News

Tonight I’ll be reading with Thom Hartmann, to promote the anthology Proud to be Liberal . Here are the details:

7:30 PM
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside
Portland, Oregon

See you there!

Jilali Ferhati’s Mémoire en Detention (‘Memory In Detention’) has won first prize in the African Film Festival in Rome.

The Monitor has a profile of Doreen Baingana, who was in Kampala for the launch of her collection of short stories in Uganda. If you haven’t read her book, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe, you should.

The Guardian reports that a Moroccan mosque in Ceuta was burned down, one of apparently several incidents of this nature on Spanish territory:

El País newspaper yesterday listed a number of mosques and other Muslim targets that have been ransacked, burned or had copies of the Qur’an set alight by intruders.

Police said that extreme rightwingers and skinhead groups were responsible for almost all the attacks.

“They want Spain to have the same sort of violent reaction that the Netherlands had after the murder of film director Theo van Gogh,” one police expert told El País. “Little by little they are creating an atmosphere for this to grow.”

Spain’s 800,000 Muslims, many of them immigrants from neighbouring Morocco, have some 600 mosques around the country.

If you think that violence against Moroccans or their institutions are isolated occurrences in Europe, then you probably should make yourself watch this, courtesy of the Italian carabinieri.

In the Times, Zoe Paxton tries to find out if Gautam Malkani’s much-hyped Londonstani is ‘authentic’ by visiting a class of teenagers from Hounslow, West London–where the novel is set:

Two weeks before its publication, the book is already notorious for two things: the money and the language.The centre of a huge bidding war at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, it was bought by Fourth Estate for a six-figure advance (the rumour is £380,000).

Why the fuss? Mainly because Londonstani is written in a head-spinning, expletive-rich mixture of Asian street slang, text-speak, MTV talk and bastardised Punjabi that supposedly reflects the patois of West London Asian gangs. By writing in dialect, Malkani has set himself a tough task; it has worked for Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh, but critics had their doubts about the dictated letters in dialect that appeared in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

That’s not a very apt comparison. The issue with the chapters written in Hasina’s point of view in Brick Lane is this: Hasina presumably writes her letters in Bengali, her native language, and the novelist renders them for us in English. And yet the language of the letters is a pidginized English, which is a rather odd stylistic choice. But based on the description of Malkani’s book, he’s actually trying to approximate the dialect of English that these kids are using. In any case, Paxton leaves the class with reassurances from the kids that the author had gotten it right even if “you would never, ever write these words down.”