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>[Writers] ... subtly get under our skin and shift our consciousness
But I don't want you backdooring my brain for pleasure.
Why are literature types obsessed about Martin Amis?
Wrote one of maybe the top four or five guides on how to play Space Invaders. What else do you want from a writer?
That ("Invasion of the Space Invaders", 1982) is a fun book, and yes, it does genuinely feature tips for Space Invaders, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and other games of the period, but it is also a slice-of-life of London culture in the early 1980s.
I recommend reading some of his books. They explain the reasons. He was an innovative and very readable writer.
> I recommend reading some of his books
Shame this needs to be said.
I adore Money and London Fields. The zone of interest is a masterpiece. The man was one of the most consistently creative and interesting writers we've seen. I'd also wager he would be good fun to go on a pinting session with
He was part of the literary London set, a group of well-connected people who like to discuss their own lives, interests, and work on the pages of influential newspapers and magazines. His dad was a famous writer, which must have been a blessing (access to the literary and publishing world without the drudge of having to wait to be discovered) and a curse (the inevitable imposter syndrome). I think they admired his style, his ability to survive as a writer, and his legend (e.g. allegedly running an escort agency from his flat).
There are clues in the article.
> The Martin Amis community, from Anna Wintour to Julian Barnes, had filed in to Handel, and perched on their pews beneath the vaulting neoclassical ceiling, as Martin had done for his father Kingsley’s memorial here in 1996.
What a solid reinforcement of the idea that birth is the way to be loved by the British elites. One could paraphrase Amis and ask "How do you get from a rented room in Whitechapel to a freehold in Knightsbridge? You get the keys from your family's trust fund manager."
I don’t know about the others, but I love Julian Barnes because his writing profoundly affects me every time I encounter it.
Was he born of an elite family?
Edit: “Barnes was born in Leicester, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. Both of his parents were French teachers.” [0]
The article is about Amis.
Honestly, this dismissive comment helped me formulate a thing in my mind.
So, as a Black American, I do believe it's important to hear from the voices of people who are suffering.
That being said, I find that, unfortunately, that market-in-books tends to really lean into the suffering, and I say it's important to consider the extent to which that might weigh down the writing and the reading experience.
This is the primary reason I bristle at the idea of "getting away from e.g. white male writers." There, of course, is nothing inherently better about them; but our unfortunate social / cultural / historical filters have made it so that (easily findable) writing that is free from certain kinds of suffering comes from them -- and sometimes you need that too.
One detail that struck me in Le Guin's Dispossessed was when her anarchist-from-an-anarchist-society protagonist visits the neighbouring planet and discovers (a little to his dismay? or is it just puzzling?) that compared with his other physics colleagues there, he admires the franchise of the aristocrat the most.
Sinclair Lewis has a sort of parallel there-and-back-again story of the heroic scientist from the backwoods.
(The erstwhile Mr. Dorothy Thompson)
An ostinato themes in Dispo is cycles vs lines; today I'm not so surprised to reencounter Ms Thompson*, but was pleasantly surprised by the following cycle:
(1986) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B_UYYPb-Gk
(1979) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcCK99wHrk0
(1978) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjXLzapT4-Q
(1975) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE6fs26i4BA
now time for me to listen to The Meters, and get some prehistory? (then again, a basic problem is once you hit New Orleans, everyone has influenced everyone)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvuPuOrYMlg
* the "escalating terrorism" mentioned in her en.WP article probably refers to things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing ?
Even a person born into wealth may occassionally be genuinely talented. Not every artist/author is a struggling youth living in a cardboard box.
There is also a load of trust fund babies that no one has ever heard about.
Yeah, wealth can be a great boon for developing talent. It's annoying for the rest of us peasants, but talent is talent.... A rich kid may lack a hard-knock life, which is great fodder for writing. But, she or he may be privately tutored in, say, world literature from a young age and given 1-on-1 access to great minds.