My last event for the PEN World Voices festival is a gathering of storytellers:
An Evening with The Moth
With Neil Gaiman, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami; and Jonathan Ames as your MC
Thursday, April 26
8 – 10 PM
37 Arts: 450 West 37th St.
New York, New York
Tickets: $30 (includes wine and beer)
Purchase tickets from Ticketmaster: www.ticketmaster.com or (212) 307-4100
See you there!
I am doing two events today. Here are details for the first:
PEN World Voices
Where on Earth: The Refugee Emergency
With Ishmael Beah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Laila Lalami, Saadi Youssef; moderated by Russell Banks
Thursday, April 26
3 – 4:30 PM
Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College: 695 Park Ave.
New York, New York
Free and open to the public. No reservations.
Hope to see you there.
I’m in New York this week for the PEN World Voices festival. Here are the details for a panel to which I’m contributing today:
PEN World Voices
History and the Truth of Fiction
With Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, Michael Wallner; moderated by Colum McCann
Wednesday April 25
1 – 2:30 PM
Hemmerdinger Hall at NYU: 100 Washington Square East
New York, New York
Free and open to the public. No reservations.
Hope to see you there.
I’m on the road at the moment so I have to keep this brief, but I did want to point to Mark Sarvas‘s piece on James Wilcox’s new book Hunk City in this weekend’s NYTBR:
As in his prior novels, Wilcox’s narrative, which skitters like a stone thrown expertly across a country pond, delivers a high quotient of whimsy — Pickens’s assistant supplements his income by making office visits to floss his customers’ teeth. Wilcox’s books are full of flourishes like this, and they won’t be to every reader’s taste, especially those with a low threshold for quirkiness. His work is so crammed with complications — some subplots have subplots — that it’s occasionally hard to know what matters.
But Wilcox has always been about more than broad comedy. His men and women, though often clownish, are rarely cartoonish. He has a Dickensian knack for animating minor characters and an eye for the telling detail. “Though he was barely 23,” Wilcox writes of the professional flosser, “Edsell’s lantern jaw and narrow-set eyes gave him the spry, wizened look of an octogenarian.” Here in Barcalounger country, startled by a bit of unpleasant news, Pickens “pulled a lever and sat upright.” Burma’s mother, an especially memorable creation, invests “lavishly in a Chinese wardrobe not just to encourage capitalism in that bastion of godless Communism, but also because the high collars hid the scar from her goiter operation.”
Read it all here.
We were having our second cup of coffee on Saturday morning when we heard a loud, whooshing sound, followed by police sirens. An hour later we found out that a suicide bomber had blown himself up in front of the American Language Center, which is about a mile from our apartment. The man had tried to gain access to the ALC (which, by the way, is privately owned and is not in any way affiliated with the U.S. government) and the security guard asked for an I.D. card. The bomber then walked away, and blew himself up, killing no one but himself. A few seconds later, another bomber detonated his explosives, a few meters away from the U.S. consulate. There were no other fatalities.
Police arrived on the crime scene and chased after suspected fugitives. The evening news anchor said that the police had arrested the gang leader, the man responsible for the foiled attack of March 11, and his second-in-command on Thursday night, along with other members of the group. It’s unclear why the police didn’t announce these arrests right away, but it’s possible that they were not sure they had caught all the members of the cell, and indeed the acts of Saturday would seem to confirm that theory.
The footage on TV showed plainclothes and uniformed cops with bulletproof vests, guns drawn. Morocco does not have a gun culture so the sight of the weapons on the streets of Casablanca certainly gave me pause. Sometimes I feel like I don’t recognize the country I grew up in (just as, in the wake of the Iraq war, I felt I no longer recognized the country I moved to.) Everyone is shaken, revolted, and worried, and already citizens have called cops on someone who was acting ‘suspicious’. (It turned out to be a false alarm.)
For other perspectives:
Lounsbury in Casablanca. Lounsbury on the aftermath. Najlae. BO18. Red@blog. And, via Red@blog, this clip from rap group Fnaire, a song written post-May 2003: Matqich Bladi.