Month: March 2005
The BBC has a profile of Israeli writer Etgar Keret, whose collection The Nimrod Flip-Out comes out in Britain in March (it’ll be re-issued here in the States by FSG.)
The stories are subtly subversive, hinting at the pressure-cooker situation in which Israelis live without ever descending into overt politics. Keret says that is intentional.
“I don’t want to represent the political reality, I want to show people who live in it,” he says.
“It’s like when you use a mobile phone, it affects the TV – it makes a noise. I want to talk about this noise, not the phone call.”
Keret tells the BBC journalist an anecdote I’d heard him say before, and which I find hilarious:
And he recently appeared at a reading in France with Arab writer Sayed Kashua – where he discovered they had similar worries about the event.
“I’m always afraid of events in France. There’s always some pointy-chinned woman who stands up at the end and says: ‘You’re a baby killer, your hands are covered with blood.’
“And Sayed said: ‘I always get some guy saying: ‘You’re all suicide bombers, you have blood on your hands.’
“So I saw this woman in the crowd, she was nervous the whole time, and I was thinking to myself, that she was the one.
“And as soon as we were finished speaking she stood up and said: ‘This whole time I have been confused. Which one of you is the Israeli writer and which is the Palestinian?'”
Cracks me up every time.
The April issue of The Atlantic has a cover story by David Foster Wallace, about political talk radio. You can get a small glimpse of it here, but you’ll have to buy the issue to really get an idea of the thing. (Color-coded notes and asides, anyone?)
This week, I’m giving away the latest issue of The Baltimore Review, where my story “Better Luck Tomorrow” appears. If you’re curious about my forthcoming collection, this story is a good place to start. The magazine features the work of Dave Schuman, Terri Scullen, Anh Chi Pham, Nathan Leslie, Toby Tucker Hecht, and many others. I’ll send a copy to the first reader who writes in with his/her mailing address.
Update: The winner is R.G. from Lincoln, Nebraska. Congrats!
The finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award have been announced. They are:
Thanks to the indefatigable Dan Wickett for the link.
Marc Estrin, whose first novel was cited by critic Ron Charles as an underappreciated book a few weeks ago, has started a blog hosted at his publisher’s website. I imagine he’ll be talking about his new book, The Education of Arnold Hitler, about a young man who has the misfortune of sharing a name with a genocidal maniac.
A police chief in Mexico has found a novel way to improve his officers’ manners and make them “better people.”
Starting this month, [Luis Sanchez] the mayor of [Nezahualcoyotl] is requiring all 1,100 members of his police force to read at least one book a month, or forfeit career advancement. The cops will get reading lessons if they need them and can select the literature from a list of recommended books at a new library, ranging from “Don Quixote” to the latest crime novels by Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
Why the emphasis on literature for police officers, 70% of whom have no more than eighth-grade educations? Sanchez believes that too many cops are rude to citizens and that by reading, they will become better mannered, more communicative and thus more welcome in the neighborhoods they patrol.
“Reading makes us better people, more sensitive, more able to express ourselves,” said Sanchez, a bibliophile with the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. “Better persons give better service.”
Frankly, so many methods have been used to try and improve police work in Mexico that I think trying literary education can only help (though I disagree with the compulsory aspect.) You can read the rest of the article, and some statistics on whether the program is working, here. If you hit a subscription wall, just go to bugmenot.com and get a login and password from there. (Thanks to Dan Olivas for the link.)
A propos of compulsory education, the only example that comes to my mind at the moment is how Saddam Hussein received an award from UNESCO in 1982 for dramatically improving literacy rates in Iraq. Of course, the punishment for not attending literacy classes was three years’ imprisonment, so I can see how that was a huge incentive.