From Leon Wieselter's review of Martin Amis' "The Second Plane", NYT Book Review 4/27/08
-He [Amis] writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate. He is not only outraged by Sept. 11, he is also excited by it. "If Sept. 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime." Don't you see? It no longer matters that we missed the Spanish Civil War.
-In Amis's account, the Islamist terrorists are guilty not only of slaughtering people. They are guilty also of proliferating "cliches" and "inherited and unexamined formulations" -- and in this respect they are "like all religions," which were exposed as "fossilizations of dead prose and dead thought," were they not, by "one of the greatest novels ever written, 'Ulysses.'" Why can't they just read "Ulysses"?
-Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Wieseltier-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=the+catastrophist&st=nyt&oref=slogin
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