Cardigan Industries: Reading

Oct 1,

	FRAGMENTS FROM A MARTIN AMIS READING * * * It takes pretty sizeable gonads to open a swish bistro on Commercial Drive and name it after a bloated drunken nihilist poet who’d happily kick in the teeth of anyone who’d ever eat there. But today’s entrepreneur knows that a total lifestyle experience is unsaleable without a thin lacquer of cultural cred, a whiff of boho angst, a reassuring damnation of the horrible, suffocating conformity of those less selective in their choice of brands. Who better to spackle it on than midcentury literary scamps? The Kerouac (wore khakis), Burroughs (thought different), and Bukowski (got you laid in college) brands have been on an unstoppable marketing juggernaut for three generations, with no letup in sight. Sure, the writing was thin, artless, onanistic. And yes, their wholesale appropriation of jazz culture reduced the truly gifted to monologue fodder, but no matter: as endorsers, they’re wonderfully low-maintenance, possessed of permanent cool, and available at the right price.

I wonder how long it will be until someone opens McInerney’s, a bar celebrating the lifestyles of Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, et. al., by serving Moët and cocaine.
	I arrive at Bukowski’s stoked after a day’s prep for a Martin Amis reading, having consumed alcohol, cigarettes, fast food, pornography and a Saul Bellow novel, in no firm order. It’s packed, and hot. Standing in line at the bar, I survey just how Charles Bukowski manifests in restaurant form. Usual deal: brewery swag, coloured chalk menus, ferns. The only nod to anything faintly literary is in the bookcases above the bar, which hold some Ikea-grade remainders and no fewer than three mass-market paperbacks of Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.
When I started in books in the mid-80s, readings and launches weren’t deemed complete unless someone got sick, incited violence or lost consciousness.	The bar line just won’t move, largely because the men who like to be seen enjoying a pint of Guinness at events like these don’t consider that it takes ten minutes to pour the damn things. Two people in front of me introduce themselves to each other, declare their admiration for the guest of honour, then set to recalling which novel had the character based on Tina Brown. By the time I’m popped out at the front of the line, I’ve concluded the smart thing to do is buy a bottle of wine (“no, no glass thank you”) to upend over the course of the event, topping up the glasses of those in need as necessary. What delicious bohemianism, he says to himself. But as I move about, chatting, swigging, people just looked concerned.
Someone from Chapters visited cardigan.com once, then attempted to return the HTML for credit six weeks later.	The event has been organized by a certain book retailing operation which, after forcing all the independent booksellers in Canada out of business, spent last year firehosing money at its online division, much to the detriment of its market cap. Recently its CEO soothed his shareholders by announcing that the operation plans to move away from books into more profitable, and less unpredictable, product lines like household furnishings and gardening tools. All the best to you, Larry.
Amis knows how to warm up a room. On the London Fields tour, he read about Marmaduke the demonic infant who, after weeks of cemented constipation, goes “supernova” in his snow suit.	After an intro by the Chapters representative, the crowd parts for the little man, martini in hand, very tan. It’s inevitable that an English writer touring a book in Canada will open up with some blarf about Americans, after all, what the hell else do we think about up here, and Marty, well, Marty’s going to go with pornography, an industry that “can’t survive without humourlessness.” He’s just published a piece in The New Yorker on the porn industries of Los Angeles, featuring a now notorious interview with John “Buttman” Stagliano. When asked why his movies are so intensely focused on anal sex, Stagliano replied, “pussies are bullshit.”
At first mention of John Stagliano, I was compelled to chuckle and intone his porn moniker, Buttman. Amis tilted toward me, parted his upturned hands, and said, “Thank you, yes... Buttman.”	Discussing this nugget with a dinner table of highly paid British novelists, it is decided that if pussies are bullshit, then bullshit is pussy. They bat about ‘What’s New, Bullshit Cat,’ ‘Bullshit in Boots’ and ‘Bullshit Galore.’ Salman Rushdie, silently wearing the face of someone who knows he has the best joke of the evening, waits for the perfect moment to deliver ‘Octobullshit.’ All so droll, all so amusing. Amis feasts on his drink and places an unfiltered Camel between his lips. Someone warns he’s about to light the wrong end, and he shoots back, “There is no wrong end.” This comes right on the, er, tail of the Buttman story, and the crowd goes nutz. Settling in to read from Experience, he delivers another Rushdie anecdote about an argument over Samuel Beckett: “So you ‘like’ Beckett’s prose, do you? You ‘like’ Beckett’s prose.” Having established earlier that he did like Beckett’s prose, Salman neglected to answer. “Okay, Quote me some. Oh I see. You can’t.” No answer: only the extreme hooded-eye treatment. “Well I’ll do it for you. All you need is maximum ugliness and a lot of negatives. ‘Nor it the nothing never is.’ ‘Neither nowhere the nothing is not.’ ‘Non-nothing the never–’” Feeling my father in me now (as well as the couple hundred glasses of wine consumed at the party we had all come from), I settled down for a concerted goad and wheedle. By this stage Salman looked like a falcon staring through a venetian blind. “No neither never none not to–” “Do you want to step outside?” There follow lots of tales of famous literary lions, then something about how his father Kingsley was once told to fuck off by a dog.
Turner’s a master at this sort of goofiness. At the launch for Pornographer’s Poem, he began his thank-yous with a dry bit of comedy: “Bear with me, I’ve started drinking earlier than usual today.” and forces conspired at that second to have everything in the place fall silent. Tumbleweeds rolled through.	And now for the conversation portion of the evening, and our host, my friend Turner, is superprepared. He has what looks like half a dozen pages of notes, all of which are too specific and referenced and centred on being a writer, but he strives through them. All the crowd wants is stories about dinners with Christopher Hitchens and dry, dry wit. The room is rapidly dividing into pro- and anti-Turner factions, the former shouting down the latter with calls of “no sacred cows.” This being Commercial Drive, there’s a vocal feminist contingent in the corner still fuming over Amis’ porn glibness. Turner will not relent, refusing to give back the microphone, at one point drawing hisses from the crowd by asking the elder writer if he’d be willing to show us his famously repaired teeth. By now I’m quite literally falling off my chair laughing. But Amis is bullish on his product. This being the last stop on his long book tour, he’s ready with well-oiled anecdotes as well as somber thoughts of the two main plot points of his memoir, the death of his father and the murder of his cousin, spoken in a low monotone, his eyes three-quarters shut. After a measured portion of Seriousness, we return to crowd-pleasing. Amis informs us we have an amusing national speech impediment, requiring us to say “aboot” rather than “about.” One of his favourite memories is of asking his Canadian brother-in-law why he calls the RCMP “moonties,” to which the brother-in-law replies, “of course I don’t call them moonties.“ All so droll, all so amusing.