As has been widely reported, E.L Doctorow’s The March has won the PEN/Faulkner award. The oher finalists were William Henry Lewis, for I Got Somebody in Staunton; Bruce Wagner, for The Chrysanthemum Palace; James Salter, for Last Night.; and Pacific Northwest author Karen Fisher, for A Sudden Country.
Proud to be Liberal, which is published this month, is an anthology of essays about being a liberal in these conservative times. Contributors include Eric Alterman, Steve Almond, Margaret Cho, Al Franken, George Lakoff, Maud Newton, Tom Tomorrow, and a few others. My own essay, about the triple threat of being Arab, Immigrant, and Liberal, is also included. Check it out.
Governor Ted Kulongoski has named a Lawson Inada the new poet laureate for Oregon:
Inada is an emeritus professor of writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he has taught since 1966. He was interned during World War II along with other Japanese Americans. Inada is required to give as many as six public readings in urban and rural settings across the state.Inada is a third-generation Japanese American, born in 1938 and raised in Fresno, Calif. He was one of the co-editors of the anthology “Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers.” In his autobiographical volume, “Legends from Camp,” he wrote about his boyhood experience of internment during World War II.
The last appointee for the poet laureate position was William Stafford, who left sixteen years ago.
Ziad Hayder Rahman, a London-based lawyer who claims to be the inspiration for the character Magid in White Teeth, has said that Zadie Smith’s take on race relations in Britain was “divorced from reality.” Rahman is the brother of Jimmi Rahman, whom Smith dated at the time, and to whom she dedicated the novel.
Rahman’s own experience in Britain was not as racism-free as Smith makes out. Growing up in the East End he was bullied and beaten, insulted in the street and once had coffee thrown at him from a moving car. When he went to Oxford University he was chased out of the bar and even had a swastika daubed on the door of his room, prompting him to change colleges.Smith wrote the novel at the age of 24, after reading English at Cambridge, and after it was published in 2000 it was celebrated for its optimist portrait of a “post-racial” country.
Rahman, however, accepts Smith’s right to artistic license. “I recognised myself in White Teeth but I also recognise that it is work of fiction,” said Rahman.
Rahman says that the book doesn’t reflect his anger at “being alienated from British society” or his problems with “the Asian community with which I’m in profound disagreement”. This reaction to White Teeth appears in a new book by Claire Berlinski, titled Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too. Berlinski’s book has been praised by neo-con cheerleader Daniel Pipes.
Related: “Zadie didn’t tell the real race story.”
Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica, a film that deals with the aftermath of the mass rape of Muslim women during the Bosnian genocide, has won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The movie’s website has stills and other information.
New statistics about reading culture are revealed during a discussion at the Salon du Livre in Casablanca: The average number of newspapers sold is approximately 13 units per 1000 inhabitants. It’s a paltry number, especially in comparison with the average of 55/1000 in the rest of the Arab world. The explanation is fairly simply: Literacy rates are lower in Morocco than they are in other Arab countries, though, judging by the article, that particular argument didn’t appear to be raised.
Raja Shehadeh reviews Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun for The Nation, finding the novel full of “novelty and power,” but also “cluttered” and “overcrowded.”
Palestinians tend to expect that every work about Palestine must encompass the whole of the Palestinian experience. It is unfortunate that Khoury, who is not Palestinian, was also motivated to achieve this impossible goal. Still, Gate of the Sun is important for trying to capture the Palestinian experience during and after 1948. Although it overreaches, the novel is unique and powerful, and Archipelago Books is to be commended for making it available to an American audience.
Read the review in full here.
This week, the Lit Blog Co-Op will present discussions and reviews of Kirstin Allio’s Garner, and even interviews and podcasts with the author. Check it out.
Flemming Rose, the Jyllands-Posten editor who commissioned the infamous cartoons, explains his views in a Washington Post piece. In it, he argues that, while he exercises restraint every day in his editorial decisions (no pornographic images, no graphic pictures of the dead, few swear words), the cartoon story, is, in his words, “different.” He acknowledges that some people were offended by the cartoons, but he says his intent wasn’t to offend but to stir up debate.
Eager to show how, he too, wants to open up debates, the Italian minister for Reform (and leader of anti-immigrant Northern League party) Roberto Calderoli went ahead with his plan to wear a T-shirt with the most offensive of the 12 infamous cartoons. On Friday, rioters in Libya (which, not coincidentally, happens to be an ex-colony of Italy), stormed the Italian embassy in Benghazi. Riot police shot at the protesters, killing nine people. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, mobs attacked and burned Christian establishments and churches, killing another sixteen people. I weep for the Prophet, in whose name these atrocities were committed. With “faithful” like these, who needs enemies?
Elsewhere, a joint Spanish-Turkish alliance, called the “Alliance for Civilizations” is seeking to restore dialogue between nations under the aegis of the United Nations. Several editorials in Al Bayane appealed for calm and intellectual discussion. L’Opinion pointed out that the lack of democratic processes in some parts of the Arab world has led to violent protests rather than to reasoned discussions. And in Asharq Al-Awsat, Mona El-Tahawy argues that “the war on the people of Denmark must stop.” El-Tahawy adds, “Us Muslims often call on the rest of the world to respect us and to understand the things we hold sacred. Are we prepared to offer that same respect in return and to open a dialogue with the men and women of Denmark who are watching in horror as events unfold beyond their reach or control?”
Related:
Toon Update
Defend Freedom of Speech…Everywhere
Caricatures: Clash of Civilizations, Clash of Ignorance
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Fire: Meet Dry Gunpowder
Cartoon Shmartoon
