The Willesden Herald, a group blog from the Willesden neighorhood in London, is holding a short story competition that will be judged by none other than local lit star Zadie Smith.
For more details, go here (scroll down to November 17 entry).
In an essay contribution at Powell’s Dan Olivas addresses the issue of documenting hate in fiction.
A sixteen year old student has been suspended from a Kansas high school for speaking Spanish with a friend in the hallway.
“It was, like, totally not in the classroom,” the high school junior said, recalling the infraction. “We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he’s like, ‘Me prestas un dolar?’ ['Will you lend me a dollar?'] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I’m like, ‘No problema.’ ”But that conversation turned out to be a big problem for the staff at the Endeavor Alternative School, a small public high school in an ethnically mixed blue-collar neighborhood. A teacher who overheard the two boys sent Zach to the office, where Principal Jennifer Watts ordered him to call his father and leave the school.
Since when is speaking your language in the hall against the law? asked the kid’s father. The school district has rescinded the decision.
After the reading last night at Gravy, I walked to my car to find one of the back windows smashed. The doors were still locked, nothing was missing, and the alarm, if it kicked off, was certainly not loud enough that we could have heard it across the street.
As I started to clean the glass shards out of my car, I thought about the senselessness of the exercise–destroying someone’s window for the fun of it. It reminded me of Graham Greene’s ‘The Destructors,’ which I read in my first or second year of college. In the story, a band of street urchins set about tearing a house down, for no reason but that they want to do something fun, something different.
“You hate him a lot?” Blackie asked.
“Of course I don’t hate him,” T. said. “There’d be no fun if I hated him.” The last burning note illuminated his brooding face. “All this hate and love,” he said, “it’s soft, it’s hooey. There’s only things, Blackie,” and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things.’
For the teenagers, destruction was “after all, a form of creation.”
I suppose this is a long way of saying: I’m off to a late start this morning, so posting will be light.
I just checked the Amazon page for Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and nearly fell out of my chair. Apparently, readers who bought HODP also bought Nedjma’s The Almond. WTF? Sure, both are set in Morocco, but, really, you couldn’t pick two more different books if you tried. Bizarre.
It’s been clear for quite some time that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardliner who last June won the presidential elections in Iran on promises of turning the economy around, has failed miserably. Iran’s economy has taken a turn from the bad to the catastrophic.
Given his failures, Ahmadinejad has turned to a centuries-old tradition: When all else fails, blame the Jews. Indeed, today, he’s taken his hateful, anti-Jewish tirade to a whole new level, by questioning that the Holocaust ever happened. He’s clearly looking for confrontation, in hopes of shifting attention away from domestic problems and strengthening his right-wing base. Given the neo-cons in power here, he just might get his wish.
On a related note, author Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) suggests a good recipe for people like Ahmadinejad: Read a book! The best-selling academic is hoping to start a global book club, one in which people from all over the world can read the same books:
“If our new president in Iran could come to understand that people in Israel have the same thoughts and emotions as he,” Nafisi says, “he would not be saying let’s wipe them off the map (…) That is the one thing I have always dreamt of, to create this republic of imagination.”
For more on Nafisi’s plans, read the full Globe & Mail article. (Globe link from the Lit Saloon.)
The book I gave away earlier this morning went so fast I thought I’d give you guys on the West Coast a fair chance. I’d like to give away a copy of Anu Garg‘s fantastic A Word A Day. Back when I was in graduate school, lo these many years ago, I used to subscribe to Anu’s mailing list, to which he sent out, well, a word a day, along with its definition, pronunciation, etymology, usage, quotation, and other tidbits. Anu put together some of these words into this book, which is a treat for language nuts.
I have one copy to give away, so if you want it, please send me an email with the subject line AWAD, and be sure to include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.
Update: The winner is Adnan K. from Portland, Oregon.
I’ll be doing a reading tonight at Gravy, as part of the Loggernaut Reading Series. The prompt for the reading is the word “Bare.” Details below:
Thursday, December 8, 2005
7:30pm
at GRAVY
3957 N. Mississippi Avenue
in Portland
{$2}
I will be reading together with the uber-cool Joyelle McSweeney and Justin Tussing. See you then.
This week’s giveaway is David Wolman‘s A Left-Hand Turn Around The World: Chasing the Mystery and Meaning of All Things Southpaw, an exploration of the mystery and culture of left-handedness. I should have saved it for my own lefty brother, but what the heck, it’s more fun to give it away to readers. So: The first person to email me (subject line: Left Hand) gets the book. Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.
Update: The winner is Tom N. from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Congrats.
Finalists for the 2005 Story Prize have been announced. They are Jim Harrison (The Summer He Didn’t Die), Maureen F. McHugh (Mothers and Other Monsters), and Patrick O’Keeffe (The Hill Road). The award will be judged by Andrea Barrett, Nancy Pearl, and James Wood; the ceremony will take place on January 25, in New York. Last year’s prize went to Edwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker.
