Month: July 2002
This Washington Post review caught my eye:
“In the standard list of artistic masterpieces, [the Hamzanama] may not ring a bell. Even the most dedicated museum-goers don’t know about the lavishly illustrated manuscript executed for Akbar, great Mughal emperor of India in the 16th century. But they should. And some day they all may, if a breathtaking, groundbreaking show at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery has the ripple effect it ought to.”
The Hamzanama, Heroic in Deed
If you’re in DC, you can see the exhibit at the Sackler Gallery. For the rest of us, this online intro will have to do. The snapshots of the Hamzanama are breathtakingly gorgeous.
They don’t put that in the Islamic Revolution brochures: Iran has a huge prostitution problem. The war with Iraq created thousands of war widows, many of whom have no other way of making a living in a society with an already high unemployment rate. The government is at a loss what to do, so their latest idea is licensed “decency houses.”
The Revolution did bring a higher literacy rate and greater social justice for the lower classes, but at what cost?
I’ve had a crippling back pain since last Saturday. I have a tendency to slouch when I’m working at the laptop and I must have pulled something. I can’t get in and out of my car, I can’t pick up stuff from the floor, or go about anything without pain shooting in the lumbar area. I hope the chiropractor can do something for me tomorrow. I had to miss one yoga class and I’d hate to miss another.
I went to a reading at Dutton’s bookstore tonight where Jean Harfenist read from her story collection A Brief History of the Flood, which won rave reviews, including from the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani. The excerpts she read were excellent and I’m getting the book. Please check out her book and support a local author!
Chaim Potok passed away today. Jewish American literature has suffered a great loss.
Here’s an excerpt from The Chosen and a sampler of his works from the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Where have I been? Why didn’t I notice this book before?
I was doing research at the library today for a syllabus I’m designing and stumbled on a description of The Poet Game, by Salar Abdoh. The novel is about the 1993 bombing of the WTC, and about the Iranian man who is sent to infiltrate the Muslim radicals who are responsible. It dates from a couple of years ago (2000), but I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten more write ups after what happened last year. It’s unusual to have a “terrorist thriller” written by an Iranian, but I’ll have to check it out before forming an opinion… Here’s a piece on the author and the book:
“Everyone with ears, eyes and a television has a September 11 story to tell but Salar Abdoh — a teacher at City University in New York — has one that’s better than most. Forget TV: ears and eyes were all he needed when, a little after 9am on that morning, he heard an explosion near where he was teaching an English class. Very near, in fact.
‘I was almost at the foot of the World Trade Centre when it happened and for a second I thought I was going to bite the dust. But I wasn’t afraid, I was fascinated by this ball of flame coming towards me. People were saying this and that, that an aeroplane had hit the building, but right away I knew what had happened.’
Abdoh knew because a year earlier he had published The Poet Game, a spy novel set in New York in the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.”
Books: The man who was waiting for September 11