{"id":2764,"date":"2011-02-14T16:06:59","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T21:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2011\/02\/14\/reassuring-to-know-martin-amis-remains-a-knob\/"},"modified":"2011-02-14T16:06:59","modified_gmt":"2011-02-14T21:06:59","slug":"reassuring-to-know-martin-amis-remains-a-knob","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2011\/02\/14\/reassuring-to-know-martin-amis-remains-a-knob\/","title":{"rendered":"Reassuring to know Martin Amis remains a knob"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nWild horses couldn’t drag me in front of the television to watch Sebastian Ffaulks on fiction and fortunately it’s also forbidden under the Genevea Conventions to force people to watch his self-satisfied smug face, which is why I missed Martin Amis being a knob again. When asked if he would ever write a children’s book he said “‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book”<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nRemarks about children’s books made by Martin Amis on the BBC’s new book programme Faulks on Fiction, broadcast this week, have caused anger and offence among children’s writers.\n<\/p>\n

\n“People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book,” Amis said, in a sideways excursion from a chat about John Self, the antihero of his 1984 novel Money. “I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.”\n<\/p>\n

\n“I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write,” he added.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThese remarks led to the usual (justified) outrage by those he targeted, but they’re really nothing more than unthinking snobbism from a has-been, a somewhat desperate attempt to remain “controversial”. Of course Amis would be disdainful of children’s books: he wouldn’t be Amis if he didn’t look down on anything that wasn’t written by him or his mates like Ian McEwan. It’s pointless to get angry at him or try to reason him out of his prejudices; he only says these things for the publicity and the image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wild horses couldn’t drag me in front of the television to watch Sebastian Ffaulks on fiction and fortunately it’s also forbidden under the Genevea Conventions to force people to watch his self-satisfied smug face, which is why I missed Martin Amis being a knob again. When asked if he would ever write a children’s book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,585],"tags":[150],"class_list":["post-2764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-numpties","tag-martin-amis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}