Laila Lalami

Those of you who subscribe to TLS, check out Hirsh Sawhney’s review of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. I read the novel earlier this summer and it really stayed with me–a very fine work. It was recently shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, and is now out in paperback. I’d love to give away a copy, but I have finally, finally finished packing my books.

The Moroccan Human Rights Association is asking the government to come clean about rendition in the kingdom. The BBC reports:

Abdelhamid Amine, who is their chairman, said both the Moroccan government and Washington had to come clean.

“The United States, which declares itself a democratic country, must recognise that these so-called black sites exist and that torture goes on there,” he said.

“The United States justifies all this in the name of its war against terrorism. But we, as the defenders of human rights in Morocco, cannot accept that in the name of the war on terror you can also violate human rights or practice the terrorism of torture.”

Predictably, the Minister of Justice denies the existence of any CIA prisons, etc.

I still have not finished packing my office. Today, though, I tried to go through all the clutter on my desk. Here’s what I found so far:

1 half-used box of small index cards.
1 set of large index cards with old notes and ideas for short stories.
2 jumbo-size paper clips.
2 staplers.
2 tape dispensers.
1 iKlear laptop cleaner.
3 bobby pins.
2 sets of Chinese hairpins.
2 hair bands.
1 butterfly pin.
2 half-used books of stamps.
My log book.
My note book.
1 pair of earplugs.
1 pair of reading glasses prescribed to me by a zealous optometrist back in 1998, and which I have never used nor needed.
1 nail file.
1 Wite Out.
1 map of Rabat, 1 of Casablanca, 1 of Morocco.
1 file folder labeled ‘Events’, 1 labeled ‘Fulbright.’
1 Authors’ Guild Bulletin.
1 greeting card that says, “You’re the best auntie in the world.” Aww.
4 pens, 2 highlighters.
A photo of my beloved grandmother, my mother, my younger brother, and me.
1 voucher for a yoga class.
Eye drops.
My cell phone.
The Anchor Book of Arabic Fiction.
Season of Migration to the North by Tayib Salih.
The Fall 2006 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.
1 yellow notepad, half-used. The last item says, “Call Keiko.”
A bibliography of works on Morocco.
My laptop.
A publicity postcard for my book.
A United Airlines frequent-flyer card.
A reminder to make a dentist appointment. The reminder dates from January 17, 2006.
The July-August issue of World Literature Today.
The latest issue of the New Yorker, with 4 phone numbers scribbled on the cover.
1 chapstick.
The neighbor’s house keys.
My overflowing box of rejection letters.
Fan letters: A two-page one from a seventeen-year-old; a ten-page one from an inmate on death row.
1 phone recharger.
4 old back-ups for my laptop.
1 Dust Blaster Pro.
1 file labeled ‘Interesting Articles/Stuff To read.’
A collection of misspellings of my name, which I cut out of envelopes and other correspondence.
Various drafts of various parts of my novel.
My laptop.

And I need to trim this list to:

My laptop.

The new issue of the London Review of Books is up online. It includes Frank Kermode’s review of Edward Said’s book on late style, though that piece is available to subscribers only.

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick provides a very clear-headed analysis of the proposed torture bill that is now on the fast track toward become a law.

Asked whether he had “access to more information about this than any of us because you’ve been in the negotiations,” the senator was not reassuring. He knows “only what the president talked about in his speech.” To clarify: McCain, the Geneva Conventions’ great defender, is signing off on interrogation limits he knows nothing about. And so, it appears, will the most of the rest of Congress.

But that’s not all. Congress doesn’t want to know what it’s bargaining away this week. In the Boston Globe this weekend, Rick Klein revealed that only “10 percent of the members of Congress have been told which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act.” More troubling still, this congressional ignorance seems to be by choice. Klein quotes Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican, as saying, “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” Evidently, “widely distributing such information could result in leaks.”

We’ve reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.

If I ever meet another democrat who waxes poetic about John McCain, I don’t answer for my actions.

For those who may have missed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, it’s up on YouTube. Not to be missed.

Carl Phillips has received a $25,000 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Many congratulations.

(via.)

It’s been a bit quiet here at Dar Moorishgirl, as I’ve been busy preparing for my upcoming nine-month stay in Morocco. By far the hardest task has been to pack up my office–a frighteningly messy place most of the time, now made even scarier by the addition of boxes and packing material everywhere. Alex has been very organized about his stuff, though. His comics collection is already in bins, and his books are neatly boxed and already stored in the basement. I’ve been begging him to help, but whenever he touches something, I tell him not to pack that yet, that I might still need it. Hence the continuing mess. And have I mentioned I’m revising the last third of my novel? And traveling? And trying to find a furnished apartment in Casablanca? God help me.

The paperback edition of my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is due to be released by Harcourt a week from today, on October 2nd. But it has already started appearing at bookstores, as well as on Powells.com, Amazon.com, and BarnesandNoble.com. The vast majority of the books I own are soft covers, and it will be nice to finally place my book next to others like it on the shelf.

I will be doing several events in the fall for the promotion of the paperback release. Please check my events page for details, and come by and say hello.

Tom Engelhardt, writing in the Nation’s blog, examines various covers of Newsweek magazine:

For a little thought experiment, go to the website of Newsweek’s international edition. There, running down the left side of the page, are three covers, all the same, for the European, Asian, and Latin American editions of the October 2 issue.

Each has a dramatic shot of a Taliban fighter shouldering an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade). The cover headline is: “Losing Afghanistan,” pointing to a devastating piece on our Afghan War by Ron Moreau, Sami Yousafzai, and Michael Hirsh, “The Rise of Jihadistan.” which sports this subhead: “Five years after the Afghan invasion, the Taliban are fighting back hard, carving out a sanctuary where they–and Al Qaeda’s leaders–can operate freely.” (…) Now, go back to the international edition and take another look. Scroll down the page to the cover which doesn’t match the others. That’s the one for Newsweek’s US edition. No Taliban fighter. No RPG. Instead, a photo of an ash-blond woman with three young children dressed in white, one in her arms, and the headline: “My Life in Pictures.”

Read the article here. Is it any wonder, then, that so many Americans are misinformed about the wars our government is waging?