November 25, 2003

One more thing

I've got a story up on Pindeldyboz this week. Enjoy. I will see you back here in a week or so.

Happy Thanksgiving

I'll be logging off early today so I can go pack for our vacation. I won't have internet access, so no posts for a while. Be good while I'm gone.

One Year, Five Months, and Four Days Behind

I'm not sure if this is admirable or compulsive: Irving Tobin reads the entire New York Times (minus the Sports, Escapes, and Circuit sections.)

[His wife] introduced him to the Times. Soon he had to cut out his other reading. Then tax season came along. Every year, he fell behind, losing almost two months in March and April. “I realize I’m not going to catch up, but I like to believe I will,” he said the other day. When the Times went on strike in 1978, he lagged by only nine days. By 1998, he was almost two years behind, even though he had quit reading the Sports section years before.

I stopped reading newspapers a while ago (I read them online) but I subscribe to quite a few magazines and the one magazine I can never catch up with is the New Yorker (even though I read some of the articles online.) Most of my mags are monthlies, and I can spend a couple of hours with each one and read them and be done, but the New Yorker gets me. I have a stack of at least five staring at me right now. I think I'm going to put them in the recycle bin.

Lawrence Paintings

Paintings by D.H. Lawrence, said to be more shocking that Lady Chatterley's Lover, are exhibited in England for the first time. The central piece is said to be of a naked man peeing on dandelions. I'll leave this one to Old Hag or TMFTML.

Color Me Surprised

Congress to Universities: Teach what we like or we'll take your funding away.

Link via The Morning News.

Forgotten Writers

James Sallis writes about forgotten writers.

Why should Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) be remembered, and Kenneth Fearing (1902-61) wholly lost? What immortal hand or eye laid the blessing on F. Scott Fitzgerald while passing over John O'Hara? Why Thomas Wolfe and not Dawn Powell? And what ever happened to Philip Wylie? How many of us, for instance, inveterate readers all, know the name Calder Willingham?

Besides being an exercise in drudging up obscure writers, the article doesn't really offer up much of a response to the question of why some are remembered and others aren't.

Menand on Updike

The New Yorker's Louis Menand has a piece on John Updike on the occasion of the publication of Updike's anthology The Early Stories. Menand prefaces his review with a discussion of short stories.

A short story is not as restrictive as a sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. Its aim, as it was identified by the modern genre’s first theorist, Edgar Allan Poe, is to create “an effect”—by which Poe meant something almost physical, like a sensation or (the term is appropriate, since Poe’s reputation was always greater in France than in his own country) a frisson. Every word in a story, Poe said, is in the service of this effect.

Menand read the stories in the anthology straight through and found that they formed a biography of Updike

The names of the characters change, of course, and the circumstances vary, but if you read the volume as a single narrative, which is the way it has been arranged, you find that it follows the experiences of a man who spends his childhood in southeastern Pennsylvania, goes off to Harvard, studies in England, marries while still a young man, moves to New York City and then to a town north of Boston, has several children, and, after twenty years of marriage, gets divorced—a man whose path through that chunk of the twentieth century is a lot like John Updike’s.

Menand reviews several of the stories, and seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the anthology (unlike others.)

Ali Interview

Here's an interview with Monica Ali. I think the online writing group she's talking about is Zoetrope.

Happy Eid

To all my family and friends. Best wishes and all that good stuff.

November 24, 2003

Purple Hibiscus Review

In the New York Times Books in Brief.

Kunzru Speaks

Hari Kunzru explains why he turned down the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. Some of the judges were angry that the prize was used as a "political platform" but I think it's foolish to expect writers to keep to polite subjects rather than what makes them tick.

This Just In

Kansas town requires households to have guns.

The One-Sentence Sex Scene

Jimmy Carter's novel, the Hornet's Nest, includes a sex scene. And that fact alone warrants this article.

Short Story Anthologies

The Seattle Times has a brief review of this year's O. Henry and Best American Short Stories. The reviewer seemed to like O. Henry (I thought the selections were uneven.) She also complained that BASS has a story by Mary Yukari Waters and says that "both this story and last year's selection were set in Japan, with similar themes." That's like complaining that a Flannery O'Connor story is set in the South.

November 21, 2003

It Didn't Limn Life Well Enough

Michiko doesn't like the new collection of John Updike's early stories very much.

Arguing that "a selection, surely, is best left to others, when the author is no longer alive to obstruct the process," Mr. Updike has included virtually every short piece of fiction he wrote between 1953 and 1975 within these pages (presumably the later ones will be gathered in a gargantuan volume yet to come), and the resulting 800-plus-page book is a decidedly spotty production, filled indiscriminately with classic gems that attest to the author's determination "to give the mundane its beautiful due"; clumsy apprentice works with creaky, contrived endings; and later ham-handed experimental efforts to expand Mr. Updike's fictional terrain.

Gift Lists

These lists pop up every once in a while, and are fun for about two minutes. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a list of twelve "standout books" for the fall.

Best Graphic Novels

Time's Andrew Arnold has a rundown of the best graphic novels of the last quarter century, with the usual suspects making the cut. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis was included too. Haven't read it yet? What are you waiting for? Also, Time readers respond with their thoughts on the list.

Literary Dissent

Sara Parestky writes about the genesis of her new novel, Blacklist.

[B]y a year ago, when I was working on my novel Blacklist, I was definitely scared. That was when news stories emerged about police seizing a man in a New Jersey library for reading foreign language pages on the Web. They held him for three days without charging him, without letting him call his wife or a lawyer, before deciding that he wasn’t doing anything subversive.
When I began writing Blacklist in the summer of 2001, I had decided to use the publishing industry as the backdrop for my novel. Part of the trigger for the novel was the claim by some neo-cons that Joseph McCarthy was an American hero who had been unfairly hounded by the left. I have friends and family whose lives McCarthy and the Dies Committee made miserable and I was alarmed by this effort to rewrite a sordid chapter in our history.
As I got into the book, the events of the present began scaring me even more than the past.

Another Sonallah

Hari Kunzru has turned down the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize because it was co-sponsored by the Mail on Sunday, because he disapproves of the newspaper's handling of news items relating to refugees and asylum-seekers.

Is It a Memo to Heidi Julavits?

Neil LaBute talks about dealing with reviews in his Thursday diary entry for Slate.

It's always interesting to me how different artists respond to their critical reception. Some won't read anything, while others voraciously read it all. Still others have more elaborate lines of defense—think of the Maginot line but it actually holding. Various colleagues have detailed for me their personal rituals on the subject, and each time I find it fascinating. Certain artists will read just theater reviews, while a different number of them will glance only at film reviews, and all for different reasons. For most of them, the critics seem to be a kind of mild annoyance. The collective image they project is that of Orestes, being slowly but perpetually chased across the horizon by furies. My feeling on the subject, however, is pretty simple: Read everything and believe nothing.

It's very healthy, that. If he's never wracked by self-doubt after a negative review, even for a tiny bit, well, he's a stronger person than most.

Mille Millions de Mille Sabords

A major Tintin exhibit, put together by a lifelong fan, will soon leave France for London. The museum's curator gives the maritime details in the Herge classic high marks for verisimilitude. No word, though, on Herge's portrayal of colonized people.

The Arab Proconsul

The Atlantic has a profile of General John Abizaid (under the lame title "Abizaid of Arabia") in their December issue.

John Abizaid graduated from West Point in 1973, ranked forty-second out of 944 in the class that just missed Vietnam. Above his yearbook photo is the cryptic caption "The 'Mad Arab' came from the deserts of the West to become a star-man"—a reference to Abizaid's Lebanese roots, to his California home town of Coleville, and to the star insignia he was entitled to wear for being in the top five percent of his class.

The article describes the rest of Abizaid's career in very flattering terms. Rumsfeld must be happy.

November 20, 2003

There Should Be A Moratorium

on cutesy names like "momoirs." Here's an article on what Generation-X can teach us about parenting, which is to say, not much that you couldn't figure out on your own.

The Mufti Was Being Sarcastic Is My Guess

Taslima Nasreen, who had to flee Bangladesh after the publication of Lajja, has a new book out, Ka, a thinly veiled authobiography. This time she's in the cross-hairs of fellow author, who was upset that she portrayed him as taking two women to a guesthouse and leaving drunk (the horror!). The book's distribution was stopped after that author filed suit. But now, Nasreen is being thanked for her courage by an unlikely group: the religious party IOJ. Nasreen is currently a fellow at Harvard.

King Honor

Does a standing ovation count when you pay for sixty of your closest friends to be in attendance? (Link via Moby) We like you Stephen, we really do. And you didn't even have to buy us dinner.

November 19, 2003

Spencer Piece

Scott Spencer talks about the thrills of being nominated for the National Book Award, for A Ship Made of Paper. (The other finalists are T.C. Boyle, Shirley Hazzard, Edward P. Jones and Marianne Wiggins.) For Spencer, the accolades are great, but not nearly as exciting as publishing his first book

''I've had a lot of really good things happen to me in my career, but I don't think I've had anything that meant as much to me as having my first novel published,'' he said, leaning forward slightly in his armchair. ''It was like having my identity validated. I got my ticket punched, I wasn't going to be asked to leave the room.''

Amis on Bellow

Martin Amis has a tribute to Saul Bellow in the December issue of The Atlantic.

The American novel, having become dominant, was in turn dominated by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul Bellow. His was and is a pre-eminence that rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath.

Amis talks about the preoccupations of Saul Bellow's characters, and adds:

Of course, the Jewish-American novel subsumes the experience of the immigrant, with an "old country" at one remove; and the emphasis is on the anxiety of entitlement (marked in Roth, too, and in Malamud). It is not an anxiety about succeeding, about making good; it is an anxiety about the right to pronounce, the right to judge—about the right to write.

Amis proceeds to compare Bellow with other writers, and concludes that the only one that poses any serious trouble is Henry James.

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake

I spent the day trying to get over my cold but had time to finish reading The Namesake. I had enjoyed Interpreter of Maladies and so I'd been waiting for this book with great expectation. But The Namesake disappointed me. The book is exceedingly well-written and the characters carefully drawn and very engaging. Still, I found that the numerous descriptions sometimes substituted for plot and that certain writerly tics (lists, for example) became obvious in this longer work, whereas they weren't in the short stories. Next up is The Margaret-Ghost by Barbara Novak.

November 18, 2003

There You Have It

Maud is sick. Old Hag is sick. And I'm sick. The simultaneity of our symptoms is further proof that we're all part of a literary cabal.

Late Bloomer

It took twelve years to write, but Virginia Stuart stuck with it. She was working on a tale of three Danish sisters who rescue Jews during the holocaust, and now at age 89, she just published the novel.

The Time Traveler's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger talks to the Globe and Mail about how she got the idea for the book.

The Time Traveler's Wife is the story of Henry DeTamble, a librarian with Chrono-Displacement disorder, a rare genetic condition that transports him through time and space, mostly to periods within his own life. It's during one of these jaunts that the Mobius strip of cause and effect takes shape: A married, middle-aged Henry first meets his wife Clare as a six-year-old girl. The book chronicles their tortured relationship through past, present and future.

She also talks about what happened after Brad and Jen took an interest in her work.

Chabon Work in Progress

Michael Chabon's novel in progress is about a little know fact of U.S. history: that, in 1939, the U.S. Interior Department recommended that the Alaskan territory be settled with laborers from around the world, including Jewish refugees. The bill never passed, but Chabon's book, tentatively titled Hotzeplotz, asks what if? What if Jews had indeed been allowed to immigrate to Alaska?
Link via The Elegant Variation.

More Impac Coverage

can be found here. And again Jeffrey Eugenides seems to be a favorite.

Letters to Dubya

Letters to George Bush on the occasion of his damage-control trip to Britain. Some are models of conciseness, such as the one by DBC Pierre:

Dear Jorge,

Look out! Behind you!!

Hahahahahahahaha, only kidding.

Love,

DBC Pierre
Novelist

Or take, for example, Salam Pax's missive, in which he calls George habibi. Other letters in the batch are poems by Harold Pinter and Andrew Motion, admonitions to get real, or pleas to come off it. For good measure, there's even one or two letters thrown in in support of Bush.

Workspace

Amy Tan's workspace. She's got built-in shelves. And within arm's reach, too! That's something I've always wanted, so when we move to Portland in early January I'm hoping we'll find a place that has some.

Impac Longlist Announced

The longlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has been announced, with A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, and Jeffrey Eugenides making the cut, among many others. The (hefty) prize is international: It's open to any author, for a work in any language, and nominations are made by librarians around the world. This makes for an eclectic longlist, with such selections as Tahar Ben Jelloun for This Blinding Absence of Light, or Ismail Kadare for Spring Flowers, Spring Frost. Last year's winner was Orhan Pamuk for My Name is Red. Visit the IMPAC website for the full longlist.

Political Hopeful Books

Howard Kurtz has a wrap up of books about presidential hopefuls John Kerry, John Edwards, and Howard Dean. The book on Kerry is about his tour of duty in Vietnam and portrays his ambivalence at the effects of the war. Edwards' book portrays him as a lawyer fighting for the little guy. And the book about Dean is a chronicle of the Vermont governor's rise and his sometime problematic relationship with the media. Kurtz spends the better part of the article talking about Dean, though: Is he or isn't he electable?

We Get Hate Mail

This one made me laugh because of all the trouble the writer took to disguise his email as a comment, complete with a fake IP (plucked from NASA, of all places) and which promises that:

it's going to be the Muslims against Christianity, and one day, we're going to incinerate all you bastards --make your home a glass parking lot with your stinking sh*t eating grin looking up wondering what the hel* happened!

November 17, 2003

Billionaire Author

There are now 250 million copies of the Harry Potter books in print. J.K's Rowling in money. Heh. Sorry.

Kureishi Interview

The Guardian has an interview with Hanif Kureishi, the acclaimed author, playwright and screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette, My Son the Fanatic, The Buddha of Suburbia, etc.) His latest book is about a woman in her seventies, sex life included. The interview tackles the inevitable subjects of race (which I believe Maud already excerpted) and gender, as well as his writing routine.

He gets up early and writes every day. He writes loads, he says. "That's all I do all day. I'm always writing. I'm an obsessive. It's not because I'm a disciplined person. It's because I'm crazy about it." His most depressed period, he says, was when he had just left university and was waiting to see if any real writing talent might emerge; if it hadn't, he says, he would have had to become an academic. But it did, and he started writing plays for the Royal Court theatre. One of the characters in The Mother is a failed writer, a woman whose ambition is unmatched by ability and who Kureishi depicts, in this pathetic state, with a little too much relish.

You can also visit Kureishi's website.

Best Of

Publishers Weekly has put out a list of the best books of 2003. Here's the fiction and the non-fiction lists. I was excited that Persepolis made the cut in the Comics list. And from the department of Go Figure, the religion rundown doesn't have anything on Islam.

Inauguration

Ahnold gets sworn in today. We can expect a repeal of the car tax shortly, but in order to replace the money it would have raised we can expect, well, what do you know, cuts into social services, the very thing the Terminator promised he wouldn't do. Meanwhile, Gray Davis is taking driving lessons and mulling a comeback on a technicality.

November 16, 2003

TBR Issue

The November/December 2003 issue of The Barcelona Review is up.

PAM Is A Go

Last summer, after the furor raised over DARPA's plans to start a futures market on Middle-East events under the leadership of John Poindexter, the Policy Market Analysis was scrapped. But now it looks like the program is a go, yet again, with private funding, though it's unclear who is behind it. (The site says it's "free of government involvement.") Doesn't that make you feel better?
Link via DailyKos.

There's No Such Thing As Bad Publicity

Jennifer Howard mentions Moorishgirl in this Sunday column for the Washington Post. I found the article entertaining, if uninformed. Others weigh in with their thoughts. What irks me is that she didn't mention I was a writer. Sniff.

The Last Jihad

Who needs character development and careful plots when you can write about suicide pilots and Jihad? Who needs book tours when you've got Sean Hannity and other conservatives plugging your book? Who cares if your novel is "an act of terrorism on the reader's brain" when you can make the NY Times Bestseller list? Read more on Joel C. Rosenberg's novel here.

Donovan Profile

In this profile, Anne Donovan, the author of Buddha Da, which was nominated for a Whitbread Award earlier this week, talks about her decision to use Glasgow dialect:

Her decision to write in the Glasgow "patter", which could have thwarted her rise, has in fact propelled it, with the Whitbread judges describing it as "humorous and heartfelt, both original in style and rich in language and dialect". "It’s gratifying that a book written in dialect should be getting this attention. We know James Kelman won the Booker, but he’s in a different league."

Farewell Mohammed Choukri

I've just heard that Moroccan author Mohammed Choukri passed away this weekend at his home in Tangier. A contemporary and friend of Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles (with whom he later had a falling out), and others, Choukri is probably best known for his semi-autobiographical novel Al-Khubz Al-Hafi, which dealt with his adolescence during the famine of the 1940s and his experiences with drugs, homosexuality, and prostitution. The novel was translated into English by Bowles and into French by Tahar Ben Jelloun (himself an accomplished writer and Goncourt Prize winner.) The novel was intermittently banned in Morocco. In my hometown of Rabat, you could walk down to Kalila Wa Dimna and ask for the novel and sometimes they would carry the French version (never the Arabic one), and other times not, depending on how "subversive" the government judged it to be. Since 2001, however, I'm told that the book is widely available, in both the original Arabic and in translation. Choukri is also the author of Streetwise, as well as a non-fiction book on Jean Genet's life in Tangier. His loss is unendurable.

November 14, 2003

The Hot Reverend

Another one of these rags-to-big-advance stories, this time for Graham Taylor's Shadowmancer.

Writers on Politics

Writer/filmmaker John Pilger writes about what he sees as "the silence of writers."

That the menace of great and violent power in our own times is apparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of those who guard the gates of literary criticism, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out - a responsibility felt by even the unpolitical Ernest Hemingway. (...)
What would George Orwell make of [a new world order desired by Downing Street]? There is a series of Orwell events planned to mark the centenary of his birth. Most of those participating are politically safe or accredited liberal warriors. What if Orwell had turned Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four into parables about thought control in relatively free societies, in which he identified the disciplined minds of the corporate state and the invisible boundaries of liberal control and the latest fashions in emperor's clothes? Would they still celebrate him?

I don't know that there is as much silence as Pilger thinks. Plenty of writers speak their minds about politics: Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie all have given their two cents on the very topics that Pilger brings up. Whether people care what writers say in another matter. And who will turn out to be Orwell among these is for the future to decide.
Pilger link from Kitabkhana.

Edward P. Jones Interview

The Boston Globe has an interview with Edward P. Jones, the author of The Known World.

He got a few temporary college teaching assignments after "Lost in the City" appeared, but kept his job, while casting about for a new story to write. In the back of his mind was a fact he had learned at Holy Cross: that there had been black slaveholders in the antebellum South. For more than 20 years, that fact had gnawed at his imagination.
He says, "It was a shock that there were black people who would take part in a system like that. Why didn't they know better?" It could make a fine story, perhaps a novel, but by 2001 all he had written was six pages of the first chapter and six of the last. He had been writing the rest in his head.

Dreams

I had a dream in which I was having a conversation with T.C. Boyle. Maybe I've been reading too much of Brokentype lately.

November 13, 2003

Oh, All Right

So far I've resisted Old Hag's call for the crybaby list, but what the hell. Here it goes. Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven. Babe. Yes. I know. Anything by Oum Kalthoum. Pretty much every scene in the Pianist.

Another Accolade

First it was the Guardian's Children's Fiction Prize. Now Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has won the inaugural Booktrust Teenage Prize. But Haddon is also making the adult lists, too, like the Whitbread shorlist.

Speaking of the Post Office

I saw this Post-It Note at the priority mail counter at the post office, left behind by someone: "P.S.-Don't tell anyone you have proof of the next world--that always upsets the people who manipulate belief and faith for their income. Look how they treated Jesus." Consider yourselves warned.

His Degrees are from Mars

I heard this on NPR on my way to the post office this morning: John Gray, the best-selling author of the Men are from Mars series is a fabulist. His Ph.D. is from a school that will give you a degree in three days for 500 bucks. Now I feel bad about the 100 grand it cost to get mine.

November 12, 2003

AHDR Report -- Take Two

I had to rush out earlier this afternoon and couldn't finish typing up the entire entry on the Arab Human Development Report, so it's updated now. In addition, reader Elizabeth Angell writes in to point out that

Another important flaw in [the figure of 330 books per year] is that it apparently only takes into account authorized translations for which copyright has been purchased, thus ignoring the large number of unauthorized translated editions of western books that are sold in the Arab world.

Anniversary Issue

The 50th anniversary issue of the Paris Review is out, with an introduction by the late George Plimpton. The issue has work by Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Edna O'Brien, Ian McEwan, among many others. From the archives, they have an interview with Chinua Achebe. When asked to talk about what inspired him to write, Achebe answers:

I think the thing that clearly pointed me there was my interest in stories. Not necessarily writing stories, because at that point, writing stories was not really viable. So you didn't think of it. But I knew I loved stories, stories told in our home, first by my mother, then by my elder sister -- such as the story of the tortoise -- whatever scraps of stories I could gather from conversations, just from hanging around, sitting around when my father had visitors. When I began going to school, I loved the stories I read. They were different, but I loved them too. (...) When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp . . . fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal.
Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn't know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb, that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail, the bravery, even, of the lions.

They also have an article from the archives on the friendship and feud between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov.

Wolff Interview

The Atlantic just posted an interview with Tobias Wolff.

Arab Human Development Report

The release last year of the Arab Human Development Report by the United Nations Development Program created a flurry of attention, especially the part about translation numbers in the Arab world. (The entire Arab world translates only about 330 books annually, fewer than Greece. A Harper's reader later pointed out that the U.S., which boasts one of the biggest publishing industries in the world, translates roughly 330 books a year as well. Insularity is apparently alive and well everywhere.) At any rate, this year, a new AHDR is out. You can read an executive summary here.
The report focuses on three areas that are significant for development: freedom, women's empowerment, and knowledge. The AHDR finds that civil and political freedoms have been curtailed in the last year, in part as a consequence of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror. In contrast, there was some progress for women's empowerment, illustrated by greater participation in politics, among other things. But the largest portion of the report was devoted to the third area: building a knowledge society. While the output in the sciences (which require a greater amount of funding) is staggeringly low, in the arts there is a "wealth of distinguished literary and artistic work." But writers and publishers must face censors, a low readership rate, and low purchasing power of potential readers.
The report summary makes for very interesting reading, though the language can get unnecessarily flowery:

The outcome of this encounter was a renovation and modernization of the Arab cultural heritage, descending from the past, opening wide to the future and drawing abundantly on the sinews of modernization and the rich crop of Western production in all fields of knowledge, science, the arts, literature and technology.

In addition, the numbers cited in the summary are often not put in context:

There are less than 53 newspapers per 1000 Arab citizens, compared to 285 papers per 1000 people in developing countries.

The figures are not followed by numbers on lower literacy rates, nor by any mention of the availability of foreign newspapers in Arab countries. Sometimes it's difficult to make sense of the numbers cited:

There are just 18 computers per 1000 people in the region, compared to the global average of 78.3 percent per 1000 people and only 1.6 pecent of the population has Internet access.

Some proofreading would have been welcome here, as it's difficult to understand what the 78.3 refers to. Is it 78.3 computers? Or 78.3 percent of people that have access to computers? It's confusing at best. None of this is to say that the report doesn't make some fair observations, of course.
In addition, the report talks about the Arabic language, its use in education, and the way it is taught. Report writers note that Classical Arabic has ceased to be a spoken language. I found the word "ceased" to be a bit amusing, considering that Arabic has been for a long, long time, in a state of diglossia (meaning that there are two language forms, one a Classical, written form used in formal situations, the other a spoken variety, used in every day speech. Greek used to be in diglossia, but eventually the spoken form was used in writing.) The report writers say that it's become necessary to "strengthen the practical attributes of Arabic" but it's unclear what, specifically, they mean by this. Lastly, the report mentions the Arab Brain Drain, whereby university graduates emigrate at a steady rate toward more developed countries, contributing to a "form of reverse development aid." The report calls for the use of this Arab Diaspora by tapping its knowledge and expertise and by providing incentives for it to return, either temporarily or for good.
The AHDR report has already been picked up for comment by news outlets, for example by the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune talks mostly about the problems characterizing the Arab publishing world (poor output, larger focus on religious books than in other countries, etc.) although it doesn't challenge the report in any way (e.g. comparisons with Greece are unwarranted when literacy rates are not comparable.)

Vasanji Interview

The Toronto Star has an interview with The In-Between World Of Vikram Lall author and Giller prize winner Moyez Vasanji, in which he talks about how someone decided for him that he would study civil engineering (not electrical, as he wished), the history of East Indians in Kenya, his move to Toronto, the book he wanted to write about President Kenyatta, and the book he ended up writing.

Apologia

Sorry for the lack of posts yesterday. I was having a panic attack about the Great Novel Project (tm), but hopefully things should improve today.