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This November, in addition to the gubernatorial election, Oregonians have to decide whether to renew the library levy. More than half of the funding for Oregon libraries comes from this levy. The people campaigning against this levy and against funding include Friends for Safer Libraries, whose website describes a library as “a playground of books [that] becomes a minefield of harmful visions.” So now going to the library is like going to Iraq? Anyway, please vote yes on the levy, so that libraries can keep their funding.
Department of I told you so: The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Orhan Pamuk, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” It’s clear the judges have been sensitive to all the recent controversies that have been framed as exemplars of an age-old “clash of civilizations,” but they also understand that it’s not an inevitable state, since they’ve at least added the word “interlacing.” And Pamuk himself is not one for essentialist views, as you can see from this lovely essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in November 2001: “The Anger of the Damned.”
In any case, this is a wonderful and richly deserved distinction, and I couldn’t be more pleased. You can find all of Pamuk’s recent books online or at your favorite bookshop: My Name Is Red, Snow, The White Castle, The Black Book, and his most recent, a memoir, Istanbul: Memories of the City.
Some Pamuk-related links:
Orhan Pamuk goes on trial
Pamuk update
Pamuk in trouble?
The MG review of Snow
Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul
Photo: M. Euler/Scanpix
I was absolutely thrilled yesterday to find out that the 2006 Booker Prize has gone to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. What impressed me most about this amazing novel were its wonderfully complex characters, caught in an age of globalization that, while it has made some winners, has created many more losers. I loved how there is no sugar-coating of the immigrant experience (an unfortunately common fault, I think, in recent novels.) It’s a brave book, a smart book, and I hope the prize will get it all the readers it truly deserves.
Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
“No writer has brought America into sharper focus for me than bell hooks,” Miller says. “My biggest epiphanies in recent years have arrived while her books are on my nightstand. Of all of them, Salvation: Black People and Love had the greatest impact because it offers a different perspective of the Civil Rights Movement and, in doing so, gives a clearer sense of the possibilities for this nation, and how close we once came to realizing them.
Love is the ultimate revolutionary force, hooks argues, and it was at full fury in the lives of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, though they were both individually incomplete in their manifestation of it. Malcolm was a prophet of self-love (always vital in a system of oppression such as ours), while Martin helped change the course of history with an ethic of loving thy enemy. Had the two come together — as it appears they were about to do before Malcolm was assassinated — hooks suggests we might well be living in a different world today.
Where I was most touched, however, was in hooks’ suggestion as to who might rise to carry on love’s call: single mothers. As a child of divorce, this resonates deeply with me. But more importantly, I’m humbled and set straight. In America, unwed moms are at best invisible and at worst vilified. Yet they’ve raised most of us. If anyone has the power to shape our world, it’s them.”
Joe Miller is a journalist who lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His first book, Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season with an Inner-City Debate Squad, was published October 2006 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Newsweek seems to be convinced that Orhan Pamuk will take the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. I would not be surprised at all if he wins.
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