Laila Lalami

Yesterday I watched a pick up game of soccer while we were at the beach, just outside the capital of Rabat. A group of eight shirtless teenagers were playing, a few of them barefoot on the cement basketball court. There were three or four of these courts by the beach, but no soccer field, even in this soccer-mad town. So the kids had just used one of the basketball courts for their game. They’d divided up the teams by having four of them play with their shoes on and the other four with their shoes off. The kids in shoes were winning.
Like that game of soccer, Morocco is divided between the haves and the have nots; the mansions with their marble arches, and the shacks with their corrugated tin roofs held down by rocks, only a mile away; the westernized to the point of mimicry and the traditional to the point of extremism; the 9-to-5 workers and the jobless who sit in cafes, watching them come and go; the bikini-clad girls and those who flaunt their scarves instead of their breasts.
As I was getting ready to leave, the barefoot kids scored. I jumped up to cheer them, but they were too overjoyed to notice.

Many thanks to Jim Hanas for guesting on Friday. If you’re interested in guesting next Friday, drop me a line.

That’s it for me. Like my hostess, I’m off to a faraway land by the sea — although in my case that means Atlantic City. I leave you with my favorite item of the week: The Morning News’ guide to inside tricks used by people in various professions. I particularly like the entry about faking it as a street musician, since the same method could be used for just about anything — writing, editing music for the floor exercise, guest blogging …

In street performance, it

Whatever gets done, somebody must have done it, and I always enjoy hearing from people who create things you come across all the time without necessarily wondering who is behind them. To wit, Slate chats with Barry Nease, the king of floor exercise music. Nease, who got shut out of the Olympics because none of the gymnasts who use his music made the team, was not impressed with this year’s music selections, which he says were “not entertaining, not charming” and had no impact. He cautions further:

Esoteric or vague music lends itself to esoteric and vague gymnastics. There’s no room for ambiguity in a floor exercise. Is that a landing or isn’t it? When my athletes hit a landing, it’s like a sledgehammer!

The Washington Post details how Pamela Anderson managed to write her new novel, Star, in just seven months. Well, actually, she didn’t write write it. She talked to some dude once a week and he wrote it. The Post calculates that this means Anderson spent 28 days on the 294-page tome.

Sure, that’s seven days more than Stephanie Green spent writing her sure-to-be best-selling drive-by of evil tabloid priestess Bonnie Fuller, but it still reminds me of a line from the doomed yet brilliant Fox series Action. At one point, a screenwriter who’s been put through the wringer checks into the hospital for exhaustion. “Exhaustion?” scoffs soulless producer Peter Dragon. “You’re just sitting there. Writing is the cure for exhaustion.”

Tell that to Haruki Murakami.

The New York Daily News reports that the New York Times has successfully thwarted the Los Angeles Times‘ hostile takeover of Michiko Kakutani.

I linked to George Saunders’ latest piece for Slate yesterday from my homeblog, but I guess I’m just lucky that I get to link to it twice. Saunders — who, for my money, is the best short story writer going — is to be admired for his recent pieces about the war and other Bush administration policies, not least of all because they’re hilarious and poignant. (Which I take to be the major stength of Saunders’ deft style, cf. “The Falls” in Pastoralia.) He is also to be admired for rising above punditry, which has tempted many into cynical, ego-feeding polemics. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Hitch.) Who knew that the author’s detached, playful tone — with its mix of absurdity and humanity — would be the perfect antidote for a situtation that is at once absurd and inhumane? For those who think — and I have thought this — that it’s time to overcome obliqueness and get down to some straight talk, Saunders shows the way.

While the recent home-invasion-style theft of two Edvard Munch paintings — including the omnipresent “Scream” — from a museum in Oslo might seem unusual, Slate’s Marc Spiegler explains that high-tech security systems have made laser-dodging art burglars a thing of the past. Art thieves now frequently resort to force. He writes:

The more widespread such systems become, the harder it is to steal using subterfuge. Which leads us ineluctably to armed robbery

Thanks for the nice intro, Laila, and thanks for having me.

McSweeney’s public library embed Scott Douglas reveals some secrets of the book-lending trade in his latest dispatch from inside the theft detection pillars. He confesses:

When a kid comes to the reference desk and asks, “Where are the books on dinosaurs?,” I frequently will point very broadly at the rows of bookshelves and say, “Over there.”

Which I guess explains why I can never find any damn books about dinosaurs.

I first became aware of Jim Hanas’ work when I read his quirky story, “Miss Tennessee,” in The Land-Grant College Review. I was delighted when I saw that he’s joined the blogosphere with Encyclopedia Hanasiana, where you’ll find a gallery of tourists taking pictures of the Chrysler Building, among other things. Beside LGCR, his fiction has appeared in One Story, McSweeney’s and Bridge. He has also contributed to GQ and Salon. I leave you in Jim’s capable hands for tomorrow while I’m on travel.