Laila Lalami

A few people wrote to mention that they were suddenly shut out of the very popular Paris Review DNA of Literature project, which gives the public free access to the journal’s Writers At Work series. In an earlier entry, I had linked to parisreview.com, which worked fine just two weeks ago, but which now requires a username/password combo. If you point your browser to theparisreview.com or theparisreview.org or even parisreview.org, you should be able to read the interviews posted thus far.

Auction houses love to hype items in their catalogs, and the most recent illustration comes with this claim made by Sotheby’s, to have the world’s “first known piece of printed pornography” available for auction next month.

“Sodom”, penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby’s as a “closet drama rather than for the stage” with pornography “in almost every line”.
“We believe this is the first printed pornography in English literature, a unique copy of the quintessence of debauchery,” Peter Beal, Sotheby’s book specialist said.

At least the book specialist restricts his claim to English literature, but that hasn’t stopped the Reuters writer.

Arab and Jewish university students have started a new literary journal, titled Yalla (‘let’s go’ in Arabic, a phrase that’s also current in Israel.)

The Jewish and Arab editors did not know each other previously. The team was assembled through e-mailings, announcements and word-of-mouth, much the same way as the submissions were solicited.
Among them, they have fundamental differences, but have reached a stage where they can speak without fear of antagonizing each other. They all agree they have learned a lot, not only from each other, but from the contributions to Yalla, about how each other’s community sees things.

Nadine Gordimer, who has recently edited Telling Tales, a collection of short stories to benefit an AIDS treatment campaign in South Africa, is interviewed about her work in Newsweek.

Do you expect readers to buy the book out of a sense of duty?
It’s not at all a charitable duty to buy this book, I didn’t want it to be. The storytellers in the book reveal the marvelous possibilities of the written word. Their tales are for us to enjoy and whilst reading them support the millions among us in southern Africa who already have HIV/AIDS or are vulnerable to contracting it. The number of children born with HIV here is heading even while I speak towards one child in every five.

With 13 novels and nine short-story collections behind you, you’ve had a long and distinguished literary career. How do you want to be remembered?
The best that is within me, anything worthwhile in me, is in the books. I’m talking about the insights, the effort to understand life and to transpose it. To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I believe there is only this life. But this life is so incredible. Something that interests me very much [that] I’m beginning now to see it in my own books which are written from many different points of view: first person as a man, a child, a woman, a young person, an older person more and more [is that] there is the sense that I am really writing one book all my life.

The book consists of work by Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Susan Sontag, Hanif Kureishi, Woody Allen, Arthur Miller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amos Oz, and Chinua Achebe, among others.

In a case eerily (sorry, couldn’t resist) similar to a subplot in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a woman in Montreal has made it all but impossible for a judge to determine a paternity case, by claiming that she has had sex with identical twins on the same day, and that either twin could be the parent of her boy.

One of the twins, who cannot be named for legal reasons, went to court last summer in the hope of forcing the mother to grant him access to the child. Although his name is not on the birth certificate, he claims he is the only father the boy has known, cared for him every other weekend, provided financial support and was even known to him as ‘papa’.
But then the man’s relationship with his girlfriend broke down and the visits halted. When he began legal proceedings to prove his paternity, the mother made her claim that she had been sleeping with his twin at around the same time.

No word on whether there are mice involved.

Ever wondered about the literary connections of a particular state? I’ve only ever thought of the question when I lived in California, that land so easily dismissed by East Coasters as the home of choice of movie stars and nouveaux riches. A Sunday Times article by Alan Bisbort surveys the state of Connecticut through its literary real estate. Bisbort even calls Connecticut “a Land of Canaan for writers.” (Get it? Get it?) At any rate, among writers who have owned homes there are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hellen Keller, Maxwell E. Perkins and Thornton Wilder.

In a fascinating article for the SF Chronicle, Jonathan Curiel examines Islamic inspirations in modern American architecture, including the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco and the Civic Center in San Rafael, California. The influence dates back at least to the late 19th century, earlier if one counts Moorish trends, which came to the Southwest by way of former Spanish citizens. The slide show for the article contains a shot of the Berkeley City Club, which was designed by one of my favorite architects, Julia Morgan. Morgan’s best-known building, Hearst Castle, also contains patterns drawn from Moorish/Islamic architecture.

But perhaps the most interesting bit of information in Curiel’s article is that Minoru Yamasaki, the man who designed the World Trade Center in 1965, spent considerable time in Saudi Arabia, and used patterns he’d seen in Mecca in his own work, including in the famed Twin Towers. (It’s highly ironic that some thirty-five years later, religious fanatics would consider the building, designed by a Japanese American architect, using Islamic designs at the base and in the plaza, and housing people of a multitude of backgrounds and faiths, to be the symbol of the America they wanted to destroy.) The work was an example of cultural cross-pollination; Muslim architects themselves had borrowed from Byzantine designs.

“Cultures have constantly mixed and seen one another, either in war or peace,” [MIT Professor Nasser Rabbat] says. “It used to be that people thought of the world in terms of purely, independently developed cultures each having its own language, whether it’s culinary, visual, literary, architectural.

“But there are those of us who subscribe to the multicultural method, where we no longer believe in the notion of a purity and insularity of a cultural development. … The influence is continuous, mutual and never ceases. ”

Read the rest of this article, and find out how the city of Opa-locka, Florida, came to be known as the Baghdad of the South.

Dylan Thomas, long believed to have died from chronic alcoholism, may in fact have succumbed to a mistreated pneumonia, a new biography of the poet alleges. The Scotsman‘s Fiona McGregor reports that

Thomas had complained he could not breathe and was “suffocating”, but he was not diagnosed with pneumonia until nearly 24 hours later.
His personal physician, Dr Milton Feltenstein, initially decided he had delirium tremens and ignored the possibility of a chest infection.
Feltenstein injected the poet with three doses of morphine, which the biographers say restricted his breathing. After the third dose, Thomas’s face turned blue and he sank into a coma.

Feltenstein and all others who treated Thomas at New York’s St. Vincent’s hospital are now dead. The biography quoted in the article is Dylan Remembered 1935-1953 and came out in the States last summer.

A few weeks ago, Randa mentioned Elif Shafak’s novel The Saint Of Incipient Insanities on this blog. Shafak is a Turkish writer who has already written novels in her native language (The Flea Palace is the only one available in the U.S., it seems) but she wrote The Saint in English.

I was quite looking forward to the book for two reasons. One is that I’m acutely aware of the difficulties of writing in a foreign language, and was curious about how Shafak’s book would read. The other is that the novel features a Moroccan character, which seems to be a bit of a trend these days, what with Algerians, Tunisians, and Americans writing about Moroccans. Aren’t we the lucky ones.

A recent phone conversation with Maud Newton tempered my curiosity, when she shared some of her reservations about The Saint. Here’s her review in this weekend’s Newsday.

All literature is a struggle to escape the confines of language, to transform what Proust called the “cracked kettle” of human speech into something transcendent. And in places “The Saint of Incipient Insanities” achieves this goal. What Nabokov might call the book’s birthmarks – the irregular usage choices and strange turns of phrase – frequently enrich the prose. But at least as often they make for confusion and slow progress. Shafak’s significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the adage that the avant-garde artist must master the rules of her chosen form before breaking them unfortunately is true, and applicable here.

Like Amanda Heller in the Boston Globe, Newton compares the book to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, unfavorably for Shafak.

The Oregonian runs an AP profile of Portlander Marc Acito, author of How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater.

For Acito, who also writes a humor column syndicated in gay publications nationwide, the book is the product of a life spent scribbling in journals while trying to claw his way up the ladder of stage success.
Although his father paid for college, Acito was kicked out of Carnegie Mellon’s theater program because of, he says, “artistic differences I thought I had talent and they didn’t think so.”

Acito also proves that you can open up a Fast Signs franchise, make sales calls, run the store, and still write a novel. And it doesn’t hurt if fellow Portlander Chuck Palahniuk recommends you to his agent.