January 29, 2004

Plan B

Recently unsealed documents explain how Winston Churchill ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, beating the likes of Robert Frost, Graham Greene, and Ernest Hemingway.

Readings in Portland

Nafisi will read from her highly acclaimed book Reading Lolita in Tehran at 7:30 pm on Friday at Annie Bloom's Books. Then on Monday, Ha Jin is in Portland for the paperback tour of The Crazed. He will be at Powell's at 7:30 pm.

Mailer at 81

The Scotsman has a profile of Norman Mailer on the writer's eighty-first birthday.

Two factors have denied [Mailer] the accolades he deserves. First, he has produced no incontrovertibly great book. The Naked and the Dead is a young man�s work, visceral, na�ve, derivative, shapelessly insightful. For all his obsession with the novel as a form - he calls it "great Bitch Goddess" - Mailer has only produced one novel that flirts with greatness and again the "intertextuality" is a giveaway.

Read the article in full here.

Life Gets In The Way...

Of even the most dedicated bloggers. Expect more of the same for at least a couple of days. The unpacking should be finished, the house cleaned, the laptop fixed, and the blog on track by Monday. The decorating will have to wait a while.

January 26, 2004

Agent Orange Digested

The Guardian has the digested read of Tim Guest's My Life in Orange, his memoir of growing up on an ashram with his mother.

How I longed to punish the children who stole my toys and the mother who put her enlightenment before her only child. See in this photograph how lost and frightened, yet somehow strangely beautiful, I appear. My eyes are looking far into the distance - to my literary career. So I chose to say nothing and smile. Until now.

Their final assessment is brutal: "As toxic as you'd expect from Agent Orange."

More Brick Lane Attention

In the latest issue of The Boston Review is yet another article about Monica Ali's Brick Lane. The reviewer faults Ali for not bringing into her fiction the events of April 1999, when bombs aimed at the people who live on Brick Lane were detonated by a member of the British National Party. Although I'm not entirely comfortable with passing judgment on what someone didn't do, I do agree that Ali shied away from exploring the world outside Nazneen's apartment. There are a few scenes in which Nazneen reflects on the outside world, but, by and large, we are indeed restricted to her thoughts about Chanu, about Hasina, about her daughters, about her lover. The reviewer then goes on to compare Ali's novel to (what else?) Zadie Smith's White Teeth and uncovers many "similarities", like the fact that characters in both novels had arranged marriages to older men. Ha! Isn't arranged marriage a fact of life for many Bangladeshi women? Why would two novels that have such characters not feature this type of union? The rest of the parallels that the reviewer draws fall largely within the immigrant experience in England, and so the argument struck me as unconvincing and unfair. But the reviewer does make the point that, had Ali's book explored certain less palatable aspects of the immigrant experience, her book might not have been the huge success that it was. And he or she is probably right.

(Link seen at The Antic Muse)

R.I.P. Munif

Abdel-Rahman Munif passed away today. Here is the Washington Post obit and a more detailed article on Al-J. An oil engineer turned writer, Munif was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1963 for his critical stance on the government, and lived in Syria for the last fifteen years of his life. Here in the U.S. his best-known work is probably the Cities of Salt series. The books examine the effect of the discovery of oil on a small Arab village. Please do check him out, even if Amazon can't seem to get the spelling of his name right.

(Via TEV)

Monday Morning Blog Entry

Much as I'd like my excuse to be one of the more exciting ones Ed succintly put together, mine is much more mundane: The fan on my laptop is fried, and I have to spend the morning doing back ups before the Dell guy picks it up for repair.

January 23, 2004

Bouzfour Rejects Prize

Like the Egyptian Sonallah Ibrahim late last year, Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouzfour has rejected a literary prize awarded by the government. The prize (for which Bouzfour tied with writer Ouafae Amrani) was intended to honor his latest collection of short stories, Qounqous. Bouzfour rejected the prize in order to protest the government's incapability to deal with Morocco's literacy problem. The refusal is costly to him: the $8,000 prize is a hefty sum in a country where a schoolteacher makes about $300 a month. Bouzfour's fiction has been translated into Spanish, French, and English.

January 22, 2004

Quickies

The new issue of StorySouth is up, and it includes a special feature on the best young southern poets. And of course, you can send your nomination for best online story of 2003 to their Million Writers award.

Elsewhere, Facsimilation is open for business and they take unsolicited submissions, so send them your prose.

The Screech That Won't Be Heard

It seems that the winning entry from MoveOn.Org's bushin30seconds contest will not be run during the Super Bowl. CBS is refusing to air it. Go here for details. (Thanks to Sarah S. for the link.)

Doesn't Backlash Entail Some Sort of Success First?

Cecelia Ahern, who happens to be the daughter of the prime minister of Ireland, and who, at 22, received mountains of money for her first novel is now facing a backlash before the book is even out.

More Lunacy

Only a week after the infamous attacks in Pune, which resulted in the sacking of thousands of rare manuscripts, it seems hooligans attacked a poet in Bangalore, India because they disagreed with his poem. This is starting to get quite worrisome. I do note, of course, that the hooligans' religious affiliation (Hindu) goes unmentioned and unrelated to the crimes at hand in this case, something that would surely have been different in other parts of the world.

New Hamid Novel

Mohsin Hamid, the author of Moth Smoke, defends his book from the "Orientalist" charge in this article. Hamid is at work on a second novel, set in post-September 11 New York.

Kabul Play

American playwright William Mastrosimone wants to stage his play "The Afghan Women" in Kabul. The staging faces many challenges from the obvious (the theater has neither a roof nor seating) but the playwright is upbeat.

"The stage would in any case be best lit with flaming torches, he said, making the best of the city's regular blackouts.

January 21, 2004

Hit The Sack

One more reason to hit the sack. I probably won't be able to blog too much tomorrow as I have to work on my novel and continue the job search, but I should have something on that stupid new French law at some point, on top some pre-posted lit fare.

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

Now that I finally have a new address I was able to order the last volume of Persepolis. This last installment takes Marji from her return to Iran as a teenager, through her tribulations as she studies arts in Tehran, to her relationship with a fellow arts major. I enjoyed it tremendously (and will probably write my thoughts in more detail when the book comes out here. Volumes 1 and 2 of Persepolis were previously released in the U.S. together in one edition. )

Itinerary of WMD Announced

Well, they went to Syria. And then, after that, they were shipped to Iran, and then to Libya. Wait, scratch Libya, they were rerouted to er...Lebanon?

We Do Hope It's A Joke

R.I.P., Yankee Pot Roast. You know they'll get hits for stealing Haypenny's thunder. Those guys are good.

Up Next: How Madagascan Fauna Escaped Evolution, Er, Creation

News surfaced last week that a book with a creationist view of how the Grand Canyon developed was being sold at the park's bookstore. Now the park service has been inundated with e-mails, "equally divided between those who have a "scientific view" and want "religion" kept out of the parks, and those who believe that the book represents an accurate view of the federally managed Grand Canyon's origins."

Or They're Blogging

[Louis de Bernières is] currently working on another novel, and two short story collections, but is not one of your "method writers" who rise at 5:30 every morning to read their mail, work out at the gym then hammer out their daily 3,000 words. "I only write when I feel moved by the spirit," he declares, and when I mention that many writers insist that the only way is daily hard graft, sorting the gems from the dross, he is unrepentant. "I think that’s against the spirit of art," he remarks, then grins slyly: "And you have to remember that lots of writers are liars. They’ll tell you they work every morning because they want people to think they’ve got a proper job. Actually they’re going shopping or looking at things on the internet."

De Bernières is interviewed in the Scotsman.

What's The World Coming To?

When Arab-Americans can vote? That's their last weapon, these evil, evil ay-rabs. They will use that vote, they will take over the country, they will eat your young, blah blah blah.

January 20, 2004

New PBoz, New TBR, New Granta

This week's offerings from Pindeldyboz include fiction by Myfanwy Collins, Jeff Barnosky, M.O. Walsh, Ruth Almon, and Wendy Ogden.

The latest issue of The Barcelona Review is now up, with work by Leelila Strogov, Simmone Howell and Connla Strokes, plus a retrospective on Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

Granta has highlights from its "Over There" issue available freely on the Web. The editors asked a bunch of writers to talk about how America sees the world (you'll want to read this in conjunction with their previous issue, which was on how outsiders see America.) I wanted to direct readers to Murad Kalam's piece, where he talks about the time he spent in Egypt and his disillusionment with the Arab-Muslim world (or what he's seen of it.) I have to say I do agree with him about the "tyranny that now masquerades as Islam" though I wish he had elaborated a bit more on that and tried to tease the political from the liturgical.

I Can Relate, Sister

In today's Slate,Aimee Nezhukumatathil has a poem titled "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."* It opens thus:

On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students Don't be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule

is chopped off or probably misspelled—
or both. I can't help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels

Read the rest of the poem here.

*the fear of long words

In Trouble For Scary Story

An eleven-year-old boy from New York was suspended from school for writing a story after the Halloween films in which he cast himself as Michael Myers and his classmates as other characters. The school allegedly made him take psychology tests without permission and later suspended him. It gets ugly from there.

Department of WTF, Part 56

I received five hits from a Paris Hilton Video blog. WTF?

Mise Au Point

If you landed here from this Scotsman article, welcome. I do wish to reassure you that there is no competition here at Moorishgirl with other literary blogs (there's plenty of room for everyone). Also, I've moved out of L.A. and now live in scenic Portland. Lastly, I think David Sexton meant to refer to this discussion at the end of the article, when he spoke of reviewing the past year in books.

NBCC Nominees

The Washington Post has a brief article on the NBCC Nominees. Edward Jones' The Known World, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore, Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing and Tobias Wolff's Old School were the fiction selections.

It Takes Even Longer To Write Them, Andy

You can write an op-ed today that runs tomorrow, set up a Web site that sells toys in a day or two, get a million signatures and recall a governor in a couple of months. But for some reason, it takes two years to get a book published.

Andy Kessler rails about the amount of time it took him to get his book published, and what he did about it. His is a tale that is becoming increasingly common, it seems: an author self-publishes, sells copies through word-of-mouth and round-the-clock self-promotion, and then finally someone buys the paperback rights. But that still won't make the paperback version come out any faster.

January 19, 2004

Hook Me Up, Part II

I'd love to hang out a bit longer today, but can't as I have to update my resume and start looking for a job. All good things must come to an end, and so it is with my sabbatical. E-mail me if you know of any leads in Portland.

Jennifer Howard Was Right

All Hail Lizzie's first review for the New York Times. Does that mean we have to start being, like, nice to her? (in case our latest, as-yet-to-be-published book, which is currently seeking representation, manages to get a contract and is eventually published and, more improbably, gets to be reviewed by her colleagues, or (gasp!) by her?) Lizzie, we hasten to add, is neither old nor a hag. In fact, besides being a NYBTR reviewer, she is a great blogger, a prolific writer of YA novels, a gifted poet, and a witty journalist.

On The Road on the road

The original scroll manuscript for On The Road will be touring the United States for the next three years. It won't be on the left coast till 2006.

Updike on Kureishi

John Updike reviews Hanif Kureishi's new novel, The Body, in which an older writer has his mind transplanted into the supple, younger body of a Los Angeles man of 25.

Perhaps no novel can do justice to the ancient and still popular concept of leaving our bodies, which are both our enablers and our prisons. Our relation to our bodies lies deeper than circumstance, undemonstrable and irrefutable, along with the sensation that there is a relation, of one thing to something else, though materialist science tells us that out of our bodies we are nothing.

The review was generally positive, though.

Big Screen Adaptation

The Little Prince is going to be made into a movie by the same folks who made Chicken Run. Here's hoping that Mel Gibson won't be doing the

Beyond Book

There is life after Book. In fact, this article has a list of book-related magazines. (Requires registration.)

RIP

Haypenny has gone belly up. You can read the editors' ultimate sign-off here.

January 16, 2004

SSN Print

Small Spiral Notebook is launching a print edition this winter, and the first issue includes fiction by Tara Wray, Paul A. Toth, David Barringer, Brian Ames, and Felicia Sullivan, as well as interviews with Aimee Bender and Beth Ann Bauman. You can pre-order a copy here.

Something To Try For Writer's Block?

The Telegraph has an article on absinthe.

Its literary devotees believed absinthe freed the imagination. According to Wilde, the first stage in its consumption was "like ordinary drinking", in the second "you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful and curious things". At one time or another, both the brilliance and the mental problems of many artists and writers, from van Gogh to Strindberg, have been attributed to absinthe.

Somewhere in there is a book review, too.

Hemingway and Evans

Photographs that had been stored by Ernest Hemingway at Sloppy Joe's in Key West are said to be those that had been given him by Walker Evans when the two were in Cuba in the 1930s. You can see some of Walker Evans' other photographs here.

Tintin Test

So I scored 7 out of 10: Not bad (but no cigar, Pharaoh or otherwise). I would have taken the quiz a bit more seriously if they'd spelled Georges Rémi correctly.

January 15, 2004

Closing Shop Early

I've got a chapter to write, a new book to read, kitchen floors to clean, and it's a slow news day. Be back soon.

Leonard Reading

You gotta love the headline of this piece on an Elmore Leonard reading in Palm Beach, Florida. Dude, if there were any secrets, wouldn't they be out by now? The PB Post writer continues waxing about said secrets well into the article.

[Elmore Leonard] lifted the veil several times in his talk, making unbelievable literary success sound unbelievably simple. It involves setting up chapters as scenes, and letting the characters talk. Leonard said he simply tries to be invisible.

So now you know the secret. What are you waiting for? Go and write.

January 14, 2004

Hannibal the Movie

I would normally have been excited at the prospect of a new movie about Hannibal and the Punic wars, but then this article says that it will star Vin Diesel. Blah.

And You Thought You Had It Bad

China, a nation of 1 billion people, has 900 literary magazines, only 90 of which manage to turn out some profit. The reasons, according to this symposium are that:

First, chief editors are appointed by governing bodies of magazines or some government officials. As a result, in most cases, seniority enjoys top priority in such personnel maneuvers and many retired officials who are ignorant of literature are given the posts of editor-in-chief. Second, some writers become editors-in-chief after they become prominent. Chief editors with such backgrounds are sometimes biased, narrow-minded or weak in managerial capability and tend to form charmed circles around them.

Bitter Fruit

The Guardian has a piece on Achmat Dangor's new novel, Bitter Fruit, loosely based on Dangor's own family history.

The book is set at a time when euphoric illusions following the end of apartheid are being shattered as the country deals with unexpected economic realities and the Aids pandemic. Dangor chose to dramatise this fraught period through the story of another rape and its aftermath. Bitter Fruit starts with its chief male protagonist, Silas, noticing someone familiar in a shopping mall. The man turns out to be the Afrikaaner cop who 20 years ago had raped Silas's black wife, Lydia, when the couple were detained for working for the ANC. The sighting unleashes a potent family drama: the couple's carefully negotiated marriage starts to fall apart; their son, conceived in the rape, becomes a Muslim fundamentalist and an avenger every bit as committed as Dangor's real grandfather; the family is torn apart in ways it could not have imagined - just as their country is.

Another one to add to the reading list.

It's Never What You Expect

A Fulbright scholar wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor about his experience in Morocco. In a nutshell, it's not what he expected. One thing I found interesting in the piece is that political protests (against the war, for example) were peaceful and undisturbed, but social protests (against the Al-Najat scam, whereby thousands of young people paid "application fees" for jobs that turned out to be non-existent) were repressed. The rest of the article didn't surprise me: no one hurled stones at the scholar, or called him names, or any such nonsense. He got dinner invitations instead.

Thanks to Michelle for the link.

January 13, 2004

Don Quixote Review

How—without feeling as addled as its hero—to try to say something new about Don Quixote? About the work once singled out by the Nobel Institute as the greatest novel of all time? After imperishable tributes by Fielding, Sterne, Samuel Johnson, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Faulkner, Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Lukács, Borges, Paz, Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera? The lowly academic hack—in this case female, a plumpish Sanchita Panza, without donkey or wineskin or really much more than turista Spanish—feels especially unqualified. And besides, who really cares?

Not sure what the "female" part has to do with it, but anyhow Terry Castle gives it a try: she reviews the new translation by Edith Grossman in the Atlantic.

Kesey Journals

Ken Kesey's notebooks from his stint in jail for marijuana possession will be out in print soon, though the collection is incomplete because two of the notebooks were confiscated before Kesey's release.

"[W]riting novels was part of the overall way [Kesey] manifested his creativity, but that was never the original plan. Everything he ever did had graphic visual art. His clothing. His rake and ax have painted handles. He was an artist. The floor of his living room is a gigantic mandala. He did that all the time. And he was good," [Editor David Sanborn] says.

The article is worth a read, if only for the oddly conservative description of San Francisco ca. 1967 as a "freak show."

It's Called A 'Roman A Clef'

Richard Perle, the loathsome advisor at the Defense Policy Board, wrote a novel (titled, predictably enough, Hard Line) which is now out of print. The Boston Globe's Mark Schone dug it up for review.

The glowering, caterpillar-browed Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, has long been known as the Prince of Darkness for his ber-hawkish views. He is also a gourmet chef. These days, when he isn't devouring coq au vin at his vacation home in Provence, he's serving on the Defense Policy Board, an influential civilian advisory panel to the Pentagon. Harvard professor Michael Waterman, the menschy hero of "Hard Line," is also a right-wing, Frenchified foodie with a No. 2 position at Defense, a house in Chevy Chase and a wife whose name begins with L. In early 2001, the New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann visited Perle at home and realized that the gurgling French stewpots in the lavishly appointed kitchen were straight out of the book.
What Lemann did not know at the time was just how realistic "Hard Line" would prove to be. The novel was meant as a roman clef of the Cold War. But it prefigures, in detail, the Bush administration's rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

I'd love to get my hands on this book, actually, and find out what's in store for the next few years of neo-con policy. For more a recent article on Richard Perle himself, you could start with this one by Seymour Hersch.

Memories of Kreisau

The Boston Globe has a very positive review of Memories of Kreisau and the German Resistance, and the article whetted my appetite.

By 1940, [Freya von Moltke's husband, Helmut von Moltke] had begun to organize secret meetings with other prominent Germans to discuss the future of the nation after the end of the war and the collapse of the Third Reich, which they viewed as inevitable. This was high treason, and very dangerous. Three of the major meetings took place during weekends on the farm in Kreisau, where Freya served as hostess.
Members of the group were also involved in the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944. Helmuth James, in prison on another charge, was not a direct participant. Nevertheless, in January 1945, he was executed for his role. The Gestapo dubbed his cadre of resisters the "Kreisau Circle." Of the 21 members listed in the book, seven were executed.

I'll have to add this to my reading list.

Yet Another One

of these articles about an author who has a big life crisis, takes a year to write a novel, which is at first rejected by short-sighted agents, but a third signs on, sells it for an obscene amount of money, etc.

January 12, 2004

Next Up: Pamela Anderson and the Plight of Child Maids

The Herald Sun has an article on the new celebrity publishing phenomenon of the humanitarian playmate. The books feature designer-clad actresses trying to draw the world's attention to the plight of the less fortunate. I think charity ought to be welcomed regardless of the source, but the Beart book does sound unwittingly cynical.

The Price of Hiring Paul O'Neill

Everyone is talking about the Paul O'Neill book. I missed the Sixty Minutes interview because we still haven't hooked up the TV (and probably won't for another couple of weeks) but already I can see that O'Neill has so far come up with the best phrase to describe Bush and his Cabinet: "a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

That Depends On What You Mean By The Word "Connection"

The New York Times is reporting that less than a year before he entered the race, Clark said that there was a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. This of course flies in the face of everything he's said in the past eight-nine months. I'm be curious to see how he handles that one, and whether he'll take a page from the Clintonian book of definitions.

January 10, 2004

Immigrant Voices

We're dying to find out more about the cacophony over at the The Key West Literary Seminar which just took place in Florida, but this AP article offers no interesting tidbits. In fact, it reduces the sixteen panelists and three moderators to just one person: Amy Tan. If you've attended, send us all the details.

Heads In The Sand

Finally! It looks like that little feud is picking up. Actually, maybe I shouldn't have called it a feud, since a feud presumably involves two parties, and as far as I know Irvine Welsh has refrained from responding to Alexander McCall Smith's inane accusations. (Plus, Smith is trying to take back what he said.) But feud or not, AL Kennedy takes a stance in this piece for the Guardian:

It has come to my attention that even more Scottish people are typing now than in former, lovelier times. This may be the result of mass hysteria and poor hygiene, or may stem from a certain linguistic facility nourished by the Scottish education system (now finally deceased) and certain misguided traditions of self-education.
Whatever the cause, Scots must face the fact that - no matter how many well-meaning publishers open branch offices North of The Border - most of the writing produced will be of quite the Wrong Sort.

She goes on like this in her inimitable style and then concludes:

And, of course, Scotland today is justly renowned as a land entirely without poverty and crime. No one who lives here is ever lonely, or upset, ill, or worried, no one loses their job, raises their voice, swears, dislikes the weather or has a mild headache for a while. Our local and national government are not inefficient and corrupt and our executive's Holyrood premises won't eventually cost more than building a Scottish embassy on Mars. In short, we have no reason whatsoever to write anything other than lovely, slightly dusty histories, or fables involving Africa and Nice Ladies.

Good for her, I say.

Title Fights

Here's a longish article on the tortuous process of titling books. I wish Margaret Mitchell had gotten the title she wanted. Perhaps the world would have been saved from Gone With The Wind.

January 08, 2004

Newland and Habila

Helon Habila and Courttia Newland conclude their e-mail discussion over at the Guardian. Parts 1 and 2 were previously published here and here.

Million Writers Award

Story South is hosting a neat contest, called the Million Writers Award for fiction. The competition is for fiction published online during 2003, and anyone can nominate a story. The only requirement is that if you nominate a story, you make a commitment to email fifteen of your friends to tell them about the winning entry. The idea is to showcase fiction that's published online and to get more people to read these stories. Details available here.

Trust Us, They're Hotties

A new calendar featuring Palestinian poets and writers was recently put out by PAWA. Featured poets include Naomi Shihab Nye, Suheir Hammad, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Nathalie Handal, Liana Badr, etc. Contact Mary Harb (HA9501@aol.com) or Ahlam Abed (ahlam1114@hotmail.com) for orders.

Is The Universe Trying To Tell Us Something?

It rains in Portland. A lot. We knew that. We were prepared for that. But nothing could have prepared us for the bleeping blizzard we've been experiencing since our arrival here on Sunday. We haven't been able to leave the house since then, due to the snow, or ice, or both. We've depended on the kindness of our neighbors who've provided us with food when our pantry turned up only two packs of mac and cheese and a can of guava paste. Fortunately, we've been supremely busy with the unpacking and therefore memories of warm winters in California haven't quite resurfaced yet.

January 07, 2004

Lit Feud #55

Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency) is mad at Irvine Welsh. The reason? Welsh is too vulgar for Mr. Smith. He even calls Welsh "a travesty for Scotland." Smith says he won't even let his characters use profane language. I guess he must be one of those people who wishes to write about life as he likes to be, rather than how it is.

Update on Lamrabet

I just heard that Ali Lamrabet was pardoned today, along with several other journalists. I would have preferred for the courts to rectify his situation rather than the king, but at this point I'm too thrilled by the news of his release to be cynical. It's a good step forward in making sure that the notorious human rights abuses of the "lead years" (1960s-90s) won't be repeated.

January 06, 2004

MR Issue

The January 2004 issue of Mississippi Review is up. Go on over and take a look.

Portland Readings

Anthony Swofford will be reading at Powell's this Friday at 7 pm. You can see other Powell's events for January here.