Hope in Morocco

The Moroccan Cultural Studies Center in Fes has published an English-language edition of Hope. My book has been used in college courses in Morocco for a while, but this edition (priced for 50 Dirhams) will make it easier for college students to get their hands on it. (Previously, they had to order it on Amazon or--gasp!--photocopy it.) The cover art is by Mohamed Mrabet. I'm thrilled!

Something Old, Something New

Some people will probably not believe me when I say I'm a big procrastinator ("How do you get so much done?" is usually the retort. Mine is: "You should've seen what I had planned!") It's taken me four and a half years to finish my new novel. I'm now slowly trudging along with edits, and I've devised a new system for positive reinforcement. After every two pages of my work, I allow myself two pages from something old (Life and Times of Michael K., at the moment). At night, if I've finished a chapter, I read something new (the new Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence.) More soon.

Keeping Government Out of the Bedroom

Great news from the California state Supreme Court today: By a vote of 4 to 3, the court has overturned a ban on same-sex marriage.

Palestine Hotel

This revelation should only come as a surprise to those who slept through the early days of the American invasion of Iraq: An army whistleblower has revealed that the Palestine Hotel, where journalists were stationed in the spring of April 2003, was on an Army target list.

The New Prisons

From a brief piece in the London Review of Books on immigration detention centers:

Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea living in Brooklyn, is one of 71 detainees to have died in the last four years in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An illegal immigrant confined to a detention centre after his green card application was rejected, Bah died after a fall that no one seems to have witnessed. ICE, which was set up by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, is responsible for the detention of a staggering number of people: 311,213 last year, a million since 2004. They are held in prisons in which, according to Mark Dow, the author of American Gulag (2005), ‘extreme forms of physical abuse are not just aberrations.’ The centre where Bah was detained is managed by Corrections Corporation of America, a firm set up in 1983 in Nashville by a group of investors that included a former chairman of Tennessee’s Republican Party. A pioneer in running private prisons, it has also been quick to specialise in immigrant detention, the fastest growing branch of the incarceration business.

CCA describes itself as the ‘nation’s largest provider of outsourced corrections management’, with 70,000 inmates and 16,000 staff. Its website speaks proudly of ‘similarities in mission and structure’ with the US army and makes a special appeal to veterans in search of work: ‘How will you make the transition from military to civilian life? CCA features a paramilitary structure: a highly refined chain of command, and policies and procedures that dictate facility operations.’

Things are similarly bleak for immigrants and refugees in the UK, as Adam Shatz explains.

Mission Accomplished

Never mind the Douglas Feith interview. The best part about yesterday's Daily Show was John Oliver's report on Jenna Bush's wedding. You have to watch it.

Emergency @ The Geffen

In class yesterday, we talked about stories that use history as a starting point, and the challenges that come with this undertaking. Daniel Beaty's one-man show Emergency (currently playing at The Geffen Playhouse) does just that. It's about a slave ship that rises out of the Hudson River, in front of the Statue of Liberty; the people of New York are all stunned, but they each react differently to the intrusion of history into their lives. Beaty performs approximately 40 characters, ranging from a little girl to an old widower, from a dispassionate newscaster to a reality TV show contestant. Some of the characters he brings to life are more fully realized than others, but their testimonies ring with truth--as painful, shocking, thought-provoking, and liberating as it may be. Emergency is playing until May 25, so don't miss it.

Et Ça Reprend

As pessimistic as it sounds, I think Lebanon is headed for another civil war before the end of the summer.

Recapture

While working on line edits for my new novel, I've been trying to justify my glacial pace to myself: it must be because I am busy with teaching; or because I spend too much time writing nonfiction; or because I am a perfectionist; or because English is my third language; or because I am lazy; and so on. In a fit of despair, I decided to read up on Vladimir Nabokov's editing process, and stumbled upon an article by Maxim D. Shrayer: "After Rapture and Recapture: Transformations in the Drafts of Nabokov's Stories," which was published in Russian Review. Shrayer cites Nabokov's preface to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:

Rough drafts, false scents, half explored trails, dead ends of inspiration, are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying canceled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.

This makes the upcoming publication of The Original of Laura, the unfinished manuscript that Nabokov wanted destroyed, a tad problematic, but that's not my subject here. I was more interested in the distinction Nabokov drew between 'Rapture' and 'Recapture,' the former being the state of conception, a process not to be interrupted but to be followed wherever it leads, and the latter the state of composition, which is a more laborious, conscious process, and begins with the very first draft. Shrayer's article demonstrates the extent to which Nabokov recaptured: everything from stylistic revisions to structural changes. I think I needed to read this to be inspired. Back to work.

Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor

I recently wrote a piece about Tom McCarthy's The Visitor for The Nation's online section on books and the arts. Here's how it opens:

On first glance, Tom McCarthy's new film, The Visitor, seems to set itself up as one of those dreadful movies in which a white, male protagonist witnesses some predicament of people of color and then, innocently and chivalrously, proceeds to save them. Think Blood Diamond or Rendition or The Last King of Scotland. Some people cry during these movies; I usually yawn and check my watch. But The Visitor quickly turns the formula on its head. For one thing, the main conflict that propels the story is caused by all the characters, and, for another, whatever realizations are made at the end of the film do not neatly separate the characters as savior and saved.

The entire piece is freely available here: "Looking Past Clichés."

(Photo credit: Overture Films)

Eye of the Cyclone

When I was getting ready to go to work yesterday, the headlines said that a cyclone hit Myanmar, and that the death toll may be as high as 4,000. By the time I finished teaching, the headlines said 10,000. And this morning the number has risen to 15,000 (now 30,000.) It's hard to fathom what that means for the survivors, for the families, for the country. But already the humanitarian crisis is being politicized. On both sides.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I loved Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly when I read it almost ten years ago, so I was quite reluctant to see the film adaptation, even though I'd heard that it was directed by Julian Schnabel. The movie arrived via Netflix on Friday and...it's incredible. Schnabel does what so few directors are capable of doing when it comes to adaptations of novels, which is to say, translate literary language into visual language. What a beautiful film.

(photo credit)

Quotable: Ahdaf Soueif

If you've sat for baccalaureate exams anywhere in the Arab world, this little passage from Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun will bring about a bout of nostalgia (or perhaps panic, depending on your grammar skills):

The afternoon is the time for memorising and the morning the time for brainwork. Not that there is much brainwork to any of this. Arabic grammar is about the only thing that can count as brainwork, parsing sentences: the Deed, the Doer, and the Done-To; the Added and the Added-To; the Attribute and the State; the Circumstance of Time and Place and, most problematic of all: the Built upon the Unknown, in which the logical Done-To assumes the form and function of the Doer. These have to be worked out.

When is Soueif coming out with a new novel? It's been almost ten years since the last one.

Right of Response

It seems there is some sort of brouhaha over reviews of Martin Amis's new book, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom, a collection of essays about terrorism, jihadism, and other -isms. One of the earliest write-ups here in the United States was by Michiko Kakutani, who hated it:

Indeed “The Second Plane” is such a weak, risible and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.

A few weeks later, Jim Sleeper rose in defense of Amis:

It would be too easy to read Martin Amis' slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in "The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom" are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.

This weekend, Leon Wieseltier rendered this judgment:

I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful. But the vacant intensity that has characterized so much of Amis’s work flourishes here too.

Now Jim Sleeper has another retort/defense. You can find out more about the literary quarrel from Ron Hogan at Galleycat.

I find these disagreements quite healthy, but also very amusing, as it seems no one thinks it necessary or useful to ask a reviewer of the Muslim persuasion to take a look at the The Second Plane, a book that is, after all, largely concerned with Muslims: their religion, their beliefs, their politics, their life in Britain, and the violent encounters of the jihadist among them with the West. When Amis says:

There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

and then proceeds to write a whole book in which he expands on these ideas, shouldn't the reading public have a chance to find out what one of the people he seems so concerned about make of his work?

Casa Fires

Last Saturday, a fire blazed through a mattress factory in Casablanca, killing 55 people and injuring dozens of others. The exit doors had been locked by the owner, who stated he did so in order to prevent theft of materials. He is now under arrest. Today comes news that another fire broke out in a different part of the city, in a carpet factory, killing 3 people. Inna lillah, wa inna ilayhi raji'oun.

Everyone knows that the law is regularly and spectacularly flouted in industrial outfits in the city. It remains to be seen whether measures will be taken or whether bribes will change hands. I'd say the latter, wouldn't you?

L.A.T. Fest

Thanks to those of you who came out to Korn Convocation Hall on the UCLA campus on Saturday. The place was packed, my panelists were great, and I had a wonderful time, even though I managed to get several sunburns. You can find full coverage of the fest at Jacket Copy, Counterbalance, and Book Fox. And of course don't miss Tod Goldberg's take on the weekend.