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iambic-stan · 6 days ago

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The Day After

Ugh, I'm so depressed and needed this escapism.

Why did I allow myself to have hope, I wondered, tossing around the last few sips of my drink at the bottom of the glass. Brooks & Dunn's "Neon Moon" was playing quietly. The bright pink lights over the bar and emptiness of the room created just the right ambiance for me to cover myself in melancholy. Living in a red state, I had to find myself a gay bar to sulk at, even if I'd never patronized this one before. Anywhere else, I risked witnessing people celebrating. It was just the day after and nothing else felt remotely safe--physically or emotionally.

I guessed the bar was really only empty because it was 8:00 p.m., not because everyone queer was hiding at home. I simultaneously wanted to be alone but also wanted someone to talk to, even if it was just venting. Or they just vented to me. I didn't think I could stand to talk about anything else as if it was just another day instead of Day 1 of a jarring acceleration to the death of democracy as we all knew it. There was a hurricane in the Gulf. I had a class to teach the next day. Chappell Roan sang a new song on Saturday Night Live. They'd just released a new teaser trailer for season 5 of Stranger Things. Quincy Jones died a couple of days ago. But who the fuck could care? Maybe I would've said as much to the bartender, but he was outside for a smoke break.

My head was buried in my phone and I was doom scrolling when a voice I knew but didn't said, "Come on, twink--you're at the Pink Pony Club but you're not dancing!" and laughed obnoxiously. My head popped up and I took in the heavy clown makeup, boat-neck lime green dress and Fifth Element wig with so much volume you could hide a family of rats in it. I blinked several times. The blinking helped lubricate my eyes with the tears that had settled in them but I still couldn't believe what I was seeing.

"Yes--it's me, Bianca Del Rio," she continued. "For once, I'm not the biggest bitch around. I take it you heard that over 70 million Americans put the 'cunt' in 'country' yesterday. They make me look like fucking Mother Teresa, hahaha! Just kidding--she was actually kind of a cunt, too--read the Christopher Hitchens book. Oh fuck I almost forgot--I don't read! Now where is the bartender who gave you that martini you're drowning your sorrows in? No one wants to work anymore, you know?"

"I love you," I choked out. Well that was embarrassing. In a sense, it was true--I was obsessed with Bianca Del Rio and had met her at a show in El Paso--a moment I had replayed in my mind dozens of times though she surely didn't remember it. She met more people than anyone could remember. But also, Bianca Del Rio was not a real person but a drag persona, and I didn't know the man behind her personally, so I couldn't really love either one. But I was shocked, angry, and sad and my social filter was malfunctioning.

"Oh, that's the booze talking," she dismissed, waving her lemon yellow nails at me. "What are you so down about, white man? Didn't buy what he was selling? My whole family's getting deported tomorrow. But Trump does love white men, almost as much as he loves grabbing 'em by the pussy. But maybe you've realized that being white won't help you when people find out you're sticking your dick in some other man's ass."

"I have a vagina," I said, as though it was any of Bianca's or Roy's business. I looked at her face to see the recognition, but it didn't appear to be anything she hadn't heard before, so I kept going.

"So if some asshole rapes and impregnates me, I have to scrape together the money to travel several states over for an abortion...if that's still legal. But it's not just that...it's everything. It's worrying about Obergefell v. Hodges being overturned, the tariff proposals, Ukraine, climate change....the continual funding of Israel..."

She sat down at the bar next to me, nodding solemnly. Slowly, her demeanor changed and I guessed she was slipping out of character, which, even in my despair, melted my heart because she was just so adorable. She reached out and touched my hand, and I took hold of hers. It was so incredibly soft--I wanted to ask if she used some expensive creams, and I never wanted to let go of it. "You're so beautiful," I said, remembering I had said the same thing that night in El Paso.

She jerked her phone out of her purse and said, "Let me get you my opthamologist's number, because clearly you can't see a GODDAMN THING!" I let out a laugh. "There it is!" she said, pointing at me. "I made you laugh. And your name is?"

"Sebastian."

I had barely uttered the last syllable when she retorted, "Faggot," which made me chuckle again in spite of myself.

"Listen, Fag--I mean Sebastian, this is a pretty nice bar--maybe you should go out more and talk to people instead of moping about your useless vote in a sea of red, huh? I try to visit this place whenever I'm in town, though not normally this early. But this way I get to chat with a loser like you and feel better about my pathetic self, you know? And the coming years look bleak, but think about it this way--we'll all die anyway! There's no way out except under...the ground. We're only particles of change orbiting around the sun. That was poetic, right? It wasn't me, though--that was Joni Mitchell."

"I know!" I said, getting a bit excited. "From 'Hejira.' I love that song, and the album."

The bartender walked back in, looking unfazed that a celebrity was sitting next to me. He and Bianca nodded in some unspoken language at one another and he started to make what I guessed was her usual drink.

"What else do you love, Sebastian?" she asked, with a smile that looked quite sincere but comical at the same time with the exaggerated fuschia lip and raccoon eyes.

"Oh, I love heartbeats," I blurted out. Really? I thought. Couldn't go with chai lattes or Cher? Had to go straight to cardiophilia?

"Guess we kind of need them," she said sarcastically.

"Sorry I'm being so weird. I'm a HUGE fan. I just meant I love listening to heartbeats, and having mine listened to. Wow. I can't believe I told you that. Like, I have a stethoscope collection. It's a thing."

When she raised her eyebrows a bit, I knew she'd never heard of this before, which made me feel embarrassed. But she didn't say anything unkind; she just listened.

"Do you want to listen to my heart?" she asked, as the bartender handed her a martini. My eyes traveled to her chest and I watched it rise with an intake of breath. I thought about how strange it was to be so attracted to someone whose public image was meant to be ridiculous rather than sexy. But I still pictured her smile and played the same bits from The Pit Stop in my head whenever I couldn't sleep. I had imagined her heartbeat many, many times.

Bianca didn't wait for a response before opening her arms. "It's nice to meet you again," she said as I leaned toward her, my head landing on her chest just above the collar of her dress. At once I heard the heart of the man behind this larger-than-life queen, thumping loudly--yet slowly and steadily. I focused on his relaxed breathing, tried to allow it to calm my own. I was near Erb's point and could hear every second heart sound clearly, and it was musical. For a moment I forgot why I was so distraught. When I remembered, I let out a long sigh, but I kept my arms wrapped around his waist and listened as long as I could. I knew none of this would be fixed overnight, and maybe some of it never could be fixed. But I had this night, and for now, that would have to do.

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popentertainment-moviereviews · 2 months ago

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SPEAK NO EVIL (2024)

Starring James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, Aisling Franciosi, Alix West Lefler, Dan Hough, Kris Hitchen and Motaz Malhees.

Screenplay by James Watkins.

Directed by James Watkins.

Distributed by Universal Pictures. 110 minutes. Rated R.

American remakes of foreign horror films almost never quite work. This one is better than many, but it still feels the need to change the very dark and downbeat ending of the original Danish film (called Gæsterne [The Guests], but eventually renamed Speak No Evil in its international release) into a pretty cookie-cutter, overly violent and much more clichéd Hollywood denouement.

Which is really kind of a shame, because the first 2/3rds of the movie, which was much more faithful to the Danish film, was actually pretty terrific. Particularly good was James McAvoy as the charming alpha male predator who traps a hapless, squabbling American couple in a gilded cage. (The couple is played by Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy, reunited several years after their fantastic old TV series Halt and Catch Fire.)

That American couple is Ben and Louise Dalton. They have uprooted their lives, moving to London for Ben’s dream job, which disappeared quickly. Although Louise is miserable having given up her career, and their 12-year-old daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) appears homesick for the US, they have decided to stay in London while Ben regroups. This caused friction in their marriage – and Louise’s near affair didn’t help things.

Trying to heal the rifts – or at least to forget their problems – the family takes a vacation in the scenic Italian wine country. There they meet Paddy (McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their boy with speech disabilities Ant (Dan Hough), a fun and charming, but slightly strange family, from deep in the British countryside of Devon. They befriend the couple during their trip and Paddy invites them to spend a weekend at their house so they can see another part of England.

The Daltons have no intention of taking them up on it, but when they return to their broken lives in London and receive a note from Paddy and Ciara reiterating the invitation, they decide they need some more distraction, and it may be an adventure.

Little do they realize.

Paddy and Ciara’s farmhouse is literally in the middle of nowhere. Quickly upon arriving, they are reminded of their new friends’ strangeness, particularly Paddy, who is oddly combative in conversation, seems to have an anger problem, and constantly is dropping very backhanded compliments.

As the stay becomes more and more disturbing, the Daltons discuss leaving, but Paddy and Ciara keep seeming to block their plans.

The audience figures out basically what is happening well before the hapless Daltons, but eventually the American family realizes that if they ever want to leave this nightmare behind, they will have to fight their way out.

And this is where Speak No Evil sort of loses the plot and becomes much less interesting than it had been previously. However, despite the kind of cookie-cutter final act, Speak No Evil has enough interesting twists and scares to make it worth the watch.

Jay S. Jacobs

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#Speak No Evil #2024 #Movie Review #James McAvoy #Jay S. Jacobs #Youtube

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wolven-maw · 5 months ago

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this novel is all about found family. specifically the Hitchens family of Poca, West Virginia who were found at the foot of a cliff three days after failing to meet up with the rest of their hiking group

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cyan1decandy · 8 months ago

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About Aileen Berwick

Aileen's character sheet

Warnings: everything said in this is said as if it's from Aileen's perspective; mentions verbal abuse; short instant of physical abuse resulting in a scar; pureblood supremacy beliefs (not from Aileen)

Blood status: half-blood

Father: Torence Berwick (PUREBLOOD)

Mother: Natasa Cosmatos (DECEASED MUGGLE)

Home: Irondale

Additional notes: metamorphmagus

Key points in her life:

Aileen’s father came from a strict pureblood family. His family formed an union with the Black family via Iola Black. The two never had any children together, much to the dismay of both families.

He was sent to Greece for work where he met a young muggle woman whom he fell in love with. By the time he completed his assignment, she was pregnant with Aileen.

Not wanting to abandon her, he brought her home to Scotland. Understandably, his parents and the Black family were upset with him. The families become more upset upon learning that Iola had been messing around with a muggle man. Eventually Iola moved out of her shared home with him and married Bob Hitchens and was disowned from the Black family. The Berwicks were soon to follow with their son.

Forced out of the Berwick vacation home, he and his lover are forced to find a new home. They settled down in Lancaster, where they planned on raising their child together.

However, Aileen’s mother wasn’t able to survive giving birth to her. This devastated her father greatly. He tried his best to raise her on his own but every time he looked at her, he was reminded of his love. The townspeople that he grew acquainted with prior to Aileen’s birth grew concerned when they noticed him hardly leaving his home and would constantly hear baby Aileen crying.

On Aileen’s first birthday, he couldn’t deal with the pain any longer. He took her to Irondale and dropped her off on his sister’s doorstep. He returned to his parents’ estate to beg for forgiveness.

Aileen’s aunt had also been disowned by their parents, but it was due to her being a squib. Despite the strange circumstances, she did take in Aileen. As she grew healthier, her hair changed from the chestnut color that her mother gifted her to carnation pink. This greatly shocked her aunt.

Aileen’s aunt finally received a letter from her brother explaining the family situation. This greatly infuriated her but she tried not to take it out on Aileen. It was hard for her, though. Especially when Aileen reached ten and still hadn’t shown any magical abilities. Yet another disgrace to the Berwick name. She became more bitter with each passing year.

The way her aunt treated her caused Aileen to become reserved. This translated into her hair as it slowly returned to the chestnut color she was born with.

Aileen started spending more time outside, often not returning home until well past dark. It always ended in a fight but it was better than dealing with the verbal abuse all day.

She mostly spent her time observing all of the witches and wizards, often mimicking their wand movements with a random stick she found. Every time nothing happened, she felt even worse about herself.

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, as she sat at the riverbank, she threw a rock in frustration. The impact of it was much harder than it should’ve been for a simple throw. When she glanced at her reflection in the water, her eyes were glowing a much lighter shade of blue than her natural eye color.

She panicked and rushed home. Her aunt was ready to reprimand her until she, too, noticed Aileen’s eyes. She placed her hands on Aileen’s cheeks and wiped away the tears.

After calming Aileen down, she sent an owl to both the ministry and her brother regarding what happened. Aileen’s father surprisingly left the Berwick estate as soon as he read the letter.

Aileen is surprised to see her own father, the man that had abandoned her as an infant. She wasn’t sure how to feel about seeing him after all these years, especially when the first thing he told her was that her grandparents were willing to take her in. While she wasn’t happy living with her aunt, she knew that her grandparents would likely be far worse.

“They’d be willing to look past your blood status as long as you renounce Natasa and claim to be Iola’s daughter.”

“They’d forgive my past sins if you agree.”

“My sister has told me about your ability to change your appearance. I’ll show you how Iola looked before she disappeared.”

Seeing Aileen hesitate confused her father. He began berating her until it grew to a head by him comparing her to his “good for nothing sister.” Aileen tried standing up for herself and her aunt but was met with a harsh slap across the face. The stones from the family ring adorning his finger dragged across her face.

Overwhelmed, Aileen left the home and didn’t look back. She followed the river, completely disoriented and her cheek bleeding. As she walked by one of the many floo flames she’d witnessed witches and wizards use for travel, an older man appeared from it. It startled her so much she screamed.

Eleazar Fig became her tutor for the remainder of the summer as she remained in Irondale. At first, her aunt wasn’t keen on the stranger constantly entering her home. But as time wore on, she grew used to his presence. Aileen’s hair even returned to the carnation pink from her early childhood. It was an emotional day when she had to bid farewell to Aileen so she could go buy her school supplies and attend Hogwarts for her fifth year.

The mark on her cheek served as a constant reminder of how much of a disgrace she was. She hid it behind her hair constantly.

Combat: defensive. She isn’t the best when it comes to aim, as she’s still adjusting to her magic and using a wand. Once adrenaline takes over, her aim improves significantly.

Relationships:

Sebastian Sallow: positive. He was the first of her peers to show her kindness and she feels indebted to him.

Anne Sallow: positive. She can see herself in Anne and only wishes the best for her.

Ominis Gaunt: very positive. Despite how much she cares for Sebastian, she sympathizes with Ominis’ hesitancy and disdain for the Dark Arts.

Imelda Reyes: neutral. She likes Imelda’s competitive attitude.

Duncan Hobhouse: hates. She holds the venomous tentacula stunt over his head.

Amit Thakkar: positive. If it weren’t for him, she would’ve failed astronomy.

Everett Clopton: negative. She believed they could be good friends until she witnessed him bullying others. It reminded her too much of her aunt when she was younger.

Natsai Onai: positive. She quickly became one of Aileen’s best friends.

Garreth Weasley: very positive. What started as a loyal friendship quickly blossomed into something deeper in her heart. They constantly collaborated on his new ideas.

Leander Prewett: neutral. She doesn’t know Leander all that well but he seemed decent enough.

Lucan Brattleby: positive. He was very helpful in teaching her better dueling techniques.

Poppy Sweeting: positive. She started off being nervous around beasts, especially large ones, but Poppy helped with her fear.

Professor Sharp: negative. He doesn’t appreciate her encouraging and helping Garreth.

Professor Weasley: positive. She sees her as a mother figure.

Headmaster Black: very negative. This is due to both her blood and her father's betrayal of his sister.

#hogwarts legacy mc #hogwarts legacy #hogwarts legacy aileen berwick #cc shares her oc

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alchemisoul · 5 months ago

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Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue at a Washington Correspondents Dinner in 1995 (Photo by Dafydd Jones)

"I miss his perfect voice. I heard it day and night, night and day. I miss the first happy trills when he woke; the low octaves of “his morning voice” as he read me snippets from the newspaper that outraged or amused him; the delighted and irritated (mostly irritated) registers as I interrupted him while he read; the jazz-tone riffs of him “talking down the line” to a radio station from the kitchen phone as he cooked lunch; his chirping, high-note greeting when our daughter came home from school; and his last soothing, pianissimo chatterings on retiring late at night.

I miss, as his readers must, his writer’s voice, his voice on the page. I miss the unpublished Hitch: the countless notes he left for me in the entryway, on my pillow, the emails he would send while we sat in different rooms in our apartment or in our place in California and the emails he sent when he was on the road. And I miss his handwritten communiqués: his innumerable letters and postcards (we date back to the time of the epistle) and his faxes, the thrill of receiving Christopher’s instant dispatches as he checked-in from a dicey spot on some other continent.

The first time Christopher went public and wrote about his illness for Vanity Fair, he was ambivalent about it. He was intent on protecting our family’s privacy. He was living the topic and he didn’t want it to become all-encompassing, he didn’t want to be defined by it. He wanted to think and write in a sphere apart from sickness. He had made a pact with his editor and chum, Graydon Carter, that he would write about anything except sports, and he kept that promise. He had often put himself in the frame, but now he was the ultimate subject of the story.

His last, unfinished, fragmentary jottings may seem to trail off, but in fact they were written on his computer in bursts of energy and enthusiasm as he sat in the hospital using his food tray for a desk.

When he was admitted to the hospital for the last time, we thought it would be for a brief stay. He thought – we all thought – he’d have the chance to write the longer book that was forming in his mind. His intellectual curiosity was sparked by genomics and the cutting-edge proton radiation treatments he underwent, and he was encouraged by the prospect that his case could contribute to future medical breakthroughs. He told an editor friend waiting for an article, “Sorry for the delay, I’ll be back home soon.” He told me he couldn’t wait to catch up on all the movies he had missed and to see the King Tut exhibition in Houston, our temporary residence.

The end was unexpected.

At home in Washington, I pull books off the shelves, out of the book towers on the floor, off the stacks of volumes on tables. Inside the back covers are notes written in his hand that he took for reviews and for himself. Piles of his papers and notes lie on surfaces all around the apartment, some of which were taken from his suitcase that I brought back from Houston. At any time I can peruse our library or his notes and rediscover and recover him.

When I do, I hear him, and he has the last word. Time after time, Christopher has the last word."

- From an edited version of Carol Blue’s afterword to Mortality by her husband Christopher Hitchens

#christopher hitchens #heretic #heretics #writing #author #writer #journalist #essay writing #essayist #bard #orator #poet #quote #philosophy #photography #film #photographer #portrait

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justforbooks · 1 year ago

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The writer Martin Amis, who has died aged 73, delighted, provoked, inspired and outraged readers of his fiction, reportage and memoirs across a literary career that set off like a rocket and went on to dazzle, streak and burn for almost 50 years. His scintillating verbal artistry, satirical audacity and sheer imaginative verve at every level from word-choice to plot-shape announced a blazing, once-in-a-generation talent.

He seldom disagreed with Christopher Hitchens, the journalist and essayist who was his soulmate and intellectual lodestar. But when Hitchens published a tepid review of a book by the American novelist Saul Bellow – Amis’s literary idol and mentor, who ranked equally high in his affections – Amis rebuked his friend for ignoring “all the pleasure he gave you”. Amis stirred envy and emulation, ignited controversy, courted scandal. Above all, though, he gave pleasure.

He paid tribute to his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, by praising his “super-humour: the great engine of his comedy”. However grave its themes – later years saw him preoccupied with losses, partings, and deaths – “super-humour” likewise fuelled the zest of Amis junior’s prose. For him, “seriousness – and morality, and indeed sanity – cannot exist without humour”. His gift of laughter followed him even into Auschwitz (in his 2014 novel The Zone of Interest). Critics could find its presence an embarrassment. Admirers never did.

He published 15 novels, from The Rachel Papers in 1973 to the hybrid Inside Story – which enfolds fiction into memoirs and essays – in 2020. His essays and journalism stretch from an account of arcade video games, through literary studies and critiques of pop culture, to a meditation on Stalin’s crimes: Koba the Dread (2002).

Until a quieter last decade, spent largely in New York, he combined fertility and versatility with a reluctant role as a writer-celebrity who epitomised literary fame in an age of glitz, hype and frenzied prurience. Keystone novels of the 1980s and 90s such as Money, London Fields and The Information channel the raucous urges of their time, and kick against them in dismay.

To a degree, he played the celebrity game: he dissected showbiz phenomena in witty articles, often for the Observer. But he found, in his case, that others played with laxer rules or none at all. For decades, the life, loves and family of a gossip-fed tabloid entity known as “Martin Amis” ran in parallel with the career of the hard-working author of that name. His fiction abounds in games of doubles, pairs and twins. In his own life, too, Amis struggled to negotiate the gap between the mask forged by fame and the true face of a serious writer.

Being the son of Kingsley might have sent him early warnings of the bill that a stellar career in literature can present. Martin was born in Oxford a year after his brother, Philip. His mother was Hilly (Hilary, nee Bardwell), whom Kingsley had met while she was studying at the Ruskin School of Art. Their third child, Sally, followed in 1954.

Hilly recalled the young Martin, bright and amiable, as “a child born under a lucky star”. The spectacular success of Kingsley’s debut, Lucky Jim (1954), brought prosperity but torpedoed family life. Kingsley’s many affairs, and his mother’s distress, became the background hum of Martin’s youth.

As his renown grew, Kingsley moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, for a year. Martin loved America: its speech rhythms rooted in his prose. In England, his father’s best friend – the melancholic poet Philip Larkin – supplied not only paltry gifts of a few pence to Martin, but a dire example of literary greatness allied to emotional squalor. The siblings spent happier times with their cousins, David and Lucy Partington. Lucy’s vanishing in 1973, and the final confirmation more than 20 years later of her murder by the serial killer Fred West, spread an ineradicable shadow over Amis’s later writing.

In 1961, Kingsley took up a teaching fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge. A rambling house on the city’s edge served as the rules-free, bohemian backdrop to the shipwreck of the Amis marriage. It ended in 1963 when Hilly moved to Mallorca while Kingsley began living with his lover, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Disharmony at home disrupted Martin’s education: he bounced idly from school to school. Relief came in the Caribbean when (for £50 per week) he acted in the film of Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind in Jamaica.

As teenagers, Martin and Phil lived mostly in Maida Vale, west London, with Jane and Kingsley. They scoured Kings Road, Chelsea, for girls, and kept drugs in the fridge. Kingsley, lord of misrule, once bought his sons a gross of condoms. Jane, the much-admired “wicked stepmother”, finally presented the “semi-literate truant and waster” Martin with a reading list that ran from Jane Austen to Muriel Spark. She sent him to a Brighton crammer, where he thrived. Martin duly studied English at Exeter College, Oxford, with an “exhibition”: a scholarship, though of a minor kind.

After graduation, in 1971, he joined the Times Literary Supplement as an assistant, then as fiction editor. Starting with The Rachel Papers, his own apprentice fiction – smart, knowing, super-cool – flowed with little fuss. For Amis fils, “nothing is more ordinary to you than what your dad does all day”. In 1974, he moved from the TLS to the New Statesman: as deputy to the literary editor Claire Tomalin, then (until 1979), as books editor himself.

The Rachel Papers won a Somerset Maugham award. And the model for the “Rachel” fictionalised in his debut – his first love – introduced him to the Jewish themes that would draw him with increasing force. For a while, though, his fiction declined to grow up. Dead Babies (1975) performs stylistic somersaults around a country-house parody, although the warring foster-brothers of Success (1978) inaugurate the trademark Amis play of pairs.

Two sides of the Amis myth, or mask, solidified. With male chums – always Hitchens, often the poets James Fenton, Ian Hamilton and Clive James, or the novelists Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan – he adorned a sort of kebab-and-chips literary salon. They derided the old guard and lauded brave new voices. Yet Kingsley, old guard incarnate, remained an always honoured guest. Amis’s deep affection for his father, despite political and artistic clashes (Kingsley scorned his boy’s fancy technique, and reputedly chucked Money across the room), surprised and impressed their friends.

Like his father, Amis also picked up a reputation as an eager if inconstant lover. By his own account, he was a slow starter until the future magazine editor Tina Brown “rode into town and rescued me from Larkinland”. Soon, columnists began to chronicle – or fantasise – the romantic life of this literary wunderkind. Tomalin herself, Brown, Emma Soames, Julie Kavanagh: his liaisons with high-achieving women were mediated by salacious reporting, attracted awestruck gazes but also evil eyes. (His longest early relationship, with the photographer Angela Gorgas, left fewer media traces.)

Too short, too clever, too entitled, too rich: Amis became the author-ogre many loved to hate. Even his father remonstrated to Larkin when, in 1978, the son earned £38,000: “Little shit. 29, he is. Little shit.” Yet companions from that time recall no sneery seducer but a sweet, funny, sympathetic friend.

Come the early 80s, Amis as writer moved into higher gears. Other People (1981) heralded a mature interest in other minds and how to represent them. In 1984, the pyrotechnic satire and narrative trickery of the sensational Money both skewered an era of greed and glitz and, typically, embodied its appeal in the razzle-dazzle of its prose. The golden boy shone with a deeper lustre. His presence on Granta magazine’s 1983 roll-call of Best of Young British Novelists sealed his position on the crest of a new, media-savvy and PR-friendly, literary wave.

Also in 1984, the writer who had fretted that “childlessness will condemn you to childishness” married the American-born academic Antonia Phillips. Their son Louis arrived the same year, followed in 1986 by Jacob. With parenthood came an investment in the planet’s fate expressed in the bomb-shadowed stories of Einstein’s Monsters (1987), and the apocalyptic weather that roils around the large-scale comic dystopia of London Fields (1989). That book’s doomed antiheroine, Nicola Six, focused criticism of Amis as a serial fabricator of stereotypically damaged femmes fatales. The complaint, and the grounds for it, would persist.

At the same time, the comic craft that forged that novel’s darts-obsessed low-life Keith Talent could still make readers fall off their chairs with laughter. Visitors to the Amis work-flat in Westbourne Park loved to report on the blockish impedimenta of dartboard and pinball machine. Fewer clocked the neat editions of Bellow and Nabokov, twin touchstones of his art, on the shelves. The Holocaust motif and reverse narration of Time’s Arrow (1991) – shortlisted for the Booker prize – spoke of lofty formal ambitions, not laddish fun.

In journalism and fiction, Amis magnetised mimics and fan-boys (fewer girls) by the score. The essays gathered first in The War Against Cliché (2001) and, later, in 2017, The Rub of Time, recruited a tribe of wannabes – which rather missed their point. Hubris was ascribed to him, not espoused by him. Envious back-biters feasted on his every mishap or misstep.

The 90s saw his dental problems become a bizarre media fixation: he retaliated, gloriously, with the all-you-can-eat dentist-surgery horrors of his 2000 memoir Experience. Less reparable, his marriage broke up. He married Isabel Fonseca, an American-Uruguayan journalist and author, in 1996. Their daughters, Fernanda and Clio, were born in 1997 and 1999.

The media onslaught intensified with Amis’s most elaborate novel of doubles and rivals: the death-haunted, long-winded literary satire of The Information (1994). Its large advance drew sniper fire. So did Amis’s split from his agent Pat Kavanagh – and from her husband, Barnes – in favour of Andrew Wylie. Kingsley’s decline, after his parting from Jane, darkened his son’s horizons and turned Amis’s mind to “the information” (about mortality) that struck as a “negative eureka moment” in his 40s. What Amis called, after Kingsley’s death in 1995, the “passage to the main event” now suffused his work. He found death “always in my thoughts, like an unwanted song”.

In 2000, his sister, Sally, died, aged 46, after periods of depression and alcoholism. Griefs accumulated: the 1994 revelation of Lucy’s fate throws a pall over the superb Experience that wit can hardly lift. Still, in the mid-90s, Amis met his eldest child. Delilah was born in 1976 while her mother, Lamorna – who later killed herself – was married to the journalist-historian Patrick Seale. Larkin’s bleak emotional wilderness had terrified Amis. If anything, he overcompensated: so much life, so much love, but so much loss as well.

Amis, Isabel and their daughters set up home in London, at the other end of the Primrose Hill road where Kingsley had finally gone back to live with Hilly and her third husband. Post-millennium, his writing took a more political turn. Hitchens had always figured for Amis as the ideal type of the public intellectual. Now, the virtuoso storyteller – who identified as a centre-left gradualist – craved a slice of that gravitas himself. In Koba the Dread, Amis’s account of Stalin’s atrocities paid homage too to Kingsley and the ardent anti-communism of his circle: notably, the historian Robert Conquest.

It was 9/11 and its aftermath that propelled Amis into front-line polemics. Islamist terrorism revived a catastrophist strain in his work: the concept of entropy haunts earlier books. In the topical essays collected as The Second Plane in 2008, it threatened to elevate political foes into metaphysical demons. Rash interview statements prompted charges of Islamophobia. More soberly, Inside Story concludes that “the real danger of terrorism lies not in what it inflicts but what it provokes”. Still, the op-ed pundit Amis could drop his verbal, even moral, compass.

By the later 2000s, Amis began to look fragile, with the stiff gait of a veteran tennis player (he enjoyed the game, and wrote well on it). His mid-2000s fiction – Yellow Dog, House of Meetings – revisited old haunts: celebrity excess and tabloid depravity in the former; the lingering horror of Soviet atrocity in the latter. Calm spells with his family in seaside Uruguay raised spirits, as for a while did stints as a creative-writing professor at Manchester University.

With The Pregnant Widow (2010), his ambitions climbed again. Within its uproarious, comic-pastoral mode, the novel counts the costs of the sexual revolution that, for Amis, had devoured his vulnerable sister. To Amis, no longer a gleeful beneficiary of post-60s erotic liberation but its appalled historian, “the boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose.”

In 2010, the Amis family began the process of moving from London to New York: Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In Amis’s telling, the need to live near his elderly mother-in-law hastened the move. British media read it as a snub to his celebrity-mad homeland and its jeering fourth estate. Lionel Asbo (2012), with its scattergun satire on lottery-winning oiks in a plebeian nightmare, rather confirmed that view.

Amis enjoyed the Brooklyn weather, the freedom from spiteful gossip, his welcome on New York’s literary scene. But he missed British backchat: his west London patch, from the pub quiz-machines of Portobello Road to the sports clubs of Paddington, had served well as scruffy muse.

Thanks to Fonseca’s heritage, Amis now had Jewish daughters. Jewish histories, fears and hopes felt nearer than ever. Yet his concentration-camp novel The Zone of Interest affirmed that, for Amis, nothing stood beyond a joke. “How can you presume to laugh at Hitlerism?” asked a German critic. For Amis, how could he not? Any depiction of Nazi evil that overlooked its farcical absurdity lent it weight and credit it did not deserve.

His two wisest jokers had exited: Bellow, with dementia, in 2005; Hitchens, from cancer, in 2011. The loss of a virtual father and a virtual brother whetted fears of death but also (with Hitchens) sharpened the appetite for life: “the delight of sentience”. Kingsley had called a late novel The Anti-Death League, but Martin would never have signed up. “Without death there is no art,” he wrote. Bellow’s and Hitchens’s passing fed tremendous elegiac passages amid the multiform miscellany of Inside Story, where tricky “autofiction” sits beside heartfelt, no-frills memoir.

With its musings on “how busy death always is, and what great plans it has for us”, Inside Story felt like a valediction. If so, it was one in which Amis’s acrobatic wit defied both gravity and solemnity. He wrote with discipline and dedication, and wrestled with all the anguish of his age. Yet that pleasure-giving principle makes his long shelf of books feel playfully, buoyantly light.

He is survived by Isabel, and by his children, Delilah, Louis, Jacob, Fernanda and Clio.

🔔 Martin Louis Amis, writer, born 25 August 1949; died 19 May 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Martin Amis #in memoriam

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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.

Christopher Hitchens

Incidentally, the piece this is from, I was surprised to find, was published in 2010 and not earlier, considering how evocative of the Dubya years it is, in that particular way that @larkandkatydid has mentioned when discussing the impact of those said years and particularly the insistent Islamophobia and exhortation to "battle the fundamentalists" (of which Hitchens is rightly associated with, for better or worse).

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absumoaevum · 9 months ago

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Jury of Hearts (53,750 Words || WIP) by absumoaevum

Chapters: 9/?

Fandom: Harry Potter

Rating: Mature

Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy

Characters: Hermione Granger, Draco Malfoy, Crookshanks (Harry Potter), Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Molly Weasley, Arthur Weasley, Ginny Weasley, Narcissa Black Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy, Eudoria Merrythought, Luna Lovegood, Patience Bright, Pomona Sprout, Minerva McGonagall, Horace Slughorn, Violetta Hitchens, Percy Weasley, Leta Brindlemore, Gertrude Meads, Filius Flitwick, Poppy Pomfrey, Eli Cresswell, Prescott Cadwallader, Jameson Terwilleger, Justin Finch-Fletchley, Ryan Oaklane, Rory Oaklane, Zacharias Smith

Additional Tags: Hogwarts Eighth Year, POV Draco Malfoy, POV Hermione Granger, POV Third Person Limited, Draco Malfoy Needs a Hug, Slow Burn, Angst and Feels, Hermione Granger's Parents Are Missing, Post-Second Wizarding War with Voldemort (Harry Potter), Eventual Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy, Bullying, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Blood, Violence, Brooding, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Canon-Typical Violence

Summary:

With his family's trials on the horizon and nothing holding him to his home apart from his despondent mother and perpetually-drunk father, Draco Malfoy jumps at the opportunity to return to Hogwarts to repeat his final year. At Hogwarts, he can escape his wretched home life and perhaps even rehabilitate his reputation. Things are looking up. That is, until he gets to school and realizes that his entire House hates him. Now Draco must decide between his old life and something new.

New is the last thing Hermione Granger needs. All she wants is for her life to go back to the way it was before the war. When a hearing at the Ministry goes sideways, Hermione accepts Headmistress McGonagall's offer to return to Hogwarts, sure answers lie hidden in the school library that will help her find her missing parents. But Hogwarts is a very different place than she remembers, and Hermione must change as well if she has any hope of overcoming her past to reclaim her future.

Fates intertwine and loyalties are tested in this Post-War 8th-Year Slow Burn Dramione Drama/Suspense/Romance.

Updates Mondays.

#dramione #draco malfoy #hermione granger #dramione fanfic #dramione fanfiction #dramione fan fiction #jury of hearts #dhrfic #dhrtag

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eaglesnick · 1 year ago

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“One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite's first premise about the abnormality of the Jew.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

Day after day, week after week, the dreadful plight of the Palestinians in Gaza has filled the airwaves. Almost every hour our main media outlets send us pictures and give commentary concerning the death of civilians - particularly children - within Gaza. As I write this Hamas claim over 10,000 Gazan citizens have been killed by Israeli bombings.

The condemnation of the Hamas massacre of innocent Israeli families, and the kidnapping of men, women and children to be held hostage and used as pawns in the Hamas war against Israel, has now been drowned out by the condemnation of the Israeli response to this deliberate, face-to-face terrorist massacre of its civilian citizens.

The question I am asking is why are people so exercised by this particular war? Why are thousands of people on the streets demonstrating against this particular conflict in the Middle East when other conflicts have exacted an equally, and in many cases more horrific death toll of children and civilians?

The civil war in Yemen was between the Houthi Shia Muslims and the Shiite Muslim led government. The Saudi’s, backed by Britain, the US and France, began air strikes against the Houthis in 2015 fearing the Houthis would give Iran, a Shia Muslim State and a political rival, a foothold in the region.

What resulted was a major escalation in hostilities leading to:

“8.4 million people at risk of starvation and 22.2 million people - 75% of the population - in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the UN. Severe acute malnutrition is threatening the lives of almost 400,000 children under the age of five.” (BBC NEWS: 13/06/18)

Where were the mass protests and daily news coverage of this humanitarian crisis? There were protests, but nowhere on the scale of the pro-Palestinian marches we are witnessing today, despite the vastly greater number of casualties:

“Yemen war deaths will reach 377,000 by end of the year: UN.” (Aljazeera: 23/11/21)

The civil war in Syria has been raging for the last 12 years. Although there were demonstrations against the war initially these slowly petered out, and over recent years the continuing conflict in Syria hardly gets a mention. Yet, the UN calculates that 306,887 civilians were killed between 2011 and 2021, and by March 2023 this figure had risen to over half a million dead civilians.

Where are the protestors concerning these deaths? Nowhere to be seen! There have been more deaths in this conflict than in Gaza, yet “righteous indignation” seems to have dried up for the victims of President Assad’s genocide of his own people

The point I am making is that our media and the protesters are being very selective when it comes to deaths of innocent civilians killed in conflict areas. What is it that makes one conflict more “news worthy” than another? What is it about the Hamas - Israeli conflict that grabs the attention of the protesters more than Middle-eastern conflicts with far greater civilian death tolls?

Accompanying the intensive media coverage and protests concerning Hamas and Israel has been a massive increase in anti-Semitism in the UK:

“Anti-Semitic hate crimes in London up 1,350%, Met police say.” (Guardian: 20/10/23)

Such a massive rise in hate crimes against our Jewish population raises the question of a GENERAL anti-Semitic culture within sections of our society. (Anti-Islamic incidents have also increased but to a lesser extent) How many in the media and how many on the pro-Palestinian marches are giving vent to conscious or unconscious anti-Semitic feelings rather than having genuine humanitarian concerns for the people of Gaza? I would like to think none of them but I fear I would be wrong.

#uk politics #israel #gaza #palestinians #selective outrage #anti-semitism

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