[Part one of this con­ver­sa­tion is here.]

John Bradley: Now, I wonder if you could talk more about my pre­vi­ous point, if you don’t mind going back to it: that polit­i­cal fig­ures are more deserv­ing of satire. They run for public office and know­ingly enter the tor­nado zone of public wrath. Writ­ers, how­ever, don’t deserve such scorn as they are not really public fig­ures. And their book photos should be off limits. Crit­i­cize the writ­ing or lit­er­ary move­ments, but not how a writer appears. That’s too easy and per­haps cruel. And don’t epi­grams about poets, epi­grams that name par­tic­u­lar poets, rein­force in some way the figure of Authorship?

Kent John­son: Only in the sense, I’d say, that words like “queer” or “nigger” rein­force big­otry when retaken and wielded openly in the faces of the bigoted…

Mr. Sammler’s Marx, that is:

“Or Marx, a stu­dent, a fellow from the Uni­ver­sity, writ­ing books which over­whelm the world.  He was really an excel­lent jour­nal­ist and publicist.  As I was a jour­nal­ist myself, I am a judge of his ability.  Like many jour­nal­ists, he made things up out of other news­pa­per arti­cles, the Euro­pean press, but he made them up extremely well, writ­ing about India or the Amer­i­can Civil War, mat­ters of which he actu­ally knew nothing.  But he was mar­velously shrewd, a guesser of genius, a pow­er­ful polemi­cist and rhetorician.  His ide­o­log­i­cal hashish was very potent.”

From Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969)

Sell­ing books is all about timing. Or at least, that’s what the cap­i­tal­ists trying to make book sell­ing into a prof­itable market would have you believe.  Now that Prez W has led Amer­ica into de facto social­ism, it may come as some sur­prise that enter­pris­ing pub­lish­ers are still trying to put free-​market voodoo into prac­tice by using busi­ness horse sense and ever-​churning pub­lic­ity machines to sell books–about socialism.

Ezra Klein points to the release of a new Japan­ese manga comic of Marx’s Das Kap­i­tal as a water­shed moment in the edu­ca­tion of a future gen­er­a­tion of Marx­ist socialists.  Make it palat­able, make it fun.  Make it cool.  A spoon­ful of manga makes the social theory go down—forilla.

But this is not new, per se…how could we forget Rius?

Eduardo del Rio, a.k.a. Rius, is a Mex­i­can polit­i­cal car­toon­ist who was bitten with the task of send­ing up the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment in the 1960s, which he did bless­edly well with a strip titled Los Super­ma­chos.

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagle­ton and Martin Amis, who now are both teach­ing at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity. In a new intro­duc­tion to his primer Ide­ol­ogy, Eagle­ton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of call­ing Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-​part essay Amis pub­lished last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now pub­lished Eagleton’s response to the latest arti­cle, as well as Amis’s letter respond­ing to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay respond­ing to it. A much-​shortened ver­sion was pub­lished by a U. of Chicago email broad­sheet called Sight­ings. Since the sub­ject has come up again, I thought I’d post the orig­i­nal ver­sion in its entirety below. (Warn­ing: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduc­tion of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic pre­req­ui­site of seri­ous moral thought, and for good reason.