BRICK LANE is a profound tale of self-making and cultural appropriation

monica ali's BRICK LANE should have won the booker prize. what a rich and delightful book! i devoured the book in a weekend, and her storytelling skills and powerful writing kept me enthralled from beginning to end. what struck me and has stuck with me is the poetic symmetry of the story. ali's narrative has the sort of structural balance for which i can only yearn. best of all, is her exquisite handling of the transnational dislocation, the clash of tradition and modernity, the dialectic of socially-constructed fate and human agency. With her powerful yet seemingly effortless prose, she uses nazneen's awakening to the possibilities of her own powers as a metonym for the immigrant experience, in which the sojourner claims the begrudging host country as a home, without allowing assimilation to whitewash her, and the feminist experience, in which the woman claims her own powers without giving up her own culture. BRICK LANE is a profound tale of self-making and cultural appropriation, whereby the encounter with a different culture is done with dignity and ultimately on her own terms. BRAVO!

marc and anja's trip around the world continues

blogspot keeps eating my posts before they get published. i wrote a long paean to marc and anja and it is gone. i am peeved.

a quick recap, since i have to finish a dissertation chapter today:

i met this lovely couple from the netherlands when i was finishing my novel last spring in dali.
anja had hurt her knee, so they sojourned in dali, before recommencing their trip around the world. during the month and a half we were there together, we bonded over our love of halal hotpot, black sticky rice and yoghurt popsicles, the quest to bring better tunes to the guys working at the guesthouse (one more 'knockin' on heaven's door' and we were going to lose our lunch), and the scrappy little runt pup, xiao taidixiong (lil teddy bear) whose life marc saved by giving mouth to mouth when taidixiong was choking to death on a hot dog.

lovely people, amazing travels. i'm sure some day we'll meet again.

check out there wild adventures and wonderful photographs at their site: www.zwervenoverdewereld.nl
if you can't read dutch, click the british flag icon on the bottom for english.

maya kulenovic delivers a visceral visual suckerpunch

with her series of paintings featured on www.artquotes.net

"I look into the darker side of humanity because I cannot pretend that I don't see it - and the only way to cope with it is to understand it better, " writes kulenovic of her work.

in particular, her painting of a crowd of naked howling bodies with eerily similar faces, entitled CHORUS, disturbs as it raises questions about identity, conformity and voice.

CHECK OUT THIS ARTIST'S FEATURED WORK

what the PATRIOT act means for writers

yes, it affects all of us, not just criminals and baddies. and even though congress passed this nasty and not so little piece of work without actually reading through it, that doesn't mean that we should put our heads in the sand and pretend everything is fine here in the land of the free (or not so free). POETS & WRITERS features an article by kay murray about some of the issues that PATRIOT raises for writers.

"BASIC PROVISIONS OF PATRIOT

In a nutshell, the act gives federal law enforcement agencies (for example, the FBI, Justice Department, U.S. Attorneys) and foreign intelligence surveillance agencies (the CIA, NSA, Pentagon, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS, formerly known as Immigration and Naturalization Service or INS], Secret Service) more tools and greater leeway to spy on citizens (and legal aliens) in national security and criminal investigations. It does so in the following ways (among others):

• Makes it much easier for domestic law enforcement to use tools like roving wiretaps and phone taps
• Lowers the standard needed to convince a court to issue search warrants and subpoenas (probable cause to believe a crime is being committed or planned is no longer needed)
• Greatly expands the scope of third- party records subject to subpoena
• Permits domestic and foreign intelligence agencies to share information gathered about citizens more easily
• Allows individual district courts to issue nationwide search warrants and wiretap orders
• Permits agencies to spy—even to exercise a search warrant without notifying the person being searched
• Expands the type of information subject to surveillance to include e-mail and other online activity
• Forbids citizens subject to surveillance to challenge it in court except after the fact if they are charged with a crime"

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE