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Pincher
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Joined: 09 Aug 2006
Posts: 242
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 Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 4:55 pm Post subject: Whatever Happened to Martin Amis's Book on 9/11? |
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Yes, he was supposed to be writing the definitive tome on the subject but instead comes up with a tract on the Gulag ('House of Meetings'). Er... 30 years too late eh Martin?
Funny that all the great literary heavyweights seem to be leaving 9/11 well alone. It's well known that many of the great imprints of New York are owned and run by spook central.
I wonder how many other Titans of late have discussed their '9/11 blockbusters' with their agents in fashionable Upper East Side restaurants only to be told that their publishers are blowing hot and cold over the manuscript?
Looks like a job for marndin... |
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chek
Mega Poster
Joined: 12 Sep 2006
Posts: 3889
Location: North Down, N. Ireland
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| Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 11:20 am Post subject: Re: Whatever Happened to Martin Amis's Book on 9/11? |
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| Pincher wrote: | Yes, he was supposed to be writing the definitive tome on the subject but instead comes up with a tract on the Gulag ('House of Meetings'). Er... 30 years too late eh Martin?
Funny that all the great literary heavyweights seem to be leaving 9/11 well alone. It's well known that many of the great imprints of New York are owned and run by spook central.
I wonder how many other Titans of late have discussed their '9/11 blockbusters' with their agents in fashionable Upper East Side restaurants only to be told that their publishers are blowing hot and cold over the manuscript?
Looks like a job for marndin... |
Your comment on the trend seems accurate - the (so called) biggest event of our times and no literary interest from th ebig guns in exploring it, seems odd to say the least.
Although I've read and liked many of his previous books, having read Amis' published extract of The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, I was less than impressed by both his approach and the lumpen sequentialness of it.
Not to mention the paint-by-(CIA) numbers characteristion, even if only from an extract. I felt that to read more would only be a disappointment.
He seems much better at delineating the underbelly of western culture he normally deals in. It also seemed to me he was well out of his depth for whatever reason - perhaps the commonly seen professional suicide of being anything other than 110% for the modern Reich that seems to be infecting our times. |
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suspecta
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Joined: 19 Jul 2006
Posts: 87
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| Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 12:42 pm Post subject: |
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He's grossly politically unaware - either that or he's playing to a dubious agenda. I saw him on a Newsnight discussion recently, sitting next to Benazir Bhutto the former Prime Minister of Pakistan. His attitude towards her was appalling; he turned his back on her on more than one occasion in something that could only be seen as a blatant snub and his contempt for her was obvious in the extreme.
Don't these people read anything outside the mainstream? Why are they stupid as to believe the mainstream? Martin Amis is apparently an intelligent, well-educated man - why is he so outside the loop?
Suspecta |
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conspiracy analyst
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 27 Sep 2005
Posts: 2279
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| Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 3:00 pm Post subject: CIA MI5 |
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hasn't got round to writing about it.
He did write a few pages of drivel in the Sunday papers about Mohammed Attas 'last words'.
Shame he forgot to write about his passport being found 'intact' after the twin towers imploded... |
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Mark Gobell
On Gardening Leave
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 4529
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| Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2007 7:00 pm Post subject: |
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From today's ObGuard
| Quote: | The absurd world of Martin Amis
Chris Morris
Sunday November 25, 2007
The Observer
Look, I'm busy. I'm writing a script and I won't be disturbed. Except that because I'm writing about terrorism and Islam, I keep being distracted by Martin Amis. He prowls the thickets of my research like a demented flasher. Sometimes Christopher Hitchens pops up, too, and flashes along with his friend. They rail against Muslims. They're obviously daft. But people take them seriously.
No matter that they act like senile 12-year-olds on the Today programme website - smoking illegal fags to look tough and cool. No matter that Amis coins truly abominable terms like 'the age of horrorism' and when criticised tells people to 'f uck off'. Surely we all chuckle at the strenuous ennui of his salon drawl. Didn't he once accidentally sneer his face off? His 'insight' about Mohammed Atta involved pretending the hijacker was constipated for six months - brilliantly smuggling into our subconscious that idea that Atta was 'full of *'. He abandoned his satire on terrorism in which a Muslim unleashes mass rape on America because 'faced with Islamism, even satire withers and dies', not because his idea was obviously rubbish.
Despite his manifest absurdity (he called the World Trade Centre attacks 'edificide' and the towers' destruction an 'apocollapse'), people take him seriously and if they do then we must.
Last week Amis was called a racist. I saw him speak at the ICA last month. Was his negativity about Islam technically racist? I don't know. What I can tell you is that Martin Amis is the new Abu Hamza.
To recap, Amis was called a racist because he said Muslims were backward, violent, homophobic, paranoid, boring, retarded and stupid. Hitchens said no, he's conducting a 'thought experiment'.
Now Amis should be allowed to wonder aloud about anything. He can suggest Muslims should 'experience painful discrimination until they get tough with their children' if he likes. Thought experiments are fine. But if he bundles his thoughts on Islam together and iterates them one after the other as he did when I saw him, he displays not unguarded musing but the forging of an incoherent creed of hate. It goes roughly like this: 9/11 was horrific, its driving ideology was totalitarian, the totalitarians were Muslims, all Muslims follow a book they believe to be the immutable word of God, I don't believe that, therefore all Muslims are idiots, and basically b******. Idiot b****** moping around the Middle East in a paranoid funk just cos they lost their empire, and what a rubbish empire it was, too, by the way. Now, what is your balanced view of these primitive wife-beating idiotic b******?
Like Hamza, Amis could only make his nonsense stand up with mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran. To risk a familiar example, it won't do for Amis (or Hamza) to state flatly that the Koran exhorts Muslims to kill Jews without even asking whether this means all Jews or some particular group of Jews with whom the Muslims were fighting in the seventh century, or indeed, whether there are other verses that modify the message by deploring killing of any kind, or describing how 'people of the book [Christians and Jews] shall have nothing to fear or regret'.
I claim no great knowledge on this subject - level-three SATs perhaps - but Amis couldn't pass the test for morning playgroup. If my Shetland pony looks like a high-horse it's only because Amis is trotting round the paddock on a chihuahua.
So how does Amis manage to move from condemning the horrors of suicide bombings to pouring scorn on anyone who can believe in paradise - effectively all Muslims? He muddles his terms. Even Hitchens concedes Amis wrongly conflates Islamism with Islam. By fudging, Amis adds the weight of his reaction against terrorism to his contempt for Muslims in general. Take 'Islamism'. What does it actually mean?
For many it means 'political Islam'. Amis calls it a 'murderous ideology', equating it with terrorism. Now look at the following statement: 'The terrorist killings in New York, Madrid and London were wrong. They were indiscriminate, un-Islamic and based on ideas abstracted to the point of insanity.' I was firmly told this by an ex-Mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago. He was an Islamist. I strongly doubt he was murderous.
These concepts are more complex than Amis would have us believe. This lack of clarity allows him to group Muslims who stop teenagers shooting one another with a man who cheerfully saws the heads off Jews.
It's not easy. Even ex-Islamists seem confused. Ed Husain - whose Hizb ut-Tahrir memoir The Islamist made him the summer's top ram-raid sound-biter - condemns Islamism as 'totalitarian' but later allows for 'moderate Islamists'. What sort of braincrash is a 'moderate totalitarian'? I doubt it could even walk.
These distinctions matter because the way out of this mess (and it is a mess, fuelled by ignorance, stupidity, prejudice and weapons) is to clarify and discriminate rather than hurl abuse at anything that goes near a mosque.
I doubt many Muslims can be bothered with Amis. But he nurtures in his audience a corrosive prejudice against people they've never bothered to meet. It is culturally dim for us to form confident opinions about people based upon how they look and what we've heard they think. It is also against our interests. Nonsense abounds on the causes of terrorism but it is hard to argue that alienation doesn't channel potential foot soldiers towards radicalisation. As one solitary Muslim asked him at the ICA, 'Why such contempt for Muslims?' Amis must have known something was up because he dropped his drawl and called the man 'sir'. But he could hardly unspeak his views. And those views are certainly alienating.
With ignorance on his side, Amis can stare east through the salon window and convince us of a single advancing hoard. He's clever. He might put it brilliantly. He might call it a 'Meccalanche' or an 'Attaclysm'. But when he speaks, think 'Hamza'.
ยท Chris Morris is a writer and broadcaster |
_________________
The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
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PaulStott
Relentless Limpet Shill
Joined: 13 Jul 2006
Posts: 326
Location: All Power To The People, No More Power To The Pigs
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| Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2007 10:25 pm Post subject: |
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| suspecta wrote: | He's grossly politically unaware - either that or he's playing to a dubious agenda. I saw him on a Newsnight discussion recently, sitting next to Benazir Bhutto the former Prime Minister of Pakistan. His attitude towards her was appalling; he turned his back on her on more than one occasion in something that could only be seen as a blatant snub and his contempt for her was obvious in the extreme.
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Lets get one thing straight on Benazir Bhutto.
For all her current posing as a champion of the people, this is a woman so corrupt she has her own private zoo, in one of the poorest nations on earth.
For all her talk of democracy, the Pakistan People's Party is not a political party in any conventional sense of term - more a family cult that exists to venerate her late father and her. Should she be assasinated, it is also most certain her husband, or her oldest daughter would be the next leader. Hereditary democracy?
For all her talk of standing up to the Mad Mullahs, she allowed the ISI to fund religious mentalists in both Kashmir and Afghanistan, thus significantly contributing to radicalistion within Pakistan. Her father was arguably the first Pakistani President to really kow tow to the religious lobby, banning alcohol and weakening the status of religious minorities. Whatever you give such characters though, it is never enough. They will always want more.
I have no idea if/why Amis was rude to Ms Bhutto. Perhaps like me he sees her as part of the problem, not part of the solution? |
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