A longish profile of Dave Eggers appears in the FT this weekend, and I only link to it because it contains a few amusing, semi-sarcastic observations, like this one:
He is part of that American tradition where being a successful author isn’t quite enough. You have to be a whole home entertainment system.
An exhibit of Botero’s paintings, inspired by the torture of Iraqi prisoner by U.S. troops at the Abu-Ghraib prison, opened in Rome last month. Another show of the artist’s works opened in Barranquilla, this time displaying pieces inspired by car bombings and kidnappings in Colombia. The L.A. Times has a review of the shows, and of what drew Botero to the events.
These aren’t the sorts of scenes most people associate with Fernando Botero. For decades, the 73-year-old Colombian painter and sculptor has been best known for his seemingly innocuous images of plump priests, chunky children and still lifes of gargantuan fruits and flowers.But this perception of Botero’s work was always overly simplistic and incomplete. Encoded, or perhaps hidden in plain sight, in many of his paintings are multilayered cultural symbols, covert allusions to current events and winking art-historical references to works by Velazquez, Vermeer and other Old Masters. Some of his most enigmatic images birds perched in lollipop trees, faces anxiously peering out of windows, a pile of dead bishops resting peacefully hint at darker forces roiling beneath the colorful, pleasing surfaces.
Read more here.
One of the (many) things that enrage me about the portrayal of Islam in the mainstream media is that it’s treated either as a revolting pathology that needs to be eradicated, or as a retrograde faith that is completely different from other religions. Right-wing pundits bleat about “Islamo-fascism” while some conservatives and quite a few liberals stress that Islam is a religion of peace. Both of these observations are one-sided. Islam, like Christianity before it, has been used both for peace and for war. It’s been used to justify utter good as well as pure evil.
So it was refreshing to see this point picked up by Jason Burke in a weekend Op-Ed in the Observer. “We need to be clear,” he says “that, like any faith, Islam is a religion of peace – and sometimes of violence.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t put the fundamentalists currently running the White House to the same thorough examination.
I noticed a sizeable surge in my stats file of referrals from casino ads, online gaming, viagra pills, and other spammers. Does anyone know how I can block these, or at least stop them from cluttering my stats file? Please email me if you have suggestions.
Of the books I read, I review very few on my blog, so since it’s a Friday and I’m procrastinating, I thought I’d post a little bit about what I’ve read lately.
I just finished Nedjma’s The Almond, which I thought was bloody awful. It had almost no character development, and the plot was fairly uninspired. The erotic part was well-written, though, if you’re into that sort of thing, but even that sank into problems of its own.
I did, however, enjoy War by Candlelight, Daniel Alarcon’s debut collection, which is set mostly in and around Lima. In his writing, the city is treated as a character and I thought that was beautifully done.
I’m nearly finished with Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. It’s set during the Gulf war, and it features a wide range of characters who all inhabit the same art-deco building in Cairo. It’s a light, fun read, with occasional eyebrow-raising comments (about women, sex, and gays) that are left to the reader to interpret. I’ll probably have more to say about it in a couple of weeks.
I just started Kevin Smokler’s anthology Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, which features essays by Adam Johnson, Meghan Daum, Tom Bissell, and Nell Freudenberger, among others. Smokler was in Portland yesterday for a reading, and he shared some thought-provoking observations about books and the state of reading today.
I know I’ve mentioned this book before several times, and I will mention it again: I loved Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion, which is set in 1899 in Zanzibar, and tracks the consequences of a forbidden love affair across three generations. I found it beautifully written, incredibly compelling, and profoundly relevant. It comes out this month, and I really urge you to read it.
Aleksandar Hemon contributes a wonderful piece to the WSJ about the massacre at Srebenica ten years ago and the aftermath of the genocide of Bosnian Muslims. I hesitate to excerpt any part of it–it’s such a thoughtful, beautifully written piece that I think it should be read in its entirety–but here’s the beginning:
A couple years ago, at a Bosnian event in Chicago, someone pointed out to me a mother from Srebrenica. She was on her way to Washington to talk about the massacre to members of Congress. She had lost, the person told me, about a hundred male members of her immediate and extended family. She was surrounded by other Bosnians, talking and listening to them, but she seemed to exist in a different realm, her serene, sad face marked by an experience most of us could not begin to understand. I did not dare approach her, for I had spent the war safe in Chicago. What could I have said to her? What can be said? Please accept my condolences? Never again? Had I found myself face to face with her, I would have probably stood silent, for the enormity of her loss is beyond my imagination, therefore beyond the reach of my language. I would have probably been embarrassed by the triteness of what I perceived as my “problems” (taxes, an ankle injury, marital discord, etc.). I would have also been ashamed of my human, individual helplessness in July 1995, and thereafter, and always. I regret I had no courage to hug her, but even if I did I would have been humbled by the physicality of my body, both of us reminded at that moment that her men had perished, and I was arbitrarily alive.
Hemon is the author, most recently, of Nowhere Man.
Thanks to Sean M. for the link.
The one and only Randa Jarrar is in Connecticut this week visiting her family so I’m going to be around here today. I’ll be catching up on some old posts I’ve been meaning to write, so stay tuned.
Lord helps us. Another review of The Almond, and another reviewer who doesn’t get it. Here’s an example:
Nedjma writes in painstaking – and often painful – detail about Islamic customs regarding marriage and sexual practices. “No, I didn’t love Hmed, but I did think he’d be of use to me, at least – he’d make a woman of me. Free me and cover me with gold and kisses,” Badra says of her husband. Then: “All he managed to do was deprive me of my laughter.”
The book tells the story of one woman from Imchouk, one woman who goes to Tangier and takes a lover. How the hell do you go from that to “Islamic customs”? What the hell are Islamic customs anyway? Bosnian? Malaysian? Chinese? French? What?
Well this should be interesting. Mark Sarvas, who’s been doing the L.A. Times Book Review Thumbnail on his blog, The Elegant Variation, will be on an open source radio show with Steve Wasserman, outgoing editor of the review. Kevin Smokler will also be a guest, so it should make for a very interesting show. You can stream it live here at 4 pm Pacific time.
Or you can listen to Bookworm on KCRW, where Michael Silverblatt will be hosting a show on Asian identity in writing, with guests Don Lee, Susan Choi, and Maxine Hong Kingston. You can stream it live here at 2:30 pm Pacific time.
An exhibit of Botero’s paintings, inspired by the torture of Iraqi prisoner by U.S. troops at the Abu-Ghraib prison, opened in Rome last month. Another show of the artist’s works opened in Barranquilla, this time displaying pieces inspired by car bombings and kidnappings in Colombia. The L.A. Times has a review of the shows, and of what drew Botero to the events.
These aren’t the sorts of scenes most people associate with Fernando Botero. For decades, the 73-year-old Colombian painter and sculptor has been best known for his seemingly innocuous images of plump priests, chunky children and still lifes of gargantuan fruits and flowers.But this perception of Botero’s work was always overly simplistic and incomplete. Encoded, or perhaps hidden in plain sight, in many of his paintings are multilayered cultural symbols, covert allusions to current events and winking art-historical references to works by Velazquez, Vermeer and other Old Masters. Some of his most enigmatic images birds perched in lollipop trees, faces anxiously peering out of windows, a pile of dead bishops resting peacefully hint at darker forces roiling beneath the colorful, pleasing surfaces.
Read more here.
