RANDA JARRAR

…is up, and there’s a sort of repressed interview with Sam Lipsyte (and new fiction by Jim Shepard and Steve Almond).

I fucking LOVE Larry McMurtry. Deborah Solomon tries her best to mess with him, but he basically tells her, and the industry, to go fuck themselves. Please read the interview through to the end. It’s worth it.

I’m over at Moorish Girl today and every Friday, so stop by and say hi.

The Daily Star has a write-up of two recent films from the Middle East, “Marock,” written and directed by Leila Marrakchi, and “One Night,” written and directed by Iranian Niki Karimi.

“It’s not your typical Arab film. I wanted to get away from all that,” says Marrakchi. “…The whole purpose was to tell a story and show a different image of Morocco.”

That different image sees the kids drinking, dancing and smoking hash with the same casual abandon as any other teenager around the world. The film deliberately avoids the traditional Maghrebi cinematic stereotypes, there are no souks, hammams or bazaars in Rita’s world – only big houses, fast cars and girls drunkenly throwing up in club toilets. Where “Marock” is most effective is when there is a collision between Rita’s bubblegum fantasy and the reality of the patriarchal order around her. The opening scene, set to Snap’s early 1990′s dance hit “I’ve Got The Power,” sees Marrakchi pan across a club car park filled with sports cars. The camera closes up on Rita and her boyfriend steaming up the windows before they’re interrupted by a police officer, who threatens them with jail unless he receives some money.

I want this job.

Does anyone know if mobile libraries have caught on in the US yet?

James Davidson reviews Alan Bray’s The Friend in the LRB.

For a very long period, formal amatory unions, conjugal, elective and indissoluble, between two members of the same sex were made in Europe, publicly recognised and consecrated in churches through Christian ritual.

They were never identical to heterosexual marriages – in societies in which gender differences were so significant, how could they have been? – but were often implicitly or explicitly compared to and contrasted with heterosexual marriages, and were by no means considered to come off the worse for the comparison. Indeed, as partnerships entered into by individuals acting as autonomous agents out of love for each other, same-sex weddings are much closer to modern companionate marriages than the heir-centred, family-allying and often family-arranged marriages of former times. In historical perspective, a love for someone greater than love for life itself, a love that obliterates the mundane world, wife, property, nation, children, is most typically a feature of the discourse of a same-sex lover. Which is why ‘would that all the Trojans died and all the Greeks as well, and you and I, Patroclus, alone survived to demolish Troy’s holy crenellations’ were considered by ancient commentators just about the gayest lines in the Iliad.

Bray was concerned that his book be seen not merely or not at all as an argument in favour of (the antiquity of) ‘gay marriage’, but The Friend is not merely about friendship either, and by the end of it I found my thoughts turning to some topics I had not anticipated: the traditionalism of the English, the British social security system, the origins of the state, and the manicure of an Egyptian pharaoh of the middle of the third millennium bce.

Someone over at the NYT thought this was worth reporting.

I, apparently, thought it was worth re-reporting.

As someone who’s only read Swann’s Way, I implore everyone to stop talking about the fucking madeleine cookie. I mean, does nothing else happen in the book? it’s as though people only read the first few sentences then give up. Hmmmm.

This is some of the funniest shit I’ve ever seen. Make sure you go through the entire site (unless, you know, you’ve go something better to do).

Sesame Street, Or “‘Aalam Simsim,” Gets Bushed

Holy Shit! Laura Bush and Nim Nim!

When he sees this. (OK, OK, I want it too.)