Alan Horn's diary

March 15, 2008

Idea for a work of literature: story or novel or play or poem (details??) that means nothing, and that (the lack of meaning) IS its meaning. (Alternatively: the point is that IT HAS NO POINT.) (Question: Has this been done before? Try and find out.)

March 5, 2008

“But the work that really drew me in,” writes Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books this week of his experience as a contributor to Wikipedia, “was trying to save articles from deletion. This became my chosen mission.”

Let’s see. Fighting to save obscure articles posted to an online “encyclopedia”; crusading to preserve ratty old newspapers in Double Fold; driven, in his fiction, to salvage the tiniest, most commonplace moments from the flux of living. It all adds up to… something. I have no idea if Mr. Baker is in therapy, or needs to be, but my analyst could do a lot with this material.

February 27, 2008

In Neuilly today to gather with a small party in memory of my old friend Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died last week. A moving reading of the description of the counting of the banana grove from La jalousie left everyone a little misty-eyed.

I remember the first time I ran into Alain at Les Deux Magots back in 1959, it must have been. Though I had never seen his photograph I recognized him right away as he was wearing a dark, flat-brimmed hat with a braided leather band no more than one-eighth of an inch in width, the braids of which formed a series of small, interlocking figure eights, while with the head of a match held between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand he was idly tracing on the marble tabletop, over and over, a similar series of figure eights.

February 6, 2008

I’m afraid I may have been unfair in yesterday’s entry to Martin Amis, the British novelist accused of spreading racist views. Since writing it I have revisited the cogent defense of his recent statements published last November by the journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens begins by pointing out that it is wrong to say--as many people do--that racists discriminate, since to be a racist is precisely to lump those of a particular ethnicity together indiscriminately. Having established this original thesis, the relevance of which it is hardly necessary to spell out, he pursues it to this powerful conclusion: “Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another. Now, a moment's thought on the part of his worst enemy would reveal that accusation to be silly and vicious, and baseless on its face.”

I am less sure, however, about Hitchens’s later argument that Amis cannot be a racist because Muslims do not constitute a race. One somehow feels it’s not the Albanians Amis is worried about.

But at least we can now understand what Amis is really saying when he writes of wanting to tell an airport guard searching his daughter’s knapsack to “stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East,” or when he puts forward the idea of randomly “strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan.” He is saying that he can’t tell the difference between one Irishman and another.

February 5, 2008

The British novelist Martin Amis has put out a new volume titled The Second Plane, a collection of the embarrassing essays and stories he’s been writing since a certain date in the fall of 2001 on the threat of anti-Western Islamist terrorism. It took a degree of bloodymindedness to do so, as his views on this subject have been widely--and rightly--criticized. Last year the liberal theologian Terry Eagleton drew attention to an interview from 2006 in which Amis confessed to “a definite urge--don’t you have it?--to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation--further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan….”

Of a piece with this wretched stuff was Amis’s publication in 2002 of the hysterically anti-Communist Koba the Dread, in which he performed an impressive Oedipal feat. His father, the famous novelist Kingsley, was in his later years such a buffoonish caricature of the reactionary that almost anyone could have attacked him from the left. But to denounce him from the right on the basis of his earlier nominal membership in the Communist Party of Great Britain was an inspired move, allowing Amis to kill his dad and to become him in a single stroke.

And become him he did. One gets the feeling from the disturbing interview he did with Johann Hari in the Independent that he has sort of a bad conscience about all the racist and male chauvinist crap he keeps “adumbrating” these days, but simply can’t help himself.

(Update: But see my second thoughts on the matter here.)