the walrus

the battle of stalingrad

Via The Browser, an excellent obituary for JG Ballard, from 2009, by Martin Amis:

In 1964 his wife Mary died suddenly, on a family holiday, so Ballard raised their three children himself. To begin with he could only manage to do this by drinking a scotch every hour, starting at nine in the morning. It took him quite a while to push this back to six o'clock in the evening. I asked him was that difficult, and he said: "Difficult? It was like the Battle of Stalingrad."

style vs signature

From William Deresiewicz's review of The Pregnant Widow, by Martin Amis:

In his study of Nabokov, Michael Wood makes the useful heuristic distinction between style and what he calls “signature.” Signature announces the author’s presence. Style, Wood says, “is something more secretive... a reflection of luck or grace, or of a moment when signature overcomes or forgets itself.” With style, “we think about the writing before we think about who wrote it.” Well, Amis’s style, in his most characteristic works, as glorious as it often is, is all signature, is always signature. Signature is the whole point of it.