Laila Lalami

Luis Alfaro reviews Gustavo Arellano’s new book, a memoir called Orange County: A Personal History. Arellano is is the author of Ask A Mexican, based on his famed columns and radio interviews. This new book charts his family’s history, its travels from El Cargadero to Anaheim, and the challenges that come from living in this ultra-conservative, anti-immigrant enclave. Here’s a snippet from the review:

The opening pages of “Orange County” provide an assessment of the place today. It’s still affluent and politically powerful with a large conservative base. According to a recent census, however, the demographics are shifting; the population is now roughly 60% white, 30% Latino/Hispanic (a number that has nearly doubled in the last 15 years), with a rapidly growing Asian community. Thirty percent of its residents are foreign-born.

And yet, writes Arellano, it’s not just television that has failed to paint a realistic portrait of Orange County. Also to blame are the founding fathers and historians who “follow a tight OC Story, almost positivist in predetermined steps and outcome. . . . We don’t care for the facts — we print the legend.”

You can read the rest here.

Michael Chabon has an article in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books about Barack Obama’s candidacy.  This paragraph made me smile, which I really needed today, what with the news of bailouts and economic meltdowns and political stunts:

The problem was not Obama; the problem was that at the instant when Hillary Clinton at last conceded, the nature of the campaign changed. It was, I considered (…) like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain.

Here’s the article in full.  Meanwhile, what does it say about our political culture that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the nut job head of state of Iran, can travel to New York, give an open press conference, and face reporters in unscripted questions, while Sarah Palin, the VP candidate, still hasn’t?

I like Chris Offutt’s guide to literary terms, which Harper’s Magazine includes in its most recent issue.  Here’s a little sample:

nonfiction: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers.

creative nonfiction: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir.

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.

short story: An essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer’s family.

novel-in-stories: A term invented solely to hoodwink the novel-reading public into inadvertently purchasing a collection of short fiction.

clandestine science fiction novel: A work set in the future that receives a strong reception from the literary world as long as no one mentions that it is, in fact, science fiction; for example, The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

plot: A device, the lack of which denotes seriousness on the part of writers.

Isn’t it great? More here. The piece was originally published in Seneca Review.

This weekend we received a pollster call about California’s Proposition 8, and it would have been an uninteresting conversation were it not for the last line.  Here’s how it went down:

Pollster:  Hello, may I speak with Laila?
Me: Speaking.
Pollster:  Could I ask you a few questions of the upcoming election?
Me:  Sure.
Pollster:  Do you know about Prop 8?
Me:  Prop 8?
Pollster:  This is the proposition that would define marriage in the California state constitution as the union of one man and one woman.
Me:  Oh, right.
Pollster:  In 2000, California overwhelmingly passed a proposition that amended the family code in this way, but it was over-ruled by the California courts.
Me:  (silence).
Pollster:  If the election were held today, how would you vote on Prop 8? Yes or no?
Me:  No.
Pollster: oh, ok.  Is that a ‘probably no’ or a ‘definitely no’?
No:  Definitely no.
Pollster: Oh, OK.  That’s all the questions I have.  Well, remember to vote on November 8. [click]

I couldn’t believe it. Here’s a list of all the props on the November 4 ballot.

I enjoyed reading the essays in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, all on the theme of teaching.  David Gessner (Sick of Nature, Return of the Osprey) writes about giving up full-time writing for the safety–and health insurance–that come with a teaching job.  He touches on all the challenges that writers in academia face, I think.  Manil Suri has a nostalgic piece about teaching mathematics for twenty-five years (that’s fifty semesters.) And Mark Oppenheimer has an interesting article about how teaching evaluations are collected, what they might measure, and what they don’t.

I start teaching in four days.  I fully expect to have one of those dreams where I show up without my papers, without my notes, having forgotten what the day’s lecture was about.

Hirsh Sawhney interviews Aravind Adiga, the author of the Booker-shortlisted novel The White Tiger. The novel tells the story of a village man who becomes a driver for a wealthy businessman, and in this interview Adiga punctures a hole in the notion that India is a rising world power with enviable economic growth.

Rail: Tell us about the India your book is set in.

Adiga: The book deals with an India smack in the middle of “the boom,” and it challenges a lot of comfortable assumptions about Indian democracy and economics. I want to challenge this idea that India is the world’s greatest democracy. It may be so in an objective sense, but on the ground, the poor have such little power.

Rail: What are some of the starker things you learned about India during this era of hype and optimism, when you were working as a reporter for Time?

Adiga: The fact that a lot of Indians have very little political freedom, especially in the north of India. That elections are rigged in large parts of the north Indian state of Bihar, and they’re also accompanied by violence. There’s like thirty-five killings during every election. If you were a poor man you’d have to pick China over India any day because your kids have a better chance of being nourished if you’re poor. Your wife is more likely to survive childbirth. You’re likely to live longer. There are so many ways in which India’s system fails horribly.

This, of course, is not quite what Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, and others have been telling the American public about India for the last few years.

Good news in Agadir: As has been widely reported, the charges against Mohammed Erraji have been dropped, and he is now free.

Is Babar a cute, quaint children’s book series or a vile tool of neocolonialism? Adam Gopnik revisits this and other questions in a piece about Jean de Brunhof’s classic:

In the past few decades, a series of critics on the left, most notably the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, have indicted Babar in the course of a surprisingly resilient and hydra-headed argument about the uses of imagery and the subtleties of imperialist propaganda. Babar, such interpreters have insisted, is an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers: the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not. The true condition of the animals—to be naked, on all fours, in the jungle—is made shameful to them, while to become an imitation human, dressed and upright, is to be given the right to rule. The animals that resist—the rhinoceroses—are defeated. The Europeanized elephants are, as in the colonial mechanism of indirect rule, then made trustees of the system, consuls for the colonial power. To be made French is to be made human and to be made superior. The straight lines and boulevards of Celesteville, the argument goes, are the sign of enslavement.

People who seem shocked by these interpretations might like to read up on Tintin.

I have been reading comments on a few Moroccan blogs about the Mohammed Erraji affair, and while the majority of people support Erraji’s right to free expression, I have to say I’m appalled at the way in which some of the commenters excuse the government and blame the victim. The angry responses range from attacks on the blogger for breaking the law (by, apparently, expressing his opinion) to attacks on his website for being trashy (it’s true it’s a tabloid, but if you want to read lies and omissions any day of the week, you could do no worse than the government rag).  It’s disheartening.

I was completely stunned by the news that David Foster Wallace had killed himself.  It’s so hard to make sense of any suicide, and especially so when the person is enormously talented, and loved by his family, his readers, his students, and his colleagues.  But neither success nor love can bring peace.  He seems to have been so tormented.  I am just so saddened by his passing.  There are many remembrances being posted all over the place. And Ed Champion has posted many writers’ reactions to the news.