As has been widely reported yesterday, Hunter S. Thompson took his own life at his home near Aspen. Over at Bookslut, Michael Shaub has been keeping up with all the articles, obits, and rememberances.
Thanks to Randa for doing such a great job on Friday. I spent the three-day weekend mostly relaxing and trying to over that awful cough. Posting should resume at the regular pace this week.
I’ve been struggling with a cough and sore throat for nearly three weeks now. At first, I thought that it would go away on its own, and continued work on my revisions. That didn’t work so well, so in between printing out portions of my book, I chugged cough syrup, and drank green tea, and even took that horrid Zinc that Alex swears by. Nothing worked. So now I’m trying a different approach: rest. That means I will have to bow out early today, though not before pointing out a couple of worthwhile links:
The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday here at Moorishgirl. I will be back at the helm on Monday.
Nice write-up in USA Today by Ed Nawotka about the growing role of literary blogs in “decoding the industry and creating an alternate literary community.” MobyLives, Complete Review, Maud Newton, Kevin Smokler, and yours truly are quoted, and the article also mentions personal faves like Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind and the Elegant Variation.
What many blogs do better than the conventional print media is offer a sense of the global literary culture by providing links to foreign book coverage.
Fortunately, Nawotka doesn’t reprise the all-too-common take that bloggers are a cozy little group of insiders.
Wendy Shalit, whose NY Times essay about the representation of Orthodox Jews in literature drew quite a response in the literary community, has a riposte in this this piece.
All the authors I discussed are great writers, and I’m sure they are good people too. Nevertheless, they are simply not from the fervently-Orthodox community that is featured so negatively in their novels. Unfortunately, the media (and many readers) seem to feel that these writers are representing the traditional Jewish community – one “grants us the illicit pleasure of eavesdropping on a closed world,” and another describes wacky newly religious types with “devastating accuracy” – when by their own admission the authors do not identify with these worlds.In quoting the authors’ public statements about themselves, such as Nathan Englander’s explanation that he’s disillusioned with his Modern Orthodoxy or Tova Mirvis’s considering herself “liberal, feminist, open Orthodox,” I am not critiquing their personal choices. I am examining why sometimes their haredi characters lack realism. The fact that these authors do not come from the specific subgroup they often write about would not be an insurmountable obstacle, so long as they didn’t rely on negative stereotypes. Unfortunately, sometimes they do. The traditional Orthodox characters in their novels tend to be hypocrites.
Do you agree? Disagree? Send an email with your thoughts to llalami AT yahoo DOT com
We mentioned the new line of comic books featuring Mid-East superheroes last October, and now the Post runs a similar piece.
AK Comics intends to flood the Arab world with Zein and three other action idols: Rakan, a hairy medieval warrior in Mesopotamia; Jalila, a brainy Levantine scientist and fighter for justice; and Aya, a North African described as a “vixen who roams the region on her supercharged motorbike confronting crime wherever it rears its ugly head.”
North African vixen? Sounds like my kind of girl.
Adam Langer talks about how he fights insomnia: he keeps up with his blurb requests. Except he’s having trouble with the format:
[At] this moment, I’m struggling with the blurb format, which often seems to be a particularly literate form of Mad Libs:“This (adjective) and (adjective/noun) cuts to the bone of (evocative phrase). Reminiscent of the works of (mainstream author) and (groovy, less well-known author), this (adjective) work marks (insert writer’s name) as a (choose one: [a] writer at the top of his/her game; [b] a bold new voice of his/her generation).”
The cynic in me has always read blurbs with a sensibility borrowed from Mad Magazine: “When they say ‘ambitious,’ they really mean ‘I didn’t finish the damn thing.’” My favorite unpublished blurb is one that was written by a very famous Hollywood personality, who I unfortunately can’t identify here: “What do you want me to say?” the blurber wrote. “I’ll write anything!”
Read the rest here.
The 11th Casablanca International Book Fair, which takes place from 11 to 20 February, features Spain as a guest of honor. Among the many events planned are tributes to Ahmed Sefrioui, Driss Chraibi, Abdellatif Laibi and Juan Goytisolo, as well as readings by Moroccan authors Edmond Amran El Maleh, Mohamed Tozy et Mohamed Bennis.
In related news, Morocco’s Minister of Culture complained about low readership in the kingdom. No word on what he plans to do about it.
I was quite interested to read about A Life Full Of Holes: The Strait Project, an exhibition of photographs by Tangier-born Yto Berrada, and quite disappointed that none of the pictures were available online. The photographs explore issues of migration, similar to the ones I deal with in The Things That Death Will Buy: the “harragas”–people who risk life and limb trying to cross the Straits of Gibraltar in order to make it in Europe. The word has its root in the verb ‘hrg,’ meaning ‘to burn’. Those who migrate in this way burn their papers, burn their past lives in hope of new ones. Here’s Barrada on the project:
‘The word strait, like its French – and as chance would have it, Arabic – equivalent, combines the senses of narrowness and distress. The collapse of the colonial entreprise has left behind a complex legacy, bridging the Mediterranean and shaping how movement across the Strait of Gibraltar is managed and perceived. Before 1991 any Moroccan with a passport could travel freely to Europe. But since the European Union’s (EU) Schengen Agreement, visiting rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait. A generation of Moroccans has grown up facing this troubled space that manages to be at once physical, symbolic, historical and intimately personal.
Berrada’s exhibition takes its name from the book by Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (edited by Paul Bowles), A Life Full of Holes. If you are a reader from Liverpool, drop me a line at llalami AT yahoo DOT com and let me know what you think of the exhibition.
More love for The Maltese Falcon‘s 75th anniversary: Commentator John Ridley has an NPR piece about Sam Spade’s San Francisco.
