by
Martin Amis
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How civilized, how spacious, how decent everything must have been, when his nose wasn’t nuts, when his eye wasn’t black. Everyone stared at him. No one sniffed at him, but everyone stared at him.
The only place he felt any good was in the Adam and Eve. No one stared at his black eye. No one noticed his black eye. This was because everyone else had a black eye. Even the men.
it is simply unjust that this is as funny as it is
The railway station had changed since he had last had call to use it. In the meantime its soot-coated, rentboy-haunted vault of tarry girders and toilet glass had become a flowing atrium of boutiques and croissant stalls and limitless cappuccino. Trains no longer dominated it with their train culture of industrial burdens dumbly and filthily borne. Trains now crept in round the back, sorry they were so late, hoping they could still be of use to the proud, strolling, cappuccino-quaffing shoppers of the mall. There was even a brand-new Dickensian pub called the Olde Curiosity Shoppe whose set was dressed with thousands of books—written not by Dickens but by that timeless band of junkshop set-dresser nobodies … In other words, the station had gone up in the world. And Richard didn’t like it. He wanted everything to stay down in the world—with him. Envy and schadenfreude and invidiousness: they arise from poor character, but also from a fear of desertion. The entrance to the platform he stood at called itself the Gateway to East Anglia. Monolithically overweight, like a prehistoric snake that had eaten not a mastodon or a mammoth but another snake of the same dimensions, the train moved toward him with its yellow eyes satedly averted. Asian and West Indian staff stood ready with their black ten-gallon rubbish bags. Richard stiffened in his soiled bow tie.
god
[...] The television in his room went about its transmissions nonjudgmentally, but to Richard the set itself often seemed scandalized and even persecuted by these gladiatorial displays—this modern marriage of window-shopping and blood sport. Or this post-modern marriage: pornography tried to occupy the basements of other genres (sex Westerns, sex space operas, sex murder mysteries), but it looked to be increasingly preoccupied by pornography: by “adult,” as the industry called itself. Pseudo-documentaries about adult; rivalries between adult stars; the ups and downs of an adult director. There was also many a talentless parody of other small-screen entertainments. There was even a loose parody of The Simpsons—called The Limpsons. All this footage had been bowdlerized, on the set, for hotel use, with a strategic lampshade here, a fruit bowl there. You saw faces, not bodies. The men perspired and bared their teeth, as if under torture. The women snarled and whinnied, as if giving birth. So: The Simpsons, The Limpsons, and room service.
tangentially related: i find it so interesting that there's so much porn that's set in like a meta way within the porn industry itself. like casting couch porn. so interesting!
[...] The only other good news to come Richard’s way since his return from America was that Anstice, his devoted secretary at The Little Magazine, had not taken a welcome break, alone, in the Isle of Mull, as everyone thought, but, instead, had gone home and killed herself.
jesus
She sat on the floor, away from the charcoal couch. When Kyle shed his army jacket, Phoebe noticed through his T-shirt how muscular he was. He took a joint from a Lucite cigarette holder on the coffee table and fired it up, then lowered himself to the floor.
feels too flat
At twenty-three, Phoebe’s brother was a millionaire. The seed of his wealth had been their father’s five thousand dollars, engorged by careful investments while Barry was at Berkeley. After graduation he’d used the money to start a software company, and when Phoebe last asked, his employees had numbered fifty-seven. He owned a four-bedroom house in the hills outside Los Gatos, and showered Phoebe each holiday with gifts that left her weak with gratitude, a Prince tennis racket, a digital watch, a string of real pearls that radiated a faint pink glow in certain lights. Barry often dropped the names of important people he’d met at parties, always stressing how they’d sought him out, how some moment of unique communication had transpired. According to Barry, his employees were off the genius charts, his products so phenomenally great that customers were nearly fainting away at their computer terminals. Against her better judgment, Phoebe found herself believing him sometimes, adopting Barry’s view that the center of the world was not New York or Paris or Washington, D.C., but a software company near Palo Alto.
no real notes here, just thought this was funny [also remember that she dated steve jobs lol]
Faith kept glancing at their father, fidgeting with the straps of her bathing suit. Finally she rose to her feet. With dread in her face she walked slowly to the highest diving board and climbed its steps. She looked tiny up there, eleven years old, slim and deeply tanned, slightly knock-kneed. “Dad,” Barry said. Their father opened his eyes and rubbed them, followed Phoebe’s and Barry’s stares and sat upright, muscles tense in his neck. Faith stood a long time at the end of the diving board. A few teenagers waited impatiently below, craning their necks to see what was taking so long. Please do it, Phoebe thought. Please, please do it. Faith gave a tentative bounce. Then a clarity came to her movements, a stillness; she leapt high in the air, spread wide her arms and arced into a swan dive, head straight down like an arrow’s head, pulling the wand of her body toward the turquoise water. Her splash was minute—in years to come Faith would never again match that first, perfect dive, a fact that galled her—and their father leapt to his feet. “That’s it!” he cried. “Jesus, you see what she did?” He was grinning, his despair gone, and Phoebe knew the day was saved.
“I mean she does it for you. That wildness? Come on, Gene. You know perfectly well that’s for you.”
Her father’s voice was hushed, furious. “You think I told her to knock that kid in the river?” he said. “I don’t tell her to be wild, Christ Almighty. She just does it.”
“You don’t have to tell her,” her mother said. “Any fool can see it makes you happy.”
Their father slapped her across the face, his palm making a loud, wet noise against her cheek. Faith looked stunned, then tears filled her eyes. “That didn’t hurt,” she said.
He hit her again, harder this time. Phoebe, standing to one side, began to whimper.
Faith was shaking, her thin limbs covered with gooseflesh. With each breath her ribs stood out like a pair of hands holding her at the waist. “Didn’t hurt,” she whispered.
He hit her again, so hard this time that Faith bent over. For a moment she didn’t move. Phoebe began to howl.
Then he lifted Faith into his arms. She clung to him, sobbing. Their father was crying, too, which frightened Phoebe—she’d never seen him cry before. “How could you scare me like that?” he sobbed. “You know you’ve got my heart—you know it.” He sounded as if he wanted it back.
“It was hard,” Barry told her with relish. “I had to order the parts from this store in New Jersey, Edmund Scientific. Then I just figured it out, you know? Studied Dad’s sketches.”
He was flushed, dark eyes fastened to the small machine. He turned a knob and the buzzing sound became a loud ringing. “Think about it,” Barry hollered over the racket. “You know? I mean, think about it, Pheeb.”
Phoebe was overwhelmed—by the whispery trace of their father, which seemed caught against its will in this shrill contraption; by her own fragile closeness to Barry, which seemed in constant jeopardy.
“I’m going to make them all,” he said rather grimly. “Every single one.”
Phoebe nodded, smiling at her brother. Her head ached. Much as she longed to share in Barry’s awe, she wished he would turn the thing off. She tried to imagine their father here—his reaction to the leftover drawings, even Barry’s machine. And she knew that he wouldn’t give a damn.