Laila Lalami

I just listened to an interview on NPR with famed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, about a mysterious book he found in an auction catalog. The book is titled The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave, Recently Escaped From North Carolina.

One of the things that struck me about the interview was that Gates said that after he read the book he was convinced the author was black and so he set out to do research on her. It was the classical case of scholars going about a research question with a set answer in mind.

Reviews I’ve seen so far, however, appear to agree with Gates, even if they don’t think it’s an “open and shut” case. See this Boston Globe article: History Meets Mystery.

The horror of Jenin, in this article from London’s The Independent.

From Yahoo! news

A novice crime writer who spent more than five months in jail for refusing to turn over research notes about a society killing lost a Supreme Court appeal Monday.
Vanessa Leggett was jailed longer than any U.S. writer who has used the First Amendment to reject a grand jury subpoena. (…) Leggett is on the government witness list for the upcoming federal trial of a prominent Houston man accused of ordering the killing of his socialite wife. DeGeurin told the high court that she will again refuse to turn over any confidential material, and “faces a substantial threat of future incarceration,” the lawyer wrote in additional court papers.

Jailed Writer Appeal Rejected

Elsewhere, Chang Rae-Lee has joined the creative writing faculty at Princeton (which already includes Maya Angelou and Joyce Carol Oates). Princeton appoints Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee to faculty post

From Newsweek:

“I went to the airport check-in counter,”says Egyptian-American comic Ahmed Ahmed to a packed room at L.A.’s Comedy Store. “The lady behind the counter asked if I packed my bags myself. I said yes, and they arrested me.” The audience titters nervously. But by the time he gets to his first Osama joke “The only virgin he’ll get in the afterlife is Janet Reno” they’re giving up the big laughs. (…) The Western and the Muslim worlds may seem more alienated than ever, but there’s a growing demand for humor that bridges the gap. The Comedy Store’s “Arabian Knights” shows regularly sell out. “I know I’m not a Middle Easterner,” says Tripoli, “but we are all brothers with unibrows” and Arab-American comics are landing prime spots in clubs nationwide.”

Laughter’s New Profile.
For tickets, see the Comedy Store homepage.

More fallout from the violence in the Middle East? A church in Los Altos, a place of worship for mostly Arab American parishioners, was the victim of arson this week. Church fire motive remains a mystery.

This is being reported in Europe but has not yet been picked up by major outlets here, so I thought I’d post it:

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said that the situation in the Middle East has become so serious that the issue of sending international peacekeepers can no longer be ignored. Speaking to journalists after a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Mr Annan called the continuing violence in the Middle East “an affront to the conscience of mankind”.

UN Chief Wants International Force

I just discovered that the site I was using to host my guestbook has essentially closed all free subscriptions. I’ll have to look for an alternative.

Another despicable attack on a synagogue, this time in Tunisia. Blast at Tunisia Synagogue Kills 5.

This is all the more heartbreaking when you consider the historical signifiance of the El Ghriba synagogue, the site of which has seen Jewish prayer for the last 2,000 years. Here’s a picture.

A peek into Edwidge Danticat’s world:

“The first time I read ‘The Farming of Bones’ in public, I couldn’t get through it. I was embarrassed because I thought people would think I thought so highly of my work,” she says, referring to her latest novel. “But it is so harsh. And it’s not like I was drawing things out of the air. Many of these things happened, and that’s what makes it more painful.”

Haitian Heritage: Edwidge Danticat Uses Her Own Story

Remember those little “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is Great” missives that accompanied the anthrax? Now the FBI is quietly backing up from claims that they were the work of foreign-born, possibly Iraqi, terrorists. They are now saying that the anthrax letters are the work of “a U.S. scientist with highly specialized training and skills”. Behind this theory is the argument that:

Extensive lab tests of the anthrax powder have revealed new details about how the powder was made, including the identity of a chemical used to coat the trillions of microscopic spores to keep them from clumping together. Sources close to the investigation declined to name the chemical but said its presence was something of a surprise. The powder’s formulation “was not routine,” said one law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Somebody had to have special knowledge and experience to do this,” the official said.(…)

The Bush administration had previously disclosed that the anthrax powder contained silica — a chemical known to have been used in the U.S. germ warfare program in the 1950s and 1960s — but not bentonite, an additive in some Iraqi biological weapons.”

Read more here:
Powder Used in Anthrax Attacks was not Routine

Conspiracy theorists are having a field day with that one. See Thinking the Unthinkable, for example.