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For Student Journalists, Challenges in Putting Out the School Newspaper
There was something wrong in each of the four issues of The Bennett that students at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School produced last year. Or at least that is what the assistant principal thought. Before they went to press, she edited 50 percent to 75 percent of the articles in each issue of the student newspaper. Everything from punctuation to a review of a school performance was fair game for the administrator’s red pen.“My students got to the point that they were saying, ‘Why should we do this? They are going to cut it anyway,’ ” said The Bennett’s adviser, Taisha Matthews… Read More
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What Egypt’s Military Council Didn’t Learn from the Revolution
My friend Yusri Foda is the host of the Egyptian talk show, The Last Word. Yusri invited me to take part in his show to comment on a program that featured Generals Assar and Hegazy of the military council. Despite my full respect for the generals, what they said in the program was disappointing because they confined themselves to praising the decisions of the military council. The next day, Yusri called me to tell me that the show had been cancelled. When I asked him what had happened, he said, “There were pressures that led to cancelling the program, so I’ve decided to suspend the show. In my work, I obey only my conscience and I can never agree to take orders from any other party.” … Read More
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J. Edgar, the movie(2011)
Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep… Read More
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Venice’s Love Affair With Egypt
VENICE — For centuries most of the eastern spices on European tables were traded by Venetians via the markets of Egypt. Along with them came exotic textiles, dyes, glass, metalwork and other fine Islamic goods.But Egypt itself — Alexandria in particular — was also of enormous religious and mythical significance for the Venetians. For it was from Alexandria that the remains of St. Mark had been hijacked by two Venetian merchants in 828, an event that, in the Venetian mind, came to be seen as the beginning of Venice’s rise to power, empire and immense wealth.The story of this remarkably enduring east-west relationship is related in “Venice and Egypt,” illustrated by more than 300 paintings, sculptures, artifacts, manuscripts, books and prints at the Doges’ Palace…Read More
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Hollywood Plans Big Binge for Christmas
It’s going to be a hot and crowded holiday at the box office. After shuffling schedules, finishing final edits and kicking tires on the festival circuit, Hollywood is preparing for a holiday film season that will end with a spectacular collision of high-profile pictures.There were four major studio releases on or around Christmas Day last year, and three the year before. But in the five days ending on Dec. 25 — a Sunday, not the usual day for film debuts — five of the major studios are to release six movies with a total production and marketing cost approaching $1 billion, from directors who have 25 past Oscar nominations among them… Read More
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Longlist Announced for International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2012
The long-awaited longlist for the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction was announced this morning. Popularly known as the Arabic Booker, the prize, currently in its fifth year, has come to be regarded as the premier prize for literary fiction in the Arab world. This year’s list contains 13 titles, culled from a selection of 101 entries from 15 countries, all published within the last year… View Website
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What It’s Like to Work for Adonis
It’s Nobel Day, which means that, around the world, curiosity-seekers such as myself will be glued to their computers at 1 p.m. CET.
With “Arab Spring” chatter in the air, it becomes perhaps more likely but certainly less pleasant to think about an Arab or Arabic-writing author taking the literary prize of prizes. It’s both fortunate and unfortunate that we can’t return to 1988, when Naguib Mahfouz was chosen from an Arab shortlist of Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Tayeb Salih, and Adonis—to worldwide surprise.
If the Nobel Prize committee wanted to surprise us now, they certainly couldn’t choose Adonis, who has topped the gossip charts for weeks now. Even readers who’ve never glanced at one of his poems know his name and basic biography.
Other Arab names are circulating: Zakaria Tamer, Assia Djebar, Ibrahim al-Koni, Elias Khoury, Samih al-Qasim, Hanan al-Shaykh, Leila Aboulela, Alaa al-Aswany, Tahar Ben Jelloun. (No Bensalem Himmich? And why no Sonallah Ibrahim? Am I the only Sonallah Ibrahim partisan here?) But Adonis remains the top of the charts, by virtue of—well, by virtue of, politics aside, deserving the thing.
I still don’t really think he’ll get it, although there’s no pinning down the politics of The Committee. But just in case, I enjoyed re-reading Samuel Shimon’s “autobiographical novel” An Iraqi in Paris, for the parts where the titular Iraqi works for a famous Arab poet who he pseudonymizes as “Adams.”
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Doha Film Institute to fund production of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
With just under three weeks to go until the start of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival and the world premiere of Arabian epic Black Gold, the Doha Film Institute (DFI) has announced that The Reluctant Fundamentalist will be the second major international film to receive funding.
Based on the bestselling Booker Prize-nominated book by Mohsin Hamid, the film adaption of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is being directed by Mira Nair, with Riz Ahmed in the lead role of Changez, a Pakistani Princeton-graduate who tells the story of his love affair with America and his eventual abandonment of the country after the events of September 11. Kate Hudsen, Lieve Schrieber and Kiefer Sutherland also star.
The film started shooting earlier in the week on location in Atlanta, New York, Lahore, Delhi and Istanbul. No release date has yet been set.
“My father lived in Lahore before the partition of India and Pakistan,” says Nair, who is producing the film with the Doha Film Institute through her production company, Mirabai Films. “I am inspired to make a contemporary film about Pakistan, especially in this day and age when the perceived schism between Islamists and the Western world becomes more pronounced each day.”
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SAT reading scores drop to lowest point in decades
By Michael Alison Chandler, Published: September 15
SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College Board reported Wednesday.
In the Washington area, one of the nation’s leading producers of college-bound students, educators were scrambling to understand double-digit drops in test scores in Montgomery and Prince William counties and elsewhere.
“Once you hit a certain mark, you want to maintain that,” said Frieda Lacey, deputy superintendent for Montgomery schools. “Don’t think the decline didn’t bother us. It really did.”
Nationally, the reading score for the Class of 2011, including public- and private-school students, was 497, down three points from the previous year and 33 points from 1972, the earliest year for which comparisons are possible. The average math score was 514, down one point from last year but up five from 1972.
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What Do Egypt’s Writers Do Now?
The Egyptian revolution is over, the army wields power and the new government is in disarray. Tensions between Christians and Muslims are ascendant and members of the elite are leaving the country in droves while those who remain bemoan the masses as ignorant ideologues. This is the Egypt of Waguih Ghali’s “Beer in the Snooker Club,” a coming-of-age novel set in 1952 that, much like “The Catcher in the Rye” in America, articulated the identity crisis of a generation. Ghali’s characters — young, precocious, cosmopolitan — are lost in the bewildering aftermath of the military coup that overthrew the pliant boy-king Farouk. They pine for the easeful gambling, womanizing and drinking of the past even as they scorn both the ancien régime’s sordid pretensions and the new regime’s inability to deliver on its vaulted promises; “We have the worst of both systems,” one of them declares, exasperated. Ghali, who published his novel in 1964 and committed suicide five years later in the bathtub of his British editor’s Primrose Hill apartment, took the fall of the monarchy as his subject. Still, his tale presents uncanny parallels to today’s Egypt, where artists, intellectuals and youth at large are beginning to fashion a new cultural republic of sorts even as they also struggle to find their bearings.
Under Mubarak, the Egyptian literary scene, long the center of the Arab cultural universe, floundered. While the state remained the primary patron of Egyptian literature, absorbing and co-opting anyone it possibly could, many authors escaped prickly Egyptian censors by publishing their books in more lenient Lebanon. Meanwhile, plush literary foundations and glittering prizes popped up in the much wealthier gulf countries. Still, there were pockets of activity. In the late 1990s, a former journalist named Mohamed Hashem founded Merit, a publisher credited with nurturing a new Egyptian avant-garde. Merit published Alaa al-Aswany, the dentist turned literary star whose “Yacoubian Building” captured the jaded grandeur of downtown Cairo. It also put out Ahmed Alaidy, whose stories of youthful mall culture used a vernacular Arabic — complete with text messages — that challenged the high orthodoxy of classical Arabic, and Khaled al-Berry, who skillfully narrated his experiences as a teenage jihadist in “Life Is More Beautiful Than Paradise.”
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The Dinner Guest Who Never Left
Ali Smith loves words. She loves playing with them, calling attention to them, listening to them as if they were members of a vast extended family, each precious in its own right and she their fair-minded parent, determined not to play favorites. She can give the word “but” such a star turn that you wonder why you’d ever taken it for granted.
Smith’s love of language lights up all her books, a body of work that encompasses four previous novels and four volumes of short stories, and that has garnered prizes including the Whitbread Award in Britain. But (Oh there it is! As one of Smith’s characters says, “The thing I particularly like about the word but . . . is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting”) Smith’s wordplay never comes at the expense of the many other facets in her complicated creations — characters, places, ideas.
Smith’s new novel, “There but for the,” is a witty, provocative urban fable about an unexpected guest who shows up at a dinner party in the London suburb of Greenwich and then, midway through, locks himself inside the guest bedroom and refuses to leave. The novel is divided into four main sections, “There,” “But,” “For” and “The,” though the title phrase is nowhere spoken, leaving us to wonder which “There” Smith is referring to, and whether she intends for her readers’ minds to echo with the phrase “Grace of God Go I” — and if so, which God and, for that matter, which I. Such uncertainties typify Smith’s sly and circuitous method. She is not a writer to seize on if linearity and a clear plotline are what you’re after. On the other hand, if you enjoy surprising, often comic insights into contemporary life, she’s someone to relish.
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Book Recommendations for September 2011
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Azar Nafisi’s Memoirs. – A book I’m looking forward to reading. Read more of this book review in the Washington Post. Also read an excerpt from Chapter 1.
Nafisi’s sensory descriptions of Tehran life — the “enticing cacophony” of its streets, the daily forays her mother makes to the market, where she appears to be “so much at home in this world of chocolates, leather, and spices” — are as vivid as the portraits of her exotically dysfunctional family. My one grievance concerning Things I’ve Been Silent About is that, like many a Near Eastern family reunion, the book is excessively crowded. Chatty cousin after chatty cousin, friend after friend, ponderous wise man after ponderous wise man barge into Nafisi’s pages, too briefly described to warrant our interest, crowding and often muddling her narrative. But this is a modest complaint to make about an utterly memorable (pardon the alliteration) memoir.
Book: The Forever War (Iraq)
listen to this book review. On this page you will also find an interview with the author and you can read an excerpt.
To classify The Forever War as a work of literature instead of, say, as a piece of “war correspondence,” is not to denigrate its journalistic integrity. Dexter Filkins’ reporting is as rigorous in this book’s informal vignettes and essays as it was when he delivered the daily news from Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times.
THE FLORENTINE
I read Machiavelli’s The Prince in graduate school and found it quite fascinating. Here’s a great article written by Claudia Roth Pierpont from today’s New Yorker on the man behind one of the most famous books ever written.
The Prince,” Machiavelli’s how-to guide for sovereigns, turned out to be “a scandal that Western political thought and practice has been gazing at in horror and in fascination since its first publication,” to quote from Albert Russell Ascoli’s introduction to Peter Constantine’s new translation. Circulated in manuscript for years, the book was not published until 1532—nearly five years after Machiavelli’s death—and received its first significant critique within the decade, from an English cardinal who pronounced the author “an enemy of the human race.”
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Welcome to the Counter-Jihad
Robin Wright contends that the Arab world’s young people are at the vanguard of a sweeping and seductive cultural revolution.
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