I'd Rather Peer Review "The Economic Influence of the Developments In Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485" Than Read Your Filthy Novel

As everyone knows, I believe Lucky Jim to be the funniest assemblage of words ever put on paper in any language. Yet I absolutely cannot stand Martin Amis, Kingsley's snobbish, pompous, supercilious, assinine son. I tried to read one of his books once, and by page ten was so filled with loathing for the author that I couldn't get any further. Right now he is on Charlie Rose, wearing a leather jacket, talking about the writing process, and quoting his own characters -- which as far as I can tell is a way of explaining his own genius by citing his own genius. A literary clusterfuck, all in his own head. He is also close friends with Christopher Hitchens, with whom he shares a particularly condescending version of an ostentatiously educated English accent, and an anachronistic obsession with ideological causes (in Hitchens' case, with Islamic extremism as a hangover of having been a Trotskyite; in Amis' case, with pretending that an endless screed against past Soviet transgressions doesn't constitute an ideology of its own). But you know, I'd never actually seen him before, and when I did tonight on PBS I went, Ah yes. Of course he looks like that. Of course he looks like THAT:

Oy. If he had grad students, he'd sleep with 'em and then mark up their dissertations with inscrutable remarks in pencil. He is, in fact, a lot like a character in Lucky Jim. "You sam...."