Martin Amis, money, Manchester and me
Was in Manchester yesterday, the airport, actually, and got to thinking was the University of Manchester right to pay Martin Amis £80,000 for 28 contact hours a year? No wonder the public prints have been in a tizzy at the thought of a mere scribbler knocking down £3,000 an hour. Cor! I'd take that. That Amis lad does like the dosh, eh? It was back in 1995, I think, when he got £500,000 for The Information, which prompted A. S. Byatt, I think, to declare it "greed simply because he has a divorce to pay for and has just had all his teeth redone."
But Amis addressed all of this, sort of, in 1984 in Money. Readers met John Self, a top London director of commercials, who goes to New York to make his first feature film — alternately titled Good Money and Bad Money. Self loves money, lives money, talks money and spends money on drink, drugs, sex and fast food. After a few weeks of big time dissolution in the Big Apple, he retreats to London, broke, financially and spiritually. "I want money again," he moans at the end of the book, "but I feel better now that I haven't got any. There are these little pluses. You, they can't do much to you when you haven't got any money. There's no money in it for them. So they can't be fucked. I've been rich and I've been poor. Poor is worse, but rich can be a clunker, too. You know, during all that time of pills and booze, during that time of suicide, my entire future flashed through my head. And guess what. It was all a drag! My past at least was — what? It was ... rich."
The present is quite rich, too, if you are Martin Amis. Wonder if the University of Manchester is looking for a blogger? Would be willing to put in 40 contact hours — a year. Got a work ethic here, you know.
