Satrapi Blog
If, like me, you’re a fan of Marjane Satrapi’s work, then you might like to know that she has a blog, in which she discusses her work on the film adaptation of Persepolis.
If, like me, you’re a fan of Marjane Satrapi’s work, then you might like to know that she has a blog, in which she discusses her work on the film adaptation of Persepolis.
This pleases me enormously: Yiyun Li’s short story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers has won the Guardian First Book Award. This is a general award, not strictly reserved for short stories, or even for fiction, so it’s particularly sweet to see Yiyun’s book taking the top spot.
The latest issue of The Nation includes a critical essay by Bashir Abu-Manneh about the Palestinian struggle for a national homeland. He takes two recent books as his starting point: Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood and Ali Abunimah’s One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. It’s a powerful, well-argued piece by Abu-Manneh, who is, quite rightly, uncompromising on the issue of self-determination.
The current issue of The Nation includes two must-read pieces. Amitava Kumar’s review of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad is a very thoughtful overview of Ahmad and his work, including many anecdotes such as this:
One senses that Ahmad was deeply sensitive to the waning influence of radical secular politics in the Muslim world, where Islamists increasingly led the opposition to military regimes that had betrayed the dream of independence from colonialism. It may well have been this concern that led him to return, shortly before his death in 1999, to Pakistan, where he hoped to build a university that would teach the humanities. It was to be called Khaldunia University, after the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), whom UN General Secretary Kofi Annan described as “a globalist long before the age of globalization.” (…) Alas, Khaldunia University was never built; according to The Economist’s obituary of Ahmad, he “died before a rupee was raised for it.”
And then there is Arthur Danto’s piece, also freely available online, about Botero’s Abu-Ghraib paintings:
hough transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.”
When it was announced not long ago that Botero had made a series of paintings and drawings inspired by the notorious photographs showing Iraqi captives, naked, degraded, tortured and humiliated by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it was easy to feel skeptical–wouldn’t Botero’s signature style humorize and cheapen this horror? And it was hard to imagine that paintings by anyone could convey the horrors of Abu Ghraib as well as–much less better than–the photographs themselves. These ghastly images of violence and humiliation, circulated on the Internet, on television and in newspapers throughout the world, were hardly in need of artistic amplification. And if any artist was to re-enact this theater of cruelty, Botero did not seem cut out for the job.
As it turns out, his images of torture, now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan and compiled in the book Botero Abu Ghraib, are masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art–art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts.
You can read it all here.
Department of Good News I Needed to Hear On A Rainy Monday Morning: Dzanc Books has announced that its first title as a publishing house will be a short story collection by my pal Roy Kesey (Nothing in the World). The book is called All Over and is due out in October 2007. You can read all about it here.
Several people sent me a link to William Grimes’s review of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge, a new book that appears to be a rebuttal of Edward Said’s Orientalism. I was dismayed by the review: Its first line calls Said’s book “a polemic” without offering much of a reason why that label should be applied to such a careful, well-sourced work. (And I say this as someone who very much enjoyed Orientalism, even if I didn’t agree with everything in it.) And I’m sorry to say that Grimes doesn’t appear to have understood Said’s work. For example he states that “orientalism is conceptually imperialist”–but this is a misreading of the book. Said himself acknowledged the contribution of classical orientalists like Maxime Rodinson.
In addition, Grimes freely admits that the historical background crucial to understanding Irwin’s rebuttal is “occasionally tough going for anyone not familiar with the field,” a category Grimes seems to place himself in, and yet, despite his unfamiliarity with the academic background, he delights in Irwin’s criticism: “The payoff is Mr. Irwin’s all-out assault on Mr. Said, which makes for bracing reading.” I think Edward Said, and his work, deserve better.