Laila Lalami

A day in the life of George Saunders, a few years from now:

Syracuse, New York, where I live, is famous for its brutal winters. We’re having one now. Although it’s been a strange year, weatherwise, given “global warming” and all. (Thanks Mr. Gore, for inventing that!) Yesterday it was a nice mild summer day, about 150 degrees - I’d just come inside from mopping up the puddle that was formerly Keith, our postman - when suddenly, I could feel it in my bones, that good old “Ah, winter’s a-coming!” feeling.

And I was right.

Suddenly the temperature dropped - three hundred degrees in one hour, a local record! It was so lovely, I couldn’t resist putting my work aside and donning special clothing purchased from NASA and taking a stroll through this “winter wonderland.” It was gorgeous: the neighborhood cats, converted to ice-cats in mid-stride, four pert little robins literally frozen to death on a clothesline, little beaks open in mid-peep.

I guess I’m just a sucker for the “pastoral.” Across the street, here was old Mrs Clark, bending to pick up her newspaper, grouchy look frozen on her face, reaching back absent-mindedly to scratch her - it was really too bad. I liked Mrs Clark. I mean, yes, she was always complaining - about Mr Clark, about the president not signing the Kyoto treaty, the kids running across her lawn, the way our lawmakers embrace pseudo-science to protect the big oil companies: a real malcontent - but still, you hate anyone to be instantaneously frozen, especially right out there where you can see them, cluttering up your beautiful winter view.

More Saundersian genius here. The piece originally appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung in March, and was reprinted on signandsight.com last weekend.

Fifty years after her death, Frida Kahlo’s letters to one of her best friends, Dr. Leo Eloesser, have been released, and are now published in Mexico, under the title My Beloved Doctor.The letters had been kept sealed on Diego Rivera’s orders for all this time, but now visitors to the Kahlo family home in Mexico City can see the letters, and other artifacts, displayed for the first time. I am a huge fan of Frida Kahlo’s–maybe someday I can finally, finally, visit her house.

Photo: Las Dos Fridas. Via.

Dan Olivas reviews Dahlia Season, the debut collection of stories by Long Beach author Myriam Gurba for the El Paso Times.

We were driving along a beach road with a couple of friends when a cop stopped us. I was sitting in the back, but being the only Darija speaker in the car, I lowered my window, ready to translate. “You went up a one-way street,” the policeman said. “License and registration.”

I apologized and explained we had not seen the sign. (Later, we drove by again and saw that it was partially covered by shrub.)

“I have to write you up. The ticket’s going to be 400 dirhams.”

Upon hearing my translation of what the cop said, my husband, clearly unaware of how these things are supposed to be handled, immediately whipped out the money from his wallet. (You are supposed to start by saying you’re very sorry, you were distracted, and yes you made a big mistake; you’re busy, so you don’t have time to deal with the paperwork; how you wish you could come to an understanding… and then you would bargain the cop down to about 1/3 of the ticket price–about 130 dirhams in this case. My husband had skipped all these steps, and was ready to hand the entire amount over. )

The cop, a tall and lanky fellow with a thin mustache, got very nervous, and walked away. He went to the intersection and directed traffic for a few minutes, before coming back.

“So,” he asked, “what are you all doing here? Are you tourists?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m here for research. But my friends are tourists.”

As soon as he heard the word “research,” he looked scared. He handed Alex his money back. “We don’t want to give tourists a bad image of the country. Here. Just pay attention next time.”

I had no idea that “research” was such a red flag for cops.

The July/August issue of the Boston Review is not yet up, but the article by Glenn Loury on the prison system in the U.S. is already available. Loury is a professor of social sciences at Brown, and in the piece he lays out the fundamental problem with the culture (and business) of mass incarceration:

Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

How did it come to this?

It’s a thought-provoking piece. Read it if you know what’s good for you.

As has been widely reported, the longlist for the Booker Prize was announced. I was pleased to see Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist included, but surprised that J. M. Coetzee’s new book, Diary of A Bad Year, was not. Still, it’s nice to see younger authors get a shot. (The shortlist will be announced on September 6 and the winner on October 16.)

Alain Mabanckou’s new book, Lettre à Jimmy, has just been published by Fayard in France. As the title suggests, it’s essentially an homage to James Baldwin in epistolary form. If you read French, you can check out an excerpt on Mabanckou’s blog.

Over at Slate, Reza Aslan reviews two books that collect Osama Bin Laden’s speeches, looking for clues as to the terrorist leader’s arguments. The first is Messages to the World, translated by James Howarth and edited by Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence, and the other, newer volume is The Al Qaeda Reader, edited and translated by Library of Congress scholar Raymond Ibrahim. Here’s a quote from Aslan’s review:

[F]ar from debunking al-Qaida’s twisted vision of a world divided in two, the Bush administration has legitimized it through its own morally reductive “us vs. them” rhetoric.
In the end, this is the most important lesson to be learned from these writings. Because, if we are truly locked in an ideological war, as the president keeps reminding us, then our greatest weapons are our words. And thus far, instead of fighting this war on our terms, we have been fighting it on al-Qaida’s.
Don’t believe me? Ask Bin Laden:

Bush left no room for doubts or media opinion. He stated clearly that this war is a Crusader war. He said this in front of the whole world so as to emphasize this fact. … When Bush says that, they try to cover up for him, then he said he didn’t mean it. He said, ‘crusade.’ Bush divided the world into two: ‘either with us or with terrorism’ … The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouths.

Odd, indeed.

By the way, earlier this year, the Boston Review published an excellent essay by Khaled Abou el Fadl about the Lawrence book, which you can still find online here.

Manuel Muñoz, whose short story collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue was recently short-listed for the Frank O’Connor prize, has a pretty cool op-ed in the New York Times about the politics of naming. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s intriguing to watch “American” names begin to dominate among my nieces and nephews and second cousins, as well as with the children of my hometown friends. I am not surprised to meet 5-year-old Brandon or Kaitlyn. Hardly anyone questions the incongruity of matching these names with last names like Trujillo or Zepeda. The English-only way of life partly explains the quiet erasure of cultural difference that assimilation has attempted to accomplish. A name like Kaitlyn Zepeda doesn’t completely obscure her ethnicity, but the half-step of her name, as a gesture, is almost understandable.

Spanish was and still is viewed with suspicion: always the language of the vilified illegal immigrant, it segregated schoolchildren into English-only and bilingual programs; it defined you, above all else, as part of a lower class. Learning English, though, brought its own complications with identity. It was simultaneously the language of the white population and a path toward the richer, expansive identity of “American.” But it took getting out of the Valley for me to understand that “white” and “American” were two very different things.

You can read the piece in full here.

It’s really disheartening to have to write yet another post, about yet another problem in the Moroccan press, but it seems the wheels of censorship never stop. Over the weekend, the government ordered all issues of Tel Quel and its sister publication Nichane seized from points of sale. The magazine’s editor in chief Ahmed Reda Benchemi was heard by police on Saturday, and was back at home on Sunday, according to this Reuters report.