This kind of vulgarity, which has always been characteristic of Mr. Amis’s attempts to come to grips with serious themes, also helps to explain why the two pieces of fiction in “The Second Plane” miscarry. “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” which traces the terrorist’s thoughts in the hours before he piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, suffers from the same programmatic quality that afflicted John Updike’s novel “Terrorist.” In the absence of true empathy with a terrorist — empathy of the sort that Dostoevsky brought to bear in “The Possessed,” or Conrad in “The Secret Agent” — Mr. Amis can only recite Atta’s motives, as though checking off points on an outline. His fear of women, his “ferocity and rectitude,” are mentioned but not inhabited. The character only comes alive in Mr. Amis’s hands when he suffers from extreme constipation — that is, from the kind of petty bodily humiliation that has always lain at the heart of Mr. Amis’s comedy.

Even the above review, otherwise wretched and presumptuous about a whole lot of things, including the literary critic Terry Eagleton, understands that there’s something wrong with “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.” (Incidentally, the story is available on the Web.) We are reading it in class tomorrow, along with a hefty portion of The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright.

Here’s a link to an interview with Wright conducted by my student Freddy Deknatel for The Daily Star Egypt. And here’s another piece that Freddy did for the Huffington Post.

A very useful interview with Wright, on his writings and his craft, is to be found in the the book The New New Journalism by Robert Boynton.

muhammad-atta-martin-amis-looming-tower-lawrence-wright-freddy deknatel

“As growth under globalization fails to alleviate the physical miseries of people around the country and voices of dissent grow, such cowardly state actions are only to be expected, a sure sign of illegitimacy and insecurity on the part of ruling cliques.”

The above in a note from my friend Aseem Shrivastava on the arrest and imprisonment of Prashant Rahi near Dehradun. Click here for a report on the case by Rahul Pandita, and here for a wide survey of recent cases of arrest and harrassment of those accused of leftist sympathies.

prashant-rahi-tehelka-rahul pandita

Two women I don’t recognize are sitting outside our lodging when I first wake up. I assume they live or work here until several hours later, when the EMTs start scrambling and saying we have our first patient. The excitement is palpable.

The women are taken inside to the sofa in the living room. Jacquie and Dr. Bill Fridinger follow. The rest of us are told to wait outside for the time being.

A few minutes pass. Jacquie emerges from the building. “EMTs, I want you to hear what tuberculosis sounds like. This woman has volunteered to be a learning case.” The EMTs rush inside with their stethoscopes at hand. I remain outside, out of the way.

I am writing my senior thesis at Vassar about treating drug-resistant tuberculosis in developing countries. I know how many people die from perfectly treatable tuberculosis because they do not have access to anti-TB drugs, which are very cost-effective.

When I come inside, the woman is laying on the couch, rebuttoning her dress. The EMTs have dispersed. I find Dr. Fridinger outside.

“That woman has HIV and TB,” he says. “She’d be in an intensive care unit in the United States. She walked here from three towns over. The people here are tough.”

From a Vassar student blog about their Uganda Project

From the sea of stories our master fisherman has brought up two gleaming, intertwining prizes - a tale about three boys from Florence in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and a story of Akbar, greatest of the Mughal emperors, who established both the wondrous and shortlived city Fatehpur Sikri and a wondrous and shortlived policy of religious tolerance. Both stories are about story itself, the power of history and fable, and why it is that we can seldom be sure which is which.

Ursula K Le Guin reviews The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie in the Guardian.

(Hat-tip, Carl Bromley)

salman-rushdie-ursula-leguin-enchantress-florence

Optically scanning the shelves wakes up dormant nodes in my memory. Picking up a copy of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller or George Ade’s Fables in Slang or Chester Himes’s Blind Man With a Pistol and leafing through it for five minutes helps restore my writing style when it has gone stale.

More

I’ve always liked the energy of Luc Sante’s sentences, and in the above post about unpacking his library, the man reveals what gets him going.

Oh, almost at random, here is Sante on “the eroticism of automobile accidents”: “Could you conceive of anything more sicko-weird? But cars are sexual objects, obviously, and if their essence is speed, consummation can be achieved only through impact. Every car commercial on television is an invitation to a Liebestod.”

(A nod here to my colleague Hua Hsu who, around midnight early this winter, standing in the photocopying room in our department, offered a paen to Sante. And to David Haglund, through whose post earlier this month, I learned about Sante’s blog.)

luc-sante-unpacking-library

In a city of 100,000 people, you can call 300 each night. You’ll talk to a dozen. Maybe one will commit to voting for your guy. The people of this city will grow to hate your voice, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.

The thing about “Senior Calls” is that people can say whatever they want. They can screw with you in the cruelest ways, and you can’t say a thing. They can tell you that “No, Roger isn’t home, because he’s dead.” Roger probably is dead, but maybe not. Maybe you hear him talking in the background, telling her not to give him the phone. But you can’t say anything, except, “I’m so sorry. Do you know who you’re supporting in the primary?” When she hangs up, just check the “Deceased” box and keep calling. Rumor is, you have a quota to fill if you want to keep the internship.

More

Jonathan Asen, who was in one of my classes last semester, wrote this lovely, sardonic piece as a part of a series on his experiences as an intern during the run-up to the Democratic primaries.

jonathan-asen-senior-calls-political-affairs

After receiving notes from friends, I checked out the extract from the Naipaul biography by Patrick French at The Telegraph (UK). The extract has an easy narrative flow and answers many questions that people had about Paul Theroux’s bilious but entertaining Sir Vidia’s Shadow. French finds out that Theroux was a grasping fellow and he was often just making it up. The biographer writes: “The material in Sir Vidia’s Shadow combines the accurate, the fictional and the appropriated, and they merge to the point where they cannot be disentangled.” French doesn’t take much delight in Theroux’s lively, often excoriating, description of a lunch at Naipaul’s house. He has found out that some of it was manufactured and inaccurate. It was one of the more memorable parts in Theroux’s book. As these reports reveal, French found a subject who is strikingly honest about this cruelty, which of course will be painted in loud, lurid colors by the media. As French reveals here, he had unique access to private documents. I’m looking forward to reading the biography. When I was listening to French read on that clip, it was clear that he is going to be able to tell me more about Naipaul’s life, but even during that admittedly brief extract it struck me that rarely are biographies able to tell you about the work itself, for which, as far as Naipaul’s body of writing is concerned, the gold standard for me has been London Calling, a magisterial book-length study by Rob Nixon.

patrick-french-v.s.-naipaul-rob-nixon

Why is there such a proliferation of economic discourses in literary theory, cultural studies, anti-sweatshop debates, popular music, and other areas outside the official discipline of economics? How is the economy represented in different ways by economists and non-economists?

In this volume, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines and countries, from inside and outside the academy, explore the implications of the fact that the economy is being represented in so many different ways. They analyze what it means for scholars and activists in trying to make sense of existing representations-theories, pictures, and stories–of the economy. They also show how new representations can be produced and utilized to change how we look at and participate in current economic debates.

By encouraging the mutual recognition of existing approaches and exploring the various ways economic representations function in diverse venues within and beyond mainstream economics, Ruccio has produced a book that is relevant to subjects as diverse as economic sociology and anthropology, political economy, globalization and cultural studies.

My friend David Ruccio has sent word of a forthcoming book he has edited, Economic Representations: Academic and Everyday.

david-ruccio-economic-representations

Lumpenprof finds out what can be done at faculty meetings to make them bearable.

Also, in the comments to the above posting at Lumpenprofessoriat a link to a post about political music videos on YouTube.

If you have ever wondered what a former External Affairs Minister is reading in retirement, you now have an answer. K. Natwar Singh reviews in Tehelka the last book by a reader of this blog.

natwar-singh-tehelka-vijay-prashad-darker-nations