions of records, winning the hand of a Hollywood princess and scruffy/expensive Hoxton styling might be enough to inflate a bubble of grandiousity around any of us.

Not that the ever so ‘right on’ Martin would recognise any of this. Sensitivity and stadium rock may have served the band well up till now, but I think its sell-by date is fast approaching.

• Salon review
• Diary – in the LRB
• Observer review
• New York Times review
• Bookslut review
• Lasdun interview @ identitytheory.com

Review by Scarlett Thomas in The Independent:

Nothing in this haunting novel is there by accident, just as no human behaviour, according to Freud, is truly “accidental” either. There is a reference to Freud’s notion of parapraxis (errors and slips created by the unconscious) on the very first page, and then the narrative unfolds like a shape emerging in a kaleidoscope. 

The protagonist Lawrence Miller teaches Gender Studies and serves on his university’s Sexual Harassment committee. The novel begins as he loses his place in a book and, as a result, begins to notice odd changes occurring in his office. He then starts to suspect that he isn’t the only person using the room – that an insane sexual predator and misogynist, Bogomil Trumilcik, may be sleeping there at night. A lot of the mysterious goings- on in this novel occur at night, as though they were parts of a dream. And the novel is – in the truest, psychoanalytic sense of the term – dreamlike. We can learn from psychoanalysis that dreams are manifestations of unconscious thought and have their own poetic language of metaphor, metonymy and juxtaposition. This is a novel written in that language, almost geometrically so.

At one point in the novel Miller throws away a glass eye. His attempted disposal of this object (the eye/I) is a failure: “I took Mr Kurwen’s eye from my pocket and hurled it into the half-frozen lake. Instead of landing in the water, it embedded itself in a floating island of ice, staring skyward.” It is not enough to read this as a metaphor for attempted repression; the reader will also want to ask (but perhaps not want to know) what exactly the narrator is trying to repress.

This novel is so creepy because it is so clever. Only in the last few pages do you realise, or begin to realise, what you’ve read, and even then you’re not sure. Images from the book flicker in your mind like images from a forgotten, disturbing dream. And this isn’t even your own dream but someone else’s. You suddenly feel that you – and he – have been engaged in an act of vast, mutual misreading. It would take another book to explain the symbolism, coincidences and symmetries within this narrative. A brilliant novel that must be reread at least once, this is easy to follow, with clear, spare prose but the ultimate effect is a vast enigma, a puzzle with a troubling, instinctive conclusion.

Opposite Temple tube, a group of friendly London fishermen:

Essay – Martin Amis and Islam – Books – Review – New York Times

Essay
Amis and Islam
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: March 9, 2008

“I’m a passionate multiracialist and a very poor multiculturalist,” Martin Amis said a few weeks ago. He was on the phone from London, praising his hometown’s ethnic variety — “It’s exhilarating and moving to live in a city with so many races and so many colors” — and denouncing its fissures, particularly over radical Islam. “I don’t think that we can accommodate cultures and ideologies that make life very difficult for half the human race: women.” Amis was explaining his stance in a gloves-off row that’s been raging in the British press since last fall, when the literary theorist Terry Eagleton likened some of Amis’s statements on Muslims to “the ramblings of a British National Party thug.”

On the one hand, it’s a classic English literary donnybrook, full of punchy insults like Eagleton’s claim that Amis was taking after his curmudgeonly father, Kingsley Amis, whom he characterized as a “racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals.” But the dust-up also touches on the fault lines of multiethnic Britain. In the press, Amis has been accused of lazy thinking and Muslim-bashing. The left-leaning Guardian ran a prominent feature, “Martin Amis and the New Racism,” with an unflattering illustration. Things have only heated up since January, with the British publication of “The Second Plane,” Amis’s new book of essays, subtitled “September 11: Terror and Boredom.” (The book, which received fairly tepid reviews in England, will appear in the United States in April.)

It all began in August 2006, when Amis granted a wide-ranging interview to Ginny Dougary of The Times of London, published online. Over chardonnay at the Long Island estate of his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and less than a month after British authorities had thwarted an alleged terrorist plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners, Amis wondered out loud: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

The interview largely passed without comment until it was cited in The London Review of Books in January 2007. Soon after, Eagleton, a feisty Marxist academic best known for his 1983 book “Literary Theory,” picked up Amis’s comments in a new introduction to the reissue of his 1991 book “Ideology: An Introduction,” along with Amis’s further musings in that interview on the demographics of Europe. (“They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. … We’re just going to be outnumbered.”) These “barbaric” comments, Eagleton wrote, were “not the ramblings of a British National Party thug, but the reflections of the novelist Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world.” Amis, Eagleton wrote, seemed to be calling for “the calculated harassment of a whole population” as a way of “humiliating and insulting certain kinds of men and women at random, so that they will return home and teach their children to be nice to the White Man.”

What would normally have gone unnoticed in the introduction to the revision of an academic book instead made the papers. “The Aging Punk of Lit Crit Still Knows How to Spit,” The Sunday Times declared in early October. In The Guardian, Eagleton complained of “a media conspiracy” against him, adding that there was something “stomach-churning” about seeing Amis and other “champions of a civilization that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.” In a letter to The Guardian, Amis called Eagleton “a marooned ideologue.” He wasn’t “advocating” anything in his original comments, he said, but “conversationally describing an urge — an urge that soon wore off.” “Can I ask him, in a collegial spirit, to shut up about it?”

The coverage was divided along broad political lines, with Eagleton finding defenders on the left and Amis on the right (and among fellow writers). In The Independent, the columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote that Amis was a “threat to the kind of society I stand up for. He is with the beasts pounding the back door, the Muslim-baiters and haters.” In November, the novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett took aim at Amis in a long essay in The Guardian. “Amis’s views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness,” Bennett wrote. Amis, he said, “got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time.”

In a letter to The Guardian, the novelist Ian McEwan defended his close friend. “When you ask a novelist or a poet his or her view of the world … you may not like what you hear, but reasoned debate is the appropriate response, not vilification,” McEwan wrote. “I wonder whether Ronan Bennett would care to expend so much of his rhetorical might excoriating at similar length the thugs who murdered — in the name of their religion — their fellow citizens in London in 2005.”

On the phone last month, Amis conceded his original comments in The Times were ill-considered, but held fast to the uneasiness that informed them. “When I made this rather stupid suggestion, or talked about the urge to make the stupid suggestion to make Muslims put their house in order, I was at the peak of my anger” about the aborted plot to blow up airliners. “Everyone else’s anger gets respected all over the place but not that of a normally very peaceful British novelist.”

But didn’t his comments appear to conflate the radical Islamist minority and the nonviolent majority? No, Amis said. He is not Islamophobic, as his critics claim, but “Islamismophobic” — that is, opposed to militant Islam. “My slogan on that distinction is, ‘We respect Muhammad, we do not respect Mohamed Atta.’ ” Jihadism, he said, is “racist, homophobic, totalitarian, genocidal, inquisitorial and imperialistic. Surely there should be no difficulty in announcing one’s hostility to that, but there is.”

In England’s left-leaning intellectual culture, traditionally somewhat hostile toward Israel and the United States, Amis has emerged as sympathetic to the two countries’ situation. Although he opposed the Iraq war and is skeptical of American power, “The Second Plane” draws admiringly on books often dismissed by some on the left: Paul Berman’s “Terror and Liberalism,” Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong?” and Mark Steyn’s “America Alone.” (He also draws on the neo-atheist Sam Harris.)

On the phone last month, Amis talked about the transAtlantic divide. “The anti-Americanism is really toxic in this country, and the anti-Zionism,” he said, attributing the sentiments to empire envy. “I think we ceased to be a world power just as America was unignorably taking on that role.” The dominant ideology “told us that we don’t like empires, we’re ashamed of ever having one.” In England, he continued, “we’ve infantilized ourselves, stupefied ourselves, through a kind of sentimental multiculturalism,” Amis said. He called for open discussion “without self-righteous cries of racism. It’s not about race, it’s about ideology.”

Back in November, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, the second wife of Kingsley Amis (who died in 1995), defended her former husband against Eagleton’s charges of racism and anti-Semitism and called Eagleton “a cobra pouring out venom.” As for her stepson, she said, “what worries me is that I don’t think he’s quite interested enough in human nature.” Asked about this, Amis chuckled. “I’ll have to take her up on that,” he said. “I’m tremendously interested in it. This crisis that we’re in and have been for six and a half years has appreciatively expanded my interest in human nature.”

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

And from Peter Conrad writing about The Second Plane and Paul Greengrass’s film:

You have to wonder why Amis has elected to inhabit the mind and the body of Atta (just as he chose to turn himself into Nazi doctor Odilo Unverdorben, who conducts vivisection while pretending to do research, in Time’s Arrow ). The reason, I think, is that Amis is conducting his own jihad, a campaign against the brawling squalor of obese humanity, especially fat blondes with dandruff, although he has an equal contempt for a ‘swinishly luxurious dark female’, a stewardess on a United Arab Emirates flight remembered by Atta, whose flesh is ‘damp and glowing as if from fever or even lust’.

Satire is Amis’s version of a holy war. Atta, shaving, studies his underbite in the mirror and sees that ‘the detestation, the detestation of everything’ is etched on his face. Can this be the writer’s self-portrait? If so, the final dispersal of Atta’s misanthropic consciousness comes as a mercy. Amis tries to make amends for this warped cruelty by having Atta look down with love on the ‘tutelary godlings’ of Manhattan as he flies low over the city. He feels no sympathy for the people he is killing; he warms only to skyscrapers, perhaps because they symbolise the erect, self-immortalising ego. Atta here is the tragic hero who has ‘achieved sublimation’, as Amis says, through a purifying hatred.