What a thrill it was to find that the New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of 2008 includes the collection of poems Half of the World in Light by my friend and UCR colleague Juan Felipe Herrera! Felicidades, JFH!
The December 1 issue of the Nation includes a review by Siddhartha Deb of Elias Khoury’s most recent novel, Yalo. Here is the opening paragraph:
The fragments of the past never add up to a whole in Beirut. The city seems to communicate in images rather than in narrative, presenting a kaleidoscope of car bomb assassinations and refugee camps, Israeli warplanes and Hezbollah fighters, shards that whirl before our eyes without yielding much meaning. And these pieces are only from recent years, thrown up by a city that already holds in its subterranean layers the 1975-90 civil war, with its militias and massacres, and long before that the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and colonial occupation by the French. When a writer attempts, then, to make Beirut the source of his work, one can understand why the first principle of his aesthetic is that a fragmented city demands a fragmented novel.
Aside from Yalo, Deb also covers Little Mountain and Gate of the Sun. (I reviewed Khoury for the Los Angeles Times a few months ago; if you’re curious about my take, you can click here.)
Interesting piece by Slavoj Žižek in the LRB. I think he’s right that far too many political observers get caught in cynically realist positions and don’t see what is happening in front of their noses:
The paradigmatic cynic tells you confidentially: ‘But don’t you see that it is all really about money/power/sex, that professions of principle or value are just empty phrases which count for nothing?’ What the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom which ignores the power of illusions.The reason Obama’s victory generated such enthusiasm is not only that, against all odds, it really happened: it demonstrated the possibility of such a thing happening. The same goes for all great historical ruptures – think of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although we all knew about the rotten inefficiency of the Communist regimes, we didn’t really believe that they would disintegrate – like Kissinger, we were all victims of cynical pragmatism. Obama’s victory was clearly predictable for at least two weeks before the election, but it was still experienced as a surprise.
And he goes on to connect the power of illusion and narrative to the way in which the financial meltdown is currently being framed. The piece is freely available here.
I noticed The World is What It Is—Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul—last week at the bookstore, but I wasn’t particularly in the mood to read 500 pages about someone as unpleasant as Naipaul. Dwight Garner’s review of the book makes me want to reconsider:
Well, the reader thinks, here we go: Mr. French’s 550-page biography will be a long string of bummers, a forced march through the life of a startlingly original writer with an ugly, remote personality.
The good news is that Mr. French, a young British journalist, is certainly unafraid to face unpleasant facts about his subject. But the better news about “The World Is What It Is” is this: it’s one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious and, well, funniest biographies of a living writer (Mr. Naipaul is 76) to come along in years.
Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley.
Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid. Here is his hole-in-one description of the editor Francis Wyndham: “Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks and moved with an amphibian gait.”
You can read it all here. Read the rest of this entry »
Even though I had a formidable migraine and could hardly stand to read by the lamplight, the opening to Mark Danner’s new piece in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books completely drew me in:
Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.
It is a myth, of course, but a lovely one.
You see what I mean? You can read the whole piece here.
I will be reading from Secret Son tomorrow at UCLA. Here are the details:
November 15, 2008
2:00 PM
Fez: Crossroads of Knowledge Conference
Faculty Center, California Room
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
The event is free and open to the public. If you’re in town, do come by and say hello.
I went to New York earlier this week for a panel discussion and a few meetings. The galleys for my novel, Secret Son, had just been delivered to my publisher, so I got to hold one in my hands for the first time. Here is what the cover art looks like:
The book will be out on April 21.
I’ve been interested in the complicated modern history of Iraqi Jews for some time, so I was thrilled to come across Adam Shatz’s latest piece in the LRB. It’s a review of two recent memoirs — Violette Shamash’s Memories of Eden and Sasson Somekh’s Baghdad, Yesterday. Here’s the opening paragraph:
On 27 April 1950 a man whose passport identified him as Richard Armstrong flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad. He came as a representative of Near East Air Transport, an American charter company seeking to win a contract with Iraq’s prime minister, Tawfiq al-Suwaida, to fly Iraqi Jews to Cyprus. Only six weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had passed the Denaturalisation Act, which allowed Jews to emigrate provided they renounced their citizenship, and gave them a year to decide whether to do so. Al-Suwaida expected that between seven and ten thousand Jews would leave out of a community of about 125,000, but a mysterious bombing in Baghdad on the last day of Passover, near a café frequented by Jews, caused panic, and the numbers registering soon outstripped his estimate. The position of the Jews in Iraq had been deteriorating with alarming speed ever since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948: they were seen as a stalking horse for the Zionists in Palestine, and were increasingly rewarded for their expressions of loyalty to Iraq with suspicion, threats and arbitrary physical assaults. By the spring of 1950 the question was when, not whether to leave, and on 9 May NEAT signed a contract with the Iraqi government to organise their departure.For Richard Armstrong and NEAT, the uprooting of the Middle East’s most ancient Jewish community was not a mere business transaction: it was a mission. Armstrong was really Shlomo (né Selim) Hillel, an Iraqi-born Mossad agent; NEAT was secretly owned by the Jewish Agency; and Israel, not Cyprus, was the refugees’ ultimate destination.
The full essay is available here. Only the Somekh book is available in the states, but I’m sure the one by Shamash can be had online.
There are still hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to count in California, but it now seems that Prop 8, the disgraceful proposition to amend the State Constitution to take away the rights of gays and lesbians to marry, will pass. Tom Toles of the Washington Post puts it succinctly in his cartoon:
I voted for Barack Obama. I donated money to his campaign several times. I phonebanked for him. So I am very, very happy that he has won; I am relieved; and I am hopeful.
Still, campaign slogans notwithstanding, the idealists who think Obama will change everything have no brains; and the cynics who think Obama will change nothing have no heart.
Obama probably can: nominate liberal Supreme Court judges so that disastrous decisions like those of the past 8 years (e.g., Ledbetter v. Goodyear) can perhaps be avoided; put checks and balances in place to manage the $700 billion bailout (excuse me, the “rescue plan”) so that, instead of being completely fucked, the taxpaper will be maybe, maybe less fucked; reinstate a few of the banking regulations that had been eroded under Bill Clinton and eliminated under George W. Bush; provide incentives for the creation of green-collar jobs; set up some sort of basic health care system; extend the existing dialogue with Iran and avoid additional confrontation there; draw a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq; close Guantanamo Bay. But Obama probably can’t: change foreign policy on Israel and Palestine in any drastic or even significant way; draw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately or unconditionally; bring high-level military personnel who were responsible for torture in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay in front of U.S. courts; take a public stand in favor of gay marriage; or build a Canadian-style or Australian-style health care system.
The United States is headed in the wrong direction. In fact, it would not be too much an exaggeration to say that, if current policies and trends are not reversed, the United States is headed for its demise. American voters have sensed this, which is why they’ve elected Obama. After eight years of disaster after disaster, I think some people were ready to settle for a president who can speak grammatical English. Electing Obama means that the country can start regrouping after neo-con rule and begin the long, slow process of change. It was the smart choice.
But it’s also the symbolic choice. Having an African-American president will go a long way toward opening the office of the presidency to all people–of all colors, races, religions, and creeds. It gives a lot of young voters who worked so hard for their candidate a chance to believe in the future of their country. And it represents the triumph of hope and belief over fear and cynicism.