RANDA JARRAR

Coelho discusses his new novel with the NYT. Its title, “The Zahir”, the NYT says, “is an Arab concept borrowed from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges”. Coelho defines it as “a thought or idea that gradually becomes obsessional”. No. El-Zahir is a Sufi concept, and means “the outward”, which signifies the outward manifestation of the divine. Borges fabulously dealt with many Sufi concepts in his story, “The Zahir,” and in the collection The Aleph, in general.

So Coelho didn’t do his research. And neither did the Times. Shocking.

This is classic.

Ms. Atkinson stopped by the LBC yesterday to talk about writing. I love that she reads her stuff off the screen and doesn’t print anything out till it’s over; and that she shows nothing too early, except sometimes to her agent. Also, her comment– that if she had enough money, she wouldn’t publish– was fabulous.

Please read one of her books, or better yet, all of them (Human Croquet is the only one I haven’t yet read.) She is worthy of worship.

And who let this chick Kristina Grish write my book?

Sweet article about the Gaza rap group P.R.

Nadir is a barber from Marasi, and Muhammad is a 19 year old who was once shot in the arm and now sits at his computer and makes beats. From the article:

Critical Palestinians speak of a “culture of death”; as long as their compatriots are being shot dead, wounded and held in jail, many people feel that there should be no public manifestation of joy. Now, large wedding parties are again taking place in the Gaza Strip; but although dance music is played, none of the seated guests even claps along to it. It’s an attitude that links the generations: music and exuberance are targets of disapproval.

Hindered at home, the Palestinian Rappers were delighted by the chance to tour Northern Ireland in March. The tour was organised by a solidarity committee in the province, and it gave Muhammad the opportunity to leave the Gaza Strip for the first time in his life.

“And when we came back”, he laughs, “the first thing that happened was we were summoned by the Palestinian intelligence agency. They wanted to know whether I knew any Americans and what I had been up to in Ireland.”

Read on here.

Amina Rachid writes an obit, focussing on Bencheikh’s new translation of A Thousand Nights and a Night:

A text that has been endlessly read and re- read, and one to be found on the bedside tables of both Proust and Borges, this book was a revelation for Bencheikh, since it signaled the revelation of another meaning to Arab culture and perhaps a truer one. Before the publication, in 1991, of the first edition of Bencheikh’s joint translation of the Thousand and One Nights, which he completed with André Miquel, Bencheikh published various critical studies of the text in which he brought out what for him was essential to it: namely, its subversive character and its way of getting around the law. Thus, in his book Les Mille et une nuits, ou la parole prisonnière (The Thousand and One Nights, or Imprisoned Speech), which appeared in 1988, after having analysed the various mechanisms employed in the work Bencheikh concluded that “this anonymous work….preserves the echo of a speech that has become a prisoner, a speech that is buried still deeper than desire and that is even more subversive than love. At the centre of civilisation appears this strange memory of another age.” In another work, this time produced in collaboration with Claude Brémond and André Miquel, entitled Les Mille et un contes de la nuit (The Thousand and One Tales of the Night) and appearing in 1991, Bencheikh analysed another aspect of the text: the connection between love and death.

From the NYer’s review of the new “anti-high school” film, Pretty Persuasion:

Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood), the high-school vamp and evil genius in the new satirical comedy “Pretty Persuasion,” tells her protégée, Randa (Adi Schnall), an Arab émigrée, that she, Kimberly, is glad she is white. Then she wonders what she would choose to be if she had to be something else. For Randa’s benefit, she lists the possibilities in her order of preference: first Asian, then African-American (as long as she could have “Caucasian features,” like Halle Berry), ending with Arab.

The movie was penned by Skander Halim. Everything I’ve read about it is a mixture of warning and urging, which makes me want to see it.

Now that the kiddo’s home, I’m watching a lot more TV, because he does. The newest Taco Hell commercial confused me with its claim of a “textural tase sensation.” I googled the phrase, because I am a very busy, highly productive person, and found out that they have a “Word Mash-up” dictionary on their site. It’s painfully bad. Samples:

Chillax (v)
Chill out and relax, hang out with friends.

Labradoodle (n)
A cross breed dog. Half poodle, half labrador.

Zlander (n)
Someone who talks badly about a person when they are sleeping.

(Side note: the dictionary gives no definitions, false or otherwise, for “Arab.”)

Over at TMN, an interview with James Howard Kunstler, author of nine novels and four books of non-fiction, most recently The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century:

RB: Your apocalyptic vision. We are trying to understand how to process your description of this major discontinuity that people view with various degrees of acceptance and incredulity. Again, I was talking about your book, and someone claimed that their boyfriend converts vegetable oil to fuel for their car. I said, “Didn’t it take some energy to get the vegetable oil to its current state?”

JHK: Let’s talk about this [alternative fuels] for a moment. I tell people that no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to continue running the interstate highways and Disney World and Wal-Mart—even a substantial fraction of what we are running in America—the way we are running it. And we will use them but probably at a much smaller scale than most people anticipate. I had a run-in with bio-diesel enthusiasts in Middlebury [Vt.], and they were incensed that I wasn’t as enthusiastic as they were about it. A lot of them were young. I tried to explore their thinking. And I asked, “Has it occurred to you that as our industrial methods of agriculture fade and fail that probably we’ll have to devote more crop land to the production of human food because our crop yields will go down when we stop pouring fertilizers and pesticides and natural gas-based products and oil-based fuels and so forth on the soil? And so we will have to devote more land for growing food for humans?” And it was, “Oh, dude, we, like, didn’t plan on that.”

Roget’s online thesaurus pulled its bullshit definition of “Arab” Monday after the ADC et al protested it. The thesaurus had given “Arab” the definitions “beggar,” as well as 16 other false synonyms like “homeless person” and “welfare bum.” Barbara Ann Kipfer, editor of the third edition of the Thesaurus, said: “We’re simply going to take it out… The last thing you want with a thesaurus is to offend anyone.”

No, Babs, the last thing you want with a thesaurus is to give the wrong definition/synonym for a word.

Link via Maud.