Tag Archives: Kingsley Amis

POETS Day! A Few Poems by Kingsley Amis as Pretense to Discuss One of His Novels

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I don’t like poinsettias and take comfort in the fact that they usually do the honorable thing and die shortly after Christmas time. They’re fine in season I suppose, but so are ugly sweaters and bells on adult shoes.

They’re poisonous flowers, I think. I read that people who don’t like cats but somehow ended up with one buy poinsettias intending to plead ignorance later and get on with their lives. Ours is still in the kitchen thriving in its pot so I daydream about adopting some sort of reverse cat that’s poisonous to poinsettias.

I’m supposed to be encouraging you to take a POETS Day, but I’m distracted by this velveteen-flop looking plant with one petal beginning to wilt and a couple of dozen more that won’t follow its example. I’m distracted like you might be on a Friday afternoon, so preoccupied with weekend thoughts that you can’t get any poinsettia work done, sitting performatively, wasting your time. You should Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Read a poem first.

***

I’ve written about Kingsley Amis in this space numerous times (see here, here, here, and here). I’m an unabashed fan so an unapologetic writer though I don’t claim any “Best” titles for him. There are better novelists, better poets, better editors, and your average park bench made for a better husband. He simply seems to be the writer I like most most of the time.

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POETS Day! Philip Larkin and Narrative

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Last Saturday, 21 year-old Paul Skenes made his major league pitching debut for the Pittsburg Pirates against the Chicago Cubs. The top overall pick of the 2023 draft reached 100mph on seventeen pitches and struck out seven. He let Nico Hoerner get a homer off him and there was a runner on base in each of his four and some innings pitched, but it’s a pretty impressive first outing for a guy people have heaped lofty expectations on.

He was pulled after allowing two hits with no outs in the fifth and credited with a total of three runs allowed because those runners eventually scored, but that’s not a fair picture. What followed his exit was an inning of incompetence made all the more torturous because of a two-and-a-half-hour misery extending rain delay in the middle of it. The bullpen took the 6-1 lead with two runners on left them by Skenes, loaded the bases and walked six runs. Walked six runs. That hasn’t been done since the White Sox walked in eight in 1959. The inning ended 7-6.

The Pirates took back the lead and won the game; Skenes was awarded a no-decision. Bygones. But there are a few lessons here for the POETS Day reader. First, no one pitches a complete game anymore. Second, the people you work with are just going to screw everything up anyway, so you might as well get out as soon as the getting’s good. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Seize opportunities and save the workplace effort for when you’re not eager for the promise of a weekend.

But try a little verse first.

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POETS Day! A Bit of Light Verse

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The school year is coming to a close and that means rough duty for POETS Day. The last couple weeks of students’ time is usually cordoned off for exam review and preparation, final essays, and such projects. That creates a bottleneck of extracurricular events now. Playoffs, tournaments, recitals, and plays need completion before testing. Such things require an audience and if you’re a parent or relative of a student in any end of term activity, you’re an expected attendee.

I’m joining the theater set for the foreseeable future. I’ve got a nephew in Legally Blonde tonight and then my son’s on stage for a three night run of Mamma Mia! I love this sort of thing even though they frown on leaving after your kid’s scenes are done (America, explain!), but I know others see these as slogs to suffer through. They’re a drain on weekend free time no matter which way you look at it, so do the right thing and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. A perfect day is the name of the game, and that starts with ducking out of work and indulging your wants and needs – after a little verse.

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POETS Day! Kingsley Amis with a Touch of Philip Larkin

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I’m writing this on a Thursday and I just checked my son out of school early. In the office there’s a sign in/out sheet by an extremely oversized digital clock and I filled in the names. The time was two after two. You couldn’t miss it. I put it down. Above our line were six sign outs all listing two o’clock. There were only eight kids out all day. Six at the same time seems like a lot. Different last names and handwriting.

It’s POETS Day, so do all the regular stuff. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday and bars, ballgames, swimming, and parks. Enjoy the weekend a few hours ahead of schedule. All that. But is there something I should know about Thursday? You wouldn’t call it POETF Day, but is there something like that? It’s just a lot of kids leaving at once. Is it a secret?

Read some verse. I’m going to look into this. If anyone wants to clue me in I can keep everything confidential.

***

I was planning on writing about Kingsley Amis without mentioning Philip Larkin. The two met at St. John’s College, Oxford, became roommates and formed a bond still strong when Amis said things at Larkin’s funeral. The little bits of their correspondence that I’ve read cracked me up. They shared a love of jazz, a distrust of posturing, and a wicked sense of humor. Often, when one is mentioned, the other pops up like a mischievous penny.

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POETS Day! Thanks for God, Girls, and Growing Old

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

There’s no need for a traditional POETS Day this week. “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” doesn’t really resonate when so many have a long Thanksgiving weekend anyway. Maybe “Pig Out, Enjoy Tryptophan Slumber?”

I’m phoning this one in myself. I’ve got potatoes dauphinoise (Not potatoes Lyonnaise!) to make and since no one else eats or cares about string bean casserole but me, I have to make that too. “Have to,” is misleading. It is necessary that I cook because I told people that I’d be contributing the potatoes, but “have to” makes it sound like a chore. It isn’t. I like spending time in the kitchen.

It’s like this column. I don’t have to write it, but I like doing so. Two years ago, I started this weekly for OT with a smirk, a silly acronym I picked up from a Scottish detective novel, and a nagging suspicion that poetry was not as much an ivory tower property as it’s considered.

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POETS Day! “Against Romanticism” by Kingsley Amis

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

My son started school today, August 8. That’s absurdly early. Back in 2012 Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan tried to start a conversation about extending the school year by shortening summer vacation. There were arguments about students forgetting lessons between grades and valuable time wasted getting them back up to speed.

The conversation never went anywhere, but it wasn’t meant to. The Department of Education being a bureaucracy, the lack of pushback against an idea most didn’t take seriously meant no impediment to its inertia. So here we are.

I’m dying to say something snarky like “The more time kids are kept away from our public school system the better,” but I’m afraid, especially if I point to political speeches from both sides of the aisle over the course of decades lamenting the sorry state of education in America or mention unacceptable test scores impervious to decades of hand wringing to bolster my point, my friends with a wife/husband/son/daughter who’s a teacher might think I’m blaming a political party or theory of education or even a bloated nameless bureaucracy when really I’m saying that the entire decrepit mess is the fault of their wife/husband/son/daughter whose been trying to score Brownie points with that “I have to buy or sell (or whatever* it is she’s doing) art supplies with my own money,” sob story since We had a President who knew how to throw out an opening pitch.

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I Read a Book! Kingsley Amis’s One Fat Englishman

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The English Novel, 1740-1820

The open road winds down from Wilson’s farm
To neat lawns and a gilt-edged paradise
Where Pamela walks out on Darcy’s arm,
And Fanny Goodwill bobs to Fanny Price.

               – Kingsley Amis

Until last summer Kingsley Amis was an author I felt I should have read. Note the “should have.” I was never possessed by an urge to actually read anything of his. I just felt like knowledge of his works was something I should have in my quiver. Lucky Jim upset all the type of people I think should be regularly upset so I finally gave in and picked it up sometime in July. I’ve read two more of his novels since along with a collection of essays on science fiction, a decent amount of poetry, and thumbed through a roguish reference book on English usage. There’s another of his novels and his collected poems on my “to read” stack. I really should have gotten around to his stuff earlier.

The reviews of One Fat Englishman fall into one of two categories: those where the reviewer says that he thought the book was okay but not nearly up to the standard set by Amis in his other novels or those where the reviewer says that he thought the book was okay but not nearly up to the standard set by Amis in his other novels until for whatever reason the reviewer picked up the book for a second reading some years after the first and realized he badly misjudged this sardonically cutting and brilliant work. I’ve read it twice in the span of a month and enjoyed it thoroughly both times so I’m only a reliable judge of literary worth half of the time. Reader beware.

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POETS Day! Philip Larkin

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The copyright on this image is owned by Bernard Sharp Edit this at Structured Data on Commons and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

The copyright on this image is owned by Bernard Sharp and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 9/16/22 which was, in fact, a Friday. You can look it up.]

Happy P.O.E.T.S. Day! It’s been over a month since I posted one of these. Sorry, but life interrupts its own course sometimes. Unexplained absence due to a slack work ethic, galivanting across the countryside, or fitful bouts of Netflix bingeing aside, it’s that day again, so let’s let bygone days be bygone days and embrace the ethos of the moment to Piss off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, and having left work behind begin the weekend early with zeal and vigor and all sorts of other things we might feel when we find ourselves freed prematurely from the surly bonds of work.

I came across this week’s poet after doing one of my occasional listings of books that I feel like I should have read at some point in my life but never got around to. From my most recent reckoning I picked out Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. Everything I knew about it should have beckoned me earlier. The book is supposed to be hilarious and nasty (in the cruel rather that the Debbie Does Dallas sense.) I love hilarious and nasty (both senses.)

I started it last night and can attest to the nastiness. It’s like a sardonic P.G. Wodehouse tired of an “Oh Gosh!” Bertie Wooster trying to avoid an accidental engagement to be married and recreated him as Jim Dixon, a social climbing would-be lecher, given the right number of bitters, and let him loose on the unsuspecting English gentry. Imagine Wooster as Michael Knight and Jim as Garthe. I’ve only read the first eighty pages so that’s all I can attest to though I can only imagine he’ll get worse as I read on.

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