Category: literary life

The Village Voice has a brief piece about literary blogs, with mentions of worthy blogs like Maudnewton, the Elegant Variation, Beatrice, Bookslut, and several others, as well as movements within the blogging community, such as the Virtual Book Tour and the Lit Blog Co-Op.

Michael Orthofer offers up a critique of the article, as do Scott Esposito and Bud Parr. In general, I feel like the journalist (the aptly named–or perhaps pseudonymous?–Joy Press) is trying to raise opposition where there might not be any.

I was a tad surprised, upon reading the article, to find out that the VBT is a rather costly service (rates start at $1,500 for one-day coverage on the blogs). Ed has some interesting comments about this pay-for-placement service, much of which I agree with. I’d also like to state, for the record, that the authors who’ve guested on Moorishgirl in the past have done so entirely free of charge (and yes, it means I’ve read their work and like it enough to invite them over for a day.)

I finally had a chance to read this interview over at Salon with Alicia Erian, the author of a new novel, Towelhead. Here’s a snippet.

Speaking of complicated reactions, did you choose the book’s title?

I did choose it. Under duress. [Laughs]

How did that happen?

Originally, it was called “Welcome to the Moral Universe.” Daddy has a speech where he tells Jasira something about the moral universe, and I liked the speech. Probably, I also really loved the movie “Welcome to the Dollhouse.” [Laughs] My editor, who’s a very sharp woman, didn’t say anything until I completed the manuscript, and then she was like, “OK, time for a new title!” So I was flipping through the book — when I find titles, I try to find them in the text first — and there’s only one word that’s coming up repeatedly. And I passed it over a million times and I thought, you know, you cannot call a book that. That is horrifying. And so I go all over the book, and it’s the only thing you can call it. A lot turns on the use of this word. And then I started thinking, you know, this is what a title is supposed to be: a little rough, ideally one word, and something that will get people’s attention. And it didn’t feel like a cheat because it really is of the book. So I wrote to my agent and said, What do you think of this? And he said yep, and I wrote to my editor, and she said, yep, and then we had this bizarre discussion about whether it should be “Raghead” or “Towelhead.” [Laughs] I talked to my [now ex-]husband and he said, “Tell them it has to be ‘Towelhead,’ because ‘Towelhead’ is funny. ‘Raghead’s’ not funny. There’s whimsy in ‘Towelhead.'” [Laughs] It’s the stupidest slur! There are better slurs. If you really want a powerful slur, that’s not the one you want.

The title is likely to set off alarm bells for a casual reader who doesn’t know anything about the book. Did you worry about that?

Sure. It’s offensive. I hope the fact I’m half Arab allows me to use that title. Which I assume it does. It’s not like I’m some white person who’s calling the book “Towelhead.” I think that would cause a lot more trouble.

It could just be me, but when I hear ‘towelhead,’ the word ‘funny’ isn’t the first one that comes to mind. In fact, I find it obscene to make light of the slur when you consider that there are people who have lost their lives because of it (men like Adel Karas or Ali Almansoop or Abdo Ali Ahmed, whose only crime was to be Arab in a post-September 11 America.)

Erian, who, by her own admission, never had to deal with the anti-Arab slur that she uses as the title of her novel, is a little misguided if she thinks that her ethnicity gives her the “right” to use it. Claiming the right means that one also accepts the responsibility that comes with such a horrendous word–do something with it, challenge it, turn it on its ear. Don’t just slap it on your book because “it’s a publisher’s wet dream.”

So, while I think Erian has the right to call her book whatever the hell she wants, I do hope that she has the courage to stand by her choice and listen up to what her audience, this ‘towelhead’ included, will have to say about it.

Tune in tomorrow for my review of the book.

I somehow managed to miss the news that Orhan Pamuk had a new book out. So the Guardian review of Istanbul was a delight and a surprise. It’s a memoir of Pamuk’s hometown.

Orhan Pamuk, an International IMPAC Award winner, inspires love and hostility in equal measure at home. Recently, the governor of S ordered that Pamuk’s books be collected from libraries and bookshops in his province and destroyed. Instant condemnation in the national press of this ‘barbarity’ demonstrated an enlightened majority asserting itself. The governor must have been furious when no books by Pamuk were found, for sale or burning. Subsequently, the author’s sales have soared.

It is fascinating, therefore, to uncover the boyhood and obsessions of this quiet, self-absorbed 52-year-old. The book centres around a solemn toddler trapped in the pressure cooker of his family’s squabbles. Each wing of the secular clan occupies a floor of the Fifties Pamuk Apt block overlooking the glittering Bosporus. The household is ruled from the bed of his overweight grandmother, who mourns her sons’ squandering of the family fortune, his aunts’ and uncles’ quarrels, his parents’ teetering marriage and the devotions of their Muslim servants.

You can read an excerpt here.

The first of the Loggernaut Reading Series took place last Thursday at Gravy, in North Portland, with Chelsey Johnson, Alicia Cohen, and Charles D’Ambrosio reading from their work. The Loggernaut website also features interviews, one of which is with the poet and translator Ammiel Alcalay. The conversation caught my eye because of Alcalay’s great choices in terms of Arab fiction that’s out there but not getting the attention it deserves:

This [what to recommend, Ed.] is a tough question because we really only have the barest minimum available in translation. Having said that, if one digs a little further, some things can be found. The poet and translator Khaled Mattawa has done some excellent work in translating the Iraqi poets Saadi Yousef and Fadhil Azzawi. Many works by the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish are available, particularly his prose masterpiece Memory for Forgetfulness, in Ibrahim Muhawi’s extraordinary translation and presentation. There is an excellent Penguin book of Modern Arabic poetry translated by Abdullah al-Udhari that gives a very good overview; unfortunately, it’s out of print but can be found in a good on-line search. A recent bilingual edition of the great poet Adonis, translated by Shawkat Toorawa, presents a kind of model of how such things should be done. We have our own treasure, Etel Adnan, an Arab poet who happens to write in American English. Some Arab poets, like Abdellatif Laabi, have written in French, and his work is available through City Lights in a book called The World’s Embrace for which I wrote an introduction. In the UK, there is a superb journal called Banipal that only publishes contemporary Arabic literature in translation. It is the best place to get a wider sense of what is going on, to read younger, lesser known writers. Having said all of this, we are still very far from really getting into a deeper sense of what is going on.

More about Alcalay here.

Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers Network sends us this link to the latest e-panel he’s moderated. This one puts together two Southern women writers and two lit bloggers to discuss (what else?) labels. The writers are Quinn Dalton and Tayari Jones (both of whom have second books out shortly) and the bloggers are Carrie Frye (of Tingle Alley) and Gwenda Bond (of Shaken and Stirred). A small sample:

Quinn Dalton: I guess cross-shelving works well if they are going to stock more than one copy of your book.

Carrie Frye: I can see pros and cons. Malaprop’s has a huge Gay/Lesbian section, and it’s meant as a service to customers.

Dan Wickett: I think at times it makes it difficult to find certain authors.

Tayari Jones: Well, I think only difficult for people who don’t really look for these writers.

Gwenda Bond: Anything that helps the audience find the books. It’d be great if one big bookstore with no categories did, but in practice I doubt it would work.

Tayari Jones: It kills me how people say, I was looking for Toni Morrison and I had to go to the black section!” I always wonder how many years they’ve been shopping and only now realized that the “Literature” section has no diversity.

In related author news, Quinn Dalton recently contributed a guest essay on Beatrice.com about whether authors should hire indy publicists.

RAWI, the Arab American writers’ association, will host its first conference June 3-5 in New York City. The indomitable Helen Thomas, veteran White House correspondent, will give the keynote address. Panels, discussions, and workshops will be held on such varied topics as scriptwriting, language teaching, hybridity, and criticism. I will be moderating a panel on literary blogs and I still need one more person to round out the discussion. So, if you are a lit blogger, and are Arab American or interested in issues of concern to Arab American writers, send me an email with a bio at llalami AT yahoo DOT com.