Tumang and DeRivera: Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time
An essay of mine is included in this anthology from Seal Press.
Celeste Lipow Macleod: Multiethnic Australia: Its History and Future
My mother-in-law wrote it!
Australia is a huge melting pot. Read about progressive labor politics and the multi-cultural mix.
Chant Avedissian: Cairo Stencils
An artist I knew a long time ago
Maria Golia: Cairo : City of Sand
A multi-layered look at Cairo's present reality: people, daily life, language, interactions with visitors and the world. Conceived as a series of long chapters, readable yet extensively footnoted, it combines scholarly research with a writer's eye for detail. A must for Cairo visitors and residents.
Deborah Madison: Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Indispensable - I use it all the time, and give it as presents to brides, young people starting out, etc. Not for vegetarians only - hence the title - a great resource for anybody wanting delicious recipes for vegetables, grains and legumes. Great sauces and salads, too.
Claudia Roden: Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon
Excellent in-depth cultural and social essays on three major cuisines; the recipes include the standards as well as unusual dishes, and the photographs are gorgeous. A great gift book - the Dove asked for and got it for Christmas.
Award-winning author Micheline Aharonian Marcom reads Wednesday, April 9 at Cody's, Berkeley: Draining the Sea: Micheline Aharonian Marcom.
Time: 7 pm
Place: Cody's (new location) Shattuck & Allston, Berkeley
The new novel explores the war in Guatemala and the continuing reverberation in one man's soul of the Armenian genocide.
From the New Yorker Say It All in Six Words.
Six words can tell a story. That’s a new book’s premise, anyway. “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” A compilation of teeny tiny memoirs.
My six-word story:
"Half-Arab wanderer settles in California."
Now the Arabs among my readers understand why my domain name is "Bedouina." My grandmother used to sing to me:
"Ya Leila'al-Badaweyah, rid as-salaam 'alayah, Lay-o-layla, ya Layla, ya Layla-al-Badaweyah." Or something like that.
Years later my New York psychiatrist said this was very significant. Sitteh gave me a song and a story: the Bedouin girl...
Usually I don't go for these but I'll try this one. From Jade Park, a "meme" 10 Signs A Book Might Be Written By Me.
OK that feels really weird to write for public consumption. Taking a chance here. If you feel inspired, I tag you to write your own list.
My best score at FreeRice: 49 (out of 50). They say that's pretty rare. At this site you play a simple vocabulary game for as long as you like. Each click donates free rice to the poor of the world.
I scored so well because I took a Shakespeare class in grad school, played violin for a decade and know a little Italian, studied French, and of course can ace all Arabic-derived words like felucca, hamal, bulbul and attar. Also I'm just a good guesser - I would say my guess rate on words I don't know is about 75% correct. I never studied Latin or Greek but I was trained in grade school to recognize major Latin and Greek roots that get used in English to form new words. Does anybody teach this stuff to kids anymore?
If I'd studied more biology, anatomy and philology I would get the animal, plant and body part terms. In fact it's usually the terms from the hard sciences that stump me. That's what you need to make 50 - Latin, Greek, Arabic, Spanish or French, Italian, plus an MD or Ph.D. in Chemistry Physics or Biology.
Here's a word I haven't seen on freerice yet, derived from Arabic. I first read it in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: noria. I love that word. Go look it up.
I don't usually think about the fact that I have a Masters Degree in English - it's so much less work and learning than a Ph.D. would be - but I can see that it did help my vocabulary!
Update: ooh, I looked up noria on Free Dictionary.com. My Webster's print edition said it was from the Arabic, which is all I knew before, but now Free Dictionary says the Arabic was from Aramaic. Since my father's roots are Aramaic - he grew up singing Aramaic liturgy in church - I find this particularly synchronistic. No wonder I like the word "noria." It's got Jungian resonance to my collective unconscious. Also, the thing itself is a delight.
From the Beirut Daily Star: Six finalists named for first 'Arabic Booker'.
Six writers from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt have been shortlisted for the first annual International Prize for Arabic Fiction, jury chief Samuel Shimon announced Tuesday during a news conference in London at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
The jury, whose six members were also revealed for the first time on Tuesday, selected Lebanese novelists Jabbour Douaihy and May Menassa, Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa, Jordanian novelist Elias Farkouh and Egyptian novelists Mekkaoui Said and Baha Taher from an entry pool of 131 writers from 18 countries. The shortlisted writers win $10,000 each, and are now in the running for the final $50,000 prize, which will be announced during an awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi on March 10.
See more at The International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
The previous post on Collapse fiction sparked a thread in comments about what to read when recovering from an illness.
Alison suggests Ian Frazier or Fran Lebowitz.
Nona says:
For silly with an enviro streak, try Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip &/or Nature Girl. For super silly, read the Artemis Fowl series with (or without) your boys. For silly with a dark side, try Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job. And not silly, but highly recommended is Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills. I read that while recuperating recently and it was a great tonic.
I read Ten Days in the Hills this summer (Jane Smiley herself signed it for me at a bookstore in Oakland!) - it is indeed just the right tonic for what might ail you. Hollywood stars, mysterious rich Russians with a fabulous mansion, angry liberals mad about the Iraq war while indulging in sybaritic pleasures. Hints of Boccaccio.
Please suggest good books to read while recovering from illness - in comments. Silly is good but not necessary - the Smiley book is not silly.
One of my recurring waking nightmares is the possible collapse of our civilization and the ecosystem that sustains it. I have tried to stop worrying about this possibility since the doctors told me in September that I have metastatic breast cancer. But the angst runs deep.
In chemotherapy, begun a month ago, I find I spend a lot of time reading novels. Here I am, writing a novel, but I don't sit around reading novels much unless they were assigned for a class I took (in grad school) or now as part of my writing group's reading program. However with chemo I am forced to rest in bed; surfing the internet for too long makes me feel terrible, so I read, and read fiction, not the usual non-fiction/journalism I tend to consume like potato chips.
Last week I stayed up all night reading Jose Saramago's Blindness. In this novel, a city is suddenly stricken with a plague of blindness - everybody eventually goes blind, and the collapse of society ensues. We follow a doctor, his wife, and a band of fellow travelers as they struggle to survive in the madness. It's harrowing and I could not put it down.
A few days later I found myself leafing through Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year, a fictionalized account (published as "true") of the great plague in 17th century London. I merely dipped into the book, enough to capture stories and horrific visions (giant pits for burying the dead, townspeople wandering the countryside looking for food and shelter, etc.)
Defoe led me to hunt for a Doris Lessing novel with a similar theme - there it was on the study shelf: Memoirs of a Survivor. I read that yesterday. In it an elderly woman in an apartment block in an unnamed city (resembling London) takes in an orphan girl, watches the chaos ensuing from societal collapse from her window, and hallucinates an alternative reality just beyond her house walls.
The above are all kin to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower, two linked novels portraying a woman's struggle to survive and prevail on the West Coast of the USA as society falls apart. The images of urban warfare and of marauding gangs walking up Interstate 5 from L.A. to Seattle have haunted me for years. Butler's America looks very much like my own, and the destruction, mayhem and collapse she depicts could so easily happen around me. She imagines what lies just on the other side of our fragile civilization.
The logical culmination of a collapse book series would be Cormac McCarthy's bestseller, The Road. But his work is so dark, and a paragraph quoted in a review was so horrific, that I've told myself best not to read this one until I am out of the woods with my illness. On the other hand, I wonder if reading all these collapse novels will have inoculated me so that I won't be quite so susceptible to the horrors if and when I do read The Road.
At the very least, I have a fabulous reading list for a very depressing college literature course. Or maybe there's a publishable article in here somewhere...
The New York Times reports that American students' reading scores are going down starting in middle school and continuing through college. Study links decline in test scores to decline in time spent reading. Well duh. Would you be surprised if a decline in baseball batting scores was linked to a decline in time spent playing baseball?
The pontificators muse that teachers and schools need to develop new programs to promote a culture of learning.
Look folks, whether you're an Arab, Chinese, Frenchman, or American, the fix is simple.
Read aloud to your kids. Even if they are old enough to read for themselves.
If you are too poor to buy books and have no access to a library (not a problem in most of the USA, and probably not for anybody who access the internet) then read aloud from your spiritual tradition: Bible, Koran, Bhaghavad Gita, you name it. You don't need to be a believer to get a great cultural and spiritual inheritance from these volumes.
Read them the newspaper. Read them yesterday's newspapers. Are you too proud? Do you want your kids to be dumb, or do you want to look "good" for the neighbors?
If you live in the affluent West you may get a library card for free which will open the door to worlds of learning once available only to archbishops and princelings.
Oh yes, and turn off those damn game boys/xboxes/tvs/cel phones/i-pods. Just throw them all out why don't you? They are poisoning your children's brains.
Easier said than done, I know. But your kids will be better off without them. My children have access to online computer games (carefully screened and time limited) and to broadcast TV with select DVDs. That's it. They don't understand why they don't have an XBox but they accept that somehow that's the way it is. And that's the way it will be for as long as we can hold out.
They spend a lot of time playing with toy figurines, blocks, costumes and swords. They also like to draw, cut out their pictures and write in composition books. They have taken to making me darling cards that say "I love you Mom".
Click here to access the podcast of the radio show which features a five minute clip of me reading from my Homelands Anthology essay: UpFront: American Empire at Home and Abroad - NAM.
I wouldn't say that this comment is exactly about me and Palestinians - the title is "Heartbroken for Lebanon". The excerpt does deal with my relationship to Ain-el-Helweh camp, which lies in part on my family's property.
For my Bay Area readers: this will be rebroadcast on KALW-FM at 2:30 pm on Sunday, October 28th. My piece is a five minute segment within a half-hour program, so you'll have to listen to the whole thing to hear me.
Eight of us Mills MFA graduates, mostly class of '07, meet regularly to discuss books and read our works in progress to each other. We work under the inspiration of our teacher, Micheline Marcom, who urged us to let great writers open us. Let them inhabit our work. Write back to them. Write in conversation with them. So we read King Lear and write a "response", usually as part of a work in progress. My King Lear response showed a raving grandmother at the hour of her death in Lebanon 1985, fighting with her offspring who want her to flee. My response to Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family featured cousins sitting around on the balcony in Lebanon 1995, with the expatriate relative looking out at the old homestead and musing, much as Ondaatje's narrator does in his memoir. My work and my characters are very much my own, but it's freeing and inspiring to let great literature seed my own writing in this manner.
I have organized a reading series for us titled The Ecstacy of Influence. We took the name from a Jonathan Lethem essay calling for appropriation and influence in literature.
Our first reading will be Tuesday, October 23, at 7:30 p.m. in Oakland California.
Place: Laurel Books, 4100 MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland, corner of 39th Avenue (across from Lucky's, about halfway between High Street and 35th Avenue). Bookstore phone: 531-2073.
If you have time and interest, we would love to see you there!
Light refreshments provided.
