January 31, 2008

And Then There Were Three

John Edwards announced yesterday that he was abandoning hid bid for the Democratic nomination, which isn't surprising in the least, but nevertheless disappointing; class, his most important campaign issue, won't get nearly as much attention now, and we can all settle in for a long, bitter fight between the three remaining Democratic candidates: Bill & Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

January 30, 2008

Titlepage Coming Soon

When I was a young, nerdy teenager, I never missed Bernard Pivot's Apostrophes, the famed French chat show about literature. It was informed but not stuffy, and Pivot really did read the 3 or 4 books that were discussed each fortnight (imagine that!). I never understood why there wasn't something similar in the States. I like Charlie Rose, but his PBS show is usually a one-on-one interview with no opportunity for discussion among different writers of the same genre. But now comes word that Daniel Menaker, former editor at the New Yorker and at Random House, is going to start an online TV show called Titlepage.

“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.

I am so excited about this. I hope the show is good.

Quotable: Chinua Achebe

From Achebe's second novel, A Man of the People:

Max began by accusing the outgoing government of all kinds of swindling and corruption. As he gave instance after instance of how some of our leaders who were ash-mouthed paupers five years ago had become near-millionaires under our very eyes, many in the audience laughed. But it was the laughter of resignation to misfortune."

The book was published in 1966.

(Photo credit: Frank May)

January 29, 2008

Artificial Membership Claims

Elizabeth Alexander, who is professor of African-American studies at Yale, sets the record straight in Salon about that Toni Morrison quote, which has been repeated ad nauseam by the Clinton camp in Hillary's campaign for the White House, so much so that it took the form of an actual question in the South Carolina Democratic debate. ("Senator Obama, do you think Bill Clinton was our first black president?") Alexander went back to the New Yorker essay in which Morrison made the comment:

A look at the context of the words at the source is illuminating. Morrison began by describing a nation glued to unseemly details of Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, as Kenneth Starr pursued his investigation and Republicans cheered him on. She questioned the pitch of Starr-fueled hysteria, and said: "Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime ... The always and already guilty 'perp' is being hunted down not by a prosecutor's obsessive application of law but by a different kind of pursuer, one who makes new laws out of the shards of those he breaks."

Morrison was not saying that Bill Clinton is America's first black president in a cute or celebratory way, nor was she calling Clinton an "honorary Negro." Rather, she was comparing Clinton's treatment at the hands of Starr and others with that of black men, so often seen as "the always and already guilty 'perp.'" Even in its original context the comparison doesn't quite work. African-American men have been demonized for centuries without having done anything but be black men, while people of all political stripes would likely agree that Clinton put himself in a compromised position with the Lewinsky situation, even if the political reaction was out of proportion to his alleged "crime." Morrison seemed here to be making a dark admonishment about what it means to be tarred with the same brush that has punished African-American men throughout this country's history.

In any case, Toni Morrison has made it clear whom she supports in this year's presidential race, and it's Barack Obama.

Atonement in Film

When the Oscar nominations were announced last week, I was a bit surprised to hear that the film adaptation of Atonement had earned a nod for Best Picture. In some ways, the beauty of the novel rests on its use of language, its psychological depth, and a rather odd structure, which Ian McEwan somehow manages to pull off. The first third of the book takes places over the course of one day and is told from the points of view of several characters: the young, impressionable Briony Tallis, who wants to be a writer; her older sister Cecilia, who just returned from Cambridge; their inept mother, Emily; the teenage Lola, a house guest who is raped that evening; and Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallises' charlady, who also just returned from Cambridge with a 'first-class degree,' and stands accused of the crime. The second part of the book is set during the Second World War, in which Robbie serves. Through flashbacks, we find out what happened to him, and learn more about his romantic relationship with Cecilia, and his fight to clear his name. The third part of the book is told through Briony's point of view. She is now training to be a nurse, and works at a London hospital where a huge number of wounded soldiers are sent. There is also an epilogue, written in 1999 by a now elderly Briony.

In Joe Wright's adaptation, the first third of the book is rendered beautifully and the shifting points of view work well on screen, but the entire project falls apart as soon as Robbie is whisked off to jail. The war scenes inevitably recall in the spectator's mind the work of Steven Spielberg--and the comparison is not to Wright's advantage. Where the book is subtle (in France, Robbie sees a single human leg hanging from a tree), the adaptation hits you over the head (a whole group of Catholic school girls dead under a tree.) The parts that are set in the hospital feel bogged down and irrelevant. Saoirse Ronan (who plays Briony as a child) and Vanessa Redgrave (who plays an old Briony) manage to rescue the scenes in which they appear, and the cinematography is certainly breathtaking, but I thought Atonement just didn't hold together as a film. (In sharp contrast to, say, the Coen brothers' adaptation of No Country for Old Men.)

Photo: Atonement film still (link.)

January 28, 2008

"The Enormous Radio" in Radio Form

A few weeks ago, in my Beginning Fiction class, we read John Cheever's short story "The Enormous Radio," which was published in the New Yorker in 1947. I've always liked that story, and it still seems relevant today, what with MySpace and YouTube. Now I just came across this 1956 radio adaptation from CBS Radio Workshop. It's interesting to see what choices were made in the course of turning the story into a radio play; for instance, Cheever barely paid any attention to the maid in the story (the reader doesn't find out her name is Emma until the very end), and certainly he doesn't give any idea about her race, but in the radio adaptation she is played by someone who is clearly going for a black character. Both the avoidance of race in the story (no one's is mentioned) and the recourse to stereotypes in the adaptation seem to me to be reflections of the times, and I wonder what people will say in fifty years about today's stories, and about our blind spots.

The picture above is of my own, enormous radio: An old Philco we picked up at an antiques store in Portland a few years ago.

January 24, 2008

Meltdown, 2008 Edition

In between his carefully timed meltdowns (flushed face, wagging forefinger, et cetera) and his smear attacks on Barack Obama, former president Bill Clinton had to take a rest. What better way than to take a nap during a speech about Martin Luther King?

(For something less somnolence-inducing, here's Obama's speech on MLK day.)

Cartoon Credit: Mike Lukovich

January 22, 2008

In Memoriam

Last week, while I was in the middle of rewriting a scene in which one of my characters falls to his death, my husband walked into my office, phone in hand, and said that he had just learned that one of his cousins fell from a ladder onto the marble floor of his bathroom and died. Life changes in the instant. How do you cope with something like that? How do you recover from it? Even though we went to a memorial for Alex's cousin, even though we grieved for him, I still have not been able to accept his death as I did his life--which is to say, without question.

January 18, 2008

Quotable

From the opening chapter of The Year of Magical Thinking.

Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what happened, I considered adding those words, "the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

January 17, 2008

Nabokov's Last

Vladimir Nabokov's last manuscript, The Original of Laura, is apparently in a vault in Switzerland. Nabokov wanted it destroyed, but his son Dmitri (now 73) is undecided about the directive, according to Slate's Ron Rosenbaum.

Dmitri's predicament goes beyond Laura. It's one that raises the difficult issue of who "owns" a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it's in?

To me, an unpublished manuscript belongs to the author only; if Nabokov wanted it destroyed, then it should be.

January 16, 2008

Department of WTF, Redux

Then again, when I read what Mike Huckabee told a Michigan crowd on Monday, it made me feel like there are enough nutcases in every religion to turn you into an atheist:

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

And this guy won Iowa, for God's sake.

Department of WTF

I heard that Britney Spears wants to convert to Islam. There comes a point in every lunatic celebrity's career when this happens (See: Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, etc.) And all I can say is: Our nut house is full, Britney. Please take up another religion, we have enough crazies of our own.

January 15, 2008

Emory Douglas @ MOCA

I had been meaning to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibit on The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas for quite a while, and I finally, finally got a chance to do so this past weekend. Douglas, for those of you who are curious, was minister of culture in the Black Panther Party and designed all their posters--rally announcements, commemorations, calls to action--as well as their official newspaper. I was fascinated by the pieces on show, by how they ranged in tone from pure propaganda to deeply felt testaments of a cultural revolution. The exhibit included articles showing the connection with Algeria (the influence of Fanon's theories, Eldridge Cleaver's flight to Algiers, the support for the Panthers in post-colonial North Africa) and with other countries of the non-aligned movement. It was interesting, too, to see how Emory Douglas contributed to the branding of the Black Panther image with the consistent use of black berets, army jackets, and rifles in representing party members. (This reminded me of a show I saw a couple of years ago at the V&A museum in London, about Alberto Korda's iconic photo of Che Guevara. The revolution will be branded!) The exhibit was curated by Sam Durant, and it's only open for another week, so if you're in the L.A. area, hurry up and see it before it closes.

Photo: "Power to the People" poster, by Emory Douglas

January 14, 2008

Elias Khoury's Yalo

My review of Elias Khoury's new novel, Yalo, appeared on the cover of Sunday's edition of the L. A. Times Book Review. The piece also makes mention of two of Khoury's earlier books, Little Mountain and City Gates, which have just recently been re-issued. Here's an excerpt:

Few cities have withstood the kind of violence and carnage that Beirut has. Though destroyed by a civil war lasting 15 long years, it seemed to be on the verge of an economic and cultural renaissance in 2006 when it was bombed again during the Israeli invasion. Beirut is a city that has learned to start over, to rebuild itself on top of its ruins, but it is also a place where memories are long and myths are persistent. In his new novel, "Yalo," Elias Khoury grapples with the idea of truth and memory, what we choose to remember and what we prefer to forget. In fact, "Yalo" is composed of confessions -- whether forced or voluntary, true or laced with self-aggrandizement, redemptive for the confessor or entirely useless.

The rest of the review is freely available on the L.A. Times website.

Reader Mail / Primaries

My Friday post about the New Hampshire primary elicited a lot of emails from you, so rather than answer individually, I am posting a handful of them here. Reader Nomi H. wrote to say:

One theory I've read about is that people in New Hampshire were truly disgusted with the pollsters, and with the journalists "pronouncing" their decisions prematurely. It was NOT a resounding victory for Clinton, by any means...

I share this frustration. Clinton and Obama won the same number of delegates in New Hampshire, but the Clinton win was framed as "comeback." A comeback from what? The month of December? If they hadn't been so quick to pronounce her political demise, there would have been no comeback. Meanwhile, reader Joseph H. wanted me to know that:

There is a new and scarier interpretation of the results surfacing even in the mainstream media.

He is referring, of course, to the theory that the Diebold voting machines, which were used in bigger cities but not in small towns, somehow favored Hillary Clinton. Reader Linda M. concurred, and added:

If there were shenanigans in New Hampshire, I would like that exposed right now. I want the vast right winged conspiracy to steal elections to stop. I want my democracy back, dammit. I am tired of having amoral thugs tyrannizing this country and the world.

Amen, sister. The problem is that the state of New Hampshire won't pay for a recount, so if Kucinich wants a recount, he'll have to pay for it. Reader Jessica L. offered yet another explanation:

Liberal NH women were going to vote for Hillary no matter what. Pollsters certainly got it wrong. But there is a large bloc of very active women who were responsible for electing one of first women governors, had women in the state legislature very early on, and electing a woman is top priority for them.

Too bad that they're choosing a woman who's so thoroughly without principle. (See for instance the kinds of attacks she's been waging lately.) Lastly, my friend David wrote:

I think you are buying into the media hype, which represents some of the shoddiest reporting I have ever seen. (...) I read today that even in my (and Clinton's) home state of NY, Obama has a shot at winning. So buck up. This election is the first political event in a long time about which I am actually optimistic.

And there you have it.

January 11, 2008

Health Days

I had to take a day off from blogging yesterday because I was too upset about Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire to be of much use around here. I think her win says something about this country that is deeply unsettling. The most common theory that has been put forward to explain the difference between the pre-election polls and the voting results is that Hillary Clinton did better with women voters, particularly older women voters, and that this was directly attributable to her emotional moment last Tuesday. But what does this say about these women voters in New Hampshire? That they saw themselves in a woman who seemed cornered and on the verge of defeat and whose ambitions were, in her view, thwarted by a posse of men who 'ganged' up on her?

The other theory is that Hillary Clinton didn't win, it was Barack Obama who lost, because of the famed Bradley effect. (In 1982, Tom Bradley had a double-digit lead in the polls and looked poised to become California's first black governor when he lost to George Deukmejian.) Again, what does this say about white people in New Hampshire? That, in the privacy of the voting booths, they didn't dare pick someone who didn't look like them? Either theory seemed too depressing, hence the day off. More soon.

January 09, 2008

Quotable

I finished reading J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello last night, an interesting, ambiguous, even perplexing novel. It's set up as a series of lectures that the character of Elizabeth Costello, a distinguished writer, gives at various locations (universities, conferences, even a cruise ship.) I was drawn to the character, and I also liked how her lectures dealt with so many different, important topics. And I think what I most liked about the book is that it defies classification or labels. Speaking of which, here's a little excerpt I underlined:

'Your handicap is that you're not a problem. What you write hasn't yet been demonstrated to be a problem. Once you offer yourself as a problem, you might be shifted over into their court. But for the present you're not a problem, just an example.'
'An example of what?'
'An example of writing. An example of how someone of your station and your generation and your origins writes. An instance.'
'An instance? Am I allowed a word of protest? After all the effort I put into not writing like anyone else?'

On a side note, I went to a chain bookstore the other day to get a copy of Diary of a Bad Year, but couldn't find it on the display shelves. I asked a clerk at the information desk, "Do you have the latest Coetzee?"
"Is that the title?"
"No, no, that's the author."
"Who?"
"Coetzee? The South African writer? Well, now he's Australian, but you know, from South Africa?"
"Oh" [Blank face.]
"You know, the guy who won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago."
"What's the title again?"

January 08, 2008

Howard Dean Moment

I normally don't register a party affiliation, but when we moved to California, I registered as a Democrat because I wanted to be sure to vote in the Democratic primaries here. So I've been watching the campaigns very closely. As regular readers probably know, I dislike Hillary Clinton very much, and for many reasons. (She voted for the Patriot Act; she voted for the war in Iraq; she voted for the torture bill; she doesn't appear to have met a lobbyist she didn't like; she calls herself a feminist, but said her husband cheated because he had been abused as a child, etc.) But even though I dislike her, I felt sorry for her when I saw how this little video has been at the top of the news all day, played at least five times in one hour on CNN, and written about on the front page of the New York Times. What is going on here? Obviously, I was not planning to vote for Hillary Clinton, and I haven't changed my mind but the way the media have been playing this, you'd think it was worse for America that this woman got a little emotional than that she voted for that immoral war in the Middle East.

January 07, 2008

A Space of One's Own

Today I am waiting to have a desk delivered to the house. I know what you're thinking: "What? You don't already have one?" I do indeed have a desk, but this what it looked like earlier today, and I need the extra space for my novel. I am expecting to get my manuscript back from Antonia Fusco, my editor at Algonquin, this week, and I want to have the space for it, without the piles of books waiting to be read, the files, the papers, the laptop, etc. I want to lay out my chapters, my time line, my character bios, my maps, and everything else. I felt a little silly ordering a whole desk just so I can have some extra space for my novel until I remembered an old, old interview with Joan Didion I'd read in the Paris Review. Here's the excerpt I'm thinking of:

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any writing rituals?

DIDION

The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I've done that day. I can't do it late in the afternoon because I'm too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. . . . Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.

One ought to do whatever works-sleep with the manuscript if one needs to, even. This is the last stretch for me, so I might as well give my novel all the space it needs.

January 04, 2008

New Short Story

I have a new short story in the fiction issue of the Italian weekly magazine Internazionale. It is titled "Il destino nelle onde," and it is illustrated by Guido Scarabottolo which is very, very cool. (Thanks to Italian reader Patrizia for the info about the illustration!) Other writers in the fiction issue include Elif Shafak, Zadie Smith, Miranda July, and a few others. The English-language version of this story should be coming out in the spring, but more on that once details have been firmed up.

Sinan Antoon's I'jaam

My review of Sinan Antoon's debut novel, I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, appears in the January 21 issue of The Nation magazine. Here is how it opens:

Legend has it that in the eleventh century, when the very eccentric and possibly demented Caliph El Hakim needed some money, he wrote a letter to the governor of Jerusalem asking that a tax be levied. The governor wrote back that this was impossible--most of the people were poor, many of them monks who lived in caves in Wad er-Rabâbeh. El Hakim asked his scribe to write a letter with the command "Count the men." Whether the scribe made a mistake or whether the letter was intercepted, no one really knows. But by the time the letter arrived in Jerusalem it read "Castrate the men." In Arabic, the difference between the two verbs hasaa and khasaa is a single dot.

The history of the Arabic language is full of such tales, in which a dot can change the meaning of a word entirely. In fact, the original Arabic alphabet consisted of consonant letters only, some of which corresponded to multiple sounds.

And it is that aspect of the language that Antoon's novel exploits, to great literary effect. You can read the review here.

January 03, 2008

WWB Book Club: The Radiance of the King

I have two new posts up at Words Without Borders, one in which I discuss some of the literary influences at play in Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, and a second one about Toni Morrison's introduction to the novel. I hope you've enjoyed reading this novel as much as I did.

January 02, 2008

While On Hiatus

I spent the last couple of weeks reading fiction; finishing two pieces that are due to appear in January; preparing syllabi for the two classes I am teaching at UCR this winter; corresponding with friends via email and letters; opening holiday cards and wishing I had the time to write some myself; being mystified at the re-casting of corrupt former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto as a martyr of democracy; meeting my friend C. at a Japanese restaurant that we spent a half an hour trying to find, a place that had no apparent sign or light (my husband began to wonder, as finally we pulled up in front, if a secret handshake would be necessary in order for us to gain admittance); discovering, much to my surprise, a photo of me in an advertisement in the New Yorker; discussing Morocco with a professor of anthropology; catching up on movies (Atonement, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, etc.), cleaning my study and filing away the mountain of papers on my desk; and enjoying a homemade Cuban meal for New Year's Eve. Happy New Year, everyone.

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04.26: LA Times Festival of Books
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