February 28, 2006
Reading: Williams College
Today I'm traveling to Massachusetts to do a reading at Williams College, again with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. Details here.
The event is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there.
February 27, 2006
Reading: City University of New York
I'm in New York, so posting will be very light this week. Tonight I'll be reading with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. Here are the details:
Graduate Center at the City University of New York
6:30 PM
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York
If you're free, come on by and say hi.
February 24, 2006
Off to New York
I'm off to New York and Massachusetts for a few readings, so blogging will likely be light for the next week or so. I'll try to post notices here on the days I'm reading, or you can check out my events page.
February 23, 2006
The Horror at Samarra
From Riverbend:
We woke up this morning to news that men wearing Iraqi security uniforms walked in and detonated explosives, damaging the mosque almost beyond repair. It’s heart-breaking and terrifying. There has been gunfire all over Baghdad since morning. The streets near our neighborhood were eerily empty and calm but there was a tension that had us all sitting on edge. We heard about problems in areas like Baladiyat where there was some rioting and vandalism, etc. and several mosques in Baghdad were attacked. I think what has everyone most disturbed is the fact that the reaction was so swift, like it was just waiting to happen.Read the full post here. Words fail.All morning we’ve been hearing/watching both Shia and Sunni religious figures speak out against the explosions and emphasise that this is what is wanted by the enemies of Iraq- this is what they would like to achieve- divide and conquer. Extreme Shia are blaming extreme Sunnis and Iraq seems to be falling apart at the seams under foreign occupiers and local fanatics.
No one went to work today as the streets were mostly closed. The situation isn’t good at all. I don’t think I remember things being this tense- everyone is just watching and waiting quietly. There’s so much talk of civil war and yet, with the people I know- Sunnis and Shia alike- I can hardly believe it is a possibility. Educated, sophisticated Iraqis are horrified with the idea of turning against each other, and even not-so-educated Iraqis seem very aware that this is a small part of a bigger, more ominous plan…
Several mosques have been taken over by the Mahdi militia and the Badir people seem to be everywhere. Tomorrow no one is going to work or college or anywhere.
People are scared and watchful. We can only pray.
Kelani on the BBC
A reader sends words that London-based Palestinian singer Reem Kelani, whose songs speak of the plight of refugees, was recently interviewed on the BBC's Everywoman and Radio 4's Woman's Hour. There also a print interview here.
Parini on Kipling
Jay Parini traveled to St. Bartholomew's Church in Burwash, deep in the countryside of east Sussex, to celebrate the life of Kipling with a small circle of other Kipling enthusiasts. Parini writes about his journey in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
O'Brien on Lost
Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, briefly glimpsed from inside the hatch on Lost, has sold more copies after its appearance on the show than in the last six years. Those of you who have read it: Any interesting theories you'd like to share? And, more importantly, how can I get my book in the hatch?
Another Birthday
Someone asked me my age the other day and I honestly had to stop and wonder, "Wait, how old am I?" The fact that I never think about my age is either a sign of healthy aging, or a sign that denial is a powerful tool. My birthday is this Friday, which means I will have to remember, even for a day.
February 22, 2006
Guest Column: Tommy Hays
Tommy Hays is the author of The Pleasure Was Mine, which comes out in paperback this month. A previous contributor to Moorishgirl.com, he sends in this short column, titled "Church of the Big Legs."
As a child, when I thought of Unitarians, I thought of pizza and women with big legs. My best friend across the street in Greenville, South Carolina, where I grew up, was Unitarian. One Sunday his family took me to their church, which was like no other church I had been to. I had had some inkling that it might be a little different because he had told me to bring my swimsuit and a towel, but I didn't think anything could be much stranger than my own religious upbringing.
As a toddler, I had often accompanied my great great aunt and uncle to a small conservative Baptist church, where the preacher harangued, and I often screamed back in a kind of mutual and strangely satisfying hysteria. Then my father, who was from the Midwest and whose parents had been Christian Scientist and who had his own mystical leanings, decided we (at least my brother, my mother and I) should attend a Christian Science Church, while he stayed home and read the Sunday morning paper. At the time a Christian Science Church in a Southern town was a real anomaly, and when my teacher at school discovered I was Christian Scientist, she would ask me questions in front of the whole class like, "If you contracted malaria, would your parents give you quinine?" In my religious upbringing I had gone from fire and brimstone to Mary Baker Eddy's murky mortal mind, from the heat of hell's eternal furnace to the intellectual intricacies of Science and Health.
So the Sunday morning I accompanied my best friend's family to a Unitarian Church I did not know what to expect. I certainly didn't expect that their church would be a house in a neighborhood. Didn't even have a steeple. No crosses. When we went in, no one was dressed in Sunday clothes. Among the men, there wasn't a coat or tie in sight. Many of the women had on slacks. There was one woman in shorts who had the biggest legs I'd ever seen. I was nine-years-old and hadn't seen that many women in shorts. My mother never wore them. No mothers I knew wore them. I certainly had never seen anyone in church wear shorts. While no one else was wearing shorts that day, I had the suspicion as I looked around, that all Unitarian women had monstrous legs.
After what they called "church" which seemed more like conversation to me-no hymns, no prayers, no responsive readings, just talk and a lot of it--we kids were shepherded down some stairs which I assumed led to a dank and moldy Bible class, where verses would be chiseled into our consciousness like epitaphs on tombstones. Instead we were led down to changing rooms, where we changed into our bathing suits, then went into the backyard. To my astonishment, there was a pool. Not a tiny baptismal pool, but a beautiful full-length swimming pool. Instead of reciting The Psalms that morning we did the backstroke. Then we ate this round doughy deliciously cheesy food called pizza. When I got home my mother hardly had time to ask me how it went, before I launched into a detailed description of the church we had to join. I told her about the pizza, the Sunday school swim and the woman with the big legs. She frowned at this last, said some women had big legs, and I should never talk about their legs because it would hurt their feelings.
I was puzzled and deflated by her response. I didn't understand why big legs were anything not to talk about. The woman's legs were interesting. An arresting fact. A breathtaking phenomenon. Even something to be proud of. The more I thought about the woman's legs over the weeks and months that passed, the bigger they grew, until they were the size of tree trunks. To me, a chubby boy who was becoming self-conscious about his body, those legs became a statement, almost religious in their significance. They were a declaration by this woman who was unabashedly and unapologetically who she was.
I never mentioned her legs or any woman's legs again to anybody. For nearly 40 years I have kept silent on this subject. I only bring it up now to show that as a child I had not the foggiest idea who these Unitarian people were and what they believed.
But as I child I believed what was in front of me. Pizza, a house that was a church, and a woman with remarkable legs. Oh, I knew all about the Baptist God, the fierce bearded fellow who sat on the edge of his cloudy throne, lightning bolt in hand waiting for me to sin, and I knew about the Christian Science God who gave me a pained look every time my thoughts wandered to the corporeal, which as far as I could figure was mostly where my thoughts stayed. But what I believed in, deep-down-in-my-heart believed in, was the corporeal, the world I lived in. What I ate, what I drank, what I touched, what I smelled, what I saw. The sensual embodied world. The Unitarians seemed like my kind of people. Their God lived next door. He wore sunglasses and swimming trunks and spent his days, floating around on a little raft, talking with whoever showed up about whatever was on their mind.
Despite my urging, my family did not join the Unitarian Church, although my mother did start buying frozen pizzas. And we remained reluctant Christian Scientists until, at the age of 14, I announced I wasn't going to church anymore. I remained churchless for the next 25 years, although during much of that time my father plied me with readings from writers like Thomas Merton, Huston Smith, Bagwan Sheree Rajneesh, Joel Goldsmith, Meister Eckhart, Gurdjieff, Adam Smith, William James and many many more. But their language was so abstract, so philosophical, so high flown, I would find myself yearning for the mundane, the sensual, the ballast of the embodied moment. I turned to fiction. While my father moved up into religion, I moved down through story. I read Eudora Welty, James Agee, Walker Percy, Katherine Ann Porter, William Maxwell, Fitzgerald and Hemingway and other writers who were so adept at inhabiting their characters and their worlds, that their books felt far more moving and at times more spiritual, than the spiritual writers themselves.
Then my wife and I, who live in Asheville, North Carolina, had our own little embodiments-two children. We were able to bring them to the very denomination I had wanted to join as a child. While I was more than a little disappointed to find no swimming pool out back, I was relieved to come to a place where my beliefs and my children's beliefs would not be scrutinized or corrected or disparaged.
What do I believe now? I believe as I did as a child. I believe what is in front of me. I believe in my family, my friends, my community. I believe in God. I believe He inhabits the stories of our lives, including all the possibilities and uncertainties of the shapes our stories might take. And there is not a Sunday I walk through the doors of our church that I don't think about that woman's legs--powerful columns sturdy enough to support a whole community of beliefs, including one small boy's fledgling faith in the world unfolding inside him.
Tommy Hays' latest novel is The Pleasure Was Mine, published by St. Martin's Press. He has written two other novels — Sam's Crossing and In the Family Way, which was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. He is Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is Director of Creative Writing for the Academy at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is a contributor to Our State. He received his BA in English from Furman University and his MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Asheville, NC with his wife and two children.
Dangerous Pursuits
Migrants are now coming to Morocco from as far away as India, hoping to try their luck at crossing over to Europe.
In the latest incident, nine Indian migrants have been arrested in Ouled Settout near the northern Moroccan city of Nador, police said Tuesday.The Indians were attempting to reach the nearby Spanish enclave of Melilla in order to cross over to mainland Spain.
Police recently held 70 people on charges of belonging to a criminal ring that brought Indians and Pakistanis through western African and Gulf countries to Morocco, which they were using as a gateway to the West.
Doctorow Wins PEN/Faulkner
As has been widely reported, E.L Doctorow's The March has won the PEN/Faulkner award. The oher finalists were William Henry Lewis, for I Got Somebody in Staunton; Bruce Wagner, for The Chrysanthemum Palace; James Salter, for Last Night.; and Pacific Northwest author Karen Fisher, for A Sudden Country.
February 21, 2006
Proud to be Liberal
Proud to be Liberal, which is published this month, is an anthology of essays about being a liberal in these conservative times. Contributors include Eric Alterman, Steve Almond, Margaret Cho, Al Franken, George Lakoff, Maud Newton, Tom Tomorrow, and a few others. My own essay, about the triple threat of being Arab, Immigrant, and Liberal, is also included. Check it out.
Oregon's Poet Laureate
Governor Ted Kulongoski has named a Lawson Inada the new poet laureate for Oregon:
Inada is an emeritus professor of writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he has taught since 1966. He was interned during World War II along with other Japanese Americans. Inada is required to give as many as six public readings in urban and rural settings across the state.The last appointee for the poet laureate position was William Stafford, who left sixteen years ago.Inada is a third-generation Japanese American, born in 1938 and raised in Fresno, Calif. He was one of the co-editors of the anthology "Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers." In his autobiographical volume, "Legends from Camp," he wrote about his boyhood experience of internment during World War II.
February 20, 2006
Rahman to Journalists: White Teeth Is Fiction!
Ziad Hayder Rahman, a London-based lawyer who claims to be the inspiration for the character Magid in White Teeth, has said that Zadie Smith's take on race relations in Britain was "divorced from reality." Rahman is the brother of Jimmi Rahman, whom Smith dated at the time, and to whom she dedicated the novel.
Rahman’s own experience in Britain was not as racism-free as Smith makes out. Growing up in the East End he was bullied and beaten, insulted in the street and once had coffee thrown at him from a moving car. When he went to Oxford University he was chased out of the bar and even had a swastika daubed on the door of his room, prompting him to change colleges.Rahman says that the book doesn't reflect his anger at “being alienated from British society” or his problems with “the Asian community with which I’m in profound disagreement”. This reaction to White Teeth appears in a new book by Claire Berlinski, titled Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too. Berlinski's book has been praised by neo-con cheerleader Daniel Pipes.Smith wrote the novel at the age of 24, after reading English at Cambridge, and after it was published in 2000 it was celebrated for its optimist portrait of a “post-racial” country.
Rahman, however, accepts Smith’s right to artistic license. “I recognised myself in White Teeth but I also recognise that it is work of fiction,” said Rahman.
Related: "Zadie didn't tell the real race story."
Bosnian Film Wins Golden Bear
Jasmila Zbanic's Grbavica, a film that deals with the aftermath of the mass rape of Muslim women during the Bosnian genocide, has won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The movie's website has stills and other information.
Salon du Livre Update
New statistics about reading culture are revealed during a discussion at the Salon du Livre in Casablanca: The average number of newspapers sold is approximately 13 units per 1000 inhabitants. It's a paltry number, especially in comparison with the average of 55/1000 in the rest of the Arab world. The explanation is fairly simply: Literacy rates are lower in Morocco than they are in other Arab countries, though, judging by the article, that particular argument didn't appear to be raised.
Mr. Peretz Goes To Fez
This has only been reported in the Moroccan and Israeli press, but could potentially be significant: Labor party chairman Amir Peretz visited King Mohammed in Fez this week, to present a "diplomatic initiative." (Peretz was born in Bejad, Morocco, and he conversed in Arabic with the monarch.)
Shehadeh on Khouri
Raja Shehadeh reviews Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun for The Nation, finding the novel full of "novelty and power," but also "cluttered" and "overcrowded."
Palestinians tend to expect that every work about Palestine must encompass the whole of the Palestinian experience. It is unfortunate that Khoury, who is not Palestinian, was also motivated to achieve this impossible goal. Still, Gate of the Sun is important for trying to capture the Palestinian experience during and after 1948. Although it overreaches, the novel is unique and powerful, and Archipelago Books is to be commended for making it available to an American audience.Read the review in full here.
This week @ the LBC
This week, the Lit Blog Co-Op will present discussions and reviews of Kirstin Allio's Garner, and even interviews and podcasts with the author. Check it out.
Another Toon Update
Flemming Rose, the Jyllands-Posten editor who commissioned the infamous cartoons, explains his views in a Washington Post piece. In it, he argues that, while he exercises restraint every day in his editorial decisions (no pornographic images, no graphic pictures of the dead, few swear words), the cartoon story, is, in his words, "different." He acknowledges that some people were offended by the cartoons, but he says his intent wasn't to offend but to stir up debate.
Eager to show how, he too, wants to open up debates, the Italian minister for Reform (and leader of anti-immigrant Northern League party) Roberto Calderoli went ahead with his plan to wear a T-shirt with the most offensive of the 12 infamous cartoons. On Friday, rioters in Libya (which, not coincidentally, happens to be an ex-colony of Italy), stormed the Italian embassy in Benghazi. Riot police shot at the protesters, killing nine people. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, mobs attacked and burned Christian establishments and churches, killing another sixteen people. I weep for the Prophet, in whose name these atrocities were committed. With "faithful" like these, who needs enemies?
Elsewhere, a joint Spanish-Turkish alliance, called the "Alliance for Civilizations" is seeking to restore dialogue between nations under the aegis of the United Nations. Several editorials in Al Bayane appealed for calm and intellectual discussion. L'Opinion pointed out that the lack of democratic processes in some parts of the Arab world has led to violent protests rather than to reasoned discussions. And in Asharq Al-Awsat, Mona El-Tahawy argues that "the war on the people of Denmark must stop." El-Tahawy adds, "Us Muslims often call on the rest of the world to respect us and to understand the things we hold sacred. Are we prepared to offer that same respect in return and to open a dialogue with the men and women of Denmark who are watching in horror as events unfold beyond their reach or control?"
Related:
Toon Update
Defend Freedom of Speech...Everywhere
Caricatures: Clash of Civilizations, Clash of Ignorance
Can't We All Just Get Along?
Fire: Meet Dry Gunpowder
Cartoon Shmartoon
February 17, 2006
Off Early
We're expecting some snow in Portland, and nothing says, "I'm your novel! Revise me!!" like a coat of snow, so I'm going to spend the day doing just that. Have a great weekend!
Overheard in New York
This NPR interview by Renee Montagne with Michael Malice, the author of Overheard in New York, got me thinking about one of the most bizarre conversations I overheard in L.A. I was sitting at a cafe on Pacific Coast Highway in Manhattan Beach when a couple of women in business suits passed by me, and one of them said to the other: "Look, if she's bludgeoned to death, I want to make sure we see some blood."
Oh, my God, I thought, what are these two plotting?
They sat down with their coffees and they started to mumble, and I couldn't hear the rest. I pushed my chair away from my table, as if I needed the extra space for my book.
"Right," one of the women said, "so one of the problems we're having is that when the blood comes out, it gets pixellated. Do you have experience dealing with that?"
"I do, indeed," the other woman replied, and she pointed to her resume.
They were having a job interview for a video game designer position.
Endgame Review
Morocco has the sad distinction of being involved in one of Africa's oldest conflicts, the thirty-year dispute with the Polisario Front over Western Sahara. Toby Shelley's Endgame in the Western Sahara, a history of the conflict, has just come out, and Jeremy Harding reviews it for the LRB. The book even covers the latest development, which, frankly, bring me to the edge of despair:
The novel dimension to the geography of this dispute is offshore oil. Shelley, once the energy desk editor for Dow Jones Newswires, has the story at his fingertips. In 2000 Morocco was the second largest oil importer in Africa (‘the Ottomans stopped at Algiers,’ Moroccans like to say, ‘and so did the oil’). Over the years, various surveys on and offshore have come to nothing, but the discovery of viable deposits off the coast of Mauritania in 2001 suggested a promising future in Western Saharan territorial waters – more promising than anything further north in Morocco proper. Towards the end of the year, Rabat ‘parcelled out the entirety of the Western Sahara’s waters’ to the French multinational TotalFinalElf and the Texan Kerr-McGee.A long review, but a very worthwhile read. In related news, the BBC reports that homes of Saharan refugees in Tindouf, in Algeria, have been destroyed or damaged by three days of heavy rains; they will need several million dollars over the next six months for support.With the scent of smoke still lingering in the air from the Ogoni affair, Polisario and Sahrawi support committees in the US and Europe responded aggressively. Since Shelley published his book, Total has pulled out, claiming to have ‘found no oil or other hydrocarbons that can be exploited’, but the company may also have been concerned about the legal status of the venture. Kerr-McGee, a Republican Party donor and a favourite of UK fund managers (notably Legal and General), has not been dissuaded from ‘reconnaissance’ – a new, Moroccan approach to awarding licences which allows companies to explore on a semi-speculative basis with a much reduced outlay, though new agreements must be drawn up for drilling to begin. (...) In the meantime, a smaller oil company, Fusion, has decided to throw in its lot with Polisario and accept a promissory licence issued by the Front, with exploration starting once the SADR has come into existence. Last December Polisario awarded a further batch of licences to six British oil companies that would sooner gamble on the likelihood of independence than paddle around in semi-legality, on or off Saharan shores.
February 16, 2006
More Salon du Livre News
The Lit Saloon has an interesting link this morning to Al-Bayane, where some depressing statistics are given on Moroccan publishing: Fewer than 3,000 books have been published between 2002 and 2004 in Morocco; most of these books have a small print run of under 2,000 copies; and the author is often called on to bear the cost (hence the expression "a compte d'auteur," which is sort of midway between self-publishing and vanity publishing.) Read the numbers, and weep.
As distressing as these numbers are, they don't, of course, offer a complete picture of readership in Morocco, because the vast majority of the books that you're likely to see in a bookstore at any given time are not printed locally, but, rather, imported, usually from France. Paperbacks from Folio and Poche, in particular, are fairly inexpensive and still affordable for Moroccan readers. (So, next time someone tells you that the Arab world needs to learn "our" values through "our" culture, just tell them Morocco is awash in "our" culture, and really needs more of its own.)
The most distressing of all the statistics in Al Bayane is that only .53% of books published in Morocco appear in the Amazigh language, which is spoken by fully 30% of population. Granted, that 30% is probably fully bilingual (with Arabic) or even trilingual (with French), but there is really no excuse for why such a large part of Moroccan heritage is not sustained through book culture. According to Le Matin, one of the booths at the Salon was devoted to the Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture, but, even there, many of the offerings about Amazigh culture were available in other languages.
Admirable Olympian
American speed skater Joey Cheek has donated his Olympics gold medal award ($25,000) to Darfur refugees.
New Abu Ghraib Photos
New photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu-Ghraib have been unveiled, and yet the lead story on CNN's website as of 5 pm yesterday remained Vice-President Dick Cheney's ridiculous hunting accident. Last week, a video of British soldiers abusing Iraqis (or, as the euphemism goes, "letting off some steam") was also released. It's unclear how the "isolated cases" defense is going to hold up in the face of new evidence.
Toon Update
Muslim graves have been desecrated in the city of Esbjerg, west of Copenhagen. No word yet from self-declared experts on what "ails" the "Danish street." Meanwhile, the Italian minister for Reform, Roberto Calderolli, has announced he will start wearing T-shirts with one of the infamous cartoons. In Morocco, Aboubakr Jamai, publisher of the Casablanca-based Le Journal Hebdomadaire, is facing harassment for printing a photo of the newspaper France-Soir, which carried the cartoons of the Prophet. Lastly, three people have died in Pakistan, shot by police as they were protesting said caricatures, bringing the total death toll to nineteen. Just when you think everyone's lost their minds, Egyptian editor Hany Shukrallah provides one of the best and most lucid assessments on this overblown controversy.
Related:
Defend Freedom of Speech...Everywhere
Caricatures: Clash of Civilizations, Clash of Ignorance
Can't We All Just Get Along?
Fire: Meet Dry Gunpowder
Cartoon Shmartoon
Add to the Pile
I've never read Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, and last year's mention of the epic in Orhan Pamuk's Snow made me want to read it even more. Well, Shahnameh is now out in a new translation, billed as the most complete yet. Here's a review.
February 15, 2006
Katrina Denza's Lit Mag Roundup 1.1
Three weeks ago, we presented Part 1 of The Lit Mag Roundup, a new, quarterly feature at Moorishgirl.com, in which North Carolina-based fiction writer Katrina Denza shares her literary discoveries of the season. Below is Part II of her fall 2005 review.
For every commercial movie I go to see, I watch about ten independents. I want to be moved; I want an experience unencumbered by packaging for the masses; I want to learn something: about another culture, another time, about humanity. Literary journals offer all of these things as well.
In the Fall/Winter 2005 issue of The Paris Review, readers can expect to be taken to faraway places. The issue begins with Karl Taro Greenfeld's dispatch, "Wild Flavor," a riveting account of how one young man, hoping for a better life, moves to Shenzhen and contracts SARS. Andy Friedman and Nicholas Dawidoff take us to the hidden world of Brooklyn's fish market, soon to be forever changed, in "At the Fish Market." There are two insightful interviews: one with poet Jack Gilbert and one with novelist Orhan Pamuk. Both offer wisdom on the writing process. There are poems by Jack Gilbert, John Burnside, and Mary Jo Bang. My favorites of each ("Ode to History," "Winter in the Night Fields," "Nothing") all have a reverence and a visceral magic to them. Suyeon Yun's "Two Koreas, Ten Portraits," shows us hidden North Korean escapees in Seoul. Dmitri Nabokov has translated one of his father's poems, "Revolution." In Ma Jian's essay, "Tibetan Excursion," he writes of his disappointment in the reality of Tibet and of his persecution by the Chinese government for his collection, "Stick Out Your Tongue." His story, "Woman and the Blue Sky," offered in this issue, is part of that collection. And in Benjamin Percy's "Refresh, Refresh," a young man's life is greatly affected when the men of his Oregon town, including his father, are deployed to Iraq.
Alaska Quarterly Review's Fall/Winter 2005 issue is neatly divided into six sections: special feature, nonfiction, novella, stories, drama, and poetry. The special feature is Heidi Bradner's moving "Chechnya: A Decade of War." I can't imagine anyone would be left with dry eyes after experiencing Bradner's photos and text. Deborah Lott's "Fifteen," is a stunning memoir piece about her grandmother's death and the subsequent nervous breakdown of her father, who had to be committed. In John Fulton's novella, "The Animal Girl," an angry, anguished teen becomes stuck in a pattern of acting out and punishing herself. Even her job as an assistant in a biomedical lab becomes another way for her to test how much pain she can endure. With strong, unique imagery, Robert Vivian tells the story of a man's grief over the death of his mother in "Errands of the Broken-hearted." Here's an excerpt:
No son ever loved his mother more, though Ma Boy was seven feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds, with tattoos of naked, writhing women all across his back that sashayed like serpents doing their moon dance that almost slithered off his shoulders to come and jump your bones.In Linda McCullough Moore's "A Night to Remember," a woman longs to push through the boundaries of her stagnant marriage. A father and son try to swim across a lake in Howard Luxenberg's "Lake Moriah," but halfway over the son becomes fatigued. In Carol Ghiglieri's "Stella by Starlight," a young alcoholic woman mourns the breakup of a six-year relationship while hanging out with a palm reader in a bar. "Where Things Are," a one-act play by Steven Schutzman features a wacky, antagonistic mother-and-son relationship. The poetry is all varied and skilled. My favorite, "Wanderer," by Liz Rosenberg, speaks of a girl's despair after she's left to fend for herself.
And Virginia Quarterly Review's Fall 2005 issue has much to offer. In Tony Kushner's humorous one-act play, "A Prayer for New York," a son and his mother find a way to pray together. There's a passage from Art Spiegelman's moving graphic novel with an introduction by VQR editor Ted Genoways. "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the World Sixty Years Later," an essay by Lindsley Cameron with Masao Miyoshi, offers a brief history of Hiroshima, interviews survivors of both bombs, and sheds light on the growing nationalist movement in Japan. Tom Bissell and Morgan Meis write of their adventures and misadventures in Vietnam. Their dispatch "After the Fall" also features photos of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, taken by Joe Pacheco. Erik Campbell describes his feeling of "otherness" in his piece, "Shirtless Days, On Living and Writing in the Jungles of Papua." VQR's art consultant, Lawrence Weschler, shares his impressions of Vincent Desiderio's work-in-progress and his discussions with the artist. Weschler also highlights the provocative work of Oscar Munoz, an artist who pays tribute to the Disappeared of Latin America by painting their faces on concrete with water and filming their evaporation. Transplant surgeon, Pauline W. Chen, considers the definition of brain death in her illuminating essay, "Dead Enough, the Paradox of Brain Death." Stanley Plumy writes of John Keats' last days and the artist who took care of Keats during that time, Joseph Severn. The fiction in this issue, grouped together under the heading "Three Tales of Suspense," deliver what they promise. Alan Heathcock's "Peacekeeper," is a tension-filled story of a sheriff's love for her town and the lengths to which she'll go to avenge the death of a child. In Joyce Carol Oates' amazing "Smother," a woman is visited by two detectives after her estranged daughter has accused her of taking part in a heinous crime. And R. T. Smith writes of the path a sheriff takes to capture a turn-of-the-century rapist and murderer in the exquisitely written "Ina Grove." The poetry is strong and vibrant; some pieces pay tribute to Keats, Goya, Michelangelo, others have a more private reference. Aaron Baker's "Commission," is an evocative glimpse into a boy's experience as he enters another culture with his missionary family, and Karin Gottshall's "The Exile's Tale," is stunning in its rendering of a "land so far to the north/ that our radios pick up nothing but strange, ancient operas/ broadcast from the Pleiades, and our language/ has no term for cold." There's a section at the back full of book reviews, a humorous essay on the music of Howard Tate by Steve Almond, and finally, Ross MacDonald's comic, "The Eternal War on Terror."
This batch was enlightening as well as entertaining--both things I appreciate in equal measure. Spring issues are beginning to arrive and I’m excited to find out what’s inside. Happy reading!
Originally from Vermont, Katrina Denza now lives in North Carolina with her husband and two sons. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Lynx Eye; New Delta Review; SmokeLong Quarterly; Emrys Journal; RE:AL; Cranky; The Jabberwock Review; and The MacGuffin among others.
February 14, 2006
Bill Gordon Recommends
I wholeheartedly recommend Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, also known as The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, published in 1722 and widely considered to be one of the first English-language novels (Defoe himself, some say, being the father of the novel form). When I first came to the book, I was halfway through drafting my own first novel, Mary After All - the story of a Jersey City woman who comes of age during the turbulent 1970s and discovers her own route to independence along the way - and it certainly made quite an impression on me: both as a reader and as a writer. So many things seemed more possible - not the least of which was the idea that you could, as a man, convincingly tell a story from a woman's perspective, and in that woman's voice. (Worth noting is the fact that Defoe wrote Moll Flanders under a pseudonym so that his readers would believe it was the actual journal of a bawdy, adventurous woman in the eighteenth century.) There was also, in those pages, validation of the concept that by creating a full-blown, closely-examined character who is chock full of flaws and fully revealing of them... who is driven by decisions, sometimes awful but always explained, that make sense at the time - in Moll's case she is, by turns, a good wife, a hooker, a pickpocket, a convict and a "reformed" bad mother of sorts - you could make the reader like your heroine even more. I surely did! I also shared in her joys and sorrows and successes more completely, I think, because none of her many "warts" were hidden. My own narrator, Mary, leads a rather quotidian existence compared to Moll - although she does have a stint as a bookie and kicks the woman who slept with her husband down the stairs. But in Moll Flanders there was the refreshing concept, clear in its early pages, that fairly ordinary details - personal finances, daily routines and decisions - could be fascinating - not just interesting -- if the conveyance was intimate and accurate enough. And in that intimacy grew drama. Drama that could build and be felt by the reader with each move and plot twist, no matter how large or small, because you were there *with* her. And nearly four hundred years after the initial publication of Moll Flanders... you still are.
Bill Gordon's work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mississippi Review, New York Press, Christopher Street, and Downtown. He received an MFA from Columbia University. He grew up in Jersey City and now lives in New York. Mary After All is his first novel.
If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
Casablanca Salon du Livre 2006
Last week, the annual Salon du Livre opened at the Foire Internationale in Casablanca. The theme was "Maghreb: Fifty Years Later." As many as 560 vendors from 53 countries are present, with, of course, readings, talks, and workshops on the schedule for the week. The fair began with the announcement of the Prix du Maroc, which this year went to Mohamed Sebbagh for Enfance Sexagenaire. In non-fiction, the winners were Mohamed Moatassim (La vision apocalyptique dans le roman arabe à la fin du 20e siecle), Zakya Daoud (Marocains de l'autre rive), and Abdelilah Belmlih (L'esclavage au Maghreb et en Andalousie). More details as they become available.
Tussing Debut
Portland-based author Justin Tussing's debut novel, The Best People in the World, has just been published, and it's reviewed in the NY Times by Dan Chiasson.
One of the pleasures of reading the novel is experiencing its sheer variety of actual things. At times you expect him, like Thoreau, to up and list the cost and quantity of materials it took for his characters to live their outlaw life. Gutters and downspouts of an old farmhouse become clogged by a family of mice, making the rain cascade off its roof. Old, wide oak floorboards will be pillaged in the 80's for "dining tables and lustrous bars for ostentatious restaurants."Tussing will be reading from his novel on Thursday, at Powell's Books on Hawthorne.
Arab American Playwrights
The NY Times has a piece by Dinitia Smith on Arab American playwrights, which cites the work of many artists in the field, including Betty Shamieh, Nathalie Handal, Yussef El-Guindi, and others. The only thing I don't understand is why one of the interviewees had to go and say something like this:
Mr. Khoury of Silk Road said that conservatism within Muslim culture may be one reason for the scarcity of Arab-American playwrights. Representations of the human form are frowned on, he said: women dancing, or performing in front of men is considered reprehensible.That's funny, because "Muslim culture" (whatever the hell that means) has also managed to produce playwrights like Tayeb Saddiki, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Assia Djebbar, Slimane Benaissa, Ahmed Ghazali, Kateb Yacine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, among many others, so that can hardly be the reason why there aren't that many Arab playwrights here in America. And as for the representation of the human form, you'd have to strike down the entire Egyptian film industry and the bazillion movies it puts out every year for Khoury's contention to make any sense, so that's not the reason either. Couldn't the reason be, oh I don't know, a little less complicated? Maybe that first- or second-generation Arab-Americans, like many other minorities here, value the professions (doctor, lawyer, etc.) over art?
February 13, 2006
The CIA's Dustbin
This is the democracy the U.S. wants to export:
The United States is helping Morocco to build a new interrogation and detention facility for Al-Qaeda suspects near its capital, Rabat, according to western intelligence sources.I'm speechless.The sources confirmed last week that building was under way at Ain Aouda, above a wooded gorge south of Rabat’s diplomatic district. Locals said they had often seen American vehicles with diplomatic plates in the area.
The construction of the new compound, run by the Direction de la Securité du Territoire (DST), the Moroccan secret police, adds to a substantial body of evidence that Morocco is one of America’s principal partners in the secret “rendition” programme in which the CIA flies prisoners to third countries for interrogation.
Ben Jelloun in Review
Allan Massie reviews Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Last Friend, over at the Scotsman:
Nostalgia permeates the novel, for it is not only the story of a friendship that is brought to breaking-point but a melancholy meditation on loss, on the bitter taste of experience, on the closing of the avenues of possibility that seemed to exist - did perhaps exist - in youth.I've actually just finished writing my own review of this engrossing and significant novel. More on this soon. In the meantime, those of you who read French can already check out Ben Jelloun's latest novel, Partir, which is quickly climbing the bestseller lists in France.Tahar Ben Jelloun is a remarkable novelist, and this novel which is at the same time fresh as a spring morning, and sad as an autumn twilight, offers us a wonderful evocation of daily life, of the conflicting claims of friendship and marriage, of the deadening weight of experience that presses on Ali and Mamed in maturity. The writing is simple and direct. Every sentence is telling. It makes you think and feel at the same time. Read it. There is nothing tricksy about it, nothing pretentious. It is that most satisfying of things: a true fiction.
Joining The Book Club
I'm not sure what the point of Curtis Sittenfeld's NY Times piece about book clubs is. Is it that book clubs hate her protagonist? That they hate her book? That they hate her? That she hates them? That they don't really talk about the book anyhow, since they're busy sipping champagne? Or is the point that Curtis is not alone? That other authors have had amusing/horrifying book club experiences? Or that book clubs are, like, so much fun that she joined one? I'm confused.
Dept. of WTF
Reuters reports that Israel and some U.S. Jewish groups have lobbied organizers of the Academy Awards to change the name of the nominating country for Hany Abu-Asad's Paradise Now. They want it to change from 'Palestine' to 'Palestinian Authority.'
Many Israelis were irked when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in publishing the nomination, said "Paradise Now" came from "Palestine."What the hell?While the tag remains on the academy's Web site, an Israeli diplomat said he expected the film to be described as coming from the "Palestinian Authority" during the awards ceremony.
Defend Freedom of Speech...Everywhere
I have said it before, and I will, unfortunately, have to say it again: Leave the cartoonists alone! Okay, so maybe it's not cartoonists this time, but it's all the same. All together now: Leave the editors alone!
Jihad Al-Momani, the editor of the Jordanian daily Al-Shihane has been fired for reprinting one of the infamous Jyllands-Posten cartoons in the February 2nd issue of his newspaper, along with an editorial in which he asked: "What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?" Al-Momani was arrested on February 4th, while King Abdullah was on an official visit to the United States. He was released without bail, the following day. He is now awaiting trial.
Also in Jordan, editor Hashim Al-Khalida reprinted and denounced the cartoons in Al-Mihwar. He has now run into trouble. What's interesting is that Al-Khalida reprinted the cartoons back in November, and only now has he been charged with "harming religious feelings." Like Al-Momani, Al-Khalida is now awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, in Morocco, Annahar Al-Maghribiya reprinted the most offensive of the twelve cartoons, the one in which the Prophet is portrayed with a bomb in his turban, along with a caption attributing the drawing to Jyllands-Posten. The editor, Abdelhakim Badie, was asked to come to the police station to answer questions. He, too, expressed surprise, considering he had published two of the cartoons, without hitch, on October 20. It's unclear yet whether Badie will be charged with a crime.
The latest arrests come from Algeria and Yemen. Kahel Bousaad of Errisala and Berkane Bouderbala of Iqraa are facing charges today in Algiers for reprinting the cartoons, even though the drawings were deliberately "fogged," and were accompanied by articles denouncing them. Mohammad al-Asaadi, the editor of the English-language Yemen Observer, and Akram Sabra and Yehiya al-Abed of al-Hurriya weekly newspaper have all been arrested; a warrant has been issued against a fourth editor, Kamal al-Aalafi of al-Rai al-Aam.
Ironies abound, of course. President Bush, who was so keen on offering Denmark support over freedom of speech, didn't bring up the case of Al-Momani or Al-Khalidi during King Abdullah's visit. Freedom of speech, in this case, is secondary to Jordanian-American relations in the so-called war on terror. And France-Soir, La Stampa, Die Welt, and all those other European newspapers who were so keen on putting the cartoons on the front page in the name of freedom of speech might do well to offer front-page support to the Arab editors who face charges for the same decision. Similarly, let's not forget that, despite the offense that Arab readers must surely have felt at seeing the cartoons in the local press, the fraction of them that ended up protesting on the street did so only at the behest of the Islamist parties, which were eager to pose themselves as the defenders of Islamic honor and identity against an imperial West. Finally, it's also quite clear that the Moroccan and Jordanian governments had no problem with freedom of expression until the right-wing religious parties fell on the cartoons like flies on, um, a Danish.
Related:
Caricatures: Clash of Civilizations, Clash of Ignorance
Can't We All Just Get Along?
Fire: Meet Dry Gunpowder
Cartoon Shmartoon
Kennedy On Stage
The Guardian's Stephanie Merritt reveals that novelist AL Kennedy has taken up stand-up comedy.
The novelist's chief advantage is that she rarely has to face her audience; aside from reviews and the odd book-fair appearance, there is no way of knowing whether a funny line bombed or made the reader laugh out loud, but in the absence of empirical evidence, she can sit at home fondly imagining the latter. So why would a novelist exchange that safe distance for the immediacy of a late-night comedy club, particularly a novelist as seemingly sensitive to criticism as Kennedy, whose website dissects reviews of all her books with occasionally chippy retorts to the reviewer?The act is made of darkly comic stories rather than jokes. When is she bringing it to the U.S.? That's what I'd like to know.
This Week @ The LBC
This week, the Lit Blog Co-Op will be discussing Rupert Thomson's excellent Divided Kingdom. The author himself will be available to answer questions today between 3:30 PM and 5:00 PM EST. (Note to my neighbor: If you're done reading Divided Kingdom, can I have it back? My sister wants to read it.)
Desai's Inheritance
Seven years after Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Kiran Desai has finally returned with a new novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Pankaj Mishra reviews it on the front page of the NYT Book Review and finds it "extraordinary" and "the best kind of post-9/11 novel."
"The Inheritance of Loss" opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the life of Biju, the son of Sai's grandfather's cook, who belongs to the "shadow class" of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.Marjorie Kehe also praises the novel in the Christian Science Monitor<What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. "Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them," Desai writes, referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them.