Laila Lalami

Since Saturday, I’ve been trying to figure out what a proper response would be to the disaster currently unfolding in South Asia. I type something, erase it, start over. I can’t think of a ‘proper’ anything-no response, no word, no feeling seems quite adequate. I struggle to find reference points, ways in which the catastrophe could be anchored, compared, examined. But I was not yet born when Agadir trembled. I have only vague memories of television images of Armenia. And Bam was knocked off the news within 48 hours. But this. This is different. The magnitude of the horror seems so great, so unbelievable that no natural disaster of modern times seems to compare. As I write this, the toll is believed to be 80,000, and is expected to climb with the spread of disease.

Most of the 80,000 victims are Asians, of various nationalities, religions, and ethnic backgrounds, though if you were watching CNN you’d think it was mostly tourists who’d been hit. Is the suffering of brown people so common, so habitual, so expected, that we only notice it when Westerners are involved? Perhaps we only notice pain when it has a face like ours, hair and eyes and skin the same as ours.

One thing has been amply demonstrated since the turn of this new century: even as we insulate ourselves, we’re not as remote as we think we are. Connections are there, whether we acknowledge them or, at our peril, deny them. The humanitarian toll of the earthquake and tsunami is only now beginning to be counted, but the economic and political consequences are not likely to be known for quite some time. If you haven’t done so already, consider making a donation to the Red Cross or Red Crescent or UNICEF or any other charity. Or you can go to tsunamihelp which is a clearinghouse of donation numbers, survivor info, tips, and images.

I haven’t been able to write since the weekend. I’ve been reading, but mostly I’ve been day-dreaming, thinking about the significance of this, how it relates to religious belief, and how it relates to art. Amateur video is being replayed on TV, but the image that I can’t seem to shake from my mind is from a print by Hokusai, In the Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa, with the tentacle-like curls of the wave, the fishing boats caught inside it, and Mount Fuji in the background, cold and distant, unaware of the horror beneath.

Like many of our noted blogging pals, we’re going to take a break here at Moorishgirl until the first week of January. We’ll be using the time off to mull over some changes to the site and put the final touches on new features. See you all in 2005.

A few days ago I mentioned the novel that Zapatista leader Sub-Comandante Marcos is co-authoring with Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo, and which is being serialized in the Mexican paper La Jornada. The Guardian has translated a portion of the extracts.

Last week, Google announced its plans to partner with major libraries in order to give access to millions of books to its users. The plans raises issues of copyright, and yesterday’s editorial at the NY Times spelled them out:

At the outset, this project will be limited to books that are old enough to no longer be under copyright. This is as it should be. It will serve as a demonstration of the immensity – and the immense cultural value – of works in the public domain, and could well kindle a new appreciation of the significance of the public domain.

Beginning with older books will also give Google, the libraries and book publishers time to sort out the problem of creating a comprehensive digital library of books that are currently under copyright. As always in negotiations over intellectual property, the trick will be to balance public utility, corporate profits and the welfare of writers, scholars and editors, and to do so, if possible, without the intervention of Congress.

While I’m all for digitizing information and propagating it by the simplest means possible, I’m also concerned that some people on Capitol Hill might use this as a further excuse to cut funding for libraries.

Over at Slate, Josh Greenman makes his case for sarcasm punctuation.

The English language must evolve. Not with emoticons or lol or brb or l8r or GRATUITOUS all caps used for emphasis, not with Spanglish or bumbling Bushisms or even cryptic Kerryisms. We don’t need more quotation marks that “hedge” or try to make the same “old” thing sound “fresh.” What we need is an honest effort to incorporate the way we live today. My fellow Americans, we need to embrace a new punctuation markone that embraces the irony and edge of contemporary conversation and clarifies rather than condenses or confuses.

It is time for the adoption of the sarcasm point. Why the sarcasm point? We have a mark that conveys that we mean or know something. We have one that says it with volume and force! We have one that communicates that we don’t know something, don’t we? We need one more: to do for language what shade did for drawing, what color did for television, and what eyebrows did for expressions introduce finesse.

Believe it or not, the world we’ve landed in is not only more image-obsessed than we’ve ever seen. It’s also more text-based than ever. We finger-type and we thumb-type. We e-mail, we IM, we blog. And the forms cannot contain the content. There’s a dastardly disconnect. Among other things, it makes Dave Barry columns somewhat difficult to read. Someone must step into the sarcasm chasm

George Bernard Shaw would be so proud

The Association of American Publishers is offering grants to publishers interested in releasing three Iranian novels in translation here in the U.S.

The association announced recently that it would give $10,000 each to publishers who would release “The Drowned” by Moniru Ravanipur, “The Empty Palace of Soluch” by Mahmoud Dawlatabadi and “Christine and Kid” by Houshang Golshiri. Money would be divided among translation costs, promotion and publicity.

“We got the idea a few years ago when some Iranian writers visited the United States and complained that works from Iran were not available in translation,” Jeri Laber, a human rights activist and consultant to the association’s International Freedom to Publish Committee, said Monday.

The grant is funded by the Open Society Institute, which is part of billionaire philanthropist George Soros’s foundation.

“I regularly give away copies of Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley,” Harfenist says. “It’s an old book (first published in 1923) about the daughter of a tobacco tenant farmer in 1920s Kentucky and it’s the unblinking, outspoken story of a superior young woman trapped by her body and her culture. With the emotional accuracy of Sister Carrie‘and without a sniff of sentimentality or self-pity’ it triggers something so strong that readers either love it or hate it. And that’s the sign of a book worth reading.”

Jean Harfenist’s novel-in-stories, A Brief History of the Flood, received wide critical acclaim when it appeared in 2002. Michiko Kakutani called it “wonderfully wry-melancholy,” and declared it “an auspicious and stirring debut.” Harfenist is a native of Minnesota, a graduate of New York University, and now lives in Santa Barbara with her husband.

First, it was filmmaker Neil Jordan, who went back to his literary roots in October, with a novel titled Shade.

That same month, filmmaker John Sayles also reconnected with his early work, this time with a collection of short stories titled Dillinger in Hollywood: New and Selected Short Stories.

Now filmmaker Alan Parker has also released a book, this time a historical novel titled The Sucker’s Kiss.

What next? A children’s book by Tim Burton? Oh, wait, that’s already been done.

Newley Purnell rounds up some bloggers’ favorite books of 2004, including picks by Lizzie Skurnick (The Old Hag), Mark Sarvas (The Elegant Variation) and yours truly.

Paul Mandelbaum, who provided one of the book recommendations in the Tuesday series, has a new book out, a collection of short stories titled Garrett in Wedlock, and it’s reviewed in the L.A. Times.