Two Talks
Tomorrow, at 4 PM, at Princeton University, I will be delivering a talk entitled “The United States vs. Shahawar Matin Siraj.” The talk will be built around the details of a case I discuss in my forthcoming book. Here is a bit about the case:
On the evening of January 8, 2007, a federal judge at the United States District Court sentenced Shahawar Matin Siraj to thirty years in prison. Siraj, a twenty-four-year-old Pakistani immigrant living in Queens, had been found guilty, after a four-week trial in May the previous year, of participating in a conspiracy to bomb the Thirty-Fourth Street-Herald Square subway station in New York City. The prosecution had presented the defendant as a young, disaffected Muslim man who, as soon as he had received his immigration papers, wanted to take revenge against the U.S. for the war in Iraq; the defendant’s lawyers didn’t question that charge, or the evidence on tape that showed their client saying things like “I want fuck this country very badly,” but they argued that the young man had been entrapped.
The following day, at 5 PM, here at Vassar, James Wood will be delivering a lecture on reading and criticism. All students reading this post are urged to attend. Here is a paragraph from Wood’s latest book:
You have only to teach literature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things that now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it.
