The King’s English – A Guide to Modern Usage by Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis author of Lucky Jim http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/lucky-jim-by-kingsley-amis-author-of.html one of The All –TIME 100 Novels - 10 out of 10

 The King’s English – A Guide to Modern Usage by Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis author of Lucky Jim http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/lucky-jim-by-kingsley-amis-author-of.html one of The All –TIME 100 Novels

10 out of 10

 

 

This is another magnum opus, a fabulous, outstanding book from the King of Comedy – from the introduction to the work we find from Martin Amis, the son of the author, himself an accomplished auteur (this would attract the wrath of the Magus, but there it is) who has died soon after the premiere of an adaptation of one of his books, acclaimed at the Cannes film Festival, that the great luminary tolerated the nickname friends used ‘King’- proof that he could engage with so many domains, with great success, comedy, science fiction, short stories, memoirs http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/12/memoirs-by-kingsley-amis-author-of-take.html  even volumes on drink…

 

Nevertheless, reading The King’s English is both an exhilarating, exuberant adventure – well, at least I am trying to learn something, I was tempted to put experience in, but then remembered one of the many suggestions, rules from the book, to avoid putting words starting with the same letter one after the other, to avoid repetition (that one I had known, and tried to apply) and so much more – and it could be depressing at times, because one could see that he or she – Kingsley Amis is careful to put he or she, and does show he is not sexist, with the jokes he makes, but he was not writing at a time when they had to be introduced as well – makes so many mistakes, and they would better stop writing…

Girl, Woman, Other http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/06/girl-woman-other-by-bernardine-evaristo.html by Bernardine Evaristo is the co-winner of The Booker Prize for 2019, and it explains the ‘gender is one of the biggest lies of our civilization’ – or words to that effect – and I would be very curious to know what The Magister Ludi thought about that concept, the book and so much more…although The King’s English is a very good indicator of what the Magus thought about the topics introduced in the opus

 

Kingsley Amis was very open and progressive on many issues, albeit he was a conservative, supporter of Margaret Thatcher – he was invited to dinner, he mentioned, or gave as a gift Russian Hide and Seek http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/07/russian-hide-and-seek-by-kingsley-amis.html and The Iron Lady told him to find some other inspiration in the crystal ball, when told about the subject of the novel, which describes a future in which the Russians would have occupied Britain and other, massive parts of the world – indeed, they are working on it, with the calamitous war they have started in Ukraine

 

Like all the spectacular books of this immense savant, The King’s English is both inspiring, hilarious and stupendous – at times, this one is also somewhat or very humiliating, for we may find that we do not know much, if anything about some, or many words, the way to use or avoid them – it is an occasion to find how perceptions have changed, many words have become unusable, while others have a new meaning – gay shows how open minded Kingsley Amis was, in its acceptance, while others rejected it – he mentions  Chesterton, ‘The World was old, but you and I were gay’, saying he is debarred from quoting it in public

 

Attitudes had changed, ‘Lucky Jim...all he does.is the sort of 'womanizing' that a modern hero would outdo in an opening paragraph…In my Second novel the hero is stated, not shown, to go to bed with a female not his wife’ and then when he writes poor bugger, the publisher tells him that ‘the six letter word might lose 2000 copies for some Library and the  he asks what about bloody fool, it turns out that this is acceptable’ later the use of fuck and so much more does not raise an eyebrow and now it is so common…

The tone is often mordant and Kingsley Amis says that ‘one wants to tell Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-clockwork-orange-by-anthony-burgess.html to get off the high horse, there are two categories, The Wankers and the Berks, the former are pretentious, insist on the traditions, but they come across as snobs and worse, while the latter are uneducated, rather primitive – or so I think about it now, however cruel that could be to myself, after all, I fall into the category of the illiterate, the class of those who make the mistakes that indicate such lack of education

 

‘A lunatic may have the Delusion (however plausible it can seem at times) that children are agents of Satan…Judgmental- I should have thought on the contrary that being (unfavorably) judgmental about things like murder and people like Stalin was required by sanity as well as decency; tolerance for the tolerable and intolerance for the intolerable…’ this shows to me how hilarious, mordant and accurate this Magician was, inspiring (he does say that role model is a barbarity, and I was tempted to say he is a one, I just deleted a repetition, for we learnt from this text, don’t we) and that brings to mind One Fat Englishman http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/08/one-fat-englishman-by-kingsley-amis.html

We have these conversations at the sauna Downtown (we have moved in the meantime, because these fellas have decided to renovate, and we will have to see what that means, improvement or otherwise) about the war in Ukraine, were this bastardy doctor, union leader as well, promotes the Russian propaganda, saying ‘Putin and Zelenski are two cretins’ –in fact, that is what another ghoul, Lula of Brazil, says- and then I have decided to stop talking to this ‘doctor Mengele’, I gave him the harsh nickname, but then what are you, if you embrace monsters, ‘intolerance for the intolerable’ is the norm

 

Now for a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world    – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html