News
Two weeks ago, a computer engineer by the name of Fouad Mourtada was arrested by Moroccan police in Casablanca for creating a fake Facebook profile of Prince Moulay Rachid, the king’s brother. Mourtada’s family found out about his arrest through the news, and had to wait a week to be allowed to see him. Mourtada says he was tortured when he was taken into custody. There are thousands of fake profiles for politicians, royals, and celebrities, but Mourtada has been charged with identity theft and risks up to five years in prison. Several Moroccan bloggers, including this one, are maintaining radio silence today. You can visit the Mourtada family website here.
The Winter 2008 issue of the magazine Bidoun includes a lovely article by Issandr El Amrani on Anfas (Souffles), the legendary Moroccan literary and cultural magazine. Here is a brief snippet
In 1966, a small group of Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals launched Souffles, a quarterly review that would over time become at once a vehicle for cultural renewal and an instigator of efforts to promote social justice in the Maghreb. From its very first issue, Souffles was a unique experiment, a Moroccan and Maghrebi effort to liberate the country’s intellectual framework from fetid provincialism and lingering colonial complexes. It was a cri de coeur, a rebellion against the artistic status quo, a manifesto for a new aesthetics, even a new worldview. Its trademark cover, emblazoned with an intense black sun, radiated rebellion.
The full article is available online here, so please take a look.
Luc Sante reviews Russell Banks’s new novel, The Reserve, for the NYT Book Review, and he doesn’t seem to like it very much:
It is 1936, and we are in the Adirondacks, at a party at a luxurious camp on a vast private reserve. (“Camp” is a local upper-caste understatement, comparable to the use of “cottage” in Newport, R.I.) As the sun begins to dip behind the mountain range that dominates the horizon, a beautiful young woman detaches herself from her elders and walks barefoot to the shore of the lake. Suddenly a seaplane appears in the air and all look on, stunned, as it lands on the surface of the water. Such a thing has never before occurred, and furthermore is taboo under the largely unspoken laws of the reserve. A dashing aviator — we will discover that he is a famous artist, a radical, a free spirit — steps out of the plane and locks eyes with the glamorous yet troubled young woman.
You can picture this on the movie screen, can’t you: all golden light and exquisite set design and dazzling wardrobe and starring, perhaps, Keira Knightley. Russell Banks’s new novel begins this way, and the scene exemplifies both its strengths and its weaknesses — it is not necessarily evident which is which.
I’m a bit disappointed, because Banks’s Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter are among my favorite novels, and I always hope to find the magic again.
I’m about half way through final edits for my new novel, The Outsider, and I am so tired these days I can barely keep my eyes open past eight p.m. While reading Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year the other day, I had to smile at this exchange between Señor C., an aging novelist, and Anya, the attractive neighbor he has hired to be his secretary:
A novel? No. I don’t have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today.
Still, I said, we have all got opinions, especially about politics. If you tell a story at least people will shut up and listen to you. A story or a joke.
Stories tell themselves, they don’t get told, he said. That much I know after a lifetime of working with stories. Never try to impose yourself. Wait for the story to speak for itself. Wait and hope that it isn’t born deaf and dumb and blind. I could do that when I was younger. I could wait patiently for months on end. Nowadays I get tired. My attention wanders.
I love the comparison with Atlas. How apt.
I will be giving a reading with my colleague Reza Aslan (No god but God) tomorrow in Rancho Mirage. Here are the details:
February 14, 2008
Reza Aslan and Laila Lalami
1:30 – 3:30 PM
Reading & Discussion
Writing from the Desert Series
Rancho Mirage Public Library
Rancho Mirage, California
If you live in the desert, come on by and say hello.