RANDA JARRAR

An interview with Jonas Hassan Khemiri (who is a hottie) about his book (which came out only in Sweden) and his ideas about identity. Here’s a little somthin’:

Halil rebels against the discontinuation of Arabic lessons at school and against his liberal father. How much do you identify with this attitude?

Khemiri: As an adolescent I tried to distance myself from Swedish identity – to the point of completely romanticizing my Arab origins. Once I said to my father: “We’ll be going home soon.” My father asked: “What do you mean?”

To see Le Tigre at Emo’s. Those bitches are the bomb. I can’t wait. I’m already dancing.

Tomorrow’s my last Friday at Moorish Girl, so stop by and say bye.

I can’t wait to see the newest Wong Kar Wai film, 2046. You can check out the trailer and some gorgeous stills from the film here.

From Nathan Lee’s Film Comment profile:

2046 is a place, a time, the name of a novel, the number of a hotel room, and, in the form of an anime megalopolis, the first digital representation in Wong’s cinema. 2046 is also, always, 2046: a cine-Narcissus enraptured by its own depths, unnerved by what it sees, struggling to pull away from its own image. Given the difficulties, the expectations, the reputation at stake, the scrutiny, the daunting perfection of In the Mood for Love—how could it have been otherwise? Anxiety: “Science-fiction films are not about science,” wrote Susan Sontag. “They are about disaster.”

Daniel Clowes tells the Guardian that he finds writing female characters easier than writing male ones:

“With every male character I feel like I either have to consciously make it not myself or I have to make it myself,” he says. “In the case of these girls, there’s a certain freedom. I just don’t feel any connection to them. I don’t feel like I have to represent myself.”

I wonder: What does it mean when a writer doesn’t feel a connection to his characters? What does it mean when this lack of connection represents freedom to the writer? Not having to represent oneself can be freeing, I understand, but maybe Clowes would be a better writer–of both male and female characters– if he didn’t suffer from a thought process which forces him to see characters as either himself, not himself, or female.

Ghost World did absolutely nothing for me. I went to three different high schools, one of which was British, the school system I was brought up in. But that’s not why. When I moved to the US, the books I loved reading in English class and in the library were Red Badge of Courage, Old Man and the Sea, The Scarlet Letter, and Norman Mailer’s Marilyn Monroe bio. It’s probably because these books had characters I could relate to, because their creators were free of something Clowes and others like him are tethered by. If someone had given me Ghost World when I was in high school, I would have taken it back, gotten my $12 or whatever, and bought myself books I could relate to. Or cassettes of bad techno.

I hung out today with an old friend and her new baby, whom she has chosen to nurse. A few blocks from my friend’s house, there is a billboard that shouts, “Babies were made to be breastfed.” I’d noticed it a few months ago, and it made my blood boil. It still does.

My friend moved to the US from the Middle East nine years ago. She is now married. Her husband is white. She says she had her first moment of judgement here, in the US, a few days ago.

RANDA: You’ve never felt moral judgement here?
FRIEND: No. You can sleep with anyone you want here. Do almost anything you want. As a woman. Come on, you know how everyone makes you their business back home.
RANDA: Yeah. I know.
FRIEND: I was sitting around the living room with [my mother-in-law, brother-in-law], and a few others. I said, “I’m only breastfeeding for three months.” Everybody was quiet. Dead silent. They were staring at me like I’d just said…
RANDA: That you wanted to fry up your baby’s head and eat it?
FRIEND: Yeah!
RANDA: Are you sure you weren’t projecting?
FRIEND: Wait! They each told me breastfeeding for a year was best for the baby. That babies who are breastfed turn out smarter– a good way to snag an academic!

She winks.

FRIEND: But I told [my brother-in-law], “I’ve read way too much Foucault not to know about the nature of punishment and discipline.”

I laugh.

RANDA: You actually said that?
FRIEND: Yes.

I slap her five.

FRIEND: Breastfeeding is a way to discipline women. Keep them tied to their babies and like, keep their bodies under control.
RANDA: Yeah. I only did it for four months.
FRIEND: I hate the way this state sponsors breastfeeding so agressively, it’s totally state-sponsored discipline.
RANDA: Are you talking about the billboard?
FRIEND: The billboard? Habibti?
RANDA: Yeah?
FRIEND: There’s not just one.

The CSM reviews Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure And Radiant Heart. I heard Millet read a section of the book at Park Lit in brooklyn a couple weeks ago. I was initially distracted by the event’s feel: a dozen mostly white folks transplanted to Prospect Park. But I snapped into the reading when Millet read the section where the protagonist imagines what she would choose if given the choice to either live in chaos or to not exist at all. She chooses the chaos.

My teenage dream of belonging to a dance squad and wearing lots of eye glitter has finally come true! I am the newest member of the Super Sonic Soul Squad, an Austin-based all-girls’ dance team. We wear shiny outfits and dance around in clubs and parking lots. The next show is in October, and you’re all invited. Updates forthcoming.

I’m staying over at a friend’s house because my apartment is filled with smoke.

There’s a short story and a long story. The short story is: my neighbor’s an idiot who started a huge grease fire and didn’t have a fire extinguisher – and didn’t ask for one, and didn’t call the fire department. I lent him mine and now we’re all alive and happy, but my apartment is still completely smoked out, and he’s still an idiot.

The long story: some details are embarassing. Basically, I was trying out a new “toy” from blowfish, and I smelled smoke. I thought the toy was melting or burning out, or something. But then I realized something was on fire.

I jumped up and peered out the window and saw smoke shadows coming from my neighbor’s.

I quickly threw some pants on and ran outside and spied on him. He was putting out a fire the size of a fucking Mine Cooper with a welcome mat.

I’m sorry, I need to repeat that. He was putting out a fucking fire. The size of a Mini fucking Cooper. With a mother fucking welcome mat.

I ran back inside and grabbed the phone, dialed 911 and hung up, grabbed the fire extinguisher, ran back outside, yelled, “Hey man, here’s a fire extinguisher!”

“No, I got it.”

“Take the fucking fire extinguisher!”

He puts out the fire with the extinguisher in .2 seconds.

He comes out coughing. “I was just heating up some grease.” He actually tries to socialize. I will spare you the details of the idiot’s post-fire-setting small talk.

I go back inside and my apartment is filled with smoke so thick, I can’t see more than a few inches in front of my face. I open all the windows, noticing for the first time that my window “screens” are ripped up, and turn on all the fans at full blast.

I get the phone, go to the parking lot, and call the only friend I think I can call at 1AM to ask, “Can I spend the night over at y’alls?” I’m facing a truck in the parking lot. “My neighbor just set some grease on fire.”

And as I say that, my eye rests on the truck, and I see them. About a dozen bullet holes.

I’m standing outside my fucking apartment with smoke and fumes spilling out of it like sleeping dragon’s breath and I’m staring at a bullet riddled truck.

I have to move out, y’all. I really do.

You know where I am today…

Qantara reports that Ibn Tufayl’s 12th Century philosophical masterpiece, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (the “Arab Robinson Crusoe”) is now out in German translation. About the novel:

Ibn Tufayl tells the story of a man named Hayy ibn Yaqzan, who grows up alone on a South Sea island on the equator and, aided only by his powers of observation and his intellect, gradually investigates the nature of things – from the anatomy of animals to the attributes of God.

Medieval explanations of the world from both the Orient and the Occident often assume a knowledge of philosophical traditions – the four elements, bodily fluids, the planets, or the difference between matter and form, substance and accident.

Ibn Tufayl, on the other hand, allows his hero Hayy ibn Yaqzan to acquire all of this knowledge by himself. He demonstrates why fire, water, earth, and air must be the most fundamental elements; through dissection he discovers the etheric vehicle of the vital force, the spirit; from observations he deduces the arrangement of the celestial spheres; and he establishes the existence of the soul and the celestial intelligences.

I’m going down to the PCL tomorrow to look for it. I tried to find it once in grad school, but gave up so I can focus on thesis research. I think the only thing I wound up focusing on was not missing happy hour.