“The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” a short-story by Martin Amis published in the latest New Yorker, fails as an act of imagination. It is an account of the last few hours in the life of the passenger in seat 8D of American Flight 11, and is limited by the following defects, none of which constitute the real reason for its failure: one, a flat-footed, comically literal interpretation of the near-grimace on Atta’s face as a sign of constipation; two, the absence from its narrative of a strong sense of a collective action, so that individual pettiness and resolve function as the key to an event both enacted and experienced in larger terms; three, the domination of the temporal framework over the spatial one, producing a tale tragically limited to temporary rented spaces, a bad choice for introducing a subject that is quintessentially bound to a global geography. But, as I said before, these aren’t the reasons that come close to describing why the short-story is so peculiar and dissatisfying. The story’s chief conceit is its greatest shortcoming: because many of the facts are verifiable the reader is unsure whether the smallest details are true or not. This doesn’t always pose a problem in fiction, but in this particular instance it is lethal. The narrative’s purported aim is to provide an insight into the mind of a mass murderer. What really happens while reading this story is that Muhammad Atta is no longer the subject of your attention–instead, Martin Amis is. (Note to Amis: It would have been more honest to write a memoir if you thought September 11 or the First World War or Hiroshima was all about you.)

The ever-reliable Maud Newton has provided a link to the Literary Saloon and to the Independent about the forthcoming collection of Martin Amis’s stories.

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Given that the Whitney Biennial 2006 has the title “Day for Night,” it should not surprise us that analyses of the show get caught in reflective mirrorings that would in all other contexts be called convoluted thinking. Arthur Danto’s review in the Nation enacts strange, speculative reversals too, but, and here I enact a reversal of my own, Danto is also clear on several fronts, not least in his scepticism of the pieties of so-called political art:

There is something strangely inert about the language of mirroring and reflecting in which “Day for Night” is framed. Somehow, one feels, the experience of a work of art ought to do something more robust than reflect on good causes. It is too much to ask that we feel the way Rilke did when he stood before an archaic torso of Apollo–that he must change his life. But there seems to be little place for passion, or pleasure, in the intellectually earnest work on display here.

I say “so-called” because nothing is as complacent and close-minded as artistic pretension of the radical kind. Gestures presume to take the place of achievement; statements that are declarative at best are routinely granted the status of disturbing questions and even acts; and mere good-will or intentions get inflated and occupy all the space previously empty and demanding, however indirectly or mutely, something more difficult than conference chatter.

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…and listen to this song
(Many thanks to my colleague and friend, Professor Judith Nichols.)

I am me and Rummy’s he, Iraq is free and we are all together
See the world run when Dick shoots his gun, see how I lie
I’m Lying…

Sitting on my own brain, waiting for the end of days
Corporation profits, Bloody oil money
I’m above the law and I’ll decide what’s right or wrong

I am the egg head, I’m the Commander, I’m the Decider
Koo-Koo-Kachoo

Baghdad city policeman sitting pretty little targets in a row
See how they die when the shrapnel flies see mothers cry
I’m Lying…I’m Ly-ing…I’m Lying…I’m Ly-ing

Yellow cake plutonium, imaginary WMD’s
Declassifying facts, exposing secret agents
Tax cuts for the wealthy leaving all the poor behind

CHORUS

Sitting in the White house garden talking to the Lord
My thoughts would be busy busy hatching If I only had a brain

CHORUS

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