Category: literary life

Amos Oz delivers an impassioned plea for literature in this L.A. Times op-ed:

If you are a mere tourist, you might stand on a street and look up at an old house, in the old part of town, and see a woman staring out of her window. Then you will walk on.

But if you are a reader, you can see that woman staring out of her window, but you are there with her, inside her room, inside her head.

As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people’s living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams.

Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not only a better businessperson or a better lover but even a better person.

Part of the tragedy between Jew and Arab is the inability of so many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other. Really imagine each other: the loves, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion. There is too much hostility between us, too little curiosity.

By the by, Gil Hochberg’s book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination deals with the problem that Oz lays out in this piece. Hochberg contends that, in literature at least, Jews and Arabs have always met, always mixed, always found the self within the other. At a reading sponsored by the Levantine Center last week, Hochberg cited numerous examples, though the one that stuck in my mind and aroused my curiosity most was the work of (Moroccan) Israeli novelist Albert Suissa.

A kind reader emailed to inform me of the passing of Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus. Here is a lovely piece about Boulus and his work by fellow Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, who recounts the last time he saw Boulus, already very sick, at a literary festival in a small town in France. Youssef eulogizes Boulus, saying:

وأقول إنه الشاعرُ الوحيدُ…
هو لم يكن سياسياً بأيّ حالٍ.
لكنه أشجعُ كثيراً من الشعراء الكثارِ الذين استعانوا برافعة السياسة حين تَرْفعُ…
لكنهم هجروها حين اقتضت الخطر!
وقف ضدّ الاحتلال، ليس باعتباره سياسياً، إذ لم يكن سركون بولص، البتةَ، سياسياً.
وقفَ ضد الاحتلال، لأن الشاعر، بالضرورة، يقف ضد الاحتلال.
سُــمُوُّ موقفِه
هو من سُــمُوّ قصيدته.

And here’s my (humble) translation:

And I say he is the only poet…
He was not political in any case.
But he was more courageous than many other poets who used the banner of politics when it suited
and then abandoned it when it presented danger.
He stood against occupation, not because he was political, since Sargon Boulus was not political at all.
He stood against occupation because the poet, by necessity, stands against occupation
The eminence of his position
is the eminence of his poem.

You can read the rest of Youssef’s piece here.

Even though we moved back to Los Angeles about two months ago, I have yet to catch up with all my forwarded mail. And I still have not renewed any of my usual subscriptions (except for the New York Review of Books). So it’s with more than a little wistfulness that I look at interesting issues of some magazines. This week’s New Yorker, for instance, has a wonderful poem by Robert Bly, an essay by Elizabeth Kolbert about the disturbing tendency by U.S. automakers to take billions in government help without producing fuel-efficient cars, and a piece on the Frida Kahlo “cult” (of which I will freely admit to being a member.)

Orhan Pamuk has a brief essay at the Guardian about reading the Paris Review interviews as a young author in Istanbul. “In the beginning,” he writes, “I read these interviews because I loved these writers’ books, because I wished to to learn their secrets, to understand how they created their fictive worlds. But I also enjoyed reading interviews with novelists and poets whose names I hardly knew, and whose books I had not read.”

I heard the incredible story of twin sisters Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein on NPR yesterday. Here’s the blurb from the station’s site:

Separated in infancy and given up for adoption, Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein grew up unaware that they had an identical twin. Their new memoir, Identical Strangers, chronicles their story of separation, reunion and identity.

Records from the adoption agency indicate that the identical twins’ separation and adoption placement in the late 1960s was connected to a psychological study investigating the effects of nature versus nurture.

The segment is a bit long, but it’s absolutely fascinating.

This week, both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report–the only TV programs I never miss–went on hiatus, so Comedy Central has been doing re-runs. It’s been a small taste of what life will be like if members of the Writers’ Guild of America decide to go on strike. At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Marc Norman’s What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting and starts off with a few anecdotes about the contempt with which screenwriters are held in Hollywood, then reveals some of the uglier side of the business. All very interesting.