RANDA JARRAR

I’m disproportionately excited about this movie.

My friend the Sad Billionaire alerted me to this excerpted interview in the New Left Review with Palestinian activist and doctor Mustafa Barghouti.

Barghouti was also interviewed on This American Life, on episode 217 (“Give It To Them”), which aired 8/2/02.

I loved Marian Marzynski’s “Dreamoirs” in this summer’s Boston Review, which focuses on “Crossing the Border”. Here is an excerpt:

The Making of a Dream. My friend Howard and I talk about the loneliness of his 40-year-old daughter, who cannot find a job or a man. Another friend, Andrzej, tells me about a 40-year-old woman’s battle with cancer.

People with flowers gather inside an old factory, the kind of factory that’s in my films about Communist Russia. An old woman comes to me and says, “My daughter died at 40, of loneliness. I am happy her funeral will be on television.”

Andrzej, a silver expert, tells me that an old silver proof has a lion’s face. Then I watch the funeral of Mother Teresa on television. People kiss her hands and her legs. Her eyes are open and striking.

I am inside the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, where the Cardinal of France celebrates a funeral mass. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, they open the casket with the body of the woman so family and friends can kiss her lips. Inside the casket, I see a stuffed lioness with human eyes. Her mother says, “These were the eyes of my daughter.”

The name of the cardinal is Maurice Lustiger. He was a Jewish boy in hiding during the war, as I was. After his mother perished, he entered the seminary and became a priest. I think that if my mother had not survived the Holocaust, I could have become the Cardinal of Poland.

Read more here.

Andrew Clark has a cool article about comedians’ commentary on empire over at the Walrus. The article explores comedians from pre-Petronius to post-Bill Hicks. I found this anecdote intriguing:

Petronius, like Bruce, was obsessed by the notion of obscenity and led a life of hedonistic excess. His book is a blow not against sexual dalliance, but against bad taste and hypocrisy, an ironic twist considering his audience—Nero—was a man known for his vulgarity. Ultimately, Petronius fell out of favour and Nero ordered him to commit suicide. Even so, the Arbiter of Elegance did not lose his composure. He ran a bath, slit his wrists, and slowly bled to death. Periodically he stopped up his wounds and did some writing. By the time he was finished, Petronius had composed a volume detailing all of Nero’s bisexual encounters, making special effort to cite the names of each and every partner. He sent a copy to the emperor. “There is nothing more insincere than people’s silly convictions,” he wrote prophetically in the Satyricon, “or more silly than their sham morality.”

That particular episode reminded me of Bill Hicks’s “Kill yourself!” Except he was advising advertising execs, and instead of the emperor ordering suicide, it was the comedian.

For father’s day, I am giving my dad a phonecall. That is pretty much all this year. One year, I wrote him a story (which is now included in DInarzad’s Children). Another year, I gave him a visor cap. This year, it’s a call.

There’s a post honoring my dad over at Moorish Girl.

I’m over at Moorish Girl today and every friday, so go see.

The highlight of my week thus far was my discovery of Krunkeoke, the hiphop version of Karaoke. I will go every week and put my name on the list until I get to rap “Big Poppa,” damn it!

Until then…

This review in the TLS is fabulous. Just look how it starts out:

In the early 1970s, when a friend and I were newly hatched social psychologists, we decided to write a book on happiness. The head of an eminent Boston publishing house took pity on us and, over lunch, explained the facts of life. “No one wants to read a book on happiness”, he said kindly. “Happy people don’t; why in the world would they want to? They are already happy. Unhappy people don’t want to, either. Why in the world would they want to read about happy people when they are feeling sullen and miserable? Moreover, it’s faintly embarrassing to be seen on a bus or park bench reading a book on happiness. It’s like being caught reading a book on paedophilia. A passer-by will question your motives.” And so my friend and I went our separate ways; he to write a book on loneliness, and I, a book on anger.

Robert Birnbaum interviews Alma Guillermoprieto, the author of Dancing ith Cuba, about her new book. They discuss memory, revolution, pathology, and translation. Here’s a little something:

RB: I really love the stance that you take in the book about memoirs—you question the veracity of dialogues and the memories.

AG: On the one hand I made those dialogues up. On the other hand I am convinced inside me, that I didn’t. Thirty years later I wrote down what people said. I am convinced of that, the memories are so vivid. On the other hand nobody’s memory is reliable. When I went back to Cuba one time looking for some of my lead characters—and there is a character who plays a very significant role—whose memory was the most painful to me.

RB: Who was that?

AG: One of the boy dancers.

RB: The gay one?

AG: Well—

RB: —the allegedly gay one?

AG: The allegedly gay one, yeah. And they didn’t remember him. I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t remember him. And so, whose memory is reliable?

I love that.

I also think it’s part of the writer’s job to remember those who history, society, tend to forget: those who don’t quite fit in with the larger whole’s idea of what is “best” for society, or what I’ve been calling the larger whole’s idea of the larger good, which oppresses and represses.

…and Egyptian-American journalists show up at the scene.

This was by far the most interesting NYT book review I’ve come across in months:

[Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony] Appiah uses [John Stuart] Mill… to focus ethical attention on the notion of identity.

This notion, he suggests, posits both a self with the freedom to create itself and a self shaped in relation to collective identities. Indeed, for Appiah these two ways of viewing the self are inseparable. I am who I am not only because I am engaged in the lifelong task of becoming the person I want to be but also because I can identify myself with groups of people engaged in similar ”life-projects”: secular Jews, people with kids, people raised in Iowa City, to mention three personal instances. Appiah stresses that the life-project I am carrying out, the story of my self that I’m struggling to tell, can’t be separated from the affiliations in which that project was formed and to which it refers. The very pursuit of individualism demands the cultivation of collective identities, and the often conflicting ethical demands of each represent the poles between which Appiah’s arguments swing.

Although far from a firebrand, Appiah doesn’t shy away from controversy. Thus, while his sympathies are clearly with social out-groups (how could an admirer of Mill, that visionary defender of women’s rights, not be so inclined?) he is suspicious of many group-rights arguments. He maintains that the appeal to ”culture” as a marker of group identity fails the test of coherence, falling into the very race-based logic it was designed to contest. He questions the expansive rhetoric, if not the ideal, of universal human rights — its ”mission creep.” Identity politics turn him off.

Similarly, Appiah recognizes the importance, for the sake of solidarity in a hostile world, of collective identities based on race or sexual preference, but is uncomfortable with the notion that black and white or gay and straight will always and everywhere need to be parsed as Black and White or Gay and Straight. Above all, he emphasizes the category of the individual, no matter how socially enmeshed that notion may be. ”The final responsibility for each life,” he resoundingly concludes one chapter, ”is always the responsibility of the person whose life it is.”

I’ve long been confused by my allegiance to certain groups: Arab Americans, Single Mothers, Gays, Palestinians, Egyptians, Alexandrians, Fat Chicks, People Who Grew Up In the 80s and 90s, People Who Witnessed The Gulf War, People Who Don’t Like To Have “Real” Jobs, etc.. I think of these groups in lower-case but write them down in upper-case to validate their group-status in my real world. In my real world, though, most of these groups lack coherence, and often do fail me, as an individual. I have thus opted to pursue friendships with individuals rather than pursue the larger group, which (pre)tends to stand for the larger good. I am intrigued by Appiah’s questioning of collective rhetoric– something I question daily. And the idea of two ways to view the self, and consequently, the struggle between the individual and collective identity, is one that has long fascinated me. I must read that book.