Otherwise Engaged
I’m waiting for the movers to show up and won’t be able to blog through the rest of this week, so I apologize for the lack of posts. I should be back in these parts on Tuesday, when my internet connection is installed.
I’m waiting for the movers to show up and won’t be able to blog through the rest of this week, so I apologize for the lack of posts. I should be back in these parts on Tuesday, when my internet connection is installed.
For Italian readers: My book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is published in Italy by Fusi Orari this month.
I’ll be in Italy in early October for the Internationale Festival in Ferrara, followed by readings in Cagliari and Rome. You can check my events for more details.
We went to Powell’s last night, and being in those aisles almost brought me to tears. The Blue Room! The literary magazine rack! The Cavallini notebooks! I picked up two travel books by Pico Iyer (The Lady and the Monk and Video Night in Kathmandu), a used hardcover, in excellent condition, of Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi’s A Season in Mecca, Coetzee’s memoir Youth, and a few other titles for fall. Few places give readers so much opportunity as Powell’s to explore and try something different. I don’t know what I’m going to do without it.
I’m in Portland this weekend to prepare for the move to Los Angeles, but I wanted to let you know that I’ll be on NPR’s Weekend Edition tomorrow (Sunday) morning to talk about summer reading. You can tune into your local NPR station or listen online tomorrow.
Over the last fifteen years, I’ve lived in Downtown Los Angeles, Koreatown, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Portland, and Casablanca. That’s one move every two years. I am so tired of moving–and yet here I am, doing it again. I’m in L.A. with my husband at the moment, looking for a place. We’ve only been gone from the city for four years, and yet so much seems to have changed. There’s so much gentrification; traffic is worse, if that’s even conceivable; and there’s a café that calls itself ‘literati,’ because it uses book spines as wall decor. (The horror! The horror!) Still, I’ve missed L.A. There’s a great diner we went to every weekend for 8 years, and it’s still open; there are lots of good theaters; amazing music; and of course all our friends and family.
My time in Casablanca is drawing to a close. It was a wonderful experience, at once heart-expanding and thought-provoking. I feel pretty good about what I’ve accomplished: I’m almost done with my novel. But, and characteristically for me, I can’t help but wish I had been able to do even more: Write more non-fiction, travel around the Middle Atlas, climb Mount Toubkal. Maybe next time, insha’llah. I will miss my brother, the new friends I made this year, the incredible food, the long afternoons spent in cafés, the call for prayer, the music, the light, the way people always rush to help. I will not, obviously, miss having to deal with Maroc Telecom every other week, or coming across the kind of society people Gad El Maleh satirizes so well.