Month: June 2009

It almost never fails. When a Western reporter goes to Morocco to write about the process of democratization, the resulting article will inevitably mention sartorial choices and give them positive or negative values. Jeans = good. Jellabas = bad. At Slate, Anne Applebaum visits Morocco and finds that many women “would not look out of place in New York or Paris.”

So what? What does Moroccan women’s fashions have anything to do with human rights and democracy? Under King Hassan, Moroccan women used to dress much less conservatively, but that didn’t mean that the country was a haven of human rights. Just look at what happened to women activists during the Years of Lead.

Her contention that protesters outside Parliament were “politely” waving signs is bizarre. If she had spent any kind of time, day after day, watching what happened to them, she wouldn’t be praising their politeness or the police’s restraint. The elections themselves are really nothing to write home about: turn-out was low and the results were, as usual, entirely unsurprising. If this is what she qualifies as “transformation from authoritarianism to democracy” then Lord help us all.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of J.M. Coetzee, so I’m anxiously awaiting the release of his new novel, Summertime, which won’t be out here in the U.S. for quite a while. Fortunately, the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books includes an excerpt. Here’s a little taste:

By the time he arrives for his first stint, Mrs. Noerdien and the counter hands have gone home. He is introduced to the brothers. “My son John,” says his father, “who has offered to help with the checking.”

He shakes their hands: Mr. Rodney Silverman, Mr. Barrett Silverman.

“I’m not sure we can afford you on the payroll, John,” says Mr. Rodney. He turns to his brother. “Which do you think is more expensive, Barrett, a Ph.D. or a CA? We may have to take out a loan.”

They all laugh together at the joke. Then they offer him a rate. It is precisely the same rate he earned as a student, sixteen years ago, for copying household data onto cards for the municipal census.

With his father he settles down in the bookkeepers’ glass cubicle. The task that faces them is simple. They have to go through file after file of invoices, confirming that the figures have been transcribed correctly to the books and to the bank ledger, ticking them off one by one in red pencil, checking the addition at the foot of the page.

They set to work and make steady progress. Once every thousand entries they come across an error, a piddling five cents one way or the other. For the rest the books are in exemplary order. As defrocked clergymen make the best proofreaders, so debarred lawyers seem to make good bookkeepers— debarred lawyers assisted if need be by their overeducated, underemployed sons.

You can read the full excerpt here. Summertime features Coetzee himself as a character: the novel is about an English biographer who is working on a book about the now-dead writer “John Coetzee.”

I love Saramago’s work, and now that summer is here and I am not tied to any deadlines I have been able to indulge myself by reading those of his novels I hadn’t yet gotten to. Here is a little excerpt from The Double:

What do you do when you’re not at school, Oh, I read, listen to music, occasionally visit a museum, And what about the cinema, No, I don’t go to the cinema much, I make do with what they show on TV, You could buy a few videos, start a collection, a video library if you like, You’re right, I could, except that I haven’t even got enough space for my books,Well, rent some videos then, that’s the best solution, Well, I do own a few videos, science documentaries, nature programmes, archaeology, anthropology, the arts in general, and I’m interested in astronomy too, that sort of thing, That’s all very well, but you need to distract yourself with stories that don’t take up too much space in your head, I mean, given, for example, that you’re interested in astronomy, you might well enjoy science fiction, adventures in outer space, star wars, special effects, As I see it, those socalled special effects are the real enemy of the imagination, that mysterious, enigmatic skill it took us human beings so much hard work to invent, Now you’re exaggerating, No, I’m not, the people who are exaggerating are the ones who want me to believe that in less than a second, with a click of the fingers, a spaceship can travel a hundred thousand million kilometres,You have to agree, though, that to create the effects you so despise also takes imagination, Yes, but it’s their imagination, not mine,

Photo credit: here.

7:00 PM
Reading with Chris Abani, Laila Lalami, and Rob Spillman
Booksoup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, California

I am doing a reading tonight with Chris Abani and Rob Spillman, to help promote Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Literature. Here are the details:

Monday, June 15, 2009
7:00 PM
Reading with Chris Abani, Laila Lalami, and Rob Spillman
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, California

The anthology includes work by J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, and many others. I have an essay in it about North African literature. If you live in L.A., come on by and say hello!

I have an opinion piece at The Nation about the proposed $800 million cuts to the budget of the University of California. Here is how it begins:

In the fall of 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor of California, he famously told Fox News, “The first thing that you have to do is not worry about should we cut the programs or raise the taxes and all those things.” He did, in fact, appear to worry about these things a great deal, though he seemed consistently to reach the wrong conclusions. Schwarzenegger’s first act in office was to repeal an unpopular but highly effective vehicle-licensing fee, which would have generated $4.2 billion a year and would have helped to close the $8 billion deficit the state was facing. Because of California’s Proposition 13, which requires a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for any increases in tax rates, the state had very few easy options for increasing its revenue. Now, after five years of Schwarzenegger’s leadership, the deficit has ballooned to $24 billion.

And of course you can read the whole piece at the magazine’s website.