Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, David Ives

Reading Lucky Jim which I got half-price used at H. Bookstore in a deluxe paperback edition published by the eminent New York Review of Each Other's Books and am not much enjoying it, set as it is in a college and peopled by academics but I do very much share his low opinion of Dylan Thomas though I would not go so far as to describe him as "excrementally evil" or express a desire to "walk on his face" though, in fairness, this was the young Amis speaking, and speaking of young, his son Martin Amis's Yellow Dog is an extraordinarily funny novel (funny ha-ha) in places though in the second half it descends into an exploration of the pornographic film industry that I read with distaste and which spoils the book as a whole but still, the laughs were great, and speaking of laughs, David Ives's play Polish Joke, which I read in an edition from Dramatists Play Service, had me laughing, over the first two scenes, harder than almost anything I've ever read, hand to God--after that it tails off horribly, pity.