New Alarcón
I was very pleased to see that the latest issue of the New Yorker includes a short story by Daniel Alarcón, “República and Grau.”
I was very pleased to see that the latest issue of the New Yorker includes a short story by Daniel Alarcón, “República and Grau.”
There is an excellent, excellent review by Jim Holt of Richard Dawkins’s much-hyped The God Delusion. Here’s a small excerpt:
Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds. Dawkins asserts that “the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.” But what possible evidence could verify or falsify the God hypothesis? The doctrine that we are presided over by a loving deity has become so rounded and elastic that no earthly evil or natural disaster, it seems, can come into collision with it. Nor is it obvious what sort of event might unsettle an atheist’s conviction to the contrary.
You should read the whole article.
There’s a great profile of Dutch-Moroccan writer Abdelkader Benali in the Daily Star. The article covers his work as a novelist and playwright–as well as his more recent foray in literary reportage. (Benali was living in Beirut during the Israeli bombing, and wrote about it for Dutch audiences.) One tidbit that resonated with me:
Benali views his job as being to creatively undermine his assigned role.
“In Holland it’s all about belonging to clubs – a running club or a sewing club. I don’t belong to any club,” he says. “People expect me to speak as a Muslim or a Moroccan yet I’m giving you my own opinion. I use my tricks, my language skills, to undermine the role they’ve assigned me.
“The problem is that everything’s connected to Islam. It never really becomes an intellectual discussion because that would invite argument and people don’t want that. Whenever journalists want the ‘Muslim Dutch perspective,’ they never go to an intellectual. They find some old man at a mosque.
This doesn’t surprise me one bit. I was invited to a panel recently, with the express purpose to give “the Muslim perspective.” I said there is no such thing. I can only give my perspective. That didn’t go over so well.
Ahdaf Soueif discusses Palestinian resistance art/art of resistance. A worthwhile read.
A few days ago, I received two copies of the Dutch translation of my book, Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens. It was released earlier this month in the Netherlands, and it’s a very handsome edition, with nice, thick paper, and beautiful cover. I am looking forward to my visit to the Netherlands in January, when I will be doing a few public events.
For those of you who live in New York: The NBCC will be hosting a panel about representations of Islam tonight. The speakers are author and historian Tariq Ali and poet and translator Eliot Weinberger, which should be quite interesting. The discussion will be moderated by Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. The event takes place at 7 pm at McNally/Robinson Bookstore (Mulberry and Prince Street in SoHo.) For more information, call (212) 274-1160. And then email me and let me know how it went.