"Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh – or, in that curious phrase, 'laugh out loud' (as if there’s any other way of doing it)?"

"Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never 'depressing.' Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown."

Wrote Martin Amis, in the introduction to "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis," which I've been reading lately.

I bought this book after listening to the Larkin episode of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast," but that Martin Amis introduction did not spring to mind when I was reading the Martin Amis obituaries this morning, though I was trying to remember what small part of his writings I may have read.

"Mr. Amis’s talent was undeniable: He was the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction."

"So were his swagger and Byronic good looks. He had well-chronicled involvements with some of the most watched young women of his era. He wore, according to media reports, velvet jackets, Cuban-heel boots, bespoke shirts. He stared balefully into paparazzi lenses. His raucous lunches with friends and fellow writers like Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Clive James, James Fenton and [Christopher] Hitchens were written up in the press and made other writers feel that they were on the outside looking in. He seemed to be having more fun than other people. His detractors considered him less a bad boy than a spoiled brat.... 'He was more blond than [Mick] Jagger and indeed rather shorter,' Mr. Hitchens wrote, 'but his sensuous lower lip was a crucial feature,' and 'you would always know when he had come into the room.' Mr. Amis wrote his first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' published in England in 1973, on nights and weekends. He gave himself a year to complete it. If it hadn’t panned out, he said, he might have considered academia."

From "Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73 In books like “Money” and “The Information,” he created “a high style to describe low things,” as he put it. He found more renown as a critic, and a measure of unease as his famous father’s son" (NYT).

ADDED: The Guardian collects a lot of quotes by Amis. I liked:

"I feel I’m only going to write short stories and novellas from now on. Chekhov said, toward the end of his life, 'Everything I read strikes me as not short enough.' And I agree."

"In the old days it came quicker, the prose. Now it’s a battle. It’s not about coming up with striking adverbs, it’s more about removing as many uglinesses as I can find."

"What makes you a writer? You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience. When writers experience things, they’re not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent. They’re always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they’d do it on the page."

AND: From the London Times:

Some thought him misanthropic, but it would probably be truer to say that he was disappointed and depressed by traits in society that, in his opinion, more and more held sway. He could see beauty and virtue lurking jointly in the shadows. He could also appreciate the rich comedy of life and the poignancy of its pretences. Yet, in the end, his was a pessimistic outlook, holding that personal progress was necessarily finite and insignificant while the universe itself, unmoved by any guiding hand, moved ineluctably towards chaos and destruction.

"Over the years, Rushdie’s friends have marvelled at his ability to write amid the fury unleashed on him."

"Martin Amis has said that, if he were in his shoes, 'I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquilized three-hundred-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs.' And yet 'Victory City' is Rushdie’s sixteenth book since the fatwa.... During the pandemic, Rushdie... was already toying with an idea for another novel. He’d reread Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain' and Franz Kafka’s 'The Castle,' novels that deploy a naturalistic language to evoke strange, hermetic worlds—an alpine sanatorium, a remote provincial bureaucracy. Rushdie thought about using a similar approach to create a peculiar imaginary college as his setting. He started keeping notes...."

From "The Defiance of Salman Rushdie/After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act" by David Remnick (in The New Yorker).

"'El Polaco' is the second of Coetzee’s novels to appear in Spanish first, but he began privileging translations much earlier..."

"... in his career: in the past twenty years, he’s seen to it that many of his books be made available in Dutch before any other language. Fêted in Amsterdam in 2010, Coetzee expressed appreciation at being 'read in a language in which I feel myself to be a somewhat more humorous writer than in the original English.' 'Humorous' is far less commonly applied to his writing than adjectives like 'cold,' 'austere,' 'rigorous,' 'spare'; Martin Amis famously described his style as 'predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.' But to his enthusiasts Coetzee transmits a great deal of pleasure—in his outwardly severe, circumscribed manner—and exhibits an abiding if vanishingly subtle sense of humor...."

Writes Colin Marshall in "J. M. Coetzee’s War Against Global English/What lies behind the celebrated South African writer’s decision to publish his latest novel in Spanish before making it available in English?" (The New Yorker).

But it's not all about humor. In fact, it seems more like that predication on absolutely no pleasure that Amis talked about: 

My favorite linguistic issue ever: What if Trump didn't say "shithole" but "shithouse"?

Have you seen this one? National Review editor Rich Lowry was on "This Week" yesterday and this happened:

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's pretty clear [President Trump] said what's been reported. By denying it, he puts his supporters in the most difficult position.

LOWRY: He used a different -- my understanding from the meeting, he used a different, but very closely related vulgarity. He said s-house, and not s-hole. That's not going to make a difference to anyone. But the general remarks -- yes -- I'd like to have a transcript, because everyone is putting so much weight on this to see exactly what was said in what ways, but the general tenor of the discussion has been reported accurately.

Not going to make a difference to anyone?! Now I'm determined to find a shithouse/shithole distinction.

Historically, going back to the 1600s, "shithole" first meant "The rectum or anus." (I'm using the OED.) "Shithole" took on other meanings in the early 20th century: "a wretched place," "a toilet." And in the late 20th century, it also became an alternative to "asshole" to mean "a despicable person."

"Shithouse," going back to the 1600s, meant "toilet," usually an outdoor toilet — a "privy" or "outhouse." The oldest published usage is (like Trump's purported use) metaphorical:

1659 J. Howell Ital. Prov. Let. Ital. Prov. sig. A4v, in Παροιμιογραϕια If Florence had a Sea Port, she would make a Hortyard of Pisa, a Counting-house of Ligorn, and a shitt-house of Luca.

Like "shithole," "shithouse" came to mean "a wretched place" in the 20th century. The first published use was in 1949, in Henry Miller's "Sexus": "You leave the toilet and you step into the big shithouse. Whatever you touch is shitty."

And here's Martin Amis in "London Fields" in 1989:

The class system just doesn't know when to call it a day. Even a nuclear holocaust, I think, would fail to make that much of a dent in it. Crawling through the iodized shithouse that used to be England, people would still be brooding about accents and cocked pinkies, about maiden names and settee or sofa, about the proper way to eat a roach in society. Do you take the head off first or start with the legs?

Ha ha. Settee or sofa. It's so like shithouse or shithole. And yet so different.

Anyway, "shithouse" also came to mean "despicable person" in the 20th century (at least in Britain). And it's been an adjective meaning "contemptible, bad, disgusting" at least since 1966, when Charles Bukowski wrote in a letter, "The flunky fired from his shithouse job, the guys like me."

There are also the phrases: "To be in the shithouse" (as in "Fleetwood Mac's career was definitely not in the shithouse") and "shithouse rumor" ("All you had was a shithouse rumor" (heh, that's all we have about Trump and "shithouse")) and the well-known "shithouse rat" ("Cute as a shithouse rat," wrote the lowly, lowry cur James Joyce in that shithouse book "Ulysses").

I've got to say, if Trump said it, I hope he said "shithouse." First, I like the resonance with his real estate career. It's the humblest real estate, a shithouse. "Shithole" has more of an anatomical whiff to it — not that Trump doesn't also have his connection to body parts (tiny hands, grabbed pussies, differently sized penises).

ADDED: There's also the subtle topic of what goes on in the mind of a person who hears "shithouse" and later drags "shithole" up out of his memory. If the wrong word was reported, what caused the house-to-hole substitution? Phobia about human anatomy?

"Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners."

"You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the president’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it."

Wrote Saul Bellow in "In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt," quoted in a Martin Amis essay about Bellow's nonfiction, collected in a new book titled "There Is Simply Too Much to Think About," which I just added to my Kindle. I can give you some more context:

Martin Amis sets his novel in a Nazi concentration camp and his European publishers reject it.

They don't get the Englishman's humor or they think he might be construed as sympathetic to the Nazis or they're squeamish and scared or... it's just not that good.

In France, the storied house Gallimard declined to publish the novel because “it wasn’t very convincing,” said Marie-Pierre Gracedieu....

Mr. Amis said his German publisher, Carl Hanser Verlag, had told him that there were “inconsistencies in the plot” and that it had found the main character, Golo Thomsen, an SS officer, too sympathetic to the Nazi cause...

Piero Salabè, Mr. Amis’s editor at Carl Hanser Verlag, said... “Our decision was based on the book’s contents as well as on economic considerations... [It had] nothing to do with the Holocaust being a sensitive issue in Germany.”....

“The problem with the novel lies in his uninhibited English perception of humor, at least for some German readers,” [wrote the London correspondentfor Allgemeine Zeitung].

Here's the book, "The Zone of Interest." See for yourself... unless you think we're being played by a publicity stunt.

"'My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions'..."

"... James Joyce wrote in a letter to his brother at the beleaguered age of 25.... Martin Amis... and Vladimir Nabokov... suffered 'catastrophic tooth-loss' while in their 40s... Virginia Woolf['s] teeth were pulled on the bizarre theory that they caused her mental disorders.... Dostoevsky's Underground Man masochistically glories in the 'malignant' pain in his mouth. Handsome Count Vronsky is deformed by toothache after Anna Karenina's [SPOILER ALERT] suicide. Abscesses and botched extractions mark the decline of the Buddenbrook clan. John Updike's 1955 short story 'Dentistry and Doubt' places a seminary student in the dentist's chair and carries out a primer on theodicy. 'Even his toothbrush,' thinks the young cleric, his mouth filled with metal instruments, 'which on good days presented itself as an acolyte of matinal devotion, today seemed an agent of atheistic hygiene, broadcasting the hideous fact of bacteria. Why had God created them . . . ?'"

The beginning a Wall Street Journal piece about a novel where the main character is a dentist.

"Workspaces of Highly Creative People."

I'll take Martin Amis's — or, actually, I prefer my own! — but click backward and forward to see some of the others. I love pictures like this.

Why are there so many serious novels about 9/11 and so few about Katrina? — asks Chloe Schama who thinks it's just shameful.

She says:

In the aftermath of the attacks on the Word Trade Center, many of the most famous authors of our time have weighed in on the attacks, depicting the ways large and small in which they altered people’s lives. Some hypothesized possible motivations behind the terrorists’ actions: John Updike in Terrorist (2006) and Martin Amis in the short story “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” (2006). Others used the events as narrative bookends: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) are two examples. Some novels commented more indirectly: At the start of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), the protagonist sees a plane flying low and fears a terrorist attack, while, in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), the main character’s quest to unravel a personal mystery is motivated by his father’s death in the World Trade Center.

Meanwhile, the literary response to Hurricane Katrina, the other great American disaster of the last decade, has been almost nonexistent. In the five years since Katrina, almost no major literary figure has similarly illustrated the effects of the hurricane.

Oh, good lord, this is so stupid I hate to have to point it out. Katrina was a hurricane. We don't have to try to figure out its motivations and come to terms with its evil. Yes, there were human failings in the aftermath of the storm, but novelists have been chewing through the routine failings of humankind since the novel was invented. They don't even need a real event that had real people screwing up to get them started. They'll make up stories and characters to show the way people do bad things. You know, fiction.

But the lack of a strong literary response to the hurricane appears to have consequences.... For centuries, novels have done the important job of making devastation more concrete for people by examining individual experience, real or fictional, with that devastation.

Ugh. Art subordinated to politics and social change. Great novelists should write about Katrina to help people. No. That's not how it works.

Novelists have done a commendable job exposing us to the dust and the rubble of September 11. It’s time for more of them to churn the mud, water, blood, and decay wrought by Katrina.

As if serious novelists take their marching orders from the political hacks of this world.

AFTERTHOUGHT: "It’s time for more of them to churn the mud, water, blood, and decay wrought by Katrina." Put mud, water, blood, and decay in in the blender and press "churn." Yummy Katrina art smoothie. 

Martin Amis recommends "death booths" as a solution to the "population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops."

"I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years' time. There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal."

A martini and a medal and... death.  Picture it:

Audible Althouse #70.

It's a new Audible Althouse. With porcupines, cactuses, sharpened daggers, and poison pens.

Books referred to:

Jack Handey, "Lost Deep Thoughts: Don't Fight the Deepness"

D. H. Lawrence, "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays"

Jill Krementz, "The Writer's Desk"

Martin Amis, "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million"

And that plant I mentioned: hens-and-chickens.

Stream it right through your computer here. But all acutely incisive sharp people subscribe on iTunes: