September 28, 2007

Favorite Headline of the Day

It comes from Le Matin, of all places: The Spanish discover the existence of blondes in Morocco. It's about the response in Europe when it was discovered that the blond and blue-eyed girl photographed riding on her mother's back is not Madeleine McCann, but two-year-old Bouchra Benaissa. Photos here.

September 27, 2007

Reading: Los Angeles

I am doing a reading this evening in support of the anthology X-24: Unclassified, which was edited by Tash Aw and Nii Ayikwei Parkes. Nii will be there tonight, along with contributors Nikki Aguirre, Jennifer Kabat, and yours truly. Details, details:

X-24: Unclassified
With Nikki Aguirre, Jennifer Kabat, Laila Lalami and Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Thursday, September 27
6:30 pm
John F. Kennedy Library
Conference Room B530
California State University Los Angeles

Do come by and say hello.

September 26, 2007

On Edward Said

On the fourth anniversary of Edward Said's passing, Randa Jarrar has posted a poem/appreciation she wrote for him. Here are the first two stanzas:

It's been four years and a day.
I like the way you wrote about bellydancers,
Tahia Carioca, who couldn't tell you how many men she'd married.
When you asked her,
She could only utter a shrill

Kteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!

And I love the way you wrote
about those who wrote badly about bellydancers,
Oriental feet and jingles
and finger cymbals.
Edward, I wanted to meet you, wanted to fete you,
to talk about lost houses and lost selves and bellydance
with you.
What else would we have talked about?

Kteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!

Read the poem in full here.

Feminist Recommendations

Jessica Valenti, Natasha Walter, Rebecca Walker, Julie Binder, Ariel Levy, and Joan Smith tell readers which books on feminism most marked them.

Specter of 1981

Protests over a 30% hike in the price of bread quickly degenerated into full on riots in the town of Sefrou, and ignited several other demonstrations around the country, including in Rabat. (A loaf of bread or a baguette normally costs 1.20 dirhams. The new price would have been 1.56 dirhams, which is outrageous, especially considering the importance of bread and bread products to the Moroccan diet, particularly among the poor.) Yesterday, the Moroccan government announced it was canceling the hike, probably out of fear they would end up with a repeat of the bread riots of 1981 in Casablanca, which left several hundred people dead.

Just Plain Revolting

Rudy Giuliani wants you to donate $9.11 to his presidential campaign.

September 25, 2007

Trapped in the Nut House

I injured my right shoulder and elbow a few days ago, and I am in occasional but excruciating pain, which I suppose is just as well, seeing as how it's preventing me from putting my fist through a wall whenever I read or listen to the news. Take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University, which demonstrated once and for all his disconnect with reality. On the Holocaust, he said:

You shouldn't ask me why I'm asking questions. You should ask yourselves why you think that that's questionable? Why do you want to stop the progress of science and research? Do you ever take what's known as absolute in physics?

The Holocaust isn't some esoterical subject. It happened. If you keep insisting that it needs to be researched further, you're not going to convince anyone you're not a revisionist. And then when asked about gays, Ahmadinejad offered this:

In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country. We don't have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it.

The power of denial will never cease to amaze.

Nor was Ahmadinejad the only one to make ignorant comments that day. In his introduction, Columbia President Lee Bollinger referred to Ahmadinejad as "a petty and cruel dictator." He must have a new definition of 'dictator' in mind. Ahmadinejad was elected (on a platform of economic reforms, by the way, which he has failed to deliver.)

And, to compound the madness, look at this headline from the Los Angeles Times: "Ahmadinejad Hailed in Middle East." The source for this fantastical claim about millions of people? Why, a handful of people in Cairo, of course.

September 24, 2007

New Pamuk

I just got Orhan Pamuk's new collection of essays, Other Colors, and I am so excited about it, I can't wait to dive into it. The review by Michael McGaha in this weekend's SF Chronicle makes me look forward to it. It's interesting, too, to read his comments about the translation, by Maureen Freely:

The best thing one can say about Freely's translation is that it doesn't read like a translation. If you didn't know, you would never guess this book had originally been written in a foreign language. Freely's approach to translation seems to be to think about the meaning of Pamuk's Turkish and then rephrase the idea in English as she would have expressed it. For example, when Pamuk writes "from now on until the end of my life, I will never smoke a cigarette again," Freely translates: "I'm never going to smoke again, ever." The basic idea is there, and Freely's sentence sounds more natural in English than Pamuk's, yet something important is lost.

Sometimes her formulations seem to complicate things unnecessarily. When Pamuk writes, "Looking out the window was such a basic habit that when television did come to Turkey, people started looking at it as if they were looking out the window," the aptly named Freely translates: "Looking out the window was such an important pastime that when television did finally come to Turkey, people acted the same way in front of their sets as they had in front of their windows." In this case even the meaning seems somewhat distorted, and once again, the poetry of the original is lost. Why not let Pamuk be Pamuk?

You can read the article in full here.

Lending New Meaning to the Term 'Diva'

From Peter Conrad's Guardian review of a new biography of Rudolph Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh:

If he didn't like a ballerina he was partnering, he ungallantly let her thud to the ground. Once, he dragged an uncooperative dancer across the floor by her necklace, grazing her throat; he fractured the jaw of a male colleague who annoyed him. He ripped up costumes, hurled Thermos flasks into mirrors, spat at photographers and kicked police cars. In a tizz at Zeffirelli's chintzy villa, he hurled a wrought-iron chair at his host and pulled down a curtain rod with which he pounded some majolica pottery to smithereens. Expelled from the premises, he paused to shit on the steps like an indignant, incontinent dog.

There's more here, too.

Another Day in Hell

Well, that didn't last long. Last Thursday, Iraqi puppet (sorry, 'Prime Minister') Nouri Al-Maliki said he wanted to revoke the work license of Blackwater USA, the mercenary group (sorry, 'private security firm') working for the United States government in Iraq, in the wake of yet another shootout where Iraqi civilians were murdered. But yesterday, ta-da!, Blackwater was back in business.

September 21, 2007

'Jena is America'

Gary Younge has an excellent column in the current issue of The Nation about the case of the Jena 6. After describing the series of abhorrent racial incidents leading up to charging six black teenagers for attempted second-degree murder, he concludes:

These incidents have turned Jena into a national symbol of racial injustice. As such it is both a potent emblem and a convenient whipping boy. Potent because it shines a spotlight on how race and class conspire to deny black people equality before the law. According to the Justice Department, blacks are almost three times as likely as whites to have their cars searched when they are pulled over and more than twice as likely to be arrested. They are more than five times as likely as whites to be sent to jail and are sentenced to 20 percent longer jail time. This would not be a problem for the likes of Kobe Bryant, but in Jena's "quarters" high-powered legal teams are hard to come by.

Convenient because it allows the rest of the nation to dismiss the incidents as the work of Southern redneck backwoodsmen without addressing the systemic national failures it showcases. According to the Sentencing Project, the ten states with the highest discrepancy between black and white incarceration rates include Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York and none from the South. What took place in Jena is not aberrant; it's consistent. The details are a local disgrace. The broader themes are a national scandal. Jim Crow Jr. travels well--unencumbered by historical baggage.

Read it all here.

September 20, 2007

No Hotcakes

The UK Telegraph has published sales figures for this year's shortlisted books. Kind of shocking.

Tajbakhsh Free

It was very nice to come home to news that Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh has been released from Evin Prison. (See also.)

Banality of Evil

The New York Times has a slide show from a photo album found in Germany after World War II, but only recently donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The photos show senior SS officers and their families listening to music, relaxing on lounge chairs, and trimming Christmas trees while Jews and other Nazi victims were being gassed in Auschwitz.

Back in Action

I am back at home after a couple of days in New York, where I met with my editor, my agent, caught up with some good friends, and stopped by Columbia to attend the CJR panel on book reviewing (podcast here.) On the plane over, I read James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, which for some reason I had never read before. I've said before that writing a novel is like having a religion: you see signs everywhere. I felt like this book came at the right time for me; it's helped me see how a character's tortured inner life can be dissected and every feeling, every thought, every impulse recorded. Pretty stunning.

September 17, 2007

In New York

I am in New York for a couple of days, for meetings with my agent and my editor, and to catch up with some friends. On Tuesday night, my friend Mark Sarvas will be taking part in a panel discussion at the Columbia School of Journalism, and I plan on being in the audience. Join us, won't you? Here are the details:

Panel on the crisis in book reviewing
7 p.m.
Tuesday, September 18
Third-floor lecture hall, Journalism Building
116th and Broadway
The panelists will be Steve Wasserman, Peter Osnos, Elisabeth Sifton, Carlin Romano, and Mark Sarvas.

The moderator for the panel will be CJR’s publisher, Evan Cornog

September 15, 2007

Recap: San Francisco

When I was writing Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I could not possibly have imagined it would get the reaction it did from readers, or that it would be used in such varied classrooms as post-colonial North African literature and high school English. On Friday, I went to give a reading at Mercy High School, where the entire class of 600 students had read my book for the fall. What surprised me was how much and well the book was integrated into the curriculum. In drama class, students teased out personality traits for each of the main characters in my novel; in literature class, they looked for simile, metaphor, and other figures of speech; in French class, they translated some key quotes from the book; in ceramics class, they looked for Moroccan designs and used them to create artifacts, and they also chose scenes from some of the stories and recreated them in clay. Students were very familiar with the book by the time I came to read from it, and being in that auditorium with so many teenagers was truly one of the most fun experiences I have had on the road.

September 14, 2007

Hope in San Francisco

I am in San Francisco for the day to do a reading at Mercy High School, which has selected my book for a school-wide read. Sorry, no posts today.

September 13, 2007

New LRB

The latest issue of the London Review of Books is available, and it includes an excellent essay by Hilary Mantel on two new books about the AIDS crisis in South Africa. The essay explores sociological, economic, historical, and cultural aspects of the epidemic in a country that struck down apartheid only a decade or so ago. A must read.

Holidays

Today marks the start of Ramadan, so I'd like to wish ramadan karim to all my Muslim readers. May the coming month bring good tidings to all. In a happy coincidence, Rosh Hashanah started at sundown last night, so happy new year to all my Jewish readers as well.

September 12, 2007

Jeffrey Frank Recommends

"By a miracle of publishing, Gilbert Sorrentino's 1971 novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (a deeply cynical look at the Manhattan art world of mid-century) is available, barely, and it hasn't lost a bit of its nasty comic brilliance. Begin, for instance, with the beginning: "What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the top of her stockings? It is an old story." Sorrentino, who died not long ago, was always defiant, hugely incorrect, and unfailingly original; his Mulligan Stew remains a mildly insane and exhilarating satire about publishing (and literature itself), and his more recent Little Casino is a "deck" of fifty-two little linked stories, most of them terrific. But nothing was quite like Imaginative Qualities, which reads, still, as if it might have been written today or, perhaps, tomorrow."

Jeffrey Frank is the author of four novels, most recently Trudy Hopedale, and co-author, with his wife Diana, of The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation From the Danish. He lives in New York, where he is a senior editor at The New Yorker.

New Mag: Meena

Take a look at Meena; it's a new literary magazine, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Alexandria, Egypt.

September 11, 2007

'Shock Doctrine'

Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.

The short film below, written by Naomi Klein and directed by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón, uses this principle, put forth by economist Milton Friedman, to re-examine some of the fundamental events of our time, including 9/11 and the war on Iraq. It's called "The Shock Doctrine," and it's meant to accompany Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Take a look:

The Guardian has been running excerpts of Klein's book all week (see one, two, three). I liked what she wrote about the days leading to the invasion of Iraq, but I think at times Klein's writing in this excerpt is not precise enough or rigorous enough to fully back up her claims. Still, I'm intrigued.

(YouTube video via Amitava Kumar)

El Che's Notebook

The Guardian reports that the contents of Che Guevara's private notebook will be published next month in Mexico. Instead of the political writing or guerrilla strategy one might expect, the notebook contained Che's favorite poetry, written in his hand.

9/11 Six Years On

Over at Salon, Gary Kamiya commemorates the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by asking what happened: How did we go from nineteen terrorists, most of whom from Saudi Arabia, to the hellish mess that is the Iraq war? Here's the opening paragraph:

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his "war on terror." He has incessantly linked the words "al-Qaida" and "Iraq," a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' "anxiously awaited" evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11.

Petraeus' evaluation can only be "anxiously awaited" by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we've been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush's mighty-me, will insist that we're making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that "we're kicking ass" in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.

So let's forget the absurd debate about "progress" and whether a bullet in the front of the head is better than one in the back, and how much we can trust our new friends from Saddam's Fedayeen. On the anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask more basic questions -- not just about why we can't bring ourselves to pull out of Iraq, but why we invaded it in the first place.

Read the entire article here. It's thoughtful, but also passionate. (And it sort of explains why cheerleaders for the war, like Kenneth Pollack, or complicit Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, just cannot bring themselves to say they were wrong.)

September 10, 2007

Last Stretch

I know I must sound like a broken record by now, but posting may be a bit light this week. I need to finish revising the last chapter of my novel before my trip to New York next week, so please bear with me.

Al Aswany Interview

The Observer has an interview with novelist/dentist Alaa Al Aswany about his best-selling novel The Yacoubian Building. The piece is called "An author with bite" (har, har). Al Aswany's new novel, Chicago, will apparently be released by the American University in Cairo Press in 2008, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't have a U.S. publisher yet.

Election Results

The legislative elections in Morocco came and went, and the much hyped Islamist tsunami never materialized. As I suggested here on Friday, the PJD (Party of Justice and Development) failed to win a majority of seats--which would have been nearly impossible anyway, thanks to recent electoral reforms--or even to come in first place. They ended up in second place with 47 seats. The pre-election hype about a possible PJD win did serve the Makhzen well, however, presenting the monarchy once again as a bulwark against Islamists of all stripes, even moderate ones. Meanwhile, press and civil freedoms continue to be eroded.

What is surprising, however, is that Istiqlal, the conservative party whom many would have written off as a group of has-been politicians from Fes, took the lead, with 52 seats. The USFP, whose leftist credentials have long been forgotten, were big losers, coming in fifth place with 36 seats. The 2002 elections ushered USFP to power, and they had formed a coalition with Istiqlal in order to keep PJD in check. Now comes news that, in the wake of the 2007 elections, Istiqlal plans on creating a coalition with USFP. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

September 07, 2007

M.G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song

My review of M.G. Vassanji's new novel The Assassin's Song appeared in last weekend's Chicago Tribune. Here's the opening paragraph:

In February 2002, a group of Hindu demonstrators converged on the town of Ayodhya, India, to demand that a temple be built on the site of the Babri Masjid, a 16th Century mosque that had been destroyed a decade earlier. On their way back from the rally, their train stopped in the city of Godhra, in Gujarat state, where a group of Muslims standing on the platform allegedly heckled them. Part of the train carrying the Hindu demonstrators caught fire, and nearly 60 people were killed.

The deaths -- which new evidence suggests may have been caused by a cooking stove inside the train car -- led to months-long attacks on the state's entire Muslim minority. As many as 2,000 people were murdered. Muslim women were raped and burned alive, and their babies were torn from their wombs. Using voter lists, mobs targeted and looted Muslim businesses. By the time the killings stopped, 150,000 Muslims had been displaced.

The sheer viciousness and depressing regularity of communal riots in Gujarat make it an unlikely setting for a novel about a mystical saint who transcends religious identity, yet that is where M.G. Vassanji places the action in his new novel, "The Assassin's Song." Alternating chapters tell the stories of Karsan Dargawalla, an Indian college professor who returns home to Gujarat after having spent long years abroad, and Nur Fazal, a 13th Century Sufi Muslim who arrives in Gujarat seeking refuge with the Hindu king, Vishal Dev. Karsan is Nur's descendant, his successor -- and his avatar.

You can read the review in full here.

Moroccan Legislative Elections

Moroccans will be going to the polls today, electing their representatives in the lower house of parliament. You may have come across a couple of alarmist pieces in the Western press saying something like "Oh my God, Oh my God, the Islamists are going to win!" (At least it seemed that way to me when I was in Casablanca: a cover story in Le Point every other week on the topic.) But I think there is little chance of that happening, given recent changes in electoral laws and electoral districts. And in any case, the real question ought to be about what elections really mean in a country where there is no system of checks-and-balances and no accountability to the voters.

The elections will put 325 representatives in parliament, and of these 30 are guaranteed to be women (via national lists). In what is billed as a historical event, the Parti du Centre Social has picked a Jewish Moroccan for its national list, Maguy Kakon. But of course, this is not the first time that Moroccans of the Jewish faith have taken part in the legislative process.

By the way, even though I have dual Moroccan and American citizenships, and even though the constitution provides for the voting rights of MREs (or Moroccans Residing Abroad) I am not able to vote in these elections, because no procedures have been put in place for absentee ballots. Voters must be present at their precincts. More than 3 million Moroccans are thus excluded from the democratic experiment.

Booker Shortlist

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced yesterday afternoon, and it includes: Darkmans by Nicola Barker, The Gathering by Anne Enright, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, and Animal’s People by Indra Sinha. Several newspapers and a few bookies are giving McEwan as the favorite. Of the six finalists, I have read only Hamid; I have McEwan's new novel, but haven't gotten to it yet. The winner will be announced in October.

September 06, 2007

Díaz Interview

The amazing Dave Weich interviews Junot Díaz about his new novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Toward the end of their chat, Dave asks Díaz what he would consider his greatest weakness as a writer. Díaz replies that "he doesn't write enough," but then later seems to remember something:

Díaz: - Oh, I suck at dialogue.

Dave: You suck at dialogue?

Díaz: Definitely. If I were better at dialogue, I'd probably be walking around with a fur coat.

This sounded so strange to me--I think Díaz is actually brilliant at dialogue and have used an exchange from "Fiesta, 1980" in a class on language. Funny how writers' perceptions of their work can vary so greatly from those of their readers.

September 05, 2007

A Lesson in Detail

From the first few pages of J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K.

K had never been into the flat before. He found it in chaos. In a wash of water driven through the windows by high winds lay broken furniture, gutted mattresses, fragments of glass and crockery, withered pot-plants, sodden bedding and carpeting. A paste of cake flour, breakfast cereal, sugar, cat litter and earth stuck to his shoes. In the kitchen the refrigerator lay on its face, its motor still purring, a yellow scum leaking past its hinges into the half-inch of water on the tiled floor. Rows of jars had been swept off the shelves; there was a reek of wine. On the gleaming white walls someone had written in oven cleaner: TO HEL.

What gets me is the "the half-inch" of water.

Esfandiari Free, At Last

I was delighted to find out, in the middle of my moving adventures, that Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American scholar who had been detained in Iran since last May, was released last week. Now comes news that journalist Parnaz Azima was set free yesterday. Unfortunately, Ali Shakeri and Kian Tajbaksh are still being held in Iran. Perhaps we will hear good news about them in the coming days.

Back in Action

I just emerged from a hellish weekend: We opened boxes, set up furniture, shelved books, hung pictures, and all in 95-degree temperatures. It was exhausting. But, it's done! It's done! We've been enjoying sleeping in our own bed, eating meals served in our own dishes, lounging on our own sofas, and reading the books that piled up while we were gone.

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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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