RANDA JARRAR

The current issue of Mother Jones focusses on domestic violence.

The Daily Star has a write-up of the launch of Sharq, a new magazine which aims to give voice to young British Arabs, and which, its editor painstakingly makes clear, has no financing or backing from Arab governments. Check out the magazine’s contents here.

From Ha’aretz: A mysterious new carving has surfaced at the source of the Amud River :

A few hundred meters from the site at which the stone was found there are ancient ruins on which the caliphs from the Moslem Umayyad period – the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. – built a magnificent palace with many domes that could be seen from a distance. Tepper thinks that the square domed building was carved in the stone by a man who lived in the area during that period, immortalizing the palace.

It looks like a dude holding a bong, standing on his dog, and trying to figure out how his briefcase got so huge, so naturally, I think it rocks.

Margaret Atwood reviews Eileen Blumenthal’s Puppetry: A World History over at the Independent.
The book explores the history of puppets– from ancient, articulated figurines to abstract contemporary plush– and the different roles, political, entertaining, and otherwise, that they’ve been able to play through the ages.

El-Ahram reports that the complete works of Tomas Transtromer are now available in Arabic from the Syrian-based Dar Bidayat. The translation was made by Qassim Hamadi, and the book’s intro penned by Adonis. Transtromer attended the collection’s launch in Beirut. Fabulous Transtromer poems include The Cuckoo, Grief Gondola, and National Insecurity. I hope he read the last one at the launch, it would have coincided nicely with Condi Rice’s Middle East visit.

Naomi came to Bookpeople last night to read from her new novel, Going Going. It was a fun reading, with a full house. The new novel is about a teenage girl in San Antonio who fights for small businesses and gets into all sort of hilarious and engaging arguments with friends and foes about why big business sucks.

After she read novel excerpts, Naomi read some of her poetry, including “Red Brocade,” which begins: “The Arabs used to say/When a stranger appears at your door,/feed him for three days/before asking who he is,/where he’s come from,/where he’s headed./That way, he’ll have strength enough/to answer./Or, by then you’ll be such good friends/you don’t care.”

Of course, I got all teary.

Naomi told the audience about Independent America, a website and documentary endeavor I hadn’t heard of: A cute Canadian couple, Hanson Hosein and Heather Hughes, and their dog, travel around the US and take pictures and interview owners of local businesses.

It was cool to hear her talking about all these things at Bookpeople, too, under their “best independent bookstore” banner that hangs over the staircase.

This is what happens when writers who have pseudonyms and claim they are North Africans– and have “translators” who also use pseudonyms– pen sentences that go: “In these lines where sperm and poetry mingle, my ambition is to give women back the speech that has been confiscated by their fathers, brothers and husbands. I lift these words, as one lifts a glass, to the health of Arab women.” As just one Arab woman, I have to say, those words were bad for my health. Here is my response:

I sat, my breasts heavy like pomegranates, onto the toilet. Earlier that morning, I had woken up musky with desire, like a cat or a lioness, from a wet dream. I had intended to spend the day reading my copy of The Almond, but instead I practiced the secret habit– my fingers are double jointed and thus I am quite skilled at that, even though I was initially handicapped by my upbringing, which caused me to rely heavily on bidets for this particluar task–remembering the sexy tattoed women from my dream, their persistence and strength. They reminded me of the uniformed girls from my childhood on the Arabian peninsula… or, more likely, of that one acrobatic tattoed stripper from the tittie bar I had visited the night before. I also remembered the masked and unmasked men from the dream; they reminded me of my teenagehood in the seedy clubs of the New York peninsula. Later, after I recovered my senses, I attempted to read the book by “Nedjma.” It was very moving… or atleast my bowels thought so. I ran to the bathroom, where I sat, my breasts heavy like pomegranates, onto the toilet. When I was done, I reached out for the toilet paper, but I was all out. I then realized my copy of the book could come in handy, afterall. After, I retired to my sofa and made a few phone calls to my beloveds.

*My real fucking name.

A tribute to the loneliness of writing (or– and this is my theory–to the pounds you gain with each new novel you write), the sculpture has already been to Italy, where homeless people lived underneath it, and is now on Parliament Hill. (Link via writer Karen Olsson).

Slate has an article up about Chuck Palahniuk’s so-called leap of faith (an idea he cribbed from Kierkegaard):

As he prepared to kick off a new tour in Portland, Ore., the other day, Palahniuk… explained the new methods he had cooked up to arouse his youthful audience. From a large cardboard box, he produced a handful of teriyaki-beef-scented air fresheners, which were to be passed out by women in mail-carrier uniforms. Then “everyone will be offering their meat to each other to sniff, as lurid as that sounds,” Palahniuk explained.

More than 800 members of “The Cult” gathered that night for the reading in the sanctuary of Portland’s First Unitarian Church. Palahniuk took the pulpit just after 7:30 and began the evening by tossing plastic severed hands into the crowd—a reliable trick, he said, to whip the audience into a frenzy. “Does Norman Mailer throw out severed body parts?” he shouted. “I don’t think so!” After the crowd settled down, Palahniuk read a story from Haunted in which an overzealous Christian falls into a hot spring and watches his skin boil off.

Whoa. That is one sermon I would have liked to see.

I love this photo, love its composition, the place where the dark corrugated metal in the background overlaps parallel to the girl’s smile, and the plastic birdcage in the top third of the shot, with the bird not visible, but the girl visible, leaning against the wooden pole, which serves as a border of sorts, on the left, her hair and her smile and her stance all so relaxed, which makes me worry less about her. (El-Ahram Weekly)