MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Martin Amis en conferencia. Photograph: Christopher Thomond. Fuente: the guardian

Dice la reseña de la velada en The Guardian: "Martin Amis last night fired another salvo in the war of words over Islam, condemning an "abject failure" by Muslims to vigorously denounce suicide bombings. At a debate at Manchester University, where the novelist is head of creative writing, he told a packed auditorium that only a machine would not have experienced "retaliatory urges" upon learning in August last year of the alleged plot to bomb transatlantic aircraft, in which, Amis said, 3,000 people could have died. "There should be from every corner of the west a permanent factory siren of disgust for these actions," he told students, staff and members of the public, including Afzal Khan, the first Muslim to be lord mayor of Manchester. He acknowledged Muslim efforts "to put their house in order" were made more difficult by the jihadis' "monopoly on intimidation". But there was less assent when he went on to speak of a "distorted sympathy" towards Palestine. "I have sympathy for Israel. It's not nothing to have six million of your number murdered in central Europe in the last century. Don't you think that this has had a psychological effect on this race or religion, or whatever you want to call the Jews? "Palestinians have never suffered anything as remotely terrible as that. There is an inexplicable numbness about Israel." The debate comes in a robust polemic between Amis and Terry Eagleton, the university's professor of cultural history. In an interview after the plot was exposed, Amis said Muslims should be made to suffer. Eagleton denounced him in a new preface to his 1991 book Ideology, and had been in the line-up for last night's event, Literature and Terrorism, but event organisers said a diary clash forced him to withdraw. Instead Amis was joined on stage by novelist Maureen Freely and former Islamist turned author Ed Hussain.

Etiquetas: inglaterra, martin amis, NOTICIA, terry eagleton

The Good and Evil Angels de William Blake. Fuente: The guardian.

Dice Eagleton: "Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud's. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity. "If the doors of perception were cleansed," he claims, "everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations. They do so, too, by persuading us to be "moderate"; Blake, however, was not enamoured of the third way. The New Testament that Gordon Brown reads in his Presbyterian fashion as a model of prudence, conscience and sobriety, Blake read as a hymn to creative recklessness. He sees that Jesus's ethics are extravagant, hostile to the calculative spirit of the utilitarians. If they ask for your coat, give them your cloak; if they ask you to walk one mile, walk two. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and those who restrain their desires do so because their desires are feeble enough to be restrained. The energy captured in Blake's watercolours and engravings is his riposte to mechanistic thought. In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: "To generalise is to be an Idiot," Blake writes. And again: "The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common." The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future.

Etiquetas: inglaterra, NOTICIA, terry eagleton, william blake

Ronan Bennett. Foto: Graham Jepson. Fuente: the telegraph

Dice: "Amis’s views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness. Only last week, the London Evening Standard felt able to sponsor a debate entitled: Is Islam good for London? Do another substitution here and imagine the reaction had Judaism been the subject. As Rabbi Pete Tobias noted on Comment is Free, the so-called debate was sinisterly reminiscent of the paper’s campaign a century ago to alert its readers to the “problem of the alien”, namely the eastern European Jews fleeing persecution who had found refuge in the capital. In this context, Rod Liddle’s contribution to proceedings - “Islamophobia? Count me in” - sounds neither brave, brash nor provocatively outrageous, merely racist. Those who claim that Islamophobia can’t be racist, because Islam is a religion not a race, are fooling themselves: religion is not only about faith but also about identity, background and culture, and Muslims are overwhelmingly non-white. Islamophobia is racist, and so is antisemitism.And it is different for another reason. The views quoted by Eagleton first appeared last year, in an interview Amis gave to Ginny Dougary of the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says a great deal about the depoliticised state of intellectual debate in Britain.

(...)

As a novelist, Amis is free to do whatever he wants with his characters, but the hijackers' steps on the road to 9/11 repay investigation. Reducing the motivation of the enemy to bloodlust leads nowhere, as the experience of the British in Ireland proved. The result will be wrong and it will be cliche. It may be, given Amis's spectacular powers, flamboyant, but that will only make it flamboyant cliche. Horrorism. Death cult. Thanatoid. Striking words but poor substitutes for understanding, reason and real knowledge. Go back to the start of this article. Look at the substitutions and then ask yourself what you are reading. An important question from a leading literary figure? A brave revenge fantasy? No. A major cultural and literary figure endorsing prejudice against Muslims. Why did writers not start writing? There is Eagleton and there is the Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who took apart Amis's strange and chaotic essay on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. But where are the others? Four days after the Pentagon and the twin towers were attacked, the novelist Ian McEwan wrote on these pages: "Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality." As an expression of outraged, anguished humanism, McEwan's formulation was truthful, moving and humbling, and can hardly be bettered. But it seems to me the compassion is flowing in one direction, the anger in another. I can't help feeling that Amis's remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines. And I can't help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it."

Etiquetas: bennett, inglaterra, martin amis, NOTICIA, terry eagleton

Martín Amis, a lo Belmondo, devuelve el golpe a Terry Eagleton. Fuente: edrants.com

"Terry Eagleton inhabits a parallel universe of groaning and blundering factoids. His Comment piece of October 10 (Rebuking obnoxious views is not just a personality kink) begins: "In an essay called The Age of Horrorism ... the novelist Martin Amis advocated a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain." The essay, which was published over a year ago, contains none of the sentences that Eagleton goes on to quote. The "vile views" he instances come from a newspaper interview I gave in the summer of 2006, a day or two after the exposure of the plot to blow up 10 transatlantic commercial jets. And my remarks were preceded by the following: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say ... [etc, etc]." was not "advocating" anything. I was conversationally describing an urge - an urge that soon wore off. And I hereby declare that "harassing the Muslim community in Britain" would be neither moral nor efficacious. Professor Eagleton is making a habit of this kind of thing. A marooned ideologue, he has submitted to an unworthy combination of venom and sloth. Can I ask him, in a collegial spirit, to shut up about it? "

Martin Amis
London

Etiquetas: inglaterra, martin amis, NOTICIA, terry eagleton

Terry Eagleton. Fuente: between the lines

Dice la nota: "Like Forrest Gump, he seems to have been present at all the key academic phases of the past 40 years. A third-generation Irish immigrant, he was born in Salford, near Manchester, into a family that was poor and “socially sophisticated enough to be conscious of their inferiority”. Both his grandfathers had been employed in the gasworks and his father, after winning a grammar school place, opted to work in heavy engineering. Asthmatic and the only boy with a coat at primary school, Eagleton was bullied at a grammar school run by the De La Salle brotherhood and served as an altar boy at the local Carmelite convent, with thoughts of becoming a priest. The Catholic bishop, he recalled in his 2001 memoir The Gatekeeper, had “the walk of a navvy and the face of a wino”. His schoolfellows were “a spindly, stunted, hollow-chested crew, like a chorus line from Les Misérables”. He won a scholarship to Cambridge despite being yanked out of the entrance exams with the news that his father had died. “I was furious,” he said. “What my father would have wanted was for me to stay on and take the exams.” He arrived at Cambridge as a committed socialist and a member of CND. Although Trinity was a rich college, Eagleton “fitted it like a glove”, according to a contemporary.
While on a visit to Manchester during his first year as an undergraduate, he met Rosemary Galpin, a state-registered nurse working as a health visitor. They married in 1966 and had two children, Dominic and Daniel. The couple divorced in 1976 and he then embarked on a 10-year relationship with Toril Moi, a Norwegian feminist critic. In 1997 he married Willa Murphy, an American academic, with whom he had a son, Oliver. As an undergraduate Eagleton came under the influence of the leading left-wing critic Raymond Williams, who offered him a research fellowship at Jesus College. Insecure intellectually, he became a heavy drinker before stopping 13 years ago. (“Giving up smoking was much more difficult.”) At high table he encountered only “doddering, quasi-fascistic clergymen, who talked of Gladstone’s Irish home rule bill as though it could still be headed off”. So he took a job at Oxford, which was “rather like taking refuge from insincerity in Hollywood”. It took 22 years at Oxford until he was deemed safe. “My strategy for survival was to put distance between myself and the Oxford establishment.” Whereas Eagleton preferred to focus on the relationship between literature and the culture from which it grows, English teaching at Oxford had been based on textual analysis. His weekly seminars, a focus for dissidents, increased suspicions. “They thought it was a threat to all they held precious. But I think the students I taught found it enormously enriching.” One recalled: “He was very charismatic and used to bang on about the class war. He was embedded in a previous age.” Tariq Ali, a friend of more than 30 years, says he led a double existence. “He was one of the lads in the pub with the comrades and was wonderfully good at singing and writing songs. But then he’d go off and be a cult literary theorist. To his credit, he always tried to bring his worlds together.” His star rose throughout the 1970s. “The left was in the ascendant and there was a sense we might break through,” he believed. The publication in 1983 of his most famous book, Literary Theory: An Introduction, made him an international star. Finally in 1991 the dons relented and made him Warton professor of English literature in succession to John Bayley. Typically, his enemies noted, he slagged off Bayley in his inaugural lecture. Eagleton used to be known as the closest thing to the Sex Pistols in British scholarship. With his attack on Amis he proves he can still spit with the best of them".

Etiquetas: blogs, faverón, inglaterra, martin amis, NOTICIA, terry eagleton