Bokelskere.no

Lützow var utbrent, det vil si ferdig; han var sivilisasjonstrett og hadde med seg en skremmende ansamling av halvinnbilte sykdommer som han frimodig hadde benyttet seg av for å dekke over sin tyske hverdags sørgelige tilstand med hypokondriens duk. Han led skiftevis, alt etter værsituasjon og dagsform, av astma, revmatisme, kikhoste, migrene, lede, kuldegysninger, anemi, tæring, øresus, osteoporose, ryggsmerter, innvollsorm, lysømfintlighet og kronisk snue.

Jeg vil ikke lyve for dere: med sin mangel på utdannelse, manerer og ansvarsfølelse, er Skottlands underklasse vanskelig å like.

Laurie Anderson had called to ask if he had a text about fire. She was curating an evening of performances to raise money to build a children's hospital for the charity War Child, and she had an amazing fire video and needed words to go with it. He edited together passages from the 'London's burning' part of The Satanic Verses. Laurie had persuaded Brian Eno to record several loops of sound, which she was going to mix from a little desk in the wings while he read.

He had always been post-something according to that mandarin literary discourse in which all contemporary writing was mere aftermath - post-colonial, post-modern, post-secular, post-intellectual, post-literate. Now he could add his own category, post-fatwa, to that dusty post-office, and would end up not just po-co and po-mo but po-fa as well.

He met Jacques Derrida, who made him think of Peter Sellers in The Magic Christian, walking through life with an invisible wind machine permanently ruffling his hair. He soon realised that he and Derrida would not agree about anything. In the Algeria session he made his argument that Islam itself, Actually Existing Islam, could not be exonerated from the crimes done in its name. Derrida disagreed. The 'rage of Islam' was driven not by Islam but the misdeeds of the West. Ideology had nothing to do with it. It was a question of power.

Then Cat Stevens - Yusuf Islam - bubbled up in the Guardian like a fart in a bath, still demanding that Rushdie withdraw his book and 'repent', and claiming that his support of the fatwa was in line with the Ten Commandments. (In later years he would pretend that he never said any of these things, never called for anyone's murder, never justified it on the basis of his religion's 'law', never appeared on TV or spoken to the papers to spout his uneducated bloodthirsty rubbish, knowing he lived in an age in which nobody had a memory. Repeated denials could establish a new truth that erased the old one.)

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty told Alice, in Wonderland, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' The creators of 'Newsepak' in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four knew exactly what Humpty Dumpty meant, renaming the propaganda ministry the Ministry of Truth and the state's most repressive organ the Ministry of Love. 'Islamophobia' was an addition to the vocabulary of Humpty Dumpty Newspeak. It took the language of analysis, reason and dispute, and stood it on its head.

Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know. A new word had been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia. To criticise the militant stridency of this religion in its contemporary incarnation was to be a bigot. A phobic person was extreme and irrational in his views, and so the fault lay with such persons and not with the belief system that boasted over one billion followers worldwide. One billion believers could not be wrong, therefore the critics must be the ones foaming at the mouth. When, he wanted to know, did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent. 'He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill', wrote Edward Burke. 'Our antagonist is our helper'. Only the weak and the authoritarian turned away from their opponents and called them names and sometimes wished to do them harm.

Quasi-mythological names were coming after him now, grand sheikhs and blind ones, the seminarians of Darul Uloom in India, the Wahhabi mullahs of Sudi Arabia (where the book had also been banned), and, in the near future, the turbaned Iranian theologicans of Qom. He had never given much thought to these august personages, but they were certainly thinking about him. Rapidly, ruthlessly, the world of religion was setting the terms of the debate. The secular world, less organised, less united and, essentially, less concerned, lagged far behind; and much vital ground was given up without a struggle.

At under pleddet skulle vi flette oss saman, haustgreiner og seljekjerr, born og vaksne i gasskammer, som hendene til gutane som seinare stod under paraplyane, slik dei stod og venta på å få flette seg inn i menn sine hender, som stundom stod bak far og venta på å få kome til meg som låg over hoggestabben og lytta etter mor sin song.

Scholars who expect to find the very best literature online, harmlessly cohabiting with crap, are inexorably replacing scholars who, despite themselves perhaps, still associate everything online with crap.

In other words, is Lady Gaga the last, best hope for pop smart enough to beat the Society of the Spectacle at its own game by selling out with a shamelessness that would shock even Andy Warhol (who perfected the concepts of self as brand and art as marketing) yet still snooker cultural-studies profs and nth-wave feminists into a deconstructive swoon about her Judith Butler-approved gender-performativity? Or is she something thuddingly dumber: Donatella Versace in the remake of Blow-Up? Liza Minnelli in a Vegas revue inspired by The Reluctant Astronaut? Perez Hilton singing the Human League songbook? Is she pop, or Pop Art? In on the joke, or just a joke?