October 31, 2006

Reading: Allendale, Michigan

I will be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits today at Grand Valley State University. Here are the details:

Tuesday, October 31
1 - 3 PM
Reading and Discussion
CookDeWitt Hall
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, Michigan

Come on by.

October 27, 2006

Le Journal Profile

The latest issue of the Moroccan magazine Le Journal Hebdomadaire includes a profile of me by culture editor Kenza Sefrioui.

October 26, 2006

Highsmith on Writing

Maud Newton posted a brief excerpt from Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction that I found quite inspiring:

Good books write themselves, and this can be said from a small but successful book like Ripley to longer and greater works of literature. If the writer thinks about his material long enough, until it becomes a part of his mind and his life, and he goes to bed and wakes up thinking about it — then at last when he starts to work, it will flow out as if by itself. A writer should feel geared to his book during the time he is writing it, whether that takes six weeks, six months, a year or more. It is wonderful the way bits of information, faces, names, anecdotes, all kinds of impressions that come in from the outside world during the writing period, will be usable in the book, if one is in tune with the book and its needs. Is the writer attracting the right things, or is some process keeping out the wrong ones? Probably it’s a mixture of both.

I've been working on my novel for about three years now, and only in the last few months have I seen the characters completely taking over, leading the story. They give me ideas and take me in directions I hadn't anticipated, and I discover things I had never planned or thought of when I set out to write this book. It's very joyful--but it took three years to get to this point. (via)

Email Trouble

I seem to be having some serious email trouble of late. I'm told that emails to me have bounced back, and I've also noticed I get emails two or three days late. So if you have written me and have not received a response, it may be that I never received your message in the first place. Apologies.

October 25, 2006

Controversies, Lobbies, Freedom

Earlier this month, historian Tony Judt was due to speak on "The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy" to a group called Network 20/20, which is comprised of young business leaders and academics from various countries. These meetings are usually held at the Polish consulate, which serves merely as host and not as organizer. The talk was cancelled at the last minute, and a controversy has erupted over the reasons why. Judt maintains that the consulate was threatened by Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman, while Foxman and the ADL claim they simply "inquired" into who was organizing the event.

Judt's lecture was supposed to also include a discussion of Mearsheimer and Walt's paper "The Israel Lobby," which inflamed passions when it appeared in the London Review of Books last March. (The authors were accused of anti-semitism, among other things.) Recently, a panel of experts that included Martin Indyk, John Mearsheimer, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, and Dennis Ross discussed the paper at length in New York, without incident. You can view a video of the event here.

Now the New York Review of Books has published a letter, signed by more than a hundred writers, editors, critics, and academics protesting the ADL's involvement into Tony Judt's scheduled lecture at the Polish Consulate. The signatories state: "Though we, the undersigned, have many disagreements about political matters, foreign and domestic, we are united in believing that a climate of intimidation is inconsistent with fundamental principles of debate in a democracy. The Polish Consulate is not obliged to promote free speech. But the rules of the game in America oblige citizens to encourage rather than stifle public debate. We who have signed this letter are dismayed that the ADL did not choose to play a more constructive role in promoting liberty."

For a radically different take you can read Christopher Hitchens' takedown at Slate.

Clear Your Calendar

It's too bad I'm travelling so much in the next three weeks or I would have gone to some of the events organized by Literary Arts this season: Frank Rich is due to speak on November 5th, for instance. Check out all the events here.

October 24, 2006

New Alarcón

I was very pleased to see that the latest issue of the New Yorker includes a short story by Daniel Alarcón, "República and Grau."

October 23, 2006

Dawkins in Review

There is an excellent, excellent review by Jim Holt of Richard Dawkins's much-hyped The God Delusion. Here's a small excerpt:

Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds. Dawkins asserts that “the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.” But what possible evidence could verify or falsify the God hypothesis? The doctrine that we are presided over by a loving deity has become so rounded and elastic that no earthly evil or natural disaster, it seems, can come into collision with it. Nor is it obvious what sort of event might unsettle an atheist’s conviction to the contrary.

You should read the whole article.

Benali Profile

There's a great profile of Dutch-Moroccan writer Abdelkader Benali in the Daily Star. The article covers his work as a novelist and playwright--as well as his more recent foray in literary reportage. (Benali was living in Beirut during the Israeli bombing, and wrote about it for Dutch audiences.) One tidbit that resonated with me:

Benali views his job as being to creatively undermine his assigned role.

"In Holland it's all about belonging to clubs - a running club or a sewing club. I don't belong to any club," he says. "People expect me to speak as a Muslim or a Moroccan yet I'm giving you my own opinion. I use my tricks, my language skills, to undermine the role they've assigned me.

"The problem is that everything's connected to Islam. It never really becomes an intellectual discussion because that would invite argument and people don't want that. Whenever journalists want the 'Muslim Dutch perspective,' they never go to an intellectual. They find some old man at a mosque.

This doesn't surprise me one bit. I was invited to a panel recently, with the express purpose to give "the Muslim perspective." I said there is no such thing. I can only give my perspective. That didn't go over so well.

Art of Resistance

Ahdaf Soueif discusses Palestinian resistance art/art of resistance. A worthwhile read.

Eid 1427

A happy and healthy Eid-ul-Fitr to all my Muslim readers. Eid Mubarak.

October 20, 2006

Dutch Hope

A few days ago, I received two copies of the Dutch translation of my book, Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens. It was released earlier this month in the Netherlands, and it's a very handsome edition, with nice, thick paper, and beautiful cover. I am looking forward to my visit to the Netherlands in January, when I will be doing a few public events.

For NYC Readers

For those of you who live in New York: The NBCC will be hosting a panel about representations of Islam tonight. The speakers are author and historian Tariq Ali and poet and translator Eliot Weinberger, which should be quite interesting. The discussion will be moderated by Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. The event takes place at 7 pm at McNally/Robinson Bookstore (Mulberry and Prince Street in SoHo.) For more information, call (212) 274-1160. And then email me and let me know how it went.

There Goes The Day

The Literary Saloon (one my favorite blogs) reports that the University of Rouen now offers a full transcript of the manuscript for Madame Bovary. You can see Flaubert's text as he labored over it: words crossed out, verbs changed; descriptions refined. And you can see various drafts, the final draft, the copy edited version, and the published text of 1873. It's really quite something.

October 19, 2006

Endings & Beginnings

This is what our living room looks like this morning--empty, except for a rug and a sad-looking plant. We've moved some of our furniture to storage, with the rest to go within the next couple of weeks, in preparation for the move eastward. Or westward, if you consider that Al-Maghrib ('Morocco') literally means 'the land of the setting sun.'

I've been thinking about endings a lot, lately; I am working simultaneously on the last three chapters of my novel, so I suppose I can't help seeing, or seeking, closure in other places as well. When I saw my empty living room this morning it made me feel sad, as though my life here in puddletown was coming to an end. But even endings are temporary, I know. Right after I finish these last three chapters, I am going right back to the first chapter and starting over, with the third draft.

October 18, 2006

On Pamuk

Over at the Nation, Maria Margaronis has an excellent piece of commentary on Orhan Pamuk's Nobel award:

"Pamuk's Nobel: Deciphering the Code of Silence in Ankara," read the headline in the Turkish tabloid Hurriyet--a title that could refer equally to a postmodernist reading of Orhan Pamuk's work, an account of intrigues among Ottoman pashas or a news story about the Turkish president's failure to congratulate the laureate. Since the Turkish novelist won the Nobel Prize for Literature, life has strangely come to resemble one of his fictions. On the day the prize was announced the French national assembly passed a bill making it an offense to deny the Armenian genocide, so that a person can now be prosecuted in France for denying something that it is a crime to assert in Turkey.

You can read it all here. In other news, the Literary Saloon reports that Pamuk has cancelled his appearance at the University of Minnesota, where he was due to give the Ohanessian lecture.

October 17, 2006

New Edition of Alleg Memoir

The Chronicle reports that the University of Nebraska Press has re-issued Henri Alleg's The Question, his memoir of torture at the hands of French police during the occupation of Algeria.

French citizens had known vaguely that their colonial authorities were torturing dissidents and suspected terrorists in Algeria, but Mr. Alleg's essay made that knowledge much more vivid. The French government quickly banned the book's sale — which, of course, only added to the public frenzy. (The book was legalized in France only after the Algerian war ended, in 1962.)

The Question remains a political touchstone in France, and Mr. Alleg, who is still active in his mid-80s, is a familiar commentator there on the past crimes of French colonialism. But in the English-speaking world, the book has been largely forgotten.

This new edition includes an afterword by Alleg in which he draws comparisons with the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Don't Even Ask Them What A Madhab Is

What do these people have in common? Willie Hulon, head of the FBI's new national security branch; Rep. Terry Everett (R-Alabama), vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence; and Rep. Jo Ann Davis (R-Virginia), who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.’s performance in recruiting Muslim spies. None of them could tell Jeff Stein the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. And we're now three years into the war in Iraq.

Lecturers to Spy on Muslim Students

From yesterday morning's Guardian:

Lecturers and university staff across Britain are to be asked to spy on "Asian-looking" and Muslim students they suspect of involvement in Islamic extremism and supporting terrorist violence, the Guardian has learned.

They will be told to inform on students to special branch because the government believes campuses have become "fertile recruiting grounds" for extremists.

But if lecturers are spying on students, who's spying on lecturers?

October 16, 2006

Pamuk Profile, Interview

There's obviously lots and lots of coverage of Orhan Pamuk now that he has won the Nobel Prize for literature. You can read Robert McCrum's anecdote of meeting the then "unknown Turkish novelist" in 1991. Or the interview with Malcolm Jones in Newsweek, where Pamuk describes his development as a writer. Or his reaction to the new French law that makes it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.

'Like Mercurochrome On A Wooden Leg'

The October 16 issue of the New Yorker has a profile by Jane Kramer of Aboubakr Jamaï, founder, publisher, and editor of the Casablanca-based weekly magazine Le Journal Hebdo. The article is unfortunately not available online, so I can't link to it. You should check it out, though. It's generally well researched and quite readable, and gives a good background on Jamaï (or Boubker, as he is known.) Boubker's magazine has created waves in Morocco for its daring reporting on the three taboos of the press (the king's private life, Western Sahara, and separation of church and state). His work has cost him several trips to the courthouse, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The quote in the title of this post is from an unnamed source in Kramer's article who says, "I tell Boubker, 'Your editorials about the King are like Mercurochrome on a wooden leg.'"

Although I enjoyed the article, I had a couple of problems with it. For starters, the title is "The Crusader." (I mean, seriously, what was the editor thinking?) And then Kramer adds occasional orientalist comments like: "The King at forty-three is not a statesman, despite a French education." (Excuse me? So in order to be a statesman one needs a French education?) And when she mentions the women's rights reform that took place in 2004, she states that Islamists staged a huge demonstration against it in Casablanca, but neglects to add that there was a demonstration in Rabat in favor of the reform. The effect is that one gets the impression that the only political actors on the scene are the king and the Islamists, which is not quite the case.

Mubarak's Egypt

Scott Anderson's Vanity Fair article on Egypt is an absolute must-read.

Until a few years ago, no one had heard of the Red Sea Riviera. Perhaps that's because most of the shiny beach-resort hotels that fall under the marketing label aren't on the Red Sea at all, but rather on the Gulf of 'Aqaba, that narrow strip of water which separates the eastern coast of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula from Saudi Arabia and Jordan. No matter, because it really could be anywhere. From Taba, at the very north end, flush on the border with Israel, all the way down the 125 miles of rugged Sinai coastline to the main tourist resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, the visitor exists in a cocoon of pleasure scrubbed clean of exoticism, the largest gated playground on the planet. Within those gates are five-star hotels and restaurants and world-class scuba-diving, a Hard Rock Cafe, and McDonald's. Outside those gates is everyone and everything else, a purity maintained by police checkpoints on all roads leading into the enclave. The only Egyptians allowed to enter are those wealthy enough to vacation in the zone, or those who can prove they have jobs there; the others are turned back.

Starting out at the resort, Anderson follows two trails, that of a young man who had been accused of taking part in one of the recent bombings, and that of another young man who briefly worked at the resort, but whose life has been nothing but constant humiliation. Please read the article to the end, here.

Link via The Arabist.

October 13, 2006

Reading: Portland, Oregon

Tonight I'll be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at Powell's City of Books in Portland. Here are the details:

Friday, October 13
7:30 PM
Reading and Signing
Powell's City of Books
1005 W Burnside
Portland, Oregon

If your book club is reading Hope, you may find it relevant that Harcourt has a reading guide online.

Nobel Peace Prize 2006

This is delightful news: Bangladeshi economics professor Muhammad Yunus has won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, to be shared with Grameen Bank, which he founded. Yunus is credited with inventing micro-credit. I remember watching a documentary about him on PBS a while back--a very soft-spoken man, and a committed activist. But what a difference he has made for Bangladeshi women, and men.

RIP: Gillo Pontecorvo

Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, who directed The Battle of Algiers, has passed on, aged 86. The photo below is from the scene in which Colonel Mathieu enters the city with his troops, in order to quell the rebellion. (In real life, the actor Jean Martin staunchly opposed French occupation of Algeria. )

Below is another photo from the film, from a scene where four independence militants are trapped in the casbah. All the actors in the film, with the exception of Martin, were non-professionals. To the right is Brahim Hadjiadj, who plays the role of Ali la Pointe.

When it was released in 1965, the film was banned in France, and several theatres that showed it in Europe were bombed. But the film survived, of course, and has become a classic. Last year, the Criteron Collection released a boxed set of the film, which includes many extras and commentary, by the likes of Mira Nair, Spike Lee, and Julian Schnabel. Pontecorvo will be sorely missed, and I can only hope that the rumors of a Hollywood remake are false.

Slate Fall Fiction

This week is Fall Fiction Week over at Slate. There's a great exchange between Gary Shteyngart and Walter Kirn on the future of American fiction, reviews of new books by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Edna O'Brien, Richard Powers, Lynne Tillman, and Charles Frazier, and a survey of overlooked fiction by bloggers and booksellers. Find out which book I recommended.

Help Oregon Libraries Stay Open

This November, in addition to the gubernatorial election, Oregonians have to decide whether to renew the library levy. More than half of the funding for Oregon libraries comes from this levy. The people campaigning against this levy and against funding include Friends for Safer Libraries, whose website describes a library as "a playground of books [that] becomes a minefield of harmful visions." So now going to the library is like going to Iraq? Anyway, please vote yes on the levy, so that libraries can keep their funding.

October 12, 2006

Nobel Prize in Literature 2006

Department of I told you so: The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Orhan Pamuk, "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." It's clear the judges have been sensitive to all the recent controversies that have been framed as exemplars of an age-old "clash of civilizations," but they also understand that it's not an inevitable state, since they've at least added the word "interlacing." And Pamuk himself is not one for essentialist views, as you can see from this lovely essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in November 2001: "The Anger of the Damned."

In any case, this is a wonderful and richly deserved distinction, and I couldn't be more pleased. You can find all of Pamuk's recent books online or at your favorite bookshop: My Name Is Red, Snow, The White Castle, The Black Book, and his most recent, a memoir, Istanbul: Memories of the City.

Some Pamuk-related links:
Orhan Pamuk goes on trial
Pamuk update
Pamuk in trouble?
The MG review of Snow
Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul

Photo: M. Euler/Scanpix

'Unitary Executive Branch'

From Joan Didion's article in the October 5 issue of the New York Review of Books about Vice President Dick Cheney:

It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, "called Yale and told 'em to take this guy." The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.

And then there's this:

Signing statements are not new, but at the time Bill Clinton left office, the device had been used, by the first forty-two presidents combined, fewer than six hundred times. George W. Bush, by contrast, issued more than eight hundred such takebacks during the first six years of his administration. Those who object to this or any other assumption of absolute executive power are reflexively said by those who speak for the Vice President to be "tying the president's hands," or "eroding his ability to do his job," or, more ominously, "aiding those who don't want him to do his job."

More here.

October 11, 2006

Silence, On Tue

There are days when I feel completely battered by the news, and have no energy to work, much less to post anything here. And then there are days when even a word like "battered" seems obscene. A new report, released by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, estimates that 650,000 Iraqis have died since 2003. The survey numbers are based on interviews with 1,849 Iraqi households between May and July 2006.

I do not doubt that this figure will be disputed. But it should also be pointed out that the United States itself has not kept track of civilian casualties since the early days of the war and has no counter-number to offer; and that the director of the Baghdad mosque has been quoted, time and again, as saying that the numbers he sees in the press (i.e. about 100 dead per day) do not match the numbers he has in his books.

I'm afraid that once the numbers are dismissed as "politics" (and they already have!), the media will move on. But if these numbers are correct, then the Bush administration may have killed more civilians than Saddam. Shouldn't this make statisticians run to their calculators and tell us whether the study's result are accurate? Welcome to the new, liberated Iraq. No one asks questions.

Desai Wins Booker

I was absolutely thrilled yesterday to find out that the 2006 Booker Prize has gone to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. What impressed me most about this amazing novel were its wonderfully complex characters, caught in an age of globalization that, while it has made some winners, has created many more losers. I loved how there is no sugar-coating of the immigrant experience (an unfortunately common fault, I think, in recent novels.) It's a brave book, a smart book, and I hope the prize will get it all the readers it truly deserves.

Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

October 10, 2006

Joe Miller Recommends

"No writer has brought America into sharper focus for me than bell hooks," Miller says. "My biggest epiphanies in recent years have arrived while her books are on my nightstand. Of all of them, Salvation: Black People and Love had the greatest impact because it offers a different perspective of the Civil Rights Movement and, in doing so, gives a clearer sense of the possibilities for this nation, and how close we once came to realizing them.

Love is the ultimate revolutionary force, hooks argues, and it was at full fury in the lives of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, though they were both individually incomplete in their manifestation of it. Malcolm was a prophet of self-love (always vital in a system of oppression such as ours), while Martin helped change the course of history with an ethic of loving thy enemy. Had the two come together -- as it appears they were about to do before Malcolm was assassinated -- hooks suggests we might well be living in a different world today.

Where I was most touched, however, was in hooks' suggestion as to who might rise to carry on love's call: single mothers. As a child of divorce, this resonates deeply with me. But more importantly, I'm humbled and set straight. In America, unwed moms are at best invisible and at worst vilified. Yet they've raised most of us. If anyone has the power to shape our world, it's them."

Joe Miller is a journalist who lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His first book, Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season with an Inner-City Debate Squad, was published October 2006 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

October 09, 2006

Recent Reviews, Articles, Bits Of Note

In these United States: Some people want to ban Alison Bechdel's delightful graphic memoir Fun Home, as well as Craig Thompson's Blankets, from their Missouri library. And it looks like they're winning.

If you've ever wondered about the ending to One Thousand and One Nights, and about the significance of Scheherazade's father being appointed the ruler of Samarkand, then you may like to read this meditation by Salman Rushdie, which appeared in the Times this weekend. The text is part of a collaboration with the sculptor Anish Kapoor, for a series to be shown at the Lisson Gallery.

Remember how Hugo Chávez was mercilessly derided because he thought Chomsky was dead? Well, it turns out, he never said Chomsky was dead. Ah, but surely it was just a big misunderstanding, and not part of the general trend to treat him as a kook for the unforgiveable crime of not liking our foreign policy and not wanting to sell us his oil.

The revelation that "A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas" has created a lot of anxiety. I understand the feeling, but the truth is that monitoring systems are nothing new, and have long been used by media and politicians to know what is happening around the world. For example, the BBC has one. But one should also point out that the BBC is using trained linguists, editors, and translators, people who are native speakers of the foreign language they are monitoring. These trained professionals read the foreign press and listen to speeches of leaders, and write a piece if they find that there is an interesting development. This is how a lot of the world news is circulated. However, the proposed U.S. system relies on language software, which, in my opinion, has not yet reached levels of maturity that would lead to reliable judgments. So. Expect some problems.

More Nobel Predictions

Newsweek seems to be convinced that Orhan Pamuk will take the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. I would not be surprised at all if he wins.

(via)

Back in Action

I have been thinking a lot about African literature--and not because I just got back from a symposium on the subject at Wellesley. I have been fortunate enough to have had conversations with many different people--fellow writers, but also critics, academics, editors, agents, publishers, booksellers--and the different perspectives seem to confirm some trends in the field that I'd like to write about someday, very soon. But first I have to stay focused on the last couple of chapters of my novel.

October 06, 2006

Panel: Wellesley College

I am still at Wellesley, and having a wonderful time of it. Tomorrow, I'll be participating in a roundtable about African Literature. Here are the details:

Saturday, October 7th
10:15 AM - 12 PM
Authors, Critics, Publishers: Conversations about Writing, Translating, Editing, and Publishing followed by discussion with audience.
PNW 212
Wellesley College
Wellesley, MA

More soon, I hope.

October 05, 2006

Events: Wellesley College

I'm in Boston for the rest of the week for a couple of events at Wellesley College. Tonight, Abdourahman Waberi and I will be doing a reading and Q & A at 7:30 PM. Here are the details:

7:30 - 8:45 PM
Readings and Discussion
277 Science Center
Wellesley College
Wellesley, MA

These events are open to the public. So if you're in the Boston area, do come and say hello.

October 04, 2006

Turing Fact and Fiction

Mark Sarvas (of TEV) reviews two Turing-related books for the Philadelphia Inquirer: Janna Levin's A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines and David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Full Circle

The brutalized people of Afghanistan, who endured ten years of war with the Soviets, the Mujahideen-Taliban war, and then the American invasion, have never been further from finding the elusive peace and security the country's protectors keep promising it. In his State of the Union address of January 22, 2002, Bush declared:

The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay. (Applause.) And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own. (Applause.)

America and Afghanistan are now allies against terror. We'll be partners in rebuilding that country. And this evening we welcome the distinguished interim leader of a liberated Afghanistan: Chairman Hamid Karzai. (Applause.)

The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government. And we welcome the new Minister of Women's Affairs, Doctor Sima Samar. (Applause.)

Our progress is a tribute to the spirit of the Afghan people, to the resolve of our coalition, and to the might of the United States military. (Applause.) When I called our troops into action, I did so with complete confidence in their courage and skill. And tonight, thanks to them, we are winning the war on terror. (Applause.)

Five years after the "liberation" of Afghanistan, Karzai can hardly leave his palace in Kabul without his American guards, the Taliban have regained control of parts of the country, girls who go to school have to do so in secret because of threats, and now, according to an Associated Press report, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tells us:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and urged support for efforts to bring "people who call themselves Taliban" and their allies into the government.

The Tennessee Republican said he learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated on the battlefield.

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished, we'll be successful."

So now one of our representatives wants the Taliban back. What a waste.

October 03, 2006

Satrapi Profile

The incomparable (and eminently quotable) Marjane Satrapi is interviewed in The Independent.

"Joseph Heller once said that he'd succeeded 'despite that great handicap for a novelist, a happy childhood'."

"Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried."

"Even if it meant not writing?"

"Definitely. Because I would have been happy. But when you're dropped in a pile of shit, so to speak, you have to decide - either add to the pile, or use it as fertiliser, and grow flowers."

Her newest graphic novel to appear in the U.S. is Chicken with Plums, translated by Anjali Singh.

Nobel 2006 Predictions

Speaking of probabilities: What are the odds that your favorite writer will get the Nobel? Michael Orthofer of the Literary Saloon has been keeping track of various predictions for the Nobel. Once again this year, there is mention of Mahmoud Darwish and Adunis, but I don't think it will go to them. (Why the academy has never selected an Arab poet is beyond me.) Michael thinks that Orhan Pamuk is too young, at 54, to get the prize. But Gabriel García Márquez was 54 when he got his. Plus, Pamuk has had a great year and with Turkey in the news over its ridiculous censorship law, that might just tilt the judges' votes in his favor.

On The Chances of Love

I was amused by this L.A. Times piece by statistician Michael Kaplan, in which he tries to explain the chances of finding true love:

True love is like a kick in the head. No, really. It's not just that it comes out of nowhere, knocks you sideways and changes your life forever. It's statistically like a kick in the head.

Most statistics are about things that usually happen or that most people share: prices, salaries, IQs, political opinions. These qualities are called "normally distributed": If you chart them, the graph they produce is that old favorite, the bell curve.

Love, here as everywhere, is different. True love is rare; we can only hope to find it once in a lifetime, and maybe not even then. The curve that charts love is very narrow — more like a steeple than a bell. It's called a Poisson curve, and its classic exemplar was the chance of being kicked to death by a horse while serving in the Prussian cavalry.

When I was in high school, Lo, these many years ago, one of my favorite subjects was math. I used to love probability. By the time I got to grad school, though, and had to take a class for my research, I got a C. I was mortified.

October 02, 2006

Hope, Oregon Book Awards Finalist

Today is the official release date for the paperback edition of my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and, in an odd coincidence, I just found out that it is a finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Awards. Here is the shortlist:

Ken Kesey Award for the Novel
Laila Lalami of Portland, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Algonquin Books)
Peter Rock of Portland, The Bewildered (MacAdam Cage)
Justin Tussing of Portland, The Best People in the World (Harper Collins)

To see my name associated with anything named after Ken Kesey is a huge honor, and it's a thrill to find myself in the company of Peter and Justin (both of whom I have met in the last year at the Loggernaut Reading Series.) The judge for this year's award is Francine Prose, who also adjudicates the short fiction award. The finalists in that category are:

H.L. Davis Award for Short Fiction
Tracy Daugherty of Corvallis, Late in the Standoff (Southern Methodist University Press)
Scott Nadelson of Portland, The Cantor’s Daughter (Hawthorne Books)
Gina Ochsner of Keizer, People I Wanted to Be (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books)
Geronimo G. Tagatac of Salem, The Weight of the Sun (Ooligan Press)

You can find out more details at the OBA site. The winners will be announced at a ceremony hosted by Barry Lopez at the Portland Art Museum on December 1st.

Weekend Reading

I was in California this weekend for a conference, but I managed to get some writing done on Sunday. I took a long walk on the beach in Monterrey and tried to figure a way out of my current dilemma. I'm not sure the solution I thought of will work, but I can at least see some shape to the last third of the book, the hardest part so far.

I also caught up on some online reading. There's a great Op-Ed by Robert Harris in the New York Times, about the parallels between an incident that took place in Ostia, in 68 B.C. , at the height of the Roman empire, and modern-day America.

Gary Shteyngart's NYTBR essay--about trying to write about Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov--made me smile. It's so...well, so Shteyngartian: Ten Days with Oblomov.

Rachid Bouchareb's film Indigènes, which I mentioned on a few occasions here, is finally coming out in France, and he's interviewed in Time. It looks like Chirac is finally going to sort out the pensions of North African WWII veterans. C'est pas trop tôt.

Maud Newton reviewed Aminatta Forna's Ancestor Stones, and she says that, although the characters' voices "feel insufficiently differentiated," she likes it very much. I am adding this book to my box of books to ship to Casablanca.

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My Events

04.26: LA Times Festival of Books
04.30: Claremont, California
09.23-10.04: International Literature Festival Berlin

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