Search Results for: lat

Carl Fussman interviews Salman Rushdie for Esquire, using some sort of elicitation exercise. A sample:

I left college in 1968, and “Midnight’s Children” was published twelve years later. In between, I was essentially floundering about. I worked in advertising two or three days a week in order to have the other four or five to stay home and write. Advertising was very tempting because they were constantly trying to bribe me to do it full-time. When you’ve had no success as a writer, the bribes start looking good. You start thinking, Who am I kidding? I think I want to be a novelist, but I’m not getting anywhere, and meanwhile here are these people offering me a comfortable living to do something that I actually can do. “Don’t be an idiot!” a voice says. The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I’m going to damn well be this person that I’ve set my heart on being.

If you had to pick one book from the last sixty or seventy years, you’d probably pick “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

I’ll tell you what divorce hasn’t taught me. It didn’t teach me not to get married again.

Did he have to recline on a couch? I want to know. More along those lines here.

A few years ago, when I was in grad school, I’d forcefully disagreed with someone during a seminar on linguistics. After the class, this woman walked up to me and said, “You’re so articulate!” I was about to say, “Thanks,” and move on, when she blurted out, “..for a Middle-Eastern woman.”

“Funny,” I thought. “You’re so ignorant…for a grad student. How did you get into the program?” But of course I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even point out that I’m not from the Middle-East. Gosh. Esprit d’escalier.

Everywhere one looks these days, there’s a book or an article about that subject du jour: Women and Islam. Newsweek‘s Lorraine Ali offers a different view:

Muslim women are feeling like pawns in a political game: jihadists portray them as ignorant lambs who need to be protected from outside forces, while the United States considers them helpless victims of a backward society to be saved through military intervention. “Our empowerment is being exploited by men,” says Palestinian Muslim Rima Barakat. “It’s a policy of hiding behind the skirts of women. It’s dishonorable no matter who’s doing it.” Scholars such as Khaled Abou El Fadl, an expert on Islamic law and author of “The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists,” says this is an age-old problem. “Historically the West has used the women’s issue as a spear against Islam,” he says. “It was raised in the time of the Crusades, used consistently in colonialism and is being used now. Muslim women have grown very, very sensitive about how they’re depicted on either side.”

By the by, Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Great Theft just came out in October with HarperCollins.

The Observer‘s David Smith reports on Kenya’s use of camels as book mobiles to reach out to remote villages.

There was excitement when the library camels appeared on the horizon, refusing to be hurried from their patient progress. The animals set down their cargo, and the staff from the Garissa Provincial Library assembled the tent, laid down mats and unpacked the books.

For the children who have no television, music or computer, the sight of a book offers the promise of escape and self-improvement. Soon they were scrambling over each other to get the latest delivery of titles ranging from How Pig Got His Snout, The Orange Thieves and Shaka Zulu to the more prosaic Practical Primary English, Comprehensive Mathematics and Improve Your Science and Agriculture

You can help the program by donating through the Observer’s Book Aid page.

Related: You can also read about Africa’s tradition of camel book mobiles in an MG post last year.

(Observer link cribbed from the Lit Saloon.)

Novelist Ahdaf Soueif has a long piece in the Guardian about the latest round of parliamentary elections in Egypt, which have been marked by such democractic practices as the beating of voters, closing down poll stations, and molesting of opposition figures. The situation there sounds rather catastrophic, judging from the diary Soueif kept. Here’s a snippet:

Earlier today Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president for the last 24 years, was sworn in for a further six. Cairo traffic came to a standstill for two hours as all routes to the People’s Assembly were closed off to the people. Now the protesters are gathering with their banners and a pair of kettledrums: “Dumdu-du-dumdum, Batel, Dum du-du-dum-dum, Batel, Hosni M’barak, Batel …” Batel means not valid, without legitimacy. Fortuitously, it rhymes with atel, unemployed, and so serves the protesters’ preferencefor chanting in rhyme: “In the name of 12 million atel, Hosni Mubarak’s rule is batel.” A new poster showing the president’s face with the word batel in flowing calligraphy across it has become overnight as iconic as the black on yellow Kefaya logo. “Dum du-dudum- dum …” They clap and drum and the posters bob up and down. And because the police – tonight – are keeping their presence light, they march.

More here.