antipopper

Was briefly in New York this last week, and managed to see Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo and others at PEN’s State of Emergency event at Cooper Union, at which the literati provided “Readings Against Torture, Arbitrary Detention & Extraordinary Rendition”. Funnily enough, the highlight of the evening was Rick Moody’s appearance. (Yes, Joe. Rick Moody.) He read from La Pelle, Curzio Malaparte’s misanthropic account of the American post-war occupation of Italy, and I was unsure whether Moody was simply being a sarcastic dickhead, or smuggling in a critique of the abject disavowal of Atrocity by liberals, whose panic over human rights is driven by occasional recognitions of Like — signs that are most constitutive of its inadequacy than mere hypocrisy. (Malaparte, an erstwhile fascist, wrote La Pelle in that weird political netherzone prior to his swerve towards Maoism in the ’50s, so I guess anything’s, uh, possible.) Listen to it here and judge for yourself.

[ tags: curzio-malaparte, don-delillo, pen, rick-moody, salman-rushdie, torture ]