June 30, 2006

Weirdos Welcome

I swear, I must have a big sign on my forehead that says: Weirdos Welcome. I had barely sat down in my seat on the plane back from DC than the man to my left turned to me and said, clearly enunciating every word as though I was slow or something: "Hello. My name is Adam. We can talk during the flight if you want. But if you don't want to, then we don't have to." I hadn't even fastened my seatbelt yet! I mean, what is it about me that I always get the crazy ones? He talked about himself for three hours and forty-five minutes.

June 29, 2006

Connections

I am still in orientation or I should say, in my case, re-orientation here in Washington for my December trip to Morocco. I met some of the other fellows, scholars, and students, and of course, I've already found at least three personal connections back in Al-Maghrib: One student knows a college buddy of mine, another fellow has worked closely with an acquaintance, and yet another has taught English to the childen of a good friend. It's a small world.

June 28, 2006

In Our Nation's Capital

I am in Washington, DC, this week, for the Fulbright Fellowship orientation. On the plane over here, seated between a white-bearded man who kept offering me his bars of chocolate and his glass of orange juice, and a woman who kept telling her already-quiet baby to be quiet or she'd spank her, I caught up on my magazine reading.

I stopped subscribing to The Atlantic, but I bought it this month to read the cover story by Mary Anne Weaver about Zarqawi. It turned out to be a thoroughly researched, well-written and very engaging piece. There's also a short piece by Nadya Labi about a young man who frequented Jihadi websites under the handle Irhabi 007. (Irhabi means 'terrorist' in Arabic.) He was eventually caught not because law enforcement came looking for him, but because individuals offered tips and had to be persistent in getting those tips to the right people. But there's a disturbing aspect that could have been mined further in this piece, which is the work done by contractors/vigilantes like SITE, people who clearly have an agenda and don't answer to anyone but themselves. The best part of the magazine remains its "critics" section. There's a great, great piece by Sandra Tsing-Loh about American women and their finances, and also an excellent essay by Christopher Hitchens on Iranian literature, specifically the anthology Strange Times, My Dear, which I've mentioned frequently on this blog.

Speaking of Iran, Harper's has a long piece by Christopher de Bellaigue on the current nuclear crisis. It's filed from Tehran, where de Bellaigue lives, and it provides a much needed account of what ordinary Iranians think of the situation. There's also a very thoughtful review by Robert Boyers of John Updike's new novel, Terrorist. If you read only one piece of critical writing about that novel, make it this one. And of course reading Harper's Index is always informative. Did you know that Americans rank atheists at the top of the list of people whom they are least willing to allow their children to marry? Muslims were second, African Americans were third. Hey, look at the bright side. The faithful are not as hated as the faithless.

As our plane was landing, the white-bearded man turned to me and told me that God blessed me, and that he wished all my dreams came true. I wondered if he'd still say that if he knew I was Number 2 on that list. But Amen anyway, brother.

June 27, 2006

Summer Reading List

Last Friday, Annie Reed, blogging at Maud Newton's, requested summer reading suggestions. I haven't sent mine in yet, mostly because what I'll be reading this summer is probably not going to be the kind of book you take to the beach or the pool. I'm trying to focus on books that will be of use to me with my current novel, for example by helping me to understand certain aspects of political Islam (and, more broadly, the way that religious/political ideologies gain followers.)

For example, I plan to read Fawaz Gerges' Journey of the Jihadist, which is based on extensive interviews with militants, and chronicles one man's descent--and possibly his return from--Jihadist ideology. (I do not recommend taking this book with you on the airplane to whatever faraway destination you're headed to.)

I am also planning to read Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah. I didn't like the excerpt from the book that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly a while back, but I am curious how Bowden will address the co-opting by the Ayatollah of the students who took over the American embassy. We'll see.

Then there is Ismail Kadare's The Successor. Several discerning readers, including my husband, have recommended this book very highly. I haven't read Kadare in years--since my teens, I think--and I have never read him in English. So this should be a very special treat.

Another book that came highly recommended--from readers as far away as my hometown of Rabat, Morocco--is Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. Everyone is praising it to the high heavens. I hope it lives up to the recommendations.

Can you believe I haven't yet gotten to Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss? I had just started it a couple of months ago when I was assigned something to review and had to set it aside. So I'm hoping to get into it for good this time.

Every summer I try to read older books--classics, really--that I've missed out on, and correct my ignorance. This year, I'm hoping to finally read Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear, Buchi Emecheta's Head Above Water and Mongo Beti's Mission to Kala.

And of course summer is also a good time to check out galleys of fall 2006 releases. The ones I have set aside to read are Leila Aboulela's The Translator, Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie's Half Of A Yellow Sun and Ahmed Alaidy's Being Abbas El-Abd.

Moment in Balboa

This month, photographer Ibarionex Perello sends in this picture, taken in Balboa Park, in San Diego.

I like the juxtaposition of the different lines and shapes in the photo, and the sharpness of the nenuphar. One could almost touch it.

June 26, 2006

Ramadan Wins Court Case

Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan, who had been denied a U.S. visa that would have enabled him to start teaching at Notre Dame last year, has just won a court case that essentially forces the government to process his application. The case was brought on by Professor Ramadan in conjunction with PEN American center, the ACLU, the American Academy of Religion, and the American Association of University Professors, to challenge a provision of the PATRIOT Act that had barred him from entering the U.S. to teach or to take part in PEN's World Voices festival.

U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty ruled that:

while the Executive may exclude an alien for almost any reason, it cannot do so solely because the Executive disagrees with the content of the alien’s speech and therefore wants to prevent the alien from sharing this speech with a willing American audience.

A good day's work. You can read all about it on PEN's website.

Portland Event: Jami Attenberg

Tonight I will be cheering on Jami Attenberg as she reads from her debut novel, Instant Love:

Jami Attenberg reads from Instant Love
Powell's City of Books
10th and Burnside
7:30 pm

See you there!

Djebbar In L'Académie

Assia Djebbar, who earlier this year was elected to the Académie Française, has officially joined 'Les Immortels' at a ceremony last Thursday. She will take over fauteuil numéro 5 from Georges Revel. You can read her (very moving) speech here.

L’Afrique du Nord, du temps de l’Empire français, - comme le reste de l’Afrique de la part de ses coloniaux anglais, portugais ou belges - a subi, un siècle et demi durant, dépossession de ses richesses naturelles, déstructuration de ses assises sociales, et, pour l’Algérie, exclusion dans l’enseignement de ses deux langues identitaires, le berbère séculaire, et la langue arabe dont la qualité poétique ne pouvait alors, pour moi, être perçue que dans les versets coraniques qui me restent chers.

Mesdames et Messieurs, le colonialisme vécu au jour le jour par nos ancêtres, sur quatre générations au moins, a été une immense plaie ! Une plaie dont certains ont rouvert récemment la mémoire, trop légèrement et par dérisoire calcul électoraliste. En 1950 déjà, dans son "Discours sur le Colonialisme" le grand poète Aimé Césaire avait montré, avec le souffle puissant de sa parole, comment les guerres coloniales en Afrique et en Asie ont, en fait, "décivilisé" et "ensauvagé", dit-il, l’Europe. (...)

La langue française, la vôtre, Mesdames et Messieurs, devenue la mienne, tout au moins en écriture, le français donc est lieu de creusement de mon travail, espace de ma méditation ou de ma rêverie, cible de mon utopie peut-être, je dirai même ; tempo de ma respiration, au jour le jour : ce que je voudrais esquisser, en cet instant où je demeure silhouette dressée sur votre seuil.

Je me souviens, l’an dernier, en Juin 2005, le jour où vous m’avez élue à votre Académie, aux journalistes qui quêtaient ma réaction, j’avais répondu que "J’étais contente pour la francophonie du Maghreb". La sobriété s’imposait, car m’avait saisie la sensation presque physique que vos portes ne s’ouvraient pas pour moi seule, ni pour mes seuls livres, mais pour les ombres encore vives de mes confrères - écrivains, journalistes, intellectuels, femmes et hommes d’Algérie qui, dans la décennie quatre-vingt-dix ont payé de leur vie le fait d’écrire, d’exposer leurs idées ou tout simplement d’enseigner... en langue française.

Depuis, grâce à Dieu, mon pays cautérise peu à peu ses blessures.

'Faith & Reason' on PBS

As has been widely reported, Bill Moyers is doing a series of interviews on faith and reason for PBS. His first guest was Salman Rushdie, and I was lucky enough to catch the show on TV the other day. Rushdie's answers were, as usual, quite thoughtful, and I agreed with much of what he said (though I disagreed with a couple of his positions, particularly in regards to women.) Other interviewees will include Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, David Grossman and Jeanette Winterson, and the shows will be aired throughout the summer.

Help, There Are Illegal Immigrants Under My Bed!!

Novelist Lionel Shriver is pissed off at illegal immigrants because, among other things,

3) Having followed the rules on immigration - and complicated rules they are - I resent folks who cheat and get away with it. 4) The entire world seems to believe they have a right to live in my country, but it doesn't work the other way around; other countries are as defensive of their borders as they are oblivious of mine, and I bristle at the double standard.

The problem here is that Shriver conflates two responsibilities. Migration from one country to another happens as a result of individuals' actions, while border control--whether in countries that receive or send immigrants--falls under the purview of government action. Being angry at illegal immigrants here in the U.S. because of the way their home countries' governments act toward immigrants from a third country is silly. If these illegal immigrants could control their governments, they probably would have forced them to create jobs so they wouldn't have had to come here in the first place.

Shriver's aversion to illegal immigration has worsened, she says, since visiting the U.S. recently:

I have got the immigration bug worse than usual since I flew into JFK this week, where the jumble of foreigners queuing at passport control was indistinguishable from the jumble of foreigners - taxi drivers, fast-food vendors - on the other side of customs.

What's with the assumption that the taxi drivers and fast-food vendors in New York are 'foreigners'? How does she know whether they are native born American, naturalized Americans, or immigrants--let alone legal or illegal? Or is it their skin color that pegs them as foreigners?

The rest of the article is an indignant denunciation of the American system, which Shriver believes encourages illegal immigration because of loopholes in the law, and because the law itself is never applied. Rather than direct her anger at illegal immigrants, Shriver would do well to ask why those loopholes exist. I'll tell you why: Because this government is quite happy to have cheap labor who a) will do the babysitting, elderly care, washing, cooking, cleaning, and oh yes, even fire-fighting, b) will contribute millions of dollars in sales taxes and other taxes, c) has no representation in Congress and cannot vote and, most important, d) can be used to 'wag the dog' when something else goes wrong--an illegal and immoral war for example.

June 23, 2006

Summer P&W

Some articles from the July/August issue of Poets and Writers are now available online, including a profile of Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart and an interview with Chris Abani about his novella Becoming Abigail. You might also like to read C. Max Magee's piece on the new book-cataloguing website Library Thing, which brings joy to book nerds everywhere.

'License to Lie'

Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine, a rather damning portrait of the Bush administration, has been getting loads of attention, but I must say I wasn't particularly interested because, really, how many times does one have to be told about the lies and corruption and belligerence of this administration? That's precisely the point that Gary Kamiya addresses in his review for Salon:

At this point, one could forgive readers for asking, "How many more damning portraits of the Bush administration do we need?" From yellowcake to Joe Wilson to Abu Ghraib, the list of Bush scandals and outrages is endless, but nothing ever seems to happen. As the journalist Mark Danner has pointed out, the problem is not lack of information: The problem is that Americans can't, or won't, acknowledge what that information means.

More of this thorough review here.

So What Else Is New?

In addition to eavesdropping on the phone calls of American citizens, the U.S. government apparently has also been secretly tracking the bank transactions of an untold number of people, according to the New York Times. Naturally, we have assurances that the people being spied on are 'suspected terrorists.' That's all you need to know.

June 22, 2006

Giveaway: Fun Home, Autographed

I have a very special giveaway for one lucky reader this week: A signed first edition of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. This graphic memoir tells of Alison Bechdel's relationship with her closeted gay father, Bruce, and of the discovery of her own sexuality. It's set in a small Pennsylvania town, where Bruce Bechdel ran a funeral home (the 'fun home' of the title), where he taught high school English, and where he spent years restoring his house, an 1857 Gothic revival house. It's an honest and bittersweet portrait of a father-daughter relationship, and easily the best graphic memoir of this year.

The title page reads "To a Moorishgirl.com reader" and is signed by Alison Bechdel. (You can thank Alex for this. I was in DC that night, giving a reading myself, but he took an extra copy and had it signed.) The first reader to write gets the book. Please use the subject line: "Bechdel." Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded. Update: The winner is Sheila O. from Jackson, MS.

Oh My God, Think Of The Children!

The board of the Miami-Dade County school district has voted 6-3 to remove certain books from its libraries, including one titled Vamos A Cuba! which depicts Cuban children wearing communist uniforms. The district's position is that the books are "inappropriate for young readers because of inaccuracies and omissions about life in the communist nation." Wow. Don't you feel safer with these people guarding your kids' virtue? The ACLU and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association have filed a lawsuit.

Bissell on Kaplan

Tom Bissell's essay on Robert D. Kaplan, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, opens thus:

Throughout his long career Robert D. Kaplan has consistently benefited from the fact that no one has any idea what, exactly, he is. A humble travel writer? A popular historian? A panjandrum analyst of developing-world politics and personalities? The 2001 reissue of Kaplan’s Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (1990) tried to settle the matter. The back-cover copy refers to Kaplan, pretty much definitively, as a “world affairs expert.” Kaplan’s prolific writing would appear to bear out such stature. The subtitles of his eleven books mention twenty countries or regions. The Mediterranean? Check. Kaplan has even lived there. Central Asia? Too late. Kaplan covered it. Southeast Asia? Nope. Annexed by Kaplan. North Africa? Kaplan. West Africa? Sorry. South America? What do you think?

Bissell reviews all the books that have resulted from these peregrinations, and finds that "Kaplan is worse than a bad writer or thinker. He is a dangerous writer made ever more dangerous by the fact that he is taken seriously." Kaplan is currently the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

June 21, 2006

Nejm in Translation

As`ad Abu-Khalil, the curmudgeonly political science professor behind the Angry Arab blog, is currently in the Middle East, and he reports a sighting of poet Ahmad Fouad Negm (or Nejm), on Al-Arabiyya last week. Says Abu-Khalil:

We need somebody to write a PhD dissertation on Shaykh Imam and Ahmad Fu'ad Najm. What a phenomenon. My favorite Najm poem was the one he wrote when Richard Nixon visited Cairo to escape the press scrutiny during Watergate. It goes: "You have honored us, o Nixon, with the visit, o the one of Watergate; the Sultans of ful and [olive] oil have made you a quite a fanfare [try to translate "'imah w-sima" into English]."

The difficulty of translating these lines reminded me of a scene from Ahdaf Soueif's first novel, In The Eye of the Sun, in which Asya, who is studying for a doctorate in linguistics in northern England, attempts to explain to some of her guests exactly what these lines, written by Nejm and sung by Shaykh Imam, mean:

Hisham presses the pause button.
'Let's hear the song through, and then I'll rewind it and pause after every couplet. I'd really like to hear Asya's translation.'

'Sharraft ya Nixon Baba,
Ya bta` el-Watergate -'

Hisham presses pause.
'Well,' says Asya, 'as I said, he says, "You've honored us, Nixon Baba - "Baba" means "father" but it's also used, as it is used here, as a title of mock respect - as in "Ali Baba", for example - that's probably derived from Muslim Indian use of Arabic - but the thing is you could also address a child as "Baba" as an endearment - a sort of inversion: like calling him Big Chief because he's so little - and so when it's used aggressively - say in an argument between two men - it carries a diminutivising, belittling signification. So here it holds all these meanings. Anyway, "you've honoured us, Nixon Baba," - "You've honoured us" is, by the way, the traditional greeting with which you meet someone coming into your home - it's almost like "come on in" in this country. So it functions merely as a greeting and he uses it in that way but of course he activates - ironically - the meaning of having actually "honoured" us. "You've honoured us, Nixon Baba / O you of Watergate" I suppose would be the closest translation - but the structure of "bita` el-whatever" (el - is just the definite article coming before any noun) posits a close but not necessarily defined relationship between the first noun (the person being described) and the second noun. So "bita` el-vegetables", for example, would be someone who sold vegetables, while "bita` el-women" would be someone who pursued women. So Nixon is "bita` el-Watergate", which suggests him selling the idea of Watergate to someone - selling his version of Watergate to the public - and pursuing a Watergate type of policy, but all in a very non-pompous, street vernacular, jokingly abusive kind of way. The use of "el-" to further specify Watergate - a noun which needs no further defining - is necessary for the rhythm and to add comic effect. I'm sure you won't want me to go on like this, so let's stop -'
'Nonsense!' says Gerald.
'It's fascinating,' says Lisa.
'Asya,' says Hisham, 'I swear I'm enjoying this. Come on, I'll play the next couplet.'

'Amaloulak eema w seema
Salateen el-fool wez-zeit.'

'OK, well,' Asya takes a deep breath. ' "Eema" is "worth" or "value". So he says, "They made an eema for you": to make an "eema" for someone is to behave towards them as though they have value when they in fact have none. So, "They've put on a show that gives you value" - "seema" is always used as an idiom with "eema" because of the rhyme. It means appearance. So: "the appearance of a thing of value" - the awful thing, though, is that this is taking all these sentences to translate, and it makes it seem ponderous and convoluted while in fact it's totally direct; it's language that a completely illiterate, uneducated woman would use to her child -'
'Who made him appear of value, his press office?' asks Lisa.
'This was on the occasion of Nixon's visit to the Arab world - so he's talking about Arabs - the Arab leaders,' says Deena.
'It comes in the next line,' says Hisham. 'Asya?'
'Yes. The Sultans of "fool" and "zeit". "Fool" - this is one thing that everybody knows about Egypt - that "fool" is the basic diet of the Egyptians. Particularly those from the more traditional or poorer sectors of society - I suppose they tend to be the same. It's brown beans stewed for a long time over a very low fire. It's the cheapest food you can get, and to be the "sultan" of "fool" argues massive poverty and backwardness. This "fool" can be dressed in various ways. The simplest and cheapest is with oil - "zeit" - and lemon. So "fool" and "zeit" come together - but "zeit" also, like "oil" in English, means petrol oil. So if you take that then there are two categories of "Sultan" being referred to: the sultans of "fool" and poverty etc. and the sultans of wealth and oil. There is obviously a great disparity between the two categories - but there is also a similarity - underscored by the reading of "fool and zeit" as a unit having only one sultan - a similarity in their attitude to Nixon and the USA.'

There is more to this scene, but I just wanted to give a taste of how Asya's character in In the Eye of the Sun interprets.

There's A Shocker

The Associated Press has obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI files for playwright Arthur Miller.

Miller's first Broadway play, "The Man Who Had All the Luck," came out in 1944, around the same time that the earliest FBI files are dated. His professional and personal life were closely watched, usually through newspaper clippings, but also from informants (whose names have been blacked out in the records) and public documents.

The FBI not only kept records of Miller's political statements, from his opposition to nuclear weapons to his attacks against the anti-communist blacklist, but of his affiliation with such organizations as the American Labor Party ("a communist front") and the "communist infiltrated"
American Civil Liberties Union.

The agency apparently spied on Arthur Miller until 1956. At least they stopped. In the case of Edward Said, they may have been watching him for 30 years, until his death.

Good News

On Monday I posted about the re-issue of Mohammed Choukri's For Bread Alone in the UK. Donald Linn, of Consortium, writes in to let us know that they will distribute the book in the U.S. in the fall. See? So you've got no excuse for not reading this marvel of a novel.

June 20, 2006

First Time

When I was a sophomore in college, our class was assigned Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People for our African Literature course. I went to get my copy at the English Bookshop, which back then was on Zanqat Al-Yamama, across from the train station in downtown Rabat, right behind what used to be the British Council building. The bookseller had ran out of new copies, so I bought a used one--printed by Heinemann in 1982. A Man of the People was a revelation for me; it spoke to me like few books had until then (or since, for that matter.) I went back to the store and bought the other works of Achebe's that I could find, including, of course, Things Fall Apart.

I've been scavenging bookstore shelves for titles from the Heinemann African Writers Series for a while, but I finally gave up and ordered many of the ones I hadn't yet read from an online site. But what's strange is that I tend to prefer to buy the orange-covered editions--maybe because I'm hoping to replicate that feeling of discovery I had with Achebe or because I'm hoping to fall into these books in the same way I have fallen into A Man of the People. There hasn't been anything like that first time, though.

Laroui on Benali

Fouad Laroui's brief column for this week's Jeune Afrique is about Dutch-Moroccan novelist Abdelkader Benali's recent experiences in Morocco, which he was visiting for the Casablanca Book Fair. A few cross-cultural surprises for Benali, such as

Il faut savoir qu’en Hollande les gens ne se font jamais la bise. On ne se serre même pas la main. On se dit « Hi » à bonne distance. Et voilà notre Abdelkader assailli de poutous par des gens qu’il ne connaît que très vaguement. Bonjour, smac-smac ! Bienvenue à Casa, smac-smac ! Tu te souviens de moi, on s’est croisés il y a deux ans ? Smac-smac ! Abdelkader veut bien qu’on l’appelle par son prénom, et même qu’on l’appelle Mohammed, mais qu’on l’embrasse à tout bout de champ, non, ça, ça lui semble étrange.

Benali's first novel, Bruiloft Aaan Zee, was translated into English as Wedding by the Sea. Check it out.

What The Critics Said, Back Then

The Guardian reprints its original (1924) review of E.M. Forster's A Passage To India. Quaint.

Panderer Nailed

A few days ago, Stephen Colbert asked Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, the lawmaker who sponsored a bill that would make it possible to display the Ten Commandments in courthouses, to name those same commandments:

Stephen Colbert: What are the Ten Commandments?
Lynn Westmoreland: What are all of them?
SC: Yes.
LW: You want me to name them all?
SC: Yes.
LW: Uh. Don't murder. Don't lie. Don't steal. Uh. I can't name them all.

Watch the response here. Hilarious.

(via.)

Mouthpieces

Over at the New York Times, Laurie Goldstein profiles two increasingly prominent Muslim figures in America, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, both of them American converts to Islam. It's an interesting piece. Hamza Yusuf comes across as someone who is still maturing in his philosophy and finding his way. And I can see why Zaid Shakir would appeal to young kids.

But when you get to the end of the piece you find this little nugget of wisdom from the young Imam Shakir:

[Imam Zaid Shakir] said he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law, "not by violent means, but by persuasion."

"Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country," he said. "I think it would help people, and if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be a Muslim. Because Islam helped me as a person, and it's helped a lot of people in my community."

It drives me absolutely up the wall when people say things like "every Muslim [fill in blank]." Will people please, please, quit talking for everyone? And I don't care if it's an imam or if it's one of those ubiquitous "experts on Islam" who say they know what the rest of us think. Look, I'm Muslim, and I don't want America to be a Muslim country--or any kind of a religious country, for that matter.

(via.)

June 19, 2006

'For Bread Alone'

For some time now, I've been looking for an English-language edition of Mohammed Choukri's For Bread Alone, translated by Paul Bowles, but the book is out of print and used copies are very hard to find. First editions are ridiculously expensive. Given the state of fiction in translation in the U.S., I am not holding my breath for an American edition sometime in the future, either.

Luckily for those of you who would like to finally get your hands on this seminal Moroccan novel, Telegram Books in the UK is re-issuing it this month, so I'll be sure to pick up a copy when I'm in London in July. You can also get it on Amazon.co.uk. You'd better get a copy and read it, or you are dead to me.

More Ali Reviews

Ron Charles, writing in the Washington Post, is not particularly taken with Monica Ali's new novel, Alentejo Blue.

Monica Ali's debut, the sensitive, subtly witty Brick Lane , was one of the best novels of 2003. Now, with Alentejo Blue , she's produced one of the best books of 1926. This spare, unrelentingly depressing story about several lost generations might have delighted Gertrude Stein and made Hemingway green with envy, but whether readers will want to subject themselves to it now seems doubtful. Searching for this title online, don't be surprised if you get a pop-up ad for Prozac.

Other reviewers appear to agree. I'm really disappointed, but let's face it, I'll probably pick up the book and give it a try anyway.

Summer Reading

If you're wondering what to take the beach: The Guardian asked Monica Ali, John Banville, A.S. Byatt, Dave Eggers, Francis Fukuyama, Kazuo Ishiguro, HIlary Mantel, Pankaj Mishra, Audrey Niffenegger, Orhan Pamuk, Sarah Waters, and many many others about their summer reading lists.

Reading Recap: Olsson's

Audience: About 35.
Anxiety index: 1 (out of 10).
Surprise guest(s): DC blogger Natasha Tynes. Author John Kropf.
No. of Moroccans who said hello: 8.
Book given away: None. (I forgot to pack one!)

My trip to our nation's capital last week was my very first, but for some reason I wasn't nervous at all about my reading. The weather was great, the turnout was excellent, and, even better, the audience was really engaged. I asked people what they wanted me to read. They suggested "The Fanatic," and I was happy to oblige, especially because it's not a piece I read from very often, since it's pretty long. In any case, the reading went very well. Some questions I was asked: Where will your book be published? (Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil.) Has your book been translated into Arabic? (No.) Do you want to translate it into Arabic? (Of course. Though the translation that's closest to my heart is one into Darija--Moroccan Arabic--which I'll do myself, after I finish the novel I'm working on now.) Do you feel that when you talk about problems in Moroccan society you're airing dirty laundry? (I understand that concern, particularly given the vicious images we see reflected back at us from the media. But as a writer I have to do what feels true to the characters I create. I hope the world in the book is complete enough and plausible enough that it will ring true to the reader.) Do you want to write non-fiction? (Yes. Maybe. But fiction is my first love.)

During the signing period, I got to talk to several people, some of whom had been to Morocco, and I wanted to mention in particular one guy who served in the Navy a few years ago. He was on deck when his ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, and he saw some harraga being stopped by Moroccan and Spanish coast guards. I also loved meeting four college students who were interning in Washington for the summer. I have no idea how they heard about my reading, but here are some photos they posted. I signed some extra copies at the store, so if you missed the reading, here's your chance to get them from a cool independent.

June 15, 2006

HODP Reading: Washington DC

Tonight I'll be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits in Washington, DC. Here are the details:

Thursday the 15th
7:00PM
Olsson's Books & Records -- Dupont Circle
1307 19th St., NW
Washington, DC

Hope to see you there!

Portland Event: Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is one of the best graphic memoirs I have ever read, will appear at Powell's City of Books tonight at 7:30pm. If I were in town, I'd be there. (I take some comfort in knowing Alex will get our copy signed, but it's just not the same.) I'll have more to say about this book in the near future, so watch this space.

June 14, 2006

Off to DC

I'm off to Washington, DC for a couple of events on Thursday and Friday. If you're in the area come on by and say hi. And if time permits, I'll try to post some re-caps.

Guest Review: Katrina Denza

Voodoo Heart
Scott Snyder
Bantam Dell
276 pp.

The men in Scott Snyder's debut collection of stories Voodoo Heart, are running--either away from constricting lives or after the objects of their affections. Each yearns deeply for that which is beyond his reach.

In "Blue Yodel," a man drives his Model T across the country in pursuit of the blimp which carries his girlfriend away from him, toward the West Coast. The reader can only guess why the girlfriend has left him. Perhaps it's the intensity of his feelings for her--feelings he describes as "an exhibit on hydroelectricity he'd seen at a fair." The chase, which lasts through the whole story, serves as an apt metaphor for the ultimate surrender to the unknown course of love.

Snyder's men possess the innocence and curiosity of children, and this sense of youthful wonder and outrage at the world is the very thing that endears the reader to them. The narrator of "About Face,' has an appealing naiveté. Miles Fergus is twenty-nine, well-meaning but unlucky. He's given a community service job playing the horn for troubled boys after a good deed goes wrong. The camp's director enlists Miles' help in driving his ill daughter to her treatments, and the reader is swept along with Miles as he begins to believe in a happy ending, but as in many of Snyder's stories, happy endings aren't so much a possibility as an anomaly.

Many of Snyder's men are angry. What makes them special is their awareness, and ultimate acceptance, of this anger. The narrator of "Voodoo Heart," confesses frankly:

"That's what happens with me. The feeling hits me and it won't go away. I get angry and mean and, most of all, restless. Everywhere I look I see chances to go back and correct my life, chances to start over alone or with someone new."

In "Dumpster Tuesday," a young professional leaves his Manhattan marketing firm and moves to Florida to chase the woman who left him for a shady country-western singer. He takes a job guarding a dumpster with a spear-gun--the danger of which, he admits, holds a certain appeal:

"I was in Florida because my fianc´e had left me for a brain-damaged country-singer: there were plenty of moments in each day that I wished someone would blow my fucking brains out."

Just when he thinks he's made peace with his situation, fate offers him a chance to test that peace with a face-to-face encounter with the object of his rage.

A barn-storming pilot inadvertently crashes into a wedding party in the story "The Star Attraction of 1919," and is surprised when the bride asks him to take her with him, away from her life and the groom. He's not used to being more than a one-man act and the reader wonders right until the end what will become of this unlikely couple.

Wade, the narrator in "Wreck," sits in his hunting stand and watches children in a neighboring fat-farm attempt to transform themselves by summer's end. But as the story proves, transformation is not always a good thing. For Wade, a loner by nature, change comes in the company of a famous woman, who in turn is temporarily transformed by surgery.

And in the title story, perhaps my favorite, a young man and his girlfriend buy a house too large for them, with dreams just as large. They work side by side to fix it up, often communicating in CB code through walkie-talkies. The only drawback is the women's prison next door. Still, they manage to make the house a plausible reality and the women prisoners are basically harmless. The only hurdle left for the narrator is an adverse reaction to commitment and a family legacy of running away. Snyder ends the story in a most humane and touching way.

I love the absurd in fiction and this collection is filled with delicious oddities. One man's hair has a white streak from being shot in the head as a boy; one girl's skin itches so much she has to take a brush to it; a woman throws personal items out of a blimp like crumbs for her boyfriend to follow; a man has a nose that whistles in the wind; and shards of glass leak out of the skin around a woman's eyes. All of these details add spice to an already rich narrative and in lesser hands they may have appeared gimmicky. Snyder does such a great job of grounding the reader in vibrant natural settings and characters' authentic emotions that these items eventually become not so much unusual as organic to the stories.

Even with all the missteps these characters make, all the dark tendencies and unluckiness they seem to share, the main emotional landscape rendered in these seven stories is love. These men are brave enough to go for the dream of love, and even when it's tried and lost, they're left better people for it. Scott Snyder is a writer I will be watching in the future.

IMPAC Awarded

As has been widely reported elsewhere, this year's IMPAC Dublin award has been awarded to Colm Toibin for his novel, The Master.

"If you just look at who has won it before, you think, 'God, I would really like my book to be in that list'," Toibin said.

The author, who was serving as the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University in California when he learnt of the award, said he will return there in 12 months' time.

"I'm going to take a year to get a new novel written. The great advantage of this is it really frees you, the money," he said.

Previous winners include Orhan Pamuk, Tahar Ben Jeloun, and Edward P. Jones.

June 13, 2006

Fiction Accused of "Insulting Turkishness"

Zaman Online reports that Turkish novelist Elif Shafak (The Saint of Incipient Insanities) has, like Orhan Pamuk earlier this year, been accused of "insulting Turkishness":

Ultra-rightwing Turkish Lawyers Association Chairman Kemal Kerincsiz, who is infamous for filing complaints against journalists and authors in the country, has filed a complaint against author Elif Safak for her book "Baba and Pic” (Father and Offspring).

Kemal Kerincsiz, who has sued famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and ethnic-Armenian writer Hrant Dink, has now also accused Elif Safak of 'insulting Turkishness' - over remarks made by Armenian characters in her latest book.

And this kind of ridiculous harassment is likely to continue as long as there is Article 301.

Doing Nothing: What's That?

I'm always behind on everything I want to do, so I have only an anthropological interest in the species known as "slacker," which is the subject of Tom Lutz's new book, Doing Nothing. Apparently these slackers are here to stay. "They arise in force, [Lutz] suggests, whenever there are major social changes taking place. They are also clowns and jesters, who reveal the illusions we cherish about the work we do. They are the counterforce against which workers must contend, sometimes even within themselves."

June 12, 2006

Walking Across Afghanistan

I hate gimmicky travel books, but I have to say I'm intrigued by Rory Stewart's The Places in Between. It's the story of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002, with nothing more than a walking stick and a backpack. Call it bravado. Or foolishness. In his NYT review, Tom Bissell had this to say about it:

If, finally, you're determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. "The Places in Between" is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.

One more to add to the list.

Temptation, Temptation

John Gray's review of Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West : How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond makes me very curious to read it. The book is about the fluidity of cultural frontiers, and how cultures change in response to (peaceful or violent) contact with one another, which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Here's a snippet:

In a brilliant chapter Mishra observes that one of the central aims of India's 19th-century anti-colonial movements was to invent Hinduism as a religion. As part of building a modern Indian nation that could resist and overthrow British rule, the Hindu elite simplified and remoulded India's unfathomably rich inheritance of beliefs and practices into something resembling a western creed. Like Shinto in Japan, Hinduism as it figures in Indian politics today is a byproduct of an encounter with the west. In order to resist western domination, Asian peoples have found themselves compelled to copy them. As Mishra observes, India's anti-colonial elites "denounced British imperialism as exploitative, but even they welcomed its redeeming modernity, and, above all, the European idea of the nation - a cohesive community with a common history, culture, values and sense of purpose - which for many other colonised peoples appeared a way of duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering west." The result has been to exacerbate sectarian divisions, and create them where they did not exist before.

And in an op-ed piece in the same paper, Mishra argues that China and India made important gains when they adapted parts of the free market economy and rejected others.

Economic reforms in the 80s focused on boosting export-oriented industries on the coast. They made China a huge sweatshop for the west's cheap goods and gave it an average annual growth of 10%. It may be tempting to credit the invisible hand of the free market for this, but, as in the so-called "Asian tiger" economies, the Chinese state has carefully regulated domestic industry and foreign trade and investment, besides maintaining control of public services.

More here.

What Muslim Women Want

What do Muslim women want? According to this NYT article, a new Gallup poll revealed that:

When asked what they resented most about their own societies, a majority of Muslim women polled said that a lack of unity among Muslim nations, violent extremism, and political and economic corruption were their main concerns. The hijab, or head scarf, and burqa, the garment covering face and body, seen by some Westerners as tools of oppression, were never mentioned in the women's answers to the open-ended questions, the poll analysts said.

Concerning women's rights in general, most Muslim women polled associated sex equality with the West. Seventy-eight percent of Moroccan women, 71 percent of Lebanese women and 48 percent of Saudi women polled linked legal equality with the West. Still, a majority of the respondents did not think adopting Western values would help the Muslim world's political and economic progress.

While I'm not the least bit surprised about these findings, I do wish the article gave more details.

The Gallup survey, "What Women Want: Listening to the Voices of Muslim Women," does not appear to be online at all, but with some Googling, I found this other report, which reveals that the survey covered only eight Muslim countries: Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But there are plans to cover as many as 39 majority-Muslim countries, so that's a good start.

Darija: It's High Time

There's a very interesting article in Le journal Hebdo about a round-table that took place in Rabat about the use of Darija, the vernacular language of Morocco. Writers, poets, linguists, artists, and rappers took part in the debate, i.e. all those for whom language is an essential means of creation or scholarship. I was quite pleased to see a few misconceptions discussed and cleared up during the debate (e.g. the ridiculous idea that somehow Darija is not a proper language because it is not written. Piffle.) So hopefully this is the precursor to a wider national debate about the issue. I'm fully in favor of using Darija, because of the huge impact it would have on the creation of a reading culture. Imagine: All children's books right now are in Modern Standard Arabic, which is a language no one learns until first grade (i.e. age 6 or 7), by which time reading habits are already in place for many kids.

Department of WTF

Just when it seems that the administration makes a step forward, like getting that fucker Zarqawi (not that it will change the situation in Iraq or return the hostages he's taken, but hey, I'll take comfort wherever I can get it at this point), it takes two steps back. This past weekend, when two Saudis and a Yemeni committed suicide at the prison that shame forgot, a Gitmo camp commander declared that the men "committed an act of war" against the U.S. How monumentally arrogant and soulless do you have to be to say something like that? I mean, seriously?

June 09, 2006

Portland Event: Abani, Channer & Lalami

I was asked to join a very cool reading this Saturday at Reading Frenzy, here in Portland. Here are the details:

Saturday, June 10th
7 pm
Reading Frenzy
921 SW Oak St.
Portland, Oregon
(503) 274-1449

Chris Abani will be reading from his novella, Becoming Abigail, Colin Channer will present work from Iron Balloons: Hit Fiction From Jamaica's Cat, and I'll be reading from