October 30, 2007

Panel: Los Angeles, California

I'll be on a panel on literature and immigration tonight at Loyola Marymount University here in Los Angeles. Details below:

Do come and say hello.

October 29, 2007

R.I.P. Sargon Boulus

A kind reader emailed to inform me of the passing of Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus. Here is a lovely piece about Boulus and his work by fellow Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, who recounts the last time he saw Boulus, already very sick, at a literary festival in a small town in France. Youssef eulogizes Boulus, saying:

وأقول إنه الشاعرُ الوحيدُ...
هو لم يكن سياسياً بأيّ حالٍ.
لكنه أشجعُ كثيراً من الشعراء الكثارِ الذين استعانوا برافعة السياسة حين تَرْفعُ...
لكنهم هجروها حين اقتضت الخطر!
وقف ضدّ الاحتلال، ليس باعتباره سياسياً، إذ لم يكن سركون بولص، البتةَ، سياسياً.
وقفَ ضد الاحتلال، لأن الشاعر، بالضرورة، يقف ضد الاحتلال.
سُــمُوُّ موقفِه
هو من سُــمُوّ قصيدته.

And here's my (humble) translation:

And I say he is the only poet...
He was not political in any case.
But he was more courageous than many other poets who used the banner of politics when it suited
and then abandoned it when it presented danger.
He stood against occupation, not because he was political, since Sargon Boulus was not political at all.
He stood against occupation because the poet, by necessity, stands against occupation
The eminence of his position
is the eminence of his poem.

You can read the rest of Youssef's piece here.

This Week's New Yorker

Even though we moved back to Los Angeles about two months ago, I have yet to catch up with all my forwarded mail. And I still have not renewed any of my usual subscriptions (except for the New York Review of Books). So it's with more than a little wistfulness that I look at interesting issues of some magazines. This week's New Yorker, for instance, has a wonderful poem by Robert Bly, an essay by Elizabeth Kolbert about the disturbing tendency by U.S. automakers to take billions in government help without producing fuel-efficient cars, and a piece on the Frida Kahlo "cult" (of which I will freely admit to being a member.)

Pamuk on the Paris Review

Orhan Pamuk has a brief essay at the Guardian about reading the Paris Review interviews as a young author in Istanbul. "In the beginning," he writes, "I read these interviews because I loved these writers' books, because I wished to to learn their secrets, to understand how they created their fictive worlds. But I also enjoyed reading interviews with novelists and poets whose names I hardly knew, and whose books I had not read."

October 26, 2007

Strangers, Identical

I heard the incredible story of twin sisters Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein on NPR yesterday. Here's the blurb from the station's site:

Separated in infancy and given up for adoption, Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein grew up unaware that they had an identical twin. Their new memoir, Identical Strangers, chronicles their story of separation, reunion and identity.

Records from the adoption agency indicate that the identical twins' separation and adoption placement in the late 1960s was connected to a psychological study investigating the effects of nature versus nurture.

The segment is a bit long, but it's absolutely fascinating.

October 25, 2007

Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying and Cion

My review of Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying and Cion appears in the November 12 issue of The Nation, but the piece is already available online. I wrote this back in August, but my editor at the magazine left to join the LRB, so it took a little while to get the piece through with the transition. Here's an excerpt:

Over his long and prolific career, South African writer Zakes Mda has produced plays, novels and stories that explore very different characters, eras and landscapes. In Ways of Dying, two childhood friends from a small village in South Africa reconnect decades later in an unnamed city, their relationship fulfilled only when they reconcile with their painful past. In The Heart of Redness, villagers in the Eastern Cape fight over whether to celebrate or denigrate the legacy of a nineteenth-century teenager who prophesied that if the Xhosa people killed their cattle and burned their crops, the ancestors would be resurrected to defeat the British colonizers. The Madonna of Excelsior chronicles the coming of age of a South African woman whose mother and father were tried in 1971 under the Immorality Act for having interracial sex. Mda's latest book, Cion, is set in a small town in Ohio that once provided refuge for runaway slaves. It features a cast of characters who struggle with how to fit this important historical fact into their lives, their relationships and even their art. The connecting thread in all these novels seems to be the unresolved presence of the past. It hovers like a ghost, at once forbidding and inviting, seductive and terrifying, depressing and inspiring.

Mda is deeply concerned with how people remember the past, how they use it to shape the present, how they call upon it to fashion modern selves, modern identities--and how in the process they run the risk of exploiting or sentimentalizing it. Given Mda's life story, which is marked by all the major events of his country, one can see why he has such a keen interest in history.

More here.

Deparment of WTF

You just can't make this shit up. President Bush celebrates Hispanic Heritage month by headbanging to the song "Guantanamera":

I weep for you, José Martí.

(via)

(Screen)Writers' Work

This week, both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report--the only TV programs I never miss--went on hiatus, so Comedy Central has been doing re-runs. It's been a small taste of what life will be like if members of the Writers' Guild of America decide to go on strike. At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Marc Norman's What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting and starts off with a few anecdotes about the contempt with which screenwriters are held in Hollywood, then reveals some of the uglier side of the business. All very interesting.

October 23, 2007

Fires in L.A.

Many thanks to those readers who have emailed to ask about the fires. We are all fine here. This fire season very much reminds me of my last Indian summer in L.A., about 4 years ago. The sky was a dark pink color and it rained black ash throughout the day. It's much the same now. It's very hot, as you can imagine, and it's a bit hard to breathe. But we're alive, and we'll get through this.

Photo by sundogg via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr.

Arab Film Festival in L.A.

The 11th annual Arab Film Festival is coming to Los Angeles in just a few days. You can see a line-up here. There are two movies about Morocco or by Moroccans: The documentary I Love Hip-Hop in Morocco, which follows H-Kayne, Fatima and Brown Fingaz as they set up a music festival, and the short film The Deceased. Be there!

Ribat El Koutoub Debuts

Activists, professors and authors Abdelhay El Moudden and Abdelahad Sebti have launched an online Moroccan literary magazine called Ribat El Koutoub. It features book reviews, interviews, articles, and literary news. Check it out.

October 22, 2007

French Discover Their Immigration History (Not Really)

The French government has opened a National Center of the History of Immigration in Paris and Michael Kimmelman visits it for the New York Times. The result is a great, great piece that highlights the ways in which some French officials conceive of immigration. Here's just one tiny excerpt:

“The history of immigration is one thing, and the history of slavery and the history of colonization are other things,” Jacques Toubon, the museum’s president, told me, somewhat defensively I thought. France “is very late in confronting the truth about its colonial history,” he said, but the purpose of his museum “is to tell the story of immigration.” That sounded to an American like devising a museum for African-American or American Indian cultures but skipping gingerly over slavery, segregation and Manifest Destiny.

Do read the entire piece here.

One thing Kimmelman could have pointed out is that the French name for the center is: Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, which, in a very literal translation, means simply "National City of the History of Immigration," and so the word cité is meant to suggest republican notions of unity, and of a single, indivisible, unhyphenated French identity. But cité is also the colloquial word in French for the suburbs around the big cities where immigrants live. This is a bit like building a museum for Mexican-Americans and calling it the "barrio museum." And the worst part of it is: I don't even think French officials realize the ambiguity.

On Short Stories

Maud Newton has a wonderful review in Sunday's NYTBR of Ellen Litman's Last Chicken in America. Here's how it opens:

That people won’t read story collections is an axiom at publishing houses and a common notion in newspaper idea pieces. Whether it was ever true I tend to doubt, but it certainly isn’t now. Evidence springs effortlessly to mind — Junot Díaz, ZZ Packer, Lorrie Moore and George Saunders are just a few of the youngish writers beloved first for the short fiction that started their careers — yet the distrust persists.

When a good novel fails to find an audience, it’s the fault of bad marketing, unappealing cover art or a public too dim to appreciate literary fiction. But if short stories don’t sell, publishers blame the form. The resulting skittishness may account for the rise of the “novel in stories,” a hybridized creature typically denoted, as in the case of Ellen Litman’s “Last Chicken in America,” by an italicized subtitle.

The worst of these books are chilly and labyrinthine. You follow dour characters down corridors of plot, theme or emotion that threaten to lead to some destination, but never actually do. Litman’s elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is the converse of such aimless solemnity. It’s warm, true and original, and packed with incisive, subtle one-liners.

More here.

Department of WTF

Giles Foden, the author of The Last King of Scotland and this year's chair of judges for the Booker Prize, files a post-mortem piece for the Guardian about the judging process. I was shocked to read this tidbit:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist divided the panel: one judge felt the book tacitly supported Islamic fundamentalist violence, another that it evaded the issue. I thought these views were wrong. To my mind the skill of the book lay in the way its ingenious narrative device implicated the reader in the political issues explored.

The text itself remained ambivalent. The fact that the device was borrowed or learned from Camus' The Fall did not generate as much excitement among the judges as it did among certain literary journalists. Most of us felt imitation of form was one of the ways in which literature is carried on. Besides, the debt to the author of The Fall was implicitly acknowledged by its overtness, and by a mention of Camus in the blurb.

Some of the judges thought The Reluctant Fundamentalist condones Islamic fundamentalist violence? The character of Changez smiles at the collapse of the towers not out of political or religious fervor, but because of feelings of inferiority and resentment that he, a man from a forgotten city of the third world, harbors toward the strongest city of the first world and its obscenely powerful corporations. But let's face it: If the book had been written by a middle-aged white man (think Updike) he'd have been praised for his insights into the "Muslim mind."

Who's Afraid of the Press?

This is the question posed by Khalid Saghiyyah in this opinion piece for Al-Akhbar.

الصحافة ممنوعة من دخول مخيّم نهر البارد، وكذلك آلات التصوير، على الرغم من مرور أكثر من شهر ونصف شهر على انتهاء المعارك. والجولات الإعلامية الرسميّة لم تكن أكثر من مسرحية لم يُسمَح للمشاركين فيها بتجاوز عتبة المخيّم.
من يخاف الصحافة؟ سؤال نجد الإجابة عنه عبر بعض الصور المهرّبة، وبعض الصرخات التي تصاعدت، على رغم الحصار، من الأهالي «العائدين» إلى المخيّم الجديد، ناهيك بالأفلام والصور الفضائحيّة التي بدأ تداولها على شبكة الإنترنت

A month and a half after the end of the fighting in Nahr el Bared refugee camp, the press has still not been allowed in.

(Via.)

October 19, 2007

Hope in Morocco

I am happy to report that Moroccan publishing house Le Fennec is issuing a French-language edition of my book for the local market. Here is the cover art:

De L'espoir will be distributed in bookstores throughout Morocco at the very modest price of 50 dirhams. How cool is that?

October 18, 2007

In Portland

I am in Portland today, at the invitation of a local high school, to give a reading from Hope. Driving in from the airport last night, I cried nearly all the way home. The city is so beautiful, so green, so expansive. (Could it be that a condition of my nomadic life is that I always pine for the place I have just left?) After having dinner with my sister, I hurried to Powell's to browse for books. I found a rare, bilingual edition of al-Mutanabbi's poems, which I had been eyeing for some time now, and I also replaced a couple of essential books that got damaged when they were shipped from Morocco last summer. More later.

October 17, 2007

Day Job

Someone asked me how come I'm on the road so much this fall when I'm supposed to be teaching creative writing at UC Riverside. Short answer: I asked for (and received) a course reduction in the fall, so I will not be unleashed onto students until the winter quarter. Poor things.

October 16, 2007

Ali on Whipped-Up Controversy

Monica Ali wrote a piece for the Guardian in which she derides the media (including the newspaper that published her article) for giving so much attention to the handful of people who protested the making of her book into a film. Here's a very quotable excerpt:

As seems to be the way with these things, press coverage began (in this newspaper) with the reporting of the views of a couple of self-appointed "community leaders". I love it when a journalist does this. I think of him stumbling around Tower Hamlets, waving a notebook and echoing the old colonial cry from down the ages: take me to your leader.

Of course, writers who have ancestral roots in Muslim nations are used to this: Any kind of a protest over a supposedly offensive book is blown way out of proportion in the West, and the author turned into a martyr, whether she likes it or not.

See also:
Department of WTF.
Tempest in a Teacup.

Wright on Withdrawal

This week's New Yorker includes a nice opinion piece by Lawrence Wright on American occupation of Iraq:

In the upcoming Presidential primaries, Americans will have the chance to choose among candidates who propose immediate withdrawal from Iraq (Richardson), rapid drawdowns (Edwards and Obama), open-ended commitment to the war (Giuliani, Romney, McCain), or a resigned middle ground, notably Hillary Clinton, who acknowledges that the occupation will likely endure well into the next Presidential term no matter which party occupies the White House.

The Iraqi people have no such choice, even though it’s their future that is at stake—and even though the creation of a democratic republic, one in which the Iraqis command their own destiny, has been a stated goal of the war. According to President Bush, American troops will leave whenever the Iraqis ask us to. “It’s their government’s choice,” he has said. “If they were to say, leave, we would leave.” But while the Iraqi government is divided and uncertain about the presence of occupying forces, the will of the Iraqi people has been clear from the beginning: they want the troops withdrawn.

Read all of it here.

New Moroccan Government

Following the legislative elections of September 2007 in Morocco (which, while generally transparent, had low levels of voter turnout) the new government has been announced. The new Prime Minister is Abbas El Fassi, of the Istiqlal Party.

Mr. Abbas El Fassi is perhaps best remembered by the young people of Morocco as the man who, in his capacity as Minister of Employment in 2002 was responsible for the Al Najat fiasco. At least one person has committed suicide in the aftermath of that scandal. Abbas El Fassi is also the man who, earlier this year, was quoted in Tel Quel magazine as saying that the efforts to promote Darija Arabic in Morocco are part of a conspiracy by the francophone elite to hurt the unity of the Arab peoples. (Rien que ça? one is tempted to say.)

Several ministers have no party affiliation (Chakib Benmoussa, Taieb Fassi Fihri, Ahmed Toufiq, et al.), and are technocrats chosen for their experience in the private sector, and in that sense the country will continue to be managed as it has in previous iterations.

This new government is quite remarkable, however, for its record number of women ministers: Ms. Amina Benkhadra (Energy & Mines); Ms. Yasmina Baddou (Health); Ms. Nawal El Moutawakil (Sports); Ms. Nouzha Skalli (Family); Ms. Touria Jabrane (Culture); Ms. Latifa Labida (liaison to National Education); and Ms. Latifa Akherbach (liaison to Foreign Affairs).

Art in the Mail

I've written in this space before about the wonderful welcome that Mercy High School extended to me last month in San Francisco, but the generosity of the students turned out to be even bigger. Yesterday, the mailman delivered two boxes, each containing artwork by students. These pieces were inspired by my novel, and use techniques from North Africa:

October 15, 2007

Slow Day

I think I am going to take a day off from reading news, and instead I am going to spend my day with Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder.

On NPR

If you're so inclined, tune in today to NPR's All Things Considered. I was interviewed for a segment on art and censorship.

October 12, 2007

Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher

On the plane back from Europe, I read Tom Perrotta’s new novel, The Abstinence Teacher, which I believe comes out next week in the U.S.. It’s very similar to Little Children in its structure: alternating chapters take us into the minds of a man and a woman, with diametrically opposed lives, and yet of course strikingly similar flaws. The title character in The Abstinence Teacher is Ruth Ramsey, a recently divorced high-school sex-education teacher who runs into trouble with members of an evangelical church. They complain to the school board, the school board sides with the concerned parents, and a new, abstinence-only curriculum is introduced. The other protagonist is Tim Mason, the soccer coach. He’s a drug addict and an alcoholic who only managed to get clean and sober when he found Jesus, and he is a member of the church that forced the abstinence curriculum on Ruth. Tim is riddled with doubts, though, jealous of his ex-wife's new husband, and generally having a hard time finding anything in common with his new, church-approved wife.

Given the frightening influence of the Christian right on current U.S. policies in education, public health, and foreign affairs, it’s really refreshing to see a novelist tackle the theme of fundamentalism. (And if you doubt for one minute the wide influence of fundamentalists, just look at what the nutty Ann Coulter recently said about Jews, and at the campaign the equally nutty David Horowitz is mounting on university campuses.) Perrotta does a good job of placing his characters in difficult situations, and his satirical eye is devastatingly sharp. I found the novel engrossing, and ended up staying up to finish it even though I was exhausted when I got off the plane. I did have a couple of issues with the book, though. For instance, the continual mention of brand names grew tiring after a while; nearly each product name was shorthand for a character trait, and consumer choices don’t go very far in drawing out character.

Happy Eid

Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim readers! This year, the Empire State Building will be lit up in green in honor of the holiday, and the illumination will continue through the end of the weekend.

October 11, 2007

And The Nobel Goes To...

Doris Lessing! I sort of suspected it would be an English-language writer this year, but honestly I had not even thought of Doris Lessing. It's nice to be surprised, don't you think? Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review has already posted links to reviews, interviews, and commentary, which you should check out.

Rome With Love

My visit to Rome went by in a blink. I merely had time to catch a glimpse of the Coliseum on my way back from the Moroccan Cultural Center before jumping into a cab and going to my hotel to pack up for the trip home. Is it possible to fall in love after just one look? I think it has happened to me and I just want to return to Rome and to Italy soon and stay for a good, long while.

More Italy Photos

I am terrible at photography, despite having taken a class at UCLA extension many years ago, but wanted to show you a couple of pictures from Ferrara. On Sunday, the main square near the cathedral is turned into an antique market:

This is a shot of the console that holds all the simultaneous-translation headphones at the Internazionale festival in Ferrara. Attendees had to turn in their national ID cards to get one.

Something you're not about to see in our translation-averse U.S. newspapers. This is a short story by the late, great Abdurrahman Munif, which appeared on the cover of a national Sunday supplement:

The street leading up to my hotel, a.k.a. the Jesuit monastery:

This is as close as I got to seeing the wonderful waters off the coast of Sardegna. I took this in the airport in Cagliari:

October 08, 2007

Panel: Rome, Italy

I will be doing a panel tomorrow at the Moroccan Cultural Center here in Rome. Here are the details:

Tuesday, October 09, 2007
5 pm
Centro Averroe (Moroccan Cultural Center)
Via della Polveriera, 14
Rome, Italy

Do come. The event will be in English, with simultaneous translation into Italian.

Shoe on the Other Foot

I am so used to having to defend and explain the Arab/Muslim world when I am in America that it always comes as a bit of a surprise to me when I am abroad to have to defend and explain America. On my first night in Italy, over a delicious dinner of home-made pasta, I was told that Americans were fat. “Like this,” my friend said and held her arms out as if she were holding a door. There was not much I could say to that. Yes, Americans are obese, and the trend is only getting worse, even as all the actresses and models are starving themselves to death.

On my second day, someone asked me why I lived in America. I can think of one very good reason; it's called Alex. But, in any case, my friend was asking out of genuine curiosity. Why, he wanted to know, did someone like me wish to live in the deep, dark pool of ignorance that is America? (He was far too polite to put it that way, so I am paraphrasing a bit here.) We had just walked into a restaurant to have dinner. The conversation veered from Colin Powell’s lies at the United Nations, the war in Iraq, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, to the consumerism of American society, Bratz dolls, and the TV show Kid Nation. “What is that?” asked another one of my dinner companions. Our friend explained, in English, “They created a town run by kids, and they divided them into groups. So one group, for example, is the aristocracy and they don’t do anything.” I don’t speak Italian, but it doesn’t take much to understand our fellow diner’s response: “è una follia totale!” I felt compelled to point out that Kid Nation was widely criticized and did not do that well in the ratings. America is a diverse nation of 300 million people. There are bound to be a few cretins who think these shows are worth making or watching.

It was very hard to argue with the image of an imperialist, consumerist, excessive America, though, and I was quiet for a while. After all, I spend a lot of time criticizing all these things myself. The restaurant was empty by now, and there was a lull in conversation as everyone contemplated America's excesses. Then the voice of Louis Armstrong came on the stereo. "It's Louis Armstrong," I said, to no one in particular. He is America, too, I wanted to say. America is not just the idiocy of its TV shows and the stupidity and cupidity of its rulers, but also the brilliance of its writers, its musicians, its filmmakers, its artists.

I feel like I've been having this sort of conversation a lot since September 11. In Morocco, in France, in Holland, and now in Italy, I've been having similar experiences. There is no amount of 'public diplomacy' this Administration can do that can cover up its belligerence, and the corporatization of the media isn't helping. What can I say? We need a new administration. And I don't mean Hillary.

October 07, 2007

Reading: Cagliari, Italy

I will be at L'universita di Cagliari (doesn't that sound so much better than University of Cagliari?) for a reading and discussion. Here are the details:

Monday, October 08, 2007
6 pm
Reading and Discussion
University of Cagliari
Department of Anglo-American Literature
Cagliari, Italy

The event will be in English.

What Ferrarans Are Reading

I arrived at Mel Bookstore early on Friday to give myself time to explore the place before the time came for my reading there. I asked my editor why it was called 'bookstore' and not the Italian word for it, and the response was that many of these bookshops use that word to look more hip. Dear God, I thought, do they really think that using the American word for libreria might make people read? Anyway, as always when I am outside the U.S., I’m always startled to see what American titles are stocked by foreign bookstores. This was my first surprise: The huge stack of Walt and Mearsheimer’s new book, The Israel Lobby:

Schmaltzy best-sellers were everywhere. Here’s Io & Marley:

Of course, the bookstore had its fair share of chick-lit, in this case from Britain:

And no contemporary bookstore would be complete without burqa-lit. Look at this: The Veil of Fear, I think the title says. I’m surprised there aren’t flames rising from each letter.

It was a nice surprise when I stumbled on this huge stack of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The cover said that one million copies were in print in the U.S., which surprised me, until I remembered it was on Oprah.

Anyway, take comfort where you can find it. People in Ferrara, Italy, are reading Cormac McCarthy.

October 05, 2007

Panel: Ferrara, Italy

My main event here at the Festival Internazionale in Ferrara takes place this Saturday afternoon. Here are the details:

Saturday, October 6, 2007
4:30 pm
Panel on Fiction and Journalism
With Arundhati Roy, Laila Lalami, Efraim Medina Reyes, and Elif Shafak
Moderated by Goffredo Fofi
Festival Internazionale
Cinema Apollo
Ferrara, Italy

You can view the entire lineup for the festival right here. If you're an Italian reader of my book, or my blog, or are just curious, please come by and say hello.

October 04, 2007

Reading: Ferrara, Italy

I am doing a reading from the Italian edition of my book (La speranza e altri sogni pericolosi) at Mel Bookstore tomorrow night. Here are the details:

Friday, October 5, 2007
6:30 pm
Mel Bookstore
Piazza Trento e Trieste
Palazzo San Crispino
Ferrara, Italy

I hope Italian readers can make it.

In Italy

After a journey that took me on planes (three), trains (two), and automobiles (two), I am now in Ferrara, Italy, to attend the Festival Internazionale in Ferrara. I am staying in a converted monastery and my room is very bare, with just a bed, a desk, and a dresser. There is no internet access, and the phone doesn't let me make outgoing calls. A large crucifix hangs on the wall above my bed. The red-tiled hallways, the old furniture, the multiple Christs on the cross everywhere remind me of the grade school I attended, which was also in a converted Catholic institution in Rabat. There are relatively few cars on the cobbled streets of the village, because most people ride bicycles. So it's very quiet and peaceful, and I find myself thinking what a great place this would be to write a book. But I am here to talk about one: The Italian edition of my book just came out, and my publicist is starting things off with a reading here. More soon, I hope.

October 03, 2007

Nobel Predictions

Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review has posted some links over the last couple of days about odds and guesses leading up to the announcement, in a week or so, of the Nobel Prize in literature. Last year, I correctly predicted that the prize would go to Orhan Pamuk, and this year I am not getting a strong feeling, but I'm still going to give it a try. I think it will go to Cormac McCarthy. You heard it here first.

On Clarence Thomas

I always enjoy reading Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, and he has rarely been more incisive than in this op-ed about Clarence Thomas. Here's how it opens:

I believe in affirmative action, but I have to acknowledge there are arguments against it. One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.

If you caught Thomas on " 60 Minutes" on Sunday night, you know that he will probably consider me one of the many people who want to see him "destroyed" because he doesn't "follow in this cult-like way something that blacks are supposed to believe." That's what he told CBS correspondent Steve Kroft -- that he'd been persecuted for "veering away from the black gospel that we're supposed to adhere to."

The up-close-and-personal "60 Minutes" piece, timed to coincide with publication of Thomas's autobiography, was compelling television. It was also a useful reminder that whenever my Bush Derangement Syndrome flares up to the point where I'm actually feeling nostalgic for the days when George Bush the Elder was in the White House, I need only recall that it was Poppy who put Thomas on the court. That snaps me back to my senses. Thomas is only 59; we'll be saddled with him, and that gigantic chip on his shoulder, for decades to come.

And the rest of the piece is equally quotable. Check it out.

October 02, 2007

First Lines

First Lines is a Cornell University site that collects opening lines from many classic novels, and lets you guess which books they came from. Warning: It's pretty addictive.

Iran Plans

Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker about the Administration's plans for Iran. Here's a brief excerpt:

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

Sound familiar?

October 01, 2007

Iyer on Pamuk

What a delightful surprise: The amazing Pico Iyer reviews Orhan Pamuk's new collection of essays for the New York Times. Here's a brief excerpt:

“Other Colors” is too eagerly inclusive to make up the single-pointed, honed narrative that its author promises. Like the maximalist “Black Book” or “My Name Is Red,” it is more a fireworks display than a rounded sculpture (it’s no surprise that a favorite Pamuk character is the “encyclopedist ”). Yet what emerges powerfully, and often movingly, from it is Pamuk’s faith in writing as a “consolation” and refuge, “our only defense against life’s cruelties.” When he titles one major section in the book “My Books Are My Life,” he seems to be speaking both for the way that he has put almost all his adult life into his work (sitting in his room 10 hours every day and barely leaving Istanbul until he was 31 ), and for the fact that his shrine is his library of 12,000 books (in a culture that “views the nonreader as the norm”).

You can read the entire article here.

Camus' L'étranger

On the plane to Orlando, I re-read, for the first time since I was fourteen years old, Albert Camus' L'étranger. I remembered some passages from the novel so well I could have recited them (C'est alors que tout a vacillé etc.) My unease with the book as a teenager did not change, though, and in fact it grew worse. Meursault's killing of the character referred to simply as "the Arab," the complete absence of any dialogue from the three Arab men who confront Raymond and Meursault on the beach, the fact that the only Arab character who says anything is Raymond's abused and oppressed girlfriend, the absence of the Arab man's family or any Arab witnesses at the trial: these are not coincidences, naturally, but clear narrative choices Camus made. One might argue that Meursault's fight with the chaplain and his realization at the end are an assertion of the Self in the face of an indifferent universe and a moralizing society, but I think that assertion about the absurdity of life comes by way of victimizing the Other. Camus gives us a vision of the world that leaves nothing to compassion, emotion, or humanity.

Reading: Orlando, Florida

I am in Winter Park, Florida, for a couple of days. I will be giving a lecture, followed by a reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, here at Rollins College. Details below:

The event will take place in Tiedtke Music Hall on Tuesday (tomorrow).

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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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