I’ve discovered a way to be petty that actually makes you smarter.
This is good news, it seems to me, and if I know my readers, I imagine it will strike many of you the same way. I wanted to share it with all who sit out there, trying to slow down time by reading my work.
I pass it along with special thanks to the group of readers who pay for this stuff. I’m very grateful for your generosity. I won’t reveal how many of you paid subscribers there are, but let’s just say your number has crept up to the point where it’s finally enough for a medium-sized grand jury. (Grand juries vary by state. In Virginia, you’d be a large grand jury, and most of you would be sequestered but a few of you would probably be sent home.)
I’m giving it to the freeloaders, too, but asking them to read the following: if you can afford to pay— even for just one month— it helps me a lot, and I would greatly appreciate it. I don’t blame people who can’t afford it, as I am that person most of the time— but if you actually can afford to, please cough up the cash.
A lot of writers like to say they’d rather have readers than payers. I don’t say that. I love it when people read my writing, but on the whole I’d rather have a subscriber who pays but doesn’t read. I did that for a year, once, with George Saunders. 52 times I said I would read him next week. Meanwhile, I continued to pay.
Okay— on to the pettiness.
I was banished from a fella’s life, a few years back. I’ve suffered banishment many times, and for someone who incurs it so often, I can’t say I’ve gotten much better at handling it. This time was, and is, particularly poisonous in the aftermath. As a banishee, you learn that the post-banishing phase can be the toughest phase.
But this unseemly display of memoiric indulgence leads me to my point— I recall my banishment-wielder mentioning in passing that he didn’t care for the writer Martin Amis. I should clarify that he didn’t say this during the banishing— that would have been an odd thing to mention during a banishing ritual. (As an indicator of how valuable our friendship had once been, this particular banishing ceremony required participants to don brocade and vestments, and was conducted entirely in the original Latin.)
The revelation about Amis popped up in fatter times, when the friendship’s economy was humming along, the friendship’s inflation was historically low, and the amount of the friendship that wasn’t working was just under 6%. That’s a pretty good unemployment rate for a friendship involving two dedicated neurotics.
I mean the sort of neurotics who sit at their desk and neurose away for a certain scheduled amount of time every day of the week. Neurotics who don’t like to take vacations from their pathology. Even on an actual vacation, neurosis requires— and receives— a certain amount of upkeep. Like a goldfish, or a sea lion.
So, I started reading Amis, out of sheer pettiness. This felt like an appropriate revenge, and let me tell you— it has been absolutely the most well-written revenge I’ve ever enjoyed. Ruby-red sentences, paragraphs that lurch and leer like a well-oiled carnival ride, baroque flights of fancy involving alcoholic sexual romps that have been carefully denuded of both pleasure and guilt- if you need more than that, Amis probably isn’t for you.
Reading Amis— for those who haven’t yet banished him— is an education in the hatching and analysis of prose. His remarks on Bellow, Hitchens, Nabokov, Joyce, and others are among the best fiction criticism I’ve ever seen. He manages to faintly damn Updike without reaching for the Updike club the anti-Updikers keep next to their desks. His assessment of Vonnegut can’t be improved upon. And he talks here and there about the training you must do to get your prose ready for the ring.
I’ll spare you most of his advice about writing, and torture you with an instrument far more likely to break your spirit than his edicts on adverbs and so forth.
Amis tells us we must only write sentences that nobody else could have written.
He counsels, with audible weariness, that we absolutely have to banish the phrases and constructions that are infesting the scrubland of our prose ecosystem; he brandishes (not banishes) a particularly vinegary response to the shopworn clumps of contemporary usage.
He calls this sort of prose “herd writing.”
I’d like to add something I imagine Amis would be saying if he weren’t just as dead as these necrophilia-encouraging idioms. It is passing strange to see so many people beating their chests like Joan of Arc at the coming of AI, while gleefully posting under their byline various memes, gifs, and phrases that involve no more humanity than Chat-GPT. Unless, I suppose, we’re talking about the humanity of copping out, hypocrisy, and self-delusion.
Everyone seems to agree that writing is about being yourself. It isn’t only about that, but if you really do want your actual voice to be heard, you need to resist the satanic temptation to use the following examples of herd writing.
Find me a better _____. I’ll wait.
Ending with “so there’s that.”
Taking a turn of phrase and saying this would be the name for your band.
Three. Word. Phrase.
What’s your favorite _____ , and why is it _______ ?
Setup, followed by “oh, wait. That was you.”
Said no one ever.
Asking for a friend.
I didn’t have ____ on my bingo/dance card.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
And, whatever you do, please don’t feel guilty about the sins of the past. Just take a deep breath— or a shallow breath, if you’re in a hurry— and write in your own voice. Count me among the people who would very much like to hear it.
I encourage you to include other cursed social media idioms in your comments. I’m actually a little embarrassed that I could only think of ten.
I love reading anything by or about Martin Amis and when it makes me laugh - in much the same way that Martin Amis always did - it's a double pleasure. I would banish swiftly from my own life anyone who did not care for his prose (his story-telling, on the other hand... well, it never struck me as his own great area of interest. That's why I prefer his non-fiction). I'll stop now because otherwise I'll go on forever, almost like a literature nerd or something. Just wanted to say that was another good start to the day.
🤣 this is quite the opening line: I’ve discovered a way to be petty that actually makes you smarter.