Laila Lalami

Where was this kind of advice when I was working in the corporate world?

Stephen Pelletierre, the CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war weighs in on the mass murder of Kurds at Halabja, an act which, despite the fact that the U.S. was on the side of Iraq at the time, is now used to justify the pre-emptive war. The information he offers on Halabja might surprise you. And he also has an interesting perspective about the stakes of the war. One hint: it’s not just the oil…it’s the water, too. Requires (free) registration to the NY Times, but definitely worth a read: A War Crime or an Act of War?
Link via Metafilter.

Laura Bush’s cancellation of the White House Poetry Symposium (see yesterday’s entry here) has engendered quite a bit of press coverage. See the AP blurb, the New York Times article, the BBC, and the Guardian, for example. Visit Sam Hamill’s Poets Against the War site to read more anti-war poetry (and, in the interest of fairness, I’ll give a $20 bill to anyone who can point me to a “poets for war” site if there is such a thing, so I can link to both!)

I saw this review of The Guru of Love by Samrat Upadhyay, and it seems like it would be a fun read. I’ll have to check it out.

Diana Abu-Jaber, the author of the critically acclaimed Arabian Jazz, will have a new book out in April, called Crescent. Here is the teaser: “What do Saddam Hussein, actor Richard Burton and a mermaid named Alieph have in common? They all play bit roles in Diana Abu-Jaber’s lyrical new novel, “Crescent,” about Sirine, a 39-year-old Iraqi-American chef in Los Angeles, and her love affair with Hanif Al Eyad, an Arabic literature professor and Iraqi exile haunted by his past.”
More about Abu-Jaber’s book here.

or SOTU, as I like to call it, is available online, with comments from the Atlantic Monthly staff. Very nice resource, especially since it ties in with their special double issue, on newstands now, about “the real state of the union.”

A few months ago, the First Lady decided to organize a poetry symposium in February, but as the date drew near some of the guests made clear their opposition to her husband’s pre-emptive war. Sam Hamill, in particular, asked fellow poets to send in their contributions on the war to the symposium. Now the White House has announced that it is cancelling the event. The reason? “While Mrs Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions, and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum,” her spokesperson said.
Newsflash: literature deals with countless varieties of human experience, among them the political. So to silence the event really amounts to censorship, especially considering that a couple of months ago, the Bush Administration had no qualms about using various American literary figures in a book paid for by taxpayers (but unavailable in the U.S.) to promote the Administration’s view of the world.

I wonder if I should start a separate category for writers commenting on Bush and his war. Seems like I run into these kinds of articles almost daily. Today’s offering: an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. And he doesn’t mince words.

Link via Metafilter.

The New York Times has a brief profile of Deborah Treisman, the new fiction editor. (See an earlier entry about her here.) One quote intrigued me:

Nor is she concerned by criticism that The New Yorker, at least during Mr. Buford’s tenure, favored male fiction writers. According to her, the magazine receives 200 unsolicited manuscripts per week, and each of the five editors in her department receives another 10 or so “recommended” manuscripts daily. She estimates that out of 50 stories published each year, 5 are from virtual unknowns. But 8 out of 10 of all submissions, whether veteran or neophyte, are from men. “It makes it very hard to publish half and half,” she says, “and though I’d like to, I can’t let it force my hand. It’s quite hard to find 50 great stories a year.”

Thanks to MobyLives for the link. Check out his ongoing survey on women in the New Yorker (and he looks at both fiction and non-fiction.)

Read about the surreal, men-only world of Pakistan massage.

Link via Turbanhead.