Laila Lalami

Alex went to Comic Con last weekend. I wasn’t able to join him, but he brought me back some goodies: The third volume of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (the French edition–it’s not out yet in English.) This one talks about her four years in Vienna in the 1980s, after her parents sent her off to live with a friend to attend high school there, in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. Her sharp observations about what it’s like to be a foreigner (a Middle-Eastern woman to boot) in Kurt Waldheim’s Austria is laced with her trademark humor. I’m looking forward to the next book, which talks about her return to Iran as a young woman. Alex also got me Broderies, a humorous little book about the women in her family. It’s so delectable that I’m rationing myself to ten pages a day.

Update: Why didn’t I hear about this before? Grant Morrison (of X-Men fame) is writing an “Islamic sci-fi love story” for DC comics, titled Vimanarama and due out in the Spring. Link via Bookslut.

Stop hogging the Ace of Hearts (?!) and the Ace of Clubs cards. It looks like Uday and Qusay may have been captured. Actually, most reports say that they were killed, which is a shame; it would have been a completely cathartic experience for Iraqis to watch them brought to trial for their crimes (not to mention they would have been an important source of intelligence.) But I’m sure Iraqis will take what they can get when it comes to those two. Speaking of which, whatever happened to Tariq Aziz? I know he surrendered to U.S. troops, but I haven’t seen anything in the news about his fate.
Another piece of somewhat good news from the otherwise horrible mess in Iraq is that John Abizaid is establishing a police force at long last. (Okay, it’s a militia, but it’s a start.)

to Harper’s magazine. The August issue, for example, has an excellent article by Wil Hylton on the spread of Hepatitis in U.S. prisons and what correctional HMOs are (not) doing about it; a very funny article on the Vidocq Society, named after the 18th century French criminal/detective/writer (one of my dad’s favorite crime writers–he named our German Shepherd after him); and a sobering article on the nature of dissidence by Edward Hoagland. Oh, and it also has excerpts from rent-a-negro.com.

The New Yorker’s David Remnick talks about the “Uranium from Niger” lie and gleefully points out how Seymour Hersch had published stories about such dubious intelligence at the time the claims were made. Well, he says, “One war later, the President and his team have variously (1) denied that they knew the facts, (2) dissembled over who knew what when, (3) sort-of-but-not-really apologized, (4) said it’s only “sixteen words” and “enormously overblown,” and (5) ladled blame alternately upon the C.I.A., which had tried, however feebly, to prevent the damage, and the United Kingdom, America’s only full-sized partner in the warmaking coalition.” Read on.

Something to watch when you’re unemployed and dealing with 100+ degree weather. Courtesy of Campus Crusade.

The poet Reetika Vazirani (and wife of Pulitzer prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa) killed her son and then committed suicide. Details are scant. Link via Moby.

Dreamworks’ Sinbad movie bears little resemblance to its Middle-Eastern roots. It’s been Greco-Romanized, says this National Geographic article.

The Oxford American shuts down. Again.

Seems straight out of a John Le Carre novel: Dr. David Kelly, a British scientist and ex-UN inspector who was said to be the main source of the BBC’s reports that Tony Blair exaggerated/obsfuscated/lied about the Iraq threat, has been found dead. Elsewhere, we’re still in Animal House mode, as Bush says that the reason we went to war with Iraq was that “We gave [Saddam] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in.”

Since visiting the Pacific Northwest last fall, I’ve had this fantasy of moving to Portland someday. A long time from now. So I was quite interested in Chuck Palahniuk’s new book, which is a non-fiction paean to the city–a twisted one (it’s Palahniuk after all.) The Seattle PI has a piece on it.