My Amis True

Again, from my old journals/commonplace book, Martin Amis writing with a confidence I could never muster:

“The truth is Joyce didn’t love the reader, as you need to do. Well, he gave us Ulysses, incontestably the central modern masterpiece; it is impossible to conceive of any future novel that might give the form such a violent evolutionary lurch. You can’t help but wondering, though. Joyce could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.” 

Martin Amis,  The War Against Cliché, p. 446

Comments

[Carolyn Jean]

Hey, Mister, this is a fabulous quote. A very enjoyable little tidbit. But the real news is I went and visited your story, and it is just SO fantastic, Kevin.

You liked how the editors treated it? You are so funny. Shit, I liked how you wrote it.

[K]

Thanks, Carolyn. I'd always had a bias toward publishing short stories in print, but it is much easier to share online stories with your friends, which is kind of the point of publication.