Category: literary life

The amazing George Saunders has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. His reaction: “I feel smarter already!”

(via.)

There’s an excellent and thorough essay by Tony Judt in the current issue of the London Review of Books about liberals’ failure to stand up against Bush’s foreign policy, against his attack on civil liberties, and, more generally, against power. Here’s a taste:

Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style themselves ‘liberal intellectuals’ are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security.

A highly recommended piece.

When you visit your friends’ houses, do you find yourself scanning their bookshelves to see what books they have? Jay Parini shares some of his own, exploratory experiences in a brief piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here he is, discussing a visit to Graham Greene’s apartment:

I’ve known any number of writers and have warm recollections of wandering in their houses, seeing what books they had on the shelves, by chance or choice. Sometimes an anomaly struck me. I remember being shocked, for example, by how few books Graham Greene had in his home in Antibes. It was, of course, an apartment, not a big house, that Greene occupied. And he was by nature peripatetic, shifting among countries, even continents, right to the end of his life. It was, he told me, an inconvenience to own a lot of books, as they’re heavy in one’s bag. So he kept only those authors who really mattered to him: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and, to my surprise, the 19th-century naval hero and prolific novelist Capt. Frederick Marryat. “Now Marryat,” Greene said to me, “there is a writer!”

You can read it all here.

I thought that Martin Amis’s long essay–published, not coincidentally, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks– was quite short-sighted. I also found myself in agreement with Pankaj Mishra, who has a reaction to Amis in yesterday’s Observer. Under the title “The Politics of Paranoia,” Mishra examines the failure of many policy makers and intellectuals to understand large parts of the world with which they are engaged.

Many people, such as Martin Amis last weekend, may continue to berate Muslims for their apparent incompatibility with ‘Western’ values of democracy and rationality. We could go on debating forever whether the terrorist acts of British Muslims are directly linked to British policy in the Middle East. But a more urgent question is: where will all this rage and distrust end? Are we hurtling towards the kind of wars that made the previous century so uniquely bloody? How can we change policies that have so comprehensively failed?

These questions are relevant in democracies, where responsibility for far-reaching decisions lies with political and business elites as well as such shapers of public opinion as journalists, columnists and think-tank pundits. There is no place for such questions in societies that men like Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah preside over, countries where intellectual debate and press freedoms are severely limited. Yet even as these questions have become increasingly urgent in democratic countries, the answers remain elusive. For the ‘war on terror’ is not just a political and military fiasco but also an intellectual one, combining fatally the arrogance of power with the arrogance of mind.

Mishra uses the Vietnam war as an example of what went wrong. You can read the article in full here.

I am desperate for copies of Tayib Salih’s two books, Season of Migration to the North and The Wedding of Zein— but in Arabic. If anyone can help me out, please email me. I am more than happy to send you payment, or exchange books, or both.

Update: Found! Thanks very much to the readers who helped out.

Dan Wickett, he of the Emerging Writers Network, and his partner Steve Gillis have just launched Dzanc Books. Many congratulations.