Category: literary life

Last month, the scholar Jytte Klausen published a book on the controversy surrounding the Jyllands-Posten caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. But, despite its title, The Cartoons That Shook The World didn’t include any images. Yale University Press, Klausen’s publisher, decided to censor the cartoons out of fear that they could lead to trouble here in the United States. Of course, that only led to more controversy. (For the record, I happen to think Yale should have included the images, because they are crucial for any full understanding of the situation. To exclude them makes a thorough discussion impossible.)

In the New Republic, Oleg Grabar examines the larger question of representations of the Prophet Muhammad. He takes the reader on a little history tour through Islamic art. For instance, he discusses various representations of the Prophet Muhammad in printed form, particularly in depictions of Isra’ and Mi’raj (the mythical Night Journey, as in the image above). Although I am not entirely comfortable with claims he makes about “the Muslim world,” it is hard to take any issue with his conclusion:

To the extent that the argument against the so-called cartoons has centered on the legal propriety or impropriety of representing the Prophet Muhammad, it has been a pointless argument. Of course it is possible to question the Danish caricatures on grounds of taste, or social or political intent; but the lack of taste is not a legal category, and mischievous or even evil intent is difficult to discern in the absence of clearly stated moral and philosophical principles. The only certain lesson to draw from the sad story of the Danish cartoons is the almost universal prevalence of ignorance and incompetence–and that everyone, from writers and pundits to the leaders of mobs, should learn more before making a judgment or starting a riot.

You can read the essay in full here.

The Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah (whose debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, came out a few months ago) has some excellent advice for young writers on her blog. She writes:

A lot more people just want to know how they can be “real” , and that word keeps coming up, how they can be “real” writers. It is to these aspiring writers that I now reveal the secret to writing success.

Write.

That’s it.

Just write.

A writer is a person who writes.

Talent is overrated. Luck is overrated. The right agent is overrated. It helps to have all three, but they are all worthless without that thing in your hand, the manuscript, the thing in your hand that may become a book for which trees will die and that will be published and primped and pampered and put on bookshelves and paid for by people.

And this is what is underrated: the sitting down and grinding it out part. Because that is what writing is. You, at your computer or with your notebook, writing, and writing, revising and writing, and revising again.

This resonated with me because earlier this week, a student asked me for some career advice. I wasn’t sure what exactly she meant, and when I inquired it turned out she was very anxious because she felt that she should “put herself out there” and “try to get published.” She said that I was the only professor she had who never discussed publication or career in class. So she was curious. I told her that I didn’t discuss publication because I felt that the class should be spent on writing. I asked her how many stories she had written. The answer was: not very many. And so my advice to her was to write. I think I will also tell her to read what Gappah wrote.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, a writer, and we found ourselves doing that thing that writers often do: sharing horror stories about the book world. Here is one (among many) I told her. Several years ago, at a summer writers’ conference, I met a magazine editor who happened to be from the same city I lived in at the time. The editor said she was looking for slush pile readers, and I naively expressed some interest in helping out, on a volunteer basis. She sized me up, then asked, “How old are you?”

I didn’t quite understand why she asked me my age, but I answered, almost mechanically, “Thirty five.”

“Oh,” said the magazine editor. “Well, if you would like to volunteer your time, we really need help with office work.”

In a swift second, I had been reclassified from a potential reader of undiscovered gems to the person who stuffs rejection notices in envelopes. Needless to say, I never submitted any work to her. Eventually, I published a bunch of stories, then a book, and then another book. The kicker? A few years later, the editor, too, published a book. Then her publicist emailed me to ask me whether I could review it.

As some of you may know, A Public Space, the magazine founded in 2005 by Brigid Hughes, occasionally publishes ‘Focus Portfolios,’ which introduce the reader to the literature of a particular country. Issue 9, edited by the scholar Brian Edwards, is about Cairo. You can read Edwards’ introduction, Cairo 2010: After Kefaya, online. Contributors to the special issue include Mansoura Ez Eldin, Ahmed Alaidy, Magdy El Shafee, Muhammad Aladdin, Mohamed Al-Fakhrany, Ibrahim El Batout, Omar Taher and Khalid Kassab.

The picture above was taken at the British Museum, which is, sadly, as close as I ever came to seeing Cairo antiquities.