Every once in a while, you hear about how a hot young writer has “writer’s block” and can’t produce another work. This time is Alex (“The Beach”) Garland who’s being scrutinized by critics. What’s wrong with taking a break? Especially if you’ve got nothing to say, which he (bravely) admits?
Link via Literary Saloon.
Well, what else should he be called? The Christian Science Monitor has a piece on who will be ruling Iraq “after it’s over.”
Garry Trudeau breaks down the extremely nuanced and principled position of our representatives on the mess with Iraq. It’s particularly relevant for Democrats, I think.
This one’s for you, Alex. How well do you know your Brontes? Which one wrote Jane Eyre and which one Wuthering Heights? Find out in this lit quiz from the Guardian.
My score? “Acute Brontitis: You’re the classic case – from the outside, no one would suspect you of any intellectual ill-health. But you can suddenly be struck, without warning, with an absolute and wholly erroneous conviction that Charlotte Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights. She’s the famous one, right? And that’s the famous book, so it must have been her. Mustn’t it?”
Heh.
in Los Angeles. Such a nice change of pace. Great weather for staying indoors and getting work done.
Someone posted a message on one of the boards I read about how we’re all supposed to be prepared for an attack, have water, duct tape to seal windows, etc. I’m not sure there’s much we can do if there is indeed a biological or chemical attack, though. Remember the days when schoolchildren were taught to hide under their desks in case of an atomic bomb? Or are there precautions worth taking?
Yesterday, Powell told the Senate Budget Committee that a transcript of a new Bin Laden taped to be released by Al-Jazeera would demonstrate the link betwen Al-Qaeda and Iraq and that this link could no longer be “looked away from or ignored.” The State Department spokesperson, Richard Boucher, declared to Al-Jazeera that the tape showed that the Iraqi president and the terrorist leader are “bound by a common hatred.”
So the message is: Saddam and Bin Laden are old chums, and, really, we ought to do something about it. Simple enough for you?
Except that’s not the whole story. On the tape, Bin Laden calls Saddam and his Baath party “infidels,” a term we all thought was reserved for us Americans. Bin Laden is no friend of Saddam.
But did this bit make it on the news? I watched a local broadcast, and all that was mentioned was the threat of suicide attacks, Saddam and Osama’s alliance, etc.
The spate of articles, op-eds and interviews from poets and writers about the war on Iraq sparks the usual discussion about whether artists have anything valuable to add to the political debate. See this Boston Globe article for example.
Funny, I never read such discussions when writers were being used for a book put out by Bush’s administration to promote an “American view” of the world.
I guess Downing Street didn’t get the memo about what constitutes “intelligence,” or information gathered on the ground by reliable sources. The “smoking gun” dossier put forth by Tony Blair apparently contains large portions plagiarized (typos and all) directly from one Ibrahim Al-Marashi, a grad student in California who was publishing his own research in a scholarly journal. In addition, some of Al-Marashi’s words were changed in a way that makes the “Iraqi threat” more clear and imminent. Read about it here. And read about Tony Blair’s admission here.
Shocking! A reviewer who may not have read the book she was supposed to review. On a more serious note, if even the NY Times reviewers get this sloppy, what does that say about the rest of them? Here’s the review in question.
Links via Mobylives.
