No More Larkin' About

There is currently a terrible pun as the title of this entry. I may remove it though I will leave this sentence so you will have to guess whether the pun is still there or not.

Finished the Larkin Biography (big clue there by the way) yesterday. I didn't feel sad at all at that poet's demise, just a little empty. There was no posthumous life either and I thought I could sense some haste to finish the book and get it all out of the way. Maybe that is me.

I have actually started Lucky Jim and am managing to stick with it. I was surprised that it did not hold my attention as much as Andrew Motion's book. I cannot say what it is about the text of a book that makes it grab attention when compared to another. Things that I should race through just sit heavy on me and books which really should make me want to jettison them after a few pages can keep me enthralled. Well, writing has such a complex final result that this sort of thing is perfectly normal. Like all those Jungian ideas of synchronicity, which in a big and complex world can just be the product of coincidence rather than any mysterious connection between different parts of the universe.

Interesting stuff here about Martin Amis' Larkinophilia (I think that is a much better Amisian word than the current header of Larkinaholic - or maybe it isn't - after thinking about it the suggestion of addiction is much more like what Amis would have used.) Now are the correspondents here, trying to sound like Amis? That would be too much of a clich?; only MA can write like MA; anything that sounds like him is just crap. But then again should MA not try and sound like himself; each book should sound different from the previous one and from my limited exposure I suspect that they do. What if Martin decided that the boundary between styles was something smaller than a book? What about a chapter or a paragraph? You could take this literary differentiation to its extreme meme and have every word in a different style. You don't think that is possible? Maybe not. Still it would be a conceit not far off as extreme as that of Time's Arrow. I found a book called "The Arrow of Time" at the weekend but that was about physics and relativity.

I wrote a poem about why time slow for a moving observer last week (it may have been less time than that but I have been moving about rather a lot at the moment). Oh well, there are certain consolations of philosophy.