1/ From the cover of the Novem­ber 2007 Harper’s. Photo by David Graham:

2/ From “The Mission,” in the Octo­ber 29, 2007 New Yorker. Illus­tra­tion by Steve Brodner:

With char­ac­ter­is­tic lucid­ity, and allow­ing him­self more right­eous anger than his print per­sona nor­mally lets in, George Packer goes after Brian De Palma’s new movie Redacted on Inter­est­ing Times, his blog at The New Yorker:

So “Redacted” doesn’t merely offer a fris­son of Godar­d­ian self-​consciousness; this is irony with a rev­o­lu­tion­ary point, a return to De Palma’s ori­gins in the New Left cinema of the late six­ties. And what is the point? That we’re all the same, Zar­qawi, Lyn­ndie Eng­land, the rapists in Mah­mudiyah, CNN, Ashley Gilbert­son, the read­ers of the Times, yours truly—we’re all accom­plices in the great act of vio­la­tion that is the Iraq war. The dis­tinc­tion between per­pe­tra­tor and wit­ness, crime and its doc­u­men­ta­tion, has been oblit­er­ated. And you thought you were just trying to find out what’s hap­pen­ing over there? Pas du tout! Hyp­ocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère.
…
“Redacted” is an act of voyeurism that becomes a part of the thing that it claims to denounce. If the pic­tures from Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi’s home­made videos are war porn, “Redacted” is film-​theory porn—a styl­ized snuff film inside a meta-​critique of the media.

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.

Let’s get this straight: the New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear writes an arti­cle highly crit­i­cal of John Barr, head of the Poetry Foun­da­tion. The next week, the New Yorker pub­lishes a poem (titled, coin­ci­den­tally, “After the Diagnosis”) by Chris­t­ian Wiman, editor of Poetry, which is pub­lished by the Poetry Foun­da­tion. Around the same time, David Orr, some­time con­trib­u­tor to Poetry, uses his occa­sional column in the New York Times Book Review to bite back at Goodyear and the New Yorker’s edi­tors, accus­ing the former of a con­flict of inter­est and the latter of nepo­tism and bad taste. At least one of the accu­sa­tions is con­firmed a few weeks later, when the New Yorker pub­lishes an editor’s note acknowl­edg­ing that Goodyear sub­mit­ted poems to Poetry as recently as 2003. Now this week, the NYT Book Review has pub­lished a review by one Dana Goodyear.

May the circle be unbroken.