November 30, 2004

Rivero Freed

The Cuban government has freed poet and journalist Raul Rivero, who has spent 18 months in jail.

Link first seen at Bookslut.

Soueif on NPR

Sylvia Poggioli's NPR piece about British Muslims focuses on the widening disconnect between Muslim youth and the culture they inhabit, but doesn't offer anything terribly new. For the literary-minded among us, however, there's an interesting exchange toward the end, with British-Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who just completed a new collection of essays titled Mezzaterra. The word refers to the common ground between cultures.

This was the world that my generation believed we had inherited, an area of overlap where one culture shaded into the other, where echoes and reflections added depth and perspective, where differences were interesting rather than threatening because they were foregrounded against a backdrop of affinities.

Soueif worries that this mezzaterra is being lost, that it's being quickly swallowed up by conservatives on both sides.

Chang & Birnbaum

Robert Birnbaum's latest interview is with Lan Samantha Chang, author of the short story collection Hunger, and whose first novel, Inheritance, took ten years to complete. A fair amount of the chat centers around origins, whether national or ethnic, and there are seemingly uncomfortable moments like this one:

RB: [laughs] When you meet people, where do you say you are from?
LSC: Wisconsin.
RB: Wow! Do people then treat you differently?
LSC: Being from the Midwest?
RB: Yeah. And being Chinese from the Midwest.
LSC: When you said “Wow,” did you mean, “Wow, you say you are from Wisconsin and you should be saying you are from another country?”
RB: I don’t know what I meant.

But the conversation eventually picks up and and they get to talk about how Chang came to writing, MFA programs, and, of course, Inheritance.

Susan Darraj Recommends

"Lalita Noronha's Where Monsoons Cry is an enlightening read," Susan Muaddi Darraj says. "It's a vibrant collection of short stories spanning two continents, from India to North America. The heroines of Noronha's stories are young Indian and Indian-American women, grappling with the cultural clash they face upon immigration, as well as the economic, social, and patriarchal issues that challenge them at home. These stories form a complex, colorful lens that offers a view into the lives of women who struggle to find a home in between the cultural divide. Noronha's writing is layered, colorful, and poetic. A recommended read."

Susan Muaddi Darraj is the editor of Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing, and the managing editor of The Baltimore Review. Her essays and fiction have appeared in anthologies such as Colonize This!, Catching a Wave and Dinarzad’s Children

If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

Capote Manuscript Found

A manuscript of an early novel byTruman Capote was found recently and is now being auctioned.

The first draft of "Summer Crossing" — the story of a 17-year-old girl who has been left in New York while her parents spend the summer in Europe — was at the bottom of a box of Capote manuscripts and photos that was consigned by a relative of Capote's former house sitter.

The sitter had been hired to look after Capote's Brooklyn apartment while he was in Switzerland writing In Cold Blood. After the book's publication, Capote simply abandoned his possessions in Brooklyn, and the lucky sitter inherited the box.

Another Addition to the Thriving Genre of Dic Lit

Not content with renaming the months of the year after himself Turkmenistan's potentate Saparmurat Niyazov, also known as Turkmenbashi, has now published a book of poetry. The oeuvre is called My People. My Country. My Dignity and Honor. Previous bestsellers in the genre include Zabiba and The King, by one Saddam Hussein.

Africa's Written Tradition

The idea that Africa had no written literary tradition is so ingrained in everyone's minds, it is rarely challenged. In an IHT piece, Philip Smucker describes a new project that seeks to restore thousands of manuscripts from Africa's so-called oral tradition, which were shared with readers using the bookmobiles of the time.

From West Africa's Atlantic coast across the sandy expanses to the White Nile in the east, camels laden with chests full of books and manuscripts trekked from one oasis to the next. In caravan cities like Timbuktu, tanners, leather workers and scribes worked to replenish the rich stock of political treatises, scientific manuals, law books and sacred texts.

Many of the manuscripts were lost during the colonial era, but those that remain are particularly relevant. In them, one can find testament of an African tradition in Islam that is distinct from the Arab tradition.

Scholars today argue that study of the ancient texts will help the region's people reconnect with a lost identity. "Our work is both urgent and necessary as a means of recovering our collective memory," said [library director] Abdelkader Haidara.

Readers outside Timbuktu may get a chance to see the manuscripts as well, as some of them are being digitized.

Shakespeare Festival Wrap Up

The Daily Star wraps up the weeklong activities at the Globe Theatre in London for its Shakespeare and Islam festival. The organizer said that the inspiration for the festival came from a discussion of Othello.

"I had a conversation with the Ambassador of Morocco, who is convinced that [the character of] Othello was based on the Moroccan Ambassador who came to England in 1600. He told me a lot [about] England's relationship with Morocco and it made me realize that what we need to do is explore the context of Othello, politically, socially and culturally [in] the early 17th Century. We wanted to explore England's perceptions of Islam and Islamic lands."

Previous posts on the Shakespeare and Islam festival: here and here.

Saramago on Military Hegemony

Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner José Saramago has again expressed his distaste for the Bush administration, this time at a speaking engagement in Caracas. Among many quotes in the article:

'I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been,' said the 82-year-old writer, adding that whenever he addresses the subject of international politics, 'I always ask two questions, and only two: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?

November 29, 2004

Of Rodinson and Derrida

Adam Shatz's article about Maxime Rodinson and Jacques Derrida draws interesting parallels and contrasts between the famed scholar of Islam and the famed philosopher and thinker, both of whom passed on recently.

Where Rodinson was a fervent rationalist in the Enlightenment mold, Derrida relentlessly questioned the universality of Western reason, and at times displayed a streak of Jewish mysticism. While Rodinson wrote in a prose of impeccable lucidity, Derrida cultivated a style that was highly metaphoric, elusive, gnomic, teeming with paradox and wordplay, at times opaque to the point of self-parody ("Therefore we will be incoherent, but without systematically resigning ourselves to incoherence"). In their approach to ideas they could hardly have been more different.

Yet it's the affinities between the two scholars that make this exceedingly well-researched article such an interesting read.

'Quintessence of Debauchery'

Auction houses love to hype items in their catalogs, and the most recent illustration comes with this claim made by Sotheby's, to have the world's "first known piece of printed pornography" available for auction next month.

"Sodom", penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line".
"We believe this is the first printed pornography in English literature, a unique copy of the quintessence of debauchery," Peter Beal, Sotheby's book specialist said.

At least the book specialist restricts his claim to English literature, but that hasn't stopped the Reuters writer.

DNA of Literature Addresses

A few people wrote to mention that they were suddenly shut out of the very popular Paris Review DNA of Literature project, which gives the public free access to the journal's Writers At Work series. In an earlier entry, I had linked to parisreview.com, which worked fine just two weeks ago, but which now requires a username/password combo. If you point your browser to theparisreview.com or theparisreview.org or even parisreview.org, you should be able to read the interviews posted thus far.

Yalla Launch

Arab and Jewish university students have started a new literary journal, titled Yalla ('let's go' in Arabic, a phrase that's also current in Israel.)

The Jewish and Arab editors did not know each other previously. The team was assembled through e-mailings, announcements and word-of-mouth, much the same way as the submissions were solicited.
Among them, they have fundamental differences, but have reached a stage where they can speak without fear of antagonizing each other. They all agree they have learned a lot, not only from each other, but from the contributions to Yalla, about how each other’s community sees things.

Gordimer Interview

Nadine Gordimer, who has recently edited Telling Tales, a collection of short stories to benefit an AIDS treatment campaign in South Africa, is interviewed about her work in Newsweek.

Do you expect readers to buy the book out of a sense of duty?
It's not at all a charitable duty to buy this book, I didn't want it to be. The storytellers in the book reveal the marvelous possibilities of the written word. Their tales are for us to enjoy and whilst reading them support the millions among us in southern Africa who already have HIV/AIDS or are vulnerable to contracting it. The number of children born with HIV here is heading—even while I speak—towards one child in every five.

With 13 novels and nine short-story collections behind you, you've had a long and distinguished literary career. How do you want to be remembered?
The best that is within me, anything worthwhile in me, is in the books. I'm talking about the insights, the effort to understand life and to transpose it. To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I believe there is only this life. But this life is so incredible. Something that interests me very much [that] I'm beginning now to see it in my own books—which are written from many different points of view: first person as a man, a child, a woman, a young person, an older person—more and more [is that] there is the sense that I am really writing one book all my life.

The book consists of work by Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Susan Sontag, Hanif Kureishi, Woody Allen, Arthur Miller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amos Oz, and Chinua Achebe, among others.

Irie Jones Comes To Life

In a case eerily (sorry, couldn't resist) similar to a subplot in Zadie Smith's White Teeth, a woman in Montreal has made it all but impossible for a judge to determine a paternity case, by claiming that she has had sex with identical twins on the same day, and that either twin could be the parent of her boy.

One of the twins, who cannot be named for legal reasons, went to court last summer in the hope of forcing the mother to grant him access to the child. Although his name is not on the birth certificate, he claims he is the only father the boy has known, cared for him every other weekend, provided financial support and was even known to him as 'papa'.
But then the man's relationship with his girlfriend broke down and the visits halted. When he began legal proceedings to prove his paternity, the mother made her claim that she had been sleeping with his twin at around the same time.

No word on whether there are mice involved.

Literary Homes and Gardens

Ever wondered about the literary connections of a particular state? I've only ever thought of the question when I lived in California, that land so easily dismissed by East Coasters as the home of choice of movie stars and nouveaux riches. A Sunday Times article by Alan Bisbort surveys the state of Connecticut through its literary real estate. Bisbort even calls Connecticut "a Land of Canaan for writers." (Get it? Get it?) At any rate, among writers who have owned homes there are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hellen Keller, Maxwell E. Perkins and Thornton Wilder.

Islamic Architecture in the West

In a fascinating article for the SF Chronicle, Jonathan Curiel examines Islamic inspirations in modern American architecture, including the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco and the Civic Center in San Rafael, California. The influence dates back at least to the late 19th century, earlier if one counts Moorish trends, which came to the Southwest by way of former Spanish citizens. The slide show for the article contains a shot of the Berkeley City Club, which was designed by one of my favorite architects, Julia Morgan. Morgan's best-known building, Hearst Castle, also contains patterns drawn from Moorish/Islamic architecture.

But perhaps the most interesting bit of information in Curiel's article is that Minoru Yamasaki, the man who designed the World Trade Center in 1965, spent considerable time in Saudi Arabia, and used patterns he'd seen in Mecca in his own work, including in the famed Twin Towers. (It's highly ironic that some thirty-five years later, religious fanatics would consider the building, designed by a Japanese American architect, using Islamic designs at the base and in the plaza, and housing people of a multitude of backgrounds and faiths, to be the symbol of the America they wanted to destroy.) The work was an example of cultural cross-pollination; Muslim architects themselves had borrowed from Byzantine designs.

"Cultures have constantly mixed and seen one another, either in war or peace," [MIT Professor Nasser Rabbat] says. "It used to be that people thought of the world in terms of purely, independently developed cultures each having its own language, whether it's culinary, visual, literary, architectural.

"But there are those of us who subscribe to the multicultural method, where we no longer believe in the notion of a purity and insularity of a cultural development. ... The influence is continuous, mutual and never ceases. "

Read the rest of this article, and find out how the city of Opa-locka, Florida, came to be known as the Baghdad of the South.

Giving New Meaning to 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light'

Dylan Thomas, long believed to have died from chronic alcoholism, may in fact have succumbed to a mistreated pneumonia, a new biography of the poet alleges. The Scotsman's Fiona McGregor reports that

Thomas had complained he could not breathe and was "suffocating", but he was not diagnosed with pneumonia until nearly 24 hours later.
His personal physician, Dr Milton Feltenstein, initially decided he had delirium tremens and ignored the possibility of a chest infection.
Feltenstein injected the poet with three doses of morphine, which the biographers say restricted his breathing. After the third dose, Thomas’s face turned blue and he sank into a coma.

Feltenstein and all others who treated Thomas at New York's St. Vincent's hospital are now dead. The biography quoted in the article is Dylan Remembered 1935-1953 and came out in the States last summer.

Shafak Review

A few weeks ago, Randa mentioned Elif Shafak's novel The Saint Of Incipient Insanities on this blog. Shafak is a Turkish writer who has already written novels in her native language (The Flea Palace is the only one available in the U.S., it seems) but she wrote The Saint in English.

I was quite looking forward to the book for two reasons. One is that I'm acutely aware of the difficulties of writing in a foreign language, and was curious about how Shafak's book would read. The other is that the novel features a Moroccan character, which seems to be a bit of a trend these days, what with Algerians, Tunisians, and Americans writing about Moroccans. Aren't we the lucky ones.

A recent phone conversation with Maud Newton tempered my curiosity, when she shared some of her reservations about The Saint. Here's her review in this weekend's Newsday.

All literature is a struggle to escape the confines of language, to transform what Proust called the "cracked kettle" of human speech into something transcendent. And in places "The Saint of Incipient Insanities" achieves this goal. What Nabokov might call the book's birthmarks - the irregular usage choices and strange turns of phrase - frequently enrich the prose. But at least as often they make for confusion and slow progress. Shafak's significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the adage that the avant-garde artist must master the rules of her chosen form before breaking them unfortunately is true, and applicable here.

Like Amanda Heller in the Boston Globe, Newton compares the book to Zadie Smith's White Teeth, unfavorably for Shafak.

Acito Profile

The Oregonian runs an AP profile of Portlander Marc Acito, author of How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater.

For Acito, who also writes a humor column syndicated in gay publications nationwide, the book is the product of a life spent scribbling in journals while trying to claw his way up the ladder of stage success.
Although his father paid for college, Acito was kicked out of Carnegie Mellon's theater program because of, he says, "artistic differences — I thought I had talent and they didn't think so."

Acito also proves that you can open up a Fast Signs franchise, make sales calls, run the store, and still write a novel. And it doesn't hurt if fellow Portlander Chuck Palahniuk recommends you to his agent.

Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving sprung up on me this year, and I didn't even have the time to wish you all a happy holiday before being whisked away by my amazing sister (and wonderful cook) and put in front of a Gargantuan meal. So, happy belated Thanksgiving to you all, and welcome back. This week will be short for me, as I get ready to go to New York for a quick visit to family and friends. I'll also be on a panel about blogs, more about which perhaps a bit later this week. Until then, you can read the usual medley of links, commentary, reviews, rants, and recommendations.

November 24, 2004

Can Headlines Sink Your Novel?

The Booker Prize, which usually translates into a sales bonanza for the selected work, has failed to have that effect on this year's winning novel, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. Only four weeks after the announcement, the novel has disappeared from the list of best-selling original fiction. Mark Sanderson theorizes that "lyrical descriptions of gay sex and a return to the heady days of Thatcherism must have failed to whet the appetities of some readers." But Michael over at Literary Saloon suggests that the "labelling of it, in headline after headline, as a 'gay novel' probably didn't help."

Newsflash! The Novel's On Its Deathbed!

Sam Jones offers up this tidbit from a Newshour interview with Philip Roth that essentially repeats the pronouncements made by V.S. Naipaul a few weeks ago:

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you think it's become one of the great lost causes of our time?

PHILIP ROTH: My goodness. Um, oh, I don't think in twenty or twenty-five years people will read these things at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not at all?

PHILIP ROTH: Not at all. I think it's inevitable. I think the... there are other things for people to do, other ways for them to be occupied, other ways for them to be imaginatively engaged, that are I think probably far more compelling than the novel. So I think the novel's day has come and gone, really.

Now you're on notice. Better finish the Great American Novel before long.

Hip?

What's hip? John Leland's written a book to explain what it is and NPR's Rene Montagne has an interview.

van Gogh Report

Two articles published today about slain writer/filmmaker Theo van Gogh offer rather different perspectives about the case. In Salon, Ronald Rovers presents van Gogh as an advocate of free speech, one who saw his insults as a right in a democracy. Interestingly, the piece leads with the repeated mentions of the murderer's national origin (italics mine).

On the morning of Nov. 2 in a busy street in east Amsterdam, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was riding a bike to his office. Van Gogh hit the ground and stumbled across the street to a nearby building. He didn't make it. As the Moroccan strode toward him, van Gogh shouted, "We can still talk about it! Don't do it! Don't do it." But the Moroccan didn't stop. He shot him again, slit van Gogh's throat and stuck a letter to his chest with a knife. He was slaughtered like an animal, witnesses said.

It's a little odd, considering that (a) the murderer is named here (so he could simply be referred to as 'Bouyeri') and (b) that the murderer was born in Holland, and was therefore Dutch. Compare this to the Alternet article by Naeem Mohaiemen, which instead focuses on some of van Gogh's previous projects and what they meant for the culture.

Longtime readers of Van Gogh's weekly column in the Dutch newspaper "Metro" know very well that his intention was not to reform male chauvinism, but rather to express crude bigotry. In his columns and interviews, Van Gogh called Muslims "goat fuckers" and "the Prophet's Pimps." His latest book, which lampooned Muslims as backward obscurantists, was defiantly titled "Allah Knows Best." His collaborator on "Submission," Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was equally florid, calling the Prophet Mohammed a "pervert" and a "tyrant." Theo Van Gogh's attacks were not limited only to Muslims. He blithely attacked Christian and Jewish symbols, once saying, "It smells like caramels – they must be burning Jewish diabetics."

The murder of Theo van Gogh was an unspeakable crime of hatred by a fanatic, but the writer/filmmaker's own hatred toward others should not be conveniently forgotten now for the sake of political agendas.
Previous posts about van Gogh: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

November 23, 2004

Hannah Tinti Recommends

"I just finished The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan," Tinti says. "It’s amazing—the best book I’ve read in a while. I heard O’Nan give a reading from it at the Brattleboro Literary Festival in October. Since The Night Country was one of the few books of O’Nan’s that I hadn’t picked up yet, I bought a copy to read when I got home. It turned out to be the perfect Halloween novel: A group of five teenagers are in a terrible car accident in a New England town. Three of them are killed. Two survive. Now here’s the cool part—the book is narrated from the point of view of the dead teenagers. It sounds impossible to pull off, but Stewart O’Nan handles it brilliantly. His writing is just plain beautiful, heartbreaking and threaded with sharp black humor. The story picks up year later—the first anniversary of the crash—Halloween, of course, and the ghosts are zipping in and out of people’s heads. Then it gets really exciting—one of the living teenagers, Tim, is planning on re-creating the crash, killing himself and the other survivor, a boy named Kyle who is now brain-damaged. Throw into the mix Officer Brooks, the policeman trying to stop it from happening again, and Kyle’s mom, whose life has been turned upside down by her son’s disability, and you have an emotionally gripping, white-knuckle countdown literary thriller."

Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, was published by the Dial Press in March 2004. She is currently the editor of One Story magazine.

If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

Blogroll Update

I finally got around to update my woefully anachronistic blogroll, so please do check out the fine sites listed on the right. For instance, take a look at Bookangst's posts about whether ads sell books (short answer: yes) and a recent success story from an author whose book wasn't neglected, underpublicized, or remaindered (the story you're more likely to hear, these days, it seems).

In Search Of The Mummies

Two French amateur Egyptologists (one a realtor, the other an architect) have challenged Egypt's leading eminence on the subject of pyramids, the big Zee himself, Dr. Zahi Hawass. For two years, the Frenchmen have asked for permission to put a 15mm lens through a floor of the Great Pyramid at Giza, behind which, they believe, lies the burial chamber of Cheops (Khufu). After Hawass refused to grant their request, the amateur egyptologists went on a campaign to challenge his scholarship.

The Frenchmen's challenge to the Big Zee's authority has ruined the image of Egyptology as the gentlemanly pursuit of studied introverts. What has emerged since the Frenchmen went public in September with their accusations is a backstabbing world of academic ambition, national pride, tourism dollars and television ratings. "Dr Hawass treats Egypt as his private hunting ground," says M. Verd'hurt, from Lyon. "They are speculators, amateurs!" comes the retort from Dr Hawass.

There is more to this fascinating saga, at the heart of which is essentially a struggle between modern-day Egyptians and foreigners on who gets to study what, where, and how, who funds the excavations, and in what language the results are published.

Increase Your Bottom Line: Cut Those Pesky Writers Out

Randa sends a link to this essay by Daniel Akst, where he wonders whether current advances in technology might not allow computers to write fiction in the near future. Two programs are cited (Brutus 1 and StoryBook) and though the passages they've written aren't earth-shaking, they're still pretty decent. No need to worry, though, Akst says.

That no computer has yet written the Great American Novel may be because computers are subject to some of the same handicaps that afflict human writers. First, writing is hard! Although computers can work unhindered by free will, bourbon or divorce, such advantages are outweighed by a lack of life experience or emotions. Second, and all too familiar to living writers of fiction, there is no money in it. Unable to teach creative writing or marry rich, computers have to depend on research grants. And why would anyone pay for a computer to do something that humans can still do better for peanuts?

And, Akst says, while the passages make for amusing reading, they certainly don't strike by the power of their imagination.

OBA 2004 Redux

Tracy Daugherty, the winner of the 2004 Oregon Book Award for his novel, Axeman's Jazz was interviewed by Dan Wickett last December. Dan also reviewed the novel on his site.

A Day Late

The Bulgarian government has made an official suggestion that the death sentence that was passed by the fascist regime of King Boris against poet Nikola Vaptsarov be repealed.

Bulgarian journalists and social activists have reiterated many times their appeal to national prosecution authorities to take due steps to denounce his death sentence and thus remove this shameful act from Bulgarian history.

Vaptsarov was shot by firing squad in Sofia in 1942. He composed until the very end. His last poem was addressed to his wife.

The fight is hard and pitiless
The fight is epic, as they say.
I fell. Another takes my place –
Why single out a name?

After the firing squad – the worms.
Thus does the simple logic go.
But in the storm we’ll be with you,
My people, for we loved you so.
2 p.m. – 23.vii.1942

November 22, 2004

Hear, Hear

Maud Newton reminds us all why we love her site: She tells it like it is.

Danticat Profile

Maya Jaggi's profile of Edwidge Danticat in this Saturday's Guardian is quite au point, considering the news that came to light on Friday, on this blog and elsewhere.

The official cause of [Danticat's uncle's] death was acute pancreatitis. Yet for his niece, who says she begged to be allowed to see him when he was taken from the detention centre to hospital on November 2, but was refused "for security reasons", he is a "casualty of both the conflict in Haiti and an inhumane and discriminatory US immigration system". There are, she says, "so many people caught in the crossfire; my uncle was driven out with the clothes on his back and a briefcase. But he fled the frying pan for the fire. Maybe if they'd considered his age instead of applying a blanket policy he might be alive today." Aristide was forced into exile by the combined effects of internal rebellion and US pressure. In Danticat's view, "at the same time as this administration is creating situations elsewhere in the world that cause people to flee, it's closing the doors even tighter against them".

But the profile covers a lot of other territory--Danticat's fiction of course, but also her film work, her activism, her upbringing, politics in Haiti, writing in a third language, and much, much else. A must read.

Money Making Myths

In the Friday Guardian novelist Nada Jarrar (Somewhere, Home) writes about Norma Khouri, the woman behind one of the biggest hoaxes in publishing and who single-handedly set back the cause of Arab women through her lies. I have to say, Jarrar's arguments closely mirror mine, previously mentioned here.
Thanks to David for the link.

Let The Thrashing Begin

In a profile sure to incense quite a few people, Jackie McGlone describes author Louise Bagshawe, a woman who says she writes "trashy novels", is unabashedly conservative (not that there's anything wrong with that), and is apparently not ashamed to admit that she founded the Rock Society at Oxford only so she could use the school's clout to "make contacts in the record business" (now that's wrong.) Here's Bagshawe in her own words:

But being a trashy novelist is not exactly work, whether you’re doing Chick-Lit or Glam-Style, another of the genres in which I write. I bang out some words for about two or three hours a day; then I tidy up before Caius - we named him after Julius Caesar because it goes pretty well with my husband’s family name, LoCicero - comes home from nursery school.

Bagshawe also believes the Tory Party needs more "articulate women like [her]".

Writing in the Arab World

In a Popmatters column, Ursula Lindsey reviews the well-known problems that affect the publishing industry in the Arab world, and which became all even more apparent during the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair.

A large part of the pre-fair debate involved questioning whether the Arab League — a political organ of unparalleled ineffectiveness, representing authoritarian governments that all engage in varying degrees of censorship — had any place coordinating the event. A few countries, such as Morocco, decided that they would go solo rather than be amalgamated into a questionable "Arab world" whole. Some prominent writers were excluded. Some declined to attend. Those who didn't question the league's right to organize the presentation still worried about its ability to do so. The fair was huge, and without having been there it's very hard to gauge how successful it was. Arab visitors and attendees had good things to say about the degree of German interest, and the quality of some of the forums and discussion panels. But they also complained that works were poorly translated, and that some of the official presentations were folkloric and apolitical: kitchy amalgams of carpets and sand dunes.

Lindsey argues that the single biggest problem facing Arab writers these days is censorship, but, she says, that hasn't stopped them from creating.

As the Arab Human Development Report itself notes, writing is one of the few creative fields in which a lack of funding or support is not an insurmountable handicap. Writers aren't like scientists. They don't need labs. You don't have to live in a rich country, or a free country, or a powerful country, to write a good book.

And while they continue to write the books, they still have trouble getting them published, finding readers for them, or getting them translated outside their countries, which is why projects like Words Without Borders need support.
Thanks to Mark for the link.

Sex in Literature

In a brief survey of sex in twentieth-century writing in English, Natasha Walter argues that for all the effort it took to make sex a part of life in literature, it has become weightless of late. She mentions both male and female writers, gay and straight, from D.H. Lawrence to Doris Lessing, John Updike to Monica Ali, Linda Grant to Alan Hollinghurst, but modern writers in general don't find favor with her.

This belief in the unparalleled authenticity of sexual love has for two centuries been a distinctive belief of our society; it is part of our aggrandisement of the individual against society and part of modern western culture's disdain for social structures whenever they come into conflict with individual desire. Yet it is striking how novelists today have moved away from this reliance on sexual intimacy as a source of emotional revelation, and how the search for intimacy is simply no longer the prime motor that it once was for the novel. This goes much, much further than simply disappointment that sex does not live up to expectations - rather, it is a pervasive feeling that sex is not worth making a great fuss about at all. Although sex can be as explicit as you like, it is no longer centrally important to many novelists.

Van Gogh Report

Racial tensions following the murder of Theo van Gogh have spread from Holland to Belgium. The BBC reports that a suspect has been arrested in Antwerp for making death threats against senator cum author Mimount Bousakla, a Belgian citizen of Moroccan origin.

Ms Bousakla, 32, whose parents are Moroccan, came to prominence after writing a book about her cross-cultural upbringing called Couscous with Belgian Fries.
She has received sporadic death threats ever since, but this time they were taken so seriously that she went into hiding and was given round-the-clock police protection.

Previous posts about van Gogh: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

OBA 2004

The Oregon Book Awards were announced last Thursday. The fiction awards were judged by Colson Whitehead and he selected Axeman's Jazz by Tracy Daugherty in the novel category and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories by Scott Nadelson in the short fiction category. The Oregonian has a report that gives a bit more detail about the winners in all categories.

Immigrant Stories

I arrived in New York in August 1989, leaving behind my homeland, Yugoslavia, which was deathly ill with nationalism and a collective psychosis that was about to swallow the fragile Balkan sanity. I was 22 years old. I arrived with $1,000 inside my sock, having been advised that a sock was the safest sanctuary for one's fortune during a border crossing in a heat wave; looking inconspicuous while wearing a coat with money sewn inside the lining would have been impossible.

Natasha Radojcic writes in the Times about how she came to New York, worked a variety of jobs including at a sex shop and as as a personal trainer, in order to afford the luxury of writing. In a related multimedia feature, StaceyAnn Chin, Boris Fishman, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Nelly Rosario, George Sarrinikolaou, Sanjna N. Singh, and Suki Kim share their stories of being new new yorkers.

November 19, 2004

Another Victim of Homeland Security

Sorry to cut in on a Friday, but this is important and I just had to post it when I found out about it through an email from fellow writer Hannah Tinti. Acclaimed novelist Edwidge Danticat's uncle, who was 81 and who'd raised her while she lived in Haiti away from her parents, has died while in the custody of Homeland Security. He was a church pastor, who had to flee Haiti after being attacked by gang leaders in Port-au-Prince. He had a valid visa to enter the United States and indeed had come here many times to visit his family. Upon arriving here he requested asylum, which shouldn't have been a problem; instead, he was taken into custody. He had high blood pressure, but he was denied his medication and his family was not allowed to see him. He died five days later.
Hannah also forwards the link to this St. Petersburg Times article, which has more details about the case.

Homeland Security rejected any responsibility for Dantica's death. "Mr. Dantica died of pancreatitis while in Homeland Security custody, which an autopsy by the Miami-Dade County medical examiner's office revealed as a pre-existing and fatal condition," the department said.
It added that it was "unfortunate" that he died during the asylum interview. "We understand his family's grief, but there is no connection between the pre-existing terminal medical condition he had and the process through which he entered the country."
Homeland Security said Dantica was carrying "no legitimate prescribed medicine." All he had in his possession was a "folk remedy," which the department described as some kind of "poultice" or dressing.

Danticat's treatment stands in sharp contrast to the routine granting of asylum to Cuban citizens (the most recent of which took place this week in Las Vegas.)

Unlike Cubans fleeing communism, who are allowed automatic entry if they reach U.S. shores, undocumented Haitians are routinely detained. U.S. officials have gone as far as arguing that the Haitians represent a national security threat; Attorney General John Ashcroft recently cited intelligence reports that Muslim terrorists were trying to use Haiti to infiltrate the United States.

That's right, folks. Blame it all on the Muslims. The news has been picked up in a couple of newspapers (Seattle P.I., Sun-Sentinel) and on blogs: Maud Newton, Beatrice and Tingle Alley. We always hear about tangles with Homeland Security and think they couldn't happen to us until they do happen to someone you know. If I find out more about the case, I will update this post.

November 18, 2004

Hasta Luego

That's it for me this week. The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow (and every Friday) so do stop by and say hi. I'll be back next Monday with the usual lit news fare, plus another book recommendation, and maybe a review of a debut novel. Have a great weekend.

Sheikh-Speare

The Globe Theatre opens its festival on Shakespeare and Islam this week, and the Guardian has a piece about the seemingly incongruous pairing.

"Shakespeare and Islam" is no more or less ridiculous than "Bard and Bush". (...) Islam interested Shakespeare for the same reason it interests Tony Blair: it was simultaneously threatening and promising. In fact, Islam was a much more realistic and substantial threat to western Christian security in the 16th century than it is in the 21st.

Last month, I linked to an article about scholar Martin Lings' new theory about Shakespeare, which is also going to be presented at this festival.

I Don't Suppose They Let You Live There?

The British Library, whose collections include 150 million items, has gone wireless.

National Book Award Winners

And the winner in fiction is...Lily Tuck for The News from Paraguay. Hopefully now people will start talking about the book and not about the fact that she's a woman from New York. (See in particular, Dan's post about the NY Times' evisceration of the finalists.) You can see a full list of winners an