Laila Lalami

Over the last few days, I’ve been getting links about “An Inconvenient Truth,” Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about Al Gore’s attempts to bring attention to global warming. I might not have paid too much attention, precisely because of the fact that the film is about a potential presidential candidate, but I have heard very very good things about it, so I do look forward to seeing it. Here is the trailer.

There is also a companion book by Al Gore, also titled An Inconvenient Truth, which Michiko Kakutani reviews in today’s NYT:

Fourteen years ago, during the 1992 campaign, the current president’s father, George Herbert Walker Bush, dismissed Mr. Gore as “Ozone Man” — if the Clinton-Gore ticket were elected, he suggested, “we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American” — but with the emerging consensus on global warming today, Mr. Gore’s passionate warnings about climate change seem increasingly prescient. He has revived the slide presentation about global warming that he first began giving in 1990 and taken that slide show on the road, and he has now turned that presentation into a book and a documentary film, both called “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Read the rest here.

Dan Wickett’s latest e-panel features literary translators C.M Mayo, Jordan Stump, Liz Stump, Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, Laura Wideburg, and Linda Coverdale.

AP writer Scheherezade Faramarzi files a report about Western Sahara, specifically the case of one woman who has changed camps, from Polisario to Morocco, and the reaction of those she left behind. The article is largely favorable to the Moroccan point of view.

God save us from the “experts” on “Islam.” In the latest example of the kind of spurious scholarship that is being widely distributed in Washington, Edward Luttwak, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, announces that much of what people know about Islam “happens to be untrue,” and so he has taken it upon himself to correct them, by striking down what he considers to be myths about tolerance in Islam. Luttwak quotes the usual pseudo-research into the topic, so it’s hardly worth anyone’s time, but what strikes me with this latest Islamophobic rant (published in The Sun) is that it ends with a ringing endorsement of King Leopold.

Even a suicide bomber who kills only innocent babies can rightly claim that insofar as he contributes to the ultimate victory of Islam, he will ultimately save many more babies from eternal suffering, giving them paradise instead, complete with virginal black-eyed beauties, if they are males. It is enough to make one nostalgic for the imperialist freebooters of the West, down to King Leopold I of Belgium: They only wanted loot, not to force salvation on their victims.

Excuse me? To call King Leopold a “freebooter” is obscene. Never mind the rubber and ivory he stole from the Congo. The man killed, depending on the source, between 5 and 15 million people and is responsible for the worst genocide in recent human history. As for the contention that he did all of this without the cover of wanting to save the natives, it’s quite simply ignorant. Leopold’s efforts were clearly part of the mission civilisatrice, which deemed that imperialism was acceptable so long as the natives were civilised, by which it was meant they would be Christianized. And by the way, Luttwak: It’s King Leopold II, not Leopold I.

Last week, a professor at the University of Illinois was wondering whether he should stop teaching Heart of Darkness. I would suggest he hold special classes for someone like Luttwak.

John Malkovich will play David Lurie in the film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Why, oh why? He will completely ruin it.

(via)

Ngugi wa Thiongo is back in Kenya, to attend the trial of the thugs who attacked him in 2004, and to launch his new book, Murogi wa Kigogo. It’s written in Gikuyu and I’m not sure if an English translation is planned, and the English translation, by Ngugi himself, is due out from Pantheon in August, under the title Wizard of the Crow.

(Thanks to Kyle B. for the info.)

I’m very interested to read Monica Ali’s new novel, Alentejo Blue, which comes out in the United States next month. The Guardian already has a review, and the chief complaint seems to be that this book is not Brick Lane–not the same voice, not the same ‘colorful’ characters, not the same structure, etc.

All the characters bow off too hurriedly, little sketches that never get fleshed out, people glimpsed from a train that is moving too quickly through a strange landscape. Even if you enjoy the ride, you can’t help wishing that Monica Ali had chosen to write about somewhere she knew better, or wanted to know better.

As I was reading the piece, I kept waiting for the appearance of the word “inauthentic”–the word that seems to be the sole criterion by which Ali’s work is judged.

Julia Alvarez, whose new novel Saving the World came out last month, is interviewed by Robert Birnbaum for Identity Theory.

From The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene:

I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income-tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead; one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come, the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward; the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

With the novel I’m writing now, I feel like I’m well into the stage where the characters have begun to live, and of course there’s a lot of pleasure in this. But I still struggle with the fear that grips me whenever I sit down to write, the fear that I won’t be able to move forward. So it’s always nice to remember–or at least to hope–that the subconscious is always at work, and that progress may be right around the corner.

The Guardian has an excerpt from Gary Younge’s forthcoming book, Stranger in a Strange Land that’s very much worth a read. The book chronicles his arrival in America a couple of years after 9/11, and the work he did covering American political life. Right-wing conservatives, he writes, “badgered me as though their own reference points represented the sole prism through which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents lived through the war under European colonisation. ‘If it wasn’t for us, you would be speaking German,’ they would say. ‘No, if it wasn’t for you,’ I would tell them, ‘I would probably be speaking Yoruba.’”