News
In an opinion piece that appears in the Sydney Morning Herald, Salman Rushdie examines how the U.S. government’s corruption of language (referring to contract torture as ‘extraordinary rendition’) leads to greater perversions:
At the end of December, the German Government ordered the closing of an Islamic centre near Munich after finding documents encouraging suicide attacks in Iraq. This is a club which, we are told, Khaled al-Masri often visited before being extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan. “Aha!” we are encouraged to think. “Obvious bad guy. Render his sorry butt anywhere you like.”
What is wrong with this kind of thinking is that, as Isabel Hilton of The Guardian wrote last July, “The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone … When disappearance became state practice across Latin America in the ’70s it aroused revulsion in democratic countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government that no state actor may detain – or kill – another human being without having to answer to the law.”
In other words, the question isn’t whether or not a given individual is “good” or “bad.” The question is whether or not we are – whether or not our governments have dragged us into immorality by discarding due process of law, which is generally accorded to be second only to individual rights as the most important pillar of a free society.
Read it all here.
“Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening was published in 1998 and while it was by no means ignored–as I recall, it received glowing reviews and was nominated for some major awards–it’s a book hardly anyone seems to know about just seven years later. Thus I am always giving people copies of it as gifts, and everyone I’ve given it to (a group that includes other writers and artists as well as lots of civilians, including both of my parents–and my father never reads “this sort of book,” i.e. “literary fiction,” unless it’s one I’ve written) has fallen in love with it.
It’s the kind of book you do fall in love with, a book that is not only written gorgeously but is full of truths–that is, actual wisdom–and the main characters (Schiller, an obscure novelist/intellectual; Heather, the bookish, brazen girl who half-falls in love with him as she sets about trying to write about him; and the Schiller’s daughter, Ariel, an ex-dancer turned aerobics teacher) are so lovingly and brilliantly drawn it is almost unbearably sad to come to the end of the book.
The character Heather remembers that her life was changed when at 16 she discovered Schiller’s first novel, Tenderness: “It was as if Schiller had explained her life to her more sympathetically than she’d been able to explain it to herself.” That’s exactly how I felt reading Starting Out in the Evening, a novel that does something that hardly any contemporary novel (and for that matter hardly any contemporary art) troubles to do: it looks at the goodness in–and of–life. This is not to say that it is sentimental, or “soft.” In fact Starting Out in the Evening is full of in-passing, apparently throw-away observations (“You desire the woman who intimidates the woman you desire,” says one character) that are startling in their shrewdness. A novel that is this smart and this generous, with characters who feel entirely real, is so rare that I have never understood why it isn’t more generally acknowledged as one of the best novels of our time.”
Michelle Herman is the author of the short novel Dog and the memoir The Middle of Everything.
Amitav Ghosh’s new collection of essays, Incendiary Circumstances, receives a rave review from Time magazine, which calls it, ” sober and highly dignified.”
How to be true to one’s divided inheritance has always been his driving concern.
In the collection of reports from troubled places assembled in Incendiary Circumstances, Ghosh begins to find an answer in everyday humanity and its resilience. Faced by those rioters in Delhi in 1984, some women stood up to them and, miraculously, reversed the tide of violence. Following the destruction of their country by the Khmer Rouge, a handful of survivors in Cambodia in 1981 put on a dance performance, piecing their lives together like “rag pickers.” Writers have to be solitaries, Ghosh recalls V.S. Naipaul saying, and yet, he seems to feel, to be useful they have to be participants, too.
More here.
As has been widely reported, The Smoking Gun went looking for James Frey’s mug shots from the arrests documented in James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces, and instead found a lot of inconsistencies, exaggerations, or lies. The story has since been picked up on various blogs and in the mainstream media, so there’s not much to add here, except to say many in the press are wondering what effect this will have on Oprah’s book club. (Her next selection is still due to be announced on the 16th.)
A similar problem occurred last year, with Norma Khouri’s Honor Lost, in which the author alleged that her best friend had been murdered in an honor killing in Jordan and that she’d had to flee the country. Turns out she had been living in Chicago the whole time. Why not write novels, people?
Coincidentally, novelist JT Leroy, who had posed as a transgendered, HIV-positive former prostitute, has been unmasked by the New York Times as writer Laura Albert. Public appearances by JT Leroy were fulfilled by Albert ‘s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop.
The Cinemathèque de Tanger, a non-profit organization based in Tangier, has undertaken a full-scale renovation of the Cinéma Rif, which is located right on the Gran Socco plaza, between the old town and the new. Here are some before pictures here. (Click on the right arrow for more.) You can also see some photos of the latest renovation work here. The opening date is now scheduled to be 29 May 2006. I can’t wait to see the theatre the next time I’m in Morocco.