Month: May 2004

In Imad Rahman’s debut collection, I Dream of Microwaves, B-movie actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, has just lost his role on America’s Most Wanted (playing Manuel Gutman, a convicted felon who had “crossed the line from gun-toting menace to shotgun-wielding assassin”), and his prospects are so poor that his next job is to play a Bosnian refugee in order to get his wife Eileen’s philanthropic grandmother to part with her money.

Abdul-Jabbar’s wife convinces him to act the part because, she says,

Americans have no sense of international politics, of global community, of social duty outside their neighborhoods. The world falls apart and we dream of microwaves.

Eileen takes off for South America shortly thereafter, and Abdul-Jabbar drifts from one job to the next, dressing as Zima Zorro to hawk booze to customers, renting his wife’s home out to pornographers who want to “combine fucking with intellectual social commentary,” posing as a repo-man for a video-rental company, taking a part in Apocalypse Now: The Musical, and so on.

There are some wonderfully realized moments in the book. The opening story, for instance, works both as an ironic send-up of how we look at minorities and as a reflection of the struggle to fit into expectations. And Rahman displays a biting sense of humor throughout.

Eventually, however, the one-liners and absurd set-ups are all that keep the stories going, each new joke trying to top the one before it. Substance recedes to the background in favor of pop-culture references, and the reader ends up alienated.

I really wanted to like this book. So few short-story collections are published these days that I often start them with a favorable stance. But this Eugene Ionesco-style universe didn’t quite work for me.

I suppose you already know this, but just in case you didn’t, if defamatory material is found through Google, it doesn’t mean you can sue it. On second read, there’s also this little tidbit that may be of interest to bloggers.

By contrast, the defamation liability risk of selection sites such as The Drudge Report — that is, sites that offer collections of specially culled links to other sites — remains uncertain. Someone who chooses a link may count as having published the material to which the link leads — and may be held to have the state of mind to be held liable for the choice. This argument has been used in the context of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and could be used in the defamation context, as well.

It should be interesting to see how things develop.
*Thanks Maud.

Many of those questioning the White House line on Berg were fringe, yes, but they fed on the doubts of a mainstream no longer sure what to believe. Last week, the U.S. either bombed a safe house for terrorists, or an Iraqi wedding. Ahmad Chalabi is either an asset and one of the fathers of the new Iraq, or a spy. And Donald Rumsfeld either authorized the kind of torture meted out at Abu Ghraib, or knew nothing.

The Village Voice’s Kareem Fahim on those conspiracy theories that have been making the rounds of the blogs.

Depictions of U.S. soldiers in Korean literature are often negative, says the Chosun Ilbo.

There were many works written after the war that depicted the dark atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s in which children who should have been going to elementary school instead were working as U.S. military houseboys and pimps. Yet more works, despite featuring stories that take place is or around U.S. bases, stressed the social corruption that they claim forced us into such a situation.

Poems, novels, and short stories are examined in the article, reminding me how unfamiliar I am with Korean literature. Ideas for a good place to start are welcome.