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Literary London is enjoying an exhibition-quality row between the veteran Marxist bore and critic, Terry Eagleton, and the novelist, Martin Amis (pictured). Eagleton started it, says the Daily Telegraph:

In an introduction to the 2007 edition of his classic book, "Ideology: An Introduction", Prof Eagleton attacks the views of "Amis and his ilk" for taking up cudgels against Islam instead of propounding tolerance and understanding. The attack also extends to Amis's novelist father, the late Kingsley Amis. Prof Eagleton calls Kingsley Amis "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals". He adds: "Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase".

Happily, the things Amis learned from his father included the conduct of shapely literary feuds (and, I trust, the correct use of the word "ilk"). Here he is, replying, in a letter to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:  read more »

Today's arts news and gossip

The Vatican will publish trial documents of the Order of the Knights Templar, a medieval military group associated with the Crusades and mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. Leather bound copies of the minutes of the proceedings will sell for €5900 ($8333). The Order, which was founded in 1099 to protect those on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, was disbanded and its leaders burned at stake for heresy in 1314.   read more »

THE Frieze Art Fair opens today in London. Though Russian art collectors and museums have already bought some pieces at VIP previews, visitors can still see contemporary art exhibits, including "French Horns: Unwound and Entwined," by Claus Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and life-size statues of street performers dressed as Che Guevara.  read more »

WHY do we say "fuck you", and not "fuck yourself"? What exactly makes certain excretions more linguistically taboo (shit) than others (snot)? Is "fucking" really an adverb in the phrase "fucking brilliant"? Steven Pinker, a linguist and cognitive scientist and one of the most masterful popularisers of science writing today, answers all in a long article on profanity in the New Republic.
 read more »

“BEAU spectacle!” reports France’s Le Monde of a new production at Paris’s Bastille Opera. The choreographer inspiring this plaudit is called Waltz. Yes, that’s her real family name.

Sasha Waltz has been the toast-of-town in Berlin's dance world for a decade. Many of her shows, including perhaps her most famous, “Körper” (Bodies), have toured the world. Breaching the formidable walls of the Bastille is the 44-year-old German’s version of Berlioz’s “Romeo and Juliet”. It opened on October 5^th to extravagant applause, with another Paris daily, Libération, citing its “superb, fluid, aerial pas de deux”, performed by the Paris ballet’s stars, Aurélie Dupont and Hervé Dupont, as the star-crossed lovers.  read more »

Today's arts news and gossip.

AN ADVERTISEMENT outside the Ink-D Gallery in Brighton, England, for James Cauty's exhibit "The Rise and Fall of Portslade Massif", has been scrubbed away by the city's graffiti team, apparently by accident. The words "Portslade Massif" had been written in white emulsion paint on the outside wall and window of the gallery, which is private property. The incident prompted the gallery's director, Dan Hipkin, to ask, "Who holds the right to say what is and isn't a form of expression?"

The first Middle East International Film Festival will be held in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, next week. The festival, held at the Emirates Palace, the city's $1 billion hotel, will screen films from around the world, concentrating on work from the Gulf states and by female, Arab directors.

Zaha Hadid has unveiled her plans for the relatively deserted Zorrozaurre peninsula of Bilbao. Ms Hadid intends to turn the peninsula into an island, connect it with the mainland with eight bridges and build 6,000 new houses, all of which will sit nearly 5 metres above sea level (in case of flooding). The island will include two technology centres and a park. Developers hope the project will reinvigorate the area, which now houses only 450 residents. Ms Hadid's island is slated to be ready by 2025.

Stephen Colbert, host of the "Colbert Report", has released "The Honest Untruth", a book in which his character, a satirically conservative presenter modelled on Bill O'Reilly from Fox news, gives his views on topics ranging from religion to sports. For example, a woman who works outside the home "might as well bring coconut arsenic squares to the school bake sale." But critics claim the book lacks the bite of his live performances, like his bracingly scathing speech at the White House Press Correspondent's Dinner in 2006.

EXCITING times at Vienna's Belvedere, home of Austria's greatest art collection. The Lower Belvedere has just been restored to its early 18^th-century glory, reopening with "Vienna-Paris: Van Gogh, Cézanne and Austria's Modernists", a richly varied exhibition of Austrian and French paintings.

There was a smell of fresh paint on the walls on October 3rd, and bare wiring straggled from the ceiling. But little could steal away from the canvases, a remarkable group of French Impressionists, Klimts and Kokoschkas. The opening is a triumph for Agnes Husslein-Arco, the relatively new director of the Belvedere. She assumed her post in January, shortly after her predecessor, Gerbert Frodl, stepped down in the wake of the Belvedere’s shattering loss of five Klimts, restored to the original owners’ heir last year.

Are there any paintings with a dodgy history in this hang? Ms Husslein-Arco says that while some minor works in the collection could be Nazi spoils, none of these will be exhibited. “When I see a painting,” she says, “the first thing I do is turn it round to see what’s on the back.” Vienna’s big state museums are sensitised to possible Nazi loot in their collections, but in the Austrian provinces, different laws apply. At Linz’s Lentos Museum, for instance, a Klimt and an Emil Nolde are now the subject of restitution claims by the heirs of former Jewish owners. Proof of ownership is key, but documentation is scant, according to Sophie Lillie, a Vienna-based historian.

"It might be thought that after the Blochbauer-Altmann case, Austria could reach closure in this area,” says Ms Lillie. “In fact we are years and years away from that.”

Today's arts news and gossip.

VANDALS broke into the Musée d'Orsay on Sunday and damaged Monet's "The Argenteuil Bridge", creating a four-inch tear in the painting. This was just one in a series of ugly incidents at museums throughout France, including an attack last year on Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" by a self-proclaimed performance artist. (Though perhaps Duchamp would've been more amused.)

A new work by Doris Salcedo, a Columbian sculptor, which features a 167-metre crack in the floor, has been installed in the main hall of the Tate Modern in London. According to the artist, the crack, which will remain as a scar on the museum's floor after it is filled in the spring, represents borders and racial division. The work took five weeks to install and over a year to create.

Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God", a diamond and platinum skull that was recently sold to a group of investors for $100m, will go on display at the State Heritage Museum in St Petersburg in May as part of the museum's international contemporary-art project. The investors who bought the skull have already announced that they will re-sell the work, though they have yet announce a date.

AWARDING the Frost Medal to John Hollander earlier this year has had poets up in proverbial arms. In the New York Times Book Review Motoko Rich described both the drama of the appointment and the ethics of judging "artistic merit" against "unsavory opinions or actions of the artist". Hollander is a prolific and well-regarded poet, but he has angered many with his references to "societies without cultures", by which he means those of West Africa and Central America. His appointment has precipitated a flurry of resignations at the Poetry Society of America, including the president, William Louis-Dreyfus, who complained that the protests were reactionary, and by other board members, including Walter Mosley, a novelist who has criticised the lack of diversity among award recipients. (Only three of 38 previous winners have been not white, which is indeed disgraceful.)

Quite a bit of sturm und drang, to be sure. But let's actually consider the poetry of John Hollander.

Scanning a poet's work in search of his politics is a worse offence, in a way, than judging a poet's politics before his work. (Though judging a person who judges a poet by his politics may still rank as the worst offence.) I am not the first to say it: Hollander's poetry is of a very high quality. It is also at times thoroughly and terrifyingly Western. His enemies and influences seem to be Western philosophical greats, English literary tropes, and classic formal patterns and constructions. For me, the poems' point of interest is how they operate within these patterns, and fight against their boundaries.

Boundaries are literally explored in the poem "Policing the Yard", in which Hollander uses rhyme and repetition to create a prison of a poem:

This will return to haunt them--all the more 
For its low hopelessness as well as for 
All their conclusions being quite unsound. 
Picking up what they'd dropped too long before: 
That will return to haunt them all the more. 

The circuitry and the heavy, un-droppable burden create uneasiness, a fight aginst the heaviness of the past. Similarly, in the poem "The Night Mirror" from Selected Poetry 1993, Hollander's mirror reflects

...a horrible bit of movement
At the edge of knowledge, overhanging
The canyons of nightmare.

Something new is threatening to get out, but the stuffiness of the poem, the heaviness of the scene he has set, with grandmother in "her Windsor chair in the warm lamplight", barely constrains it.

It is a great wonder then, or no wonder at all, that his contested review of Jay Wright's collected poems in January 2001 was a positive one. Hollander proclaims Wright's poetry to "give evidence of a bookish and extremely thoughtful life while encountering the forms and rituals of cultures without literatures..." The second half of his remark is clearly nonsensical and obviously inaccurate. But the poetry of these two "extreme thoughtful" men begs comparison. Hollander called his review "Poems That Walk Anywhere", capturing Wright's fluidity, his seemingly endless movement, his ability to float in the realm of the spiritual or be grounded in the soil. In this way, his poems are all that Hollander's are not. They represent a completely different style and approach.

Wright's work moves in a way that one could be tricked into thinking it had no legacy or cultural past. But I don't believe it to be a traditionless approach. In his poem "Those who Thoroughly Bed the Estuary", Wright ends by saying

It is too soon to say
      if blindness
is the innocent gift
                of strangers.  

Cultural blindness is rarely an "innocent gift". If there is anything to be gained from the controversy over the Frost Medal, it is an understanding that there we have much to learn when we cast a wider net.