Laila Lalami

It comes from Le Matin, of all places: The Spanish discover the existence of blondes in Morocco. It’s about the response in Europe when it was discovered that the blond and blue-eyed girl photographed riding on her mother’s back is not Madeleine McCann, but two-year-old Bouchra Benaissa. Photos here.

I am doing a reading this evening in support of the anthology X-24: Unclassified, which was edited by Tash Aw and Nii Ayikwei Parkes. Nii will be there tonight, along with contributors Nikki Aguirre, Jennifer Kabat, and yours truly. Details, details:

X-24: Unclassified
With Nikki Aguirre, Jennifer Kabat, Laila Lalami and Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Thursday, September 27
6:30 pm
John F. Kennedy Library
Conference Room B530
California State University Los Angeles

Do come by and say hello.

On the fourth anniversary of Edward Said’s passing, Randa Jarrar has posted a poem/appreciation she wrote for him. Here are the first two stanzas:

It’s been four years and a day.
I like the way you wrote about bellydancers,
Tahia Carioca, who couldn’t tell you how many men she’d married.
When you asked her,
She could only utter a shrill

Kteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!

And I love the way you wrote
about those who wrote badly about bellydancers,
Oriental feet and jingles
and finger cymbals.
Edward, I wanted to meet you, wanted to fete you,
to talk about lost houses and lost selves and bellydance
with you.
What else would we have talked about?

Kteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!

Read the poem in full here.

Jessica Valenti, Natasha Walter, Rebecca Walker, Julie Binder, Ariel Levy, and Joan Smith tell readers which books on feminism most marked them.

Protests over a 30% hike in the price of bread quickly degenerated into full on riots in the town of Sefrou, and ignited several other demonstrations around the country, including in Rabat. (A loaf of bread or a baguette normally costs 1.20 dirhams. The new price would have been 1.56 dirhams, which is outrageous, especially considering the importance of bread and bread products to the Moroccan diet, particularly among the poor.) Yesterday, the Moroccan government announced it was canceling the hike, probably out of fear they would end up with a repeat of the bread riots of 1981 in Casablanca, which left several hundred people dead.

Rudy Giuliani wants you to donate $9.11 to his presidential campaign.

I injured my right shoulder and elbow a few days ago, and I am in occasional but excruciating pain, which I suppose is just as well, seeing as how it’s preventing me from putting my fist through a wall whenever I read or listen to the news. Take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University, which demonstrated once and for all his disconnect with reality. On the Holocaust, he said:

You shouldn’t ask me why I’m asking questions. You should ask yourselves why you think that that’s questionable? Why do you want to stop the progress of science and research? Do you ever take what’s known as absolute in physics?

The Holocaust isn’t some esoterical subject. It happened. If you keep insisting that it needs to be researched further, you’re not going to convince anyone you’re not a revisionist. And then when asked about gays, Ahmadinejad offered this:

In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it.

The power of denial will never cease to amaze.

Nor was Ahmadinejad the only one to make ignorant comments that day. In his introduction, Columbia President Lee Bollinger referred to Ahmadinejad as “a petty and cruel dictator.” He must have a new definition of ‘dictator’ in mind. Ahmadinejad was elected (on a platform of economic reforms, by the way, which he has failed to deliver.)

And, to compound the madness, look at this headline from the Los Angeles Times: “Ahmadinejad Hailed in Middle East.” The source for this fantastical claim about millions of people? Why, a handful of people in Cairo, of course.

I just got Orhan Pamuk’s new collection of essays, Other Colors, and I am so excited about it, I can’t wait to dive into it. The review by Michael McGaha in this weekend’s SF Chronicle makes me look forward to it. It’s interesting, too, to read his comments about the translation, by Maureen Freely:

The best thing one can say about Freely’s translation is that it doesn’t read like a translation. If you didn’t know, you would never guess this book had originally been written in a foreign language. Freely’s approach to translation seems to be to think about the meaning of Pamuk’s Turkish and then rephrase the idea in English as she would have expressed it. For example, when Pamuk writes “from now on until the end of my life, I will never smoke a cigarette again,” Freely translates: “I’m never going to smoke again, ever.” The basic idea is there, and Freely’s sentence sounds more natural in English than Pamuk’s, yet something important is lost.

Sometimes her formulations seem to complicate things unnecessarily. When Pamuk writes, “Looking out the window was such a basic habit that when television did come to Turkey, people started looking at it as if they were looking out the window,” the aptly named Freely translates: “Looking out the window was such an important pastime that when television did finally come to Turkey, people acted the same way in front of their sets as they had in front of their windows.” In this case even the meaning seems somewhat distorted, and once again, the poetry of the original is lost. Why not let Pamuk be Pamuk?

You can read the article in full here.

From Peter Conrad’s Guardian review of a new biography of Rudolph Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh:

If he didn’t like a ballerina he was partnering, he ungallantly let her thud to the ground. Once, he dragged an uncooperative dancer across the floor by her necklace, grazing her throat; he fractured the jaw of a male colleague who annoyed him. He ripped up costumes, hurled Thermos flasks into mirrors, spat at photographers and kicked police cars. In a tizz at Zeffirelli’s chintzy villa, he hurled a wrought-iron chair at his host and pulled down a curtain rod with which he pounded some majolica pottery to smithereens. Expelled from the premises, he paused to shit on the steps like an indignant, incontinent dog.

There’s more here, too.

Well, that didn’t last long. Last Thursday, Iraqi puppet (sorry, ‘Prime Minister’) Nouri Al-Maliki said he wanted to revoke the work license of Blackwater USA, the mercenary group (sorry, ‘private security firm’) working for the United States government in Iraq, in the wake of yet another shootout where Iraqi civilians were murdered. But yesterday, ta-da!, Blackwater was back in business.