by
Martin Amis
inspo/funny
Martin Amis,
Thomas Pynchon,
Charlie Kaufman,
Miranda July,
Helen DeWitt,
Elaine Dundy,
Lucia Berlin,
Iris Murdoch,
Shirley Hazzard
otherwise uncaptured moments of humor
Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle - the shop, and the flat above it—had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they had been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled! How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stopped doing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste—it was all they had plenty of, and there was nothing else to do with it—so they just went on burgling.
the iconic burglary passage
Nicola was right. After he visited her, Keith went to see a ladyfriend. Moreover, Keith visited a ladyfriend before he visited her. Only certain unrepealable physical laws stopped him going to see a ladyfriend while he visited her. Nicola was right again. The girls were all after him, or at least they weren't getting out of his way. And Keith was really putting himself about, with an urgency, a cartwheeling canine frenzy he had never known before. Was someone putting something in his lager? It couldn't be healthy (even Keith was sure of this), and he genuinely feared for his darts, not to mention his sanity. Compulsive behaviour innit. But the birds were as bad. Indeed, over the great city, or in those flues and runnels where Keith scampered and paused, his whiskers working, a sewery fever seemed to be abroad, all wastepipes and floodgates and gargoyles, rat-borne. For Keith it was sharp and brackish, like the ever-present smell of urine in the streets. Of course, you had to be persistent, and having nothing to do all day unquestionably helped. After he'd fetched her milk for the ninth morning running, Iqbala consented, once again, to turn the telly up loud. Popping in on Petronella Jones with a series of high-octane gifts to celebrate her recent marriage to the oilrigger, Keith had found that one thing led to another. Since Thelonius's arrest, Keith had been doing the right thing, making regular and glad-handed visits to Lilette and the kids, and he could all too easily see himself developing an obligation there (Lilette okay for a baby-mamma, and not pregnant, or not very pregnant, just now: give the kids a tenner get lost for twenty minutes). It was getting so bad he hardly had time to hang around for hours on end relaxing over a few drinks with his colleagues in the Black Cross. While he performed -in bed, on the couch or the carpet, up against the radiator - while he jerked and stabbed and fought for breath, his thoughts, his desperate presentiments, were all of money, transformation, Nicola and, for the first time in his life, his own death. And here was one final proof that all was not well. He'd stumble in at Christ knows when, after doing Christ knows what to Christ knows who all day, followed by nine hours of darts and rounding it all off at Trish Shirt's - and find himself elbowing Kath awake at four in the morning! Now why would he go and do a thing like that? Kath. Kath, in whose body he had long lost all but a reflexive, Friday-night interest. It was like that time in the middle of the pregnancy, when Keith had been briefly stirred to find himself alongside this cool new fat chick with the big tits and the beer gut. I don't know what's got into me, he now thought, as he pressed her shaking shoulders down the bed. Really and truly I don't.
god he's good
He was now faced with the task of equipping Marmaduke for the outside world - of dressing him entirely, from soup to nuts, with the child throwing all he had at him every inch of the way. In the nursery Guy took off Marmaduke's nappy and despairingly wedged him into the potty. 'Are you going to make a present for daddy?' he asked, again quite hopelessly. Twenty minutes later, following Marmaduke's reliable failure to make a present for daddy, Guy wrestled him into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper and, downstairs, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat, scarf. As he was dragging him towards the front door and reaching out to free the doublelock, Marmaduke 'went supervoid', in the local phrase (the phenomenon usually marked the end of Marmaduke's experiments in week-long, white-lipped constipation). The child, in other words, had swamped himself in ordure. When Guy unravelled Marmaduke's scarf he saw that some of it was even peeping over the collar of his shirt. In the nursery again Guy wrestled him out of bobble hat, face mask, gloves, anorak, jumper, shoes, socks, trousen, shirt, vest, nappy pants, nappy and nappy-liner, waved away the game but gagging nannies, hosed Marmaduke down in the master bathroom, and wrestled him back into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat and scarf. During these struggles, Marmaduke's lifelong enthusiasm for hurting his father- and, within that, his specialization in hurting his father's genitals — was given play only twice. A flying headbutt to the testicles, and an unrestrained blow with a blunt instrument (a toy grenade-launcher) to the sensitive tip. The new pains joined and reinforced and starred in all the ensemble pains that were there already. This time, he actually got the front door open before Marmaduke was noisily and copiously sick.
oh my god
He gazed through his windshield at the fake red-brick exterior, the debased shrubbery surrounded by wood chips. Beijing, Moscow—they were all over the world, McDonald’s, colonizing, anesthetizing, and it was said that no country containing one had been at war since. Of course, they were already defeated.
lmao
[...] And not to venture too far into the underside of our household humor, he also laughed inordinately when I was getting into bed and slightly farted and he said Is that the way you greet me? I replied quick as a flash That’s the only language you understand. Neither of us could figure out why we thought this was funny, but we both did.
<3
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.
i love him
Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wives are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attack—they are tough and hardy and travel in packs—but right now they’re not having any fun. And when you look in the bathroom mirror, you spot them scurrying, up out of reach behind you.
god she's amazing
Listening to his truck humming and rumbling as he plowed the driveway, I ate the cereal and looked over the pages I’d laid out yesterday, telling myself that one bowl of Count Chocula wasn’t so irresponsible; they probably spray the stuff with vitamins. And only then did it hit me what I’d done last night: got stinking drunk while four months pregnant. Four months: what did that mean in terms of how major a birth defect might be? Wouldn’t it be more major the earlier you did the bad thing? I pictured a bullet, fired at conception: deflect that bullet almost at the target and it would miss by only a little, but deflect it early on and it would veer off wide. Four months. That was less than halfway there. I slid from my chair to my knees and prayed, Dear God, since I did it without thinking, please don’t let it count. Just the kind of prayer God likes to hear. Oh, right, If it be Thy will. I listened down into my body to try to discern any damage, any change from yesterday. Nothing. Oh, God. Well, we just wouldn’t think about this. But what if Steven looked at the bottle? I remembered him saying, I want to make a baby with you. I know you must think I’ve said everything before to somebody else, but this is a first. A first. He actually said that.
There was a bar we loved back then. It was red and unhappy, a dour subterranean neighborhood institution where nothing could stop us from being charmed by it. Not its stubborn insistence on overhead lighting, not the rotting pink bar of soap in the bathroom, not an overtly hostile approach to fulfilling drink orders. (I once became genuinely concerned when a friend I brought for his first visit tried to ask to see the wine list. “No, no,” I nervously interjected when I saw the bartender’s jaw tighten. “There’s no list. It’s house red or house white. Pick one, now, please.” He chose the red.)
lmao
“What’s with all the female filmmakers from Canada?” he asks. “What is going on up there?” He’s had a weird number of Canadian female filmmakers and screenwriters come down to his clinic with concussions. (Indeed, I myself now know at least four Canadian female filmmakers who have been to this clinic.) “The front desk keeps asking me what is going on in Toronto.”
I tell him that we’re a competitive bunch. The pool of female filmmakers is small, but even smaller is the pool of money to make films. We’ve taken to bashing each other over the head to put each other out of the running for the public money. Hence, more business for him, and an added bonus of appearing as the doctor character in lots of overly serious, low-budget movies that people will never see.
love her