scars are sexy

So I got a forward from my good friend D in NYC the other day telling me that a novel called The Scar of David by Susan Abulhawa won a national award. The synopsis that followed said the book traces the lives in a Palestinian family through the major wars and massacres of the second half of the 20th century, starting with the Naqbe in 1948 through to the Jenin massacres in 2002. And I was excited. A novel about Palestine and by a Palestinian-American awarded the National Book Award? In a country like this? With the whitewashed, privileged literary establishment we have? Amazing! But, no. Upon closer inspection of D's email I realized it wasn't the esteemed National Book Award that Ms. Abulhawa won but something called the National "Best Books" Award, which, from what I can tell, isn't quite so esteemed. And in an email exchange with D, I realized The Scar of David had crossed my desk last spring. D sent it to me asking me to review it for an academic journal about the Middle East she's involved with. I remember getting 34 pages into it, trying to like it, wanting to at least be interested by it, but so bored by the limpid prose, the repetitive description, and the predictable, slow storyline that I had to stop. It would have been too painful to go on. I even remember being offended at the way Ms. Abulhawa represented her own people! When I told D how I felt, she had agreed I should stop. It seemed obvious it was a waste of time.

So why did the book win an award? There are many possible reasons. Maybe after page 34 it got really amazing. Maybe I am close-minded about prose and not fit to review anything that I don't consider up to a certain level that is completely arbitrary, some standard I've established in my mind that can't ever apply to the world at large, even though I might feel like it does. More likely, perhaps, the topic of Palestine is "sexy" lately (you know, Arabs and terrorists and shit) and gets little novelistic treatment on American bookshelves, so Ms. Abulhawa fulfilled some need, found some pocket of interest. And perhaps her prose, which I found limpid, to some is quite readable, easy, understandable, clear. Ms. Abulhawa's website says she was the speaker at some Wisconsin book event, and that she just sold Dutch rights with 10,000 copies pre-sold (a decent number if you who don't know from publishing). Where am I going with all this? Oh, you know, to a pessimistic place... where art and cultural exposure don't necessarily coincide. I'd love it if a good novel about Palestine or Lebanon or Egypt won an American award. But the fact that a bad (ok so I'm not 100% sure it's bad but at this point I'm going with it) one did, and that this bad novel is primarily a topical novel, riles me for a bevy of complicated reasons I can't disentangle for you right here and now. Maybe I should just shut up and go work on my own book already. (Incidentally, I do think scars are sexy.)

burst my bubble

It is day 2 of my 3-day weekend ("weekend" being defined as a period of time without having to go to work or school) and I felt a little guilty for having spent day 1 galavanting around town and not doing an ounce of writing, reading, or studying. So today I woke up early and besides some necessary trips to the kitchen and the bathroom, stayed at my desk. But I could tell from looking out the windows and from how happy my roommates were on coming in from the outside world that it was a pretty, sunny day out there. And so around four I gathered a pile of books, papers, and my laptop under my arm and ventured as far as the corner and found myself a little table at Maxfield's, my favorite cafe. So I got myself a nice warm cup of tea and cracked open my Arabic book to begin conjugating some new verbs. Halfway through the first set, I noticed a man coming up to me in my periphery.

Man: What's that? Hebrew?

Me: No. Arabic.

He wore jeans splattered in white paint and a similarly stained hat. He had a pencil behind his ear, and the skin on his face was red, splotched, scarred. He had a blond mustache and the idea that he was an angry person grew and grew as he continued to talk to me. Picture it: I am sitting at a small table just next to but facing away from the counter where the cafe people have put all the different kinds of sweeteners and creamers and utensils and this man is doctoring up his cup of coffee and continuing to talk at me and I vacillate between ignoring him to get back to my conjugation and turning to look at him because it seems like he wants to have a conversation but also it seems like he thinks he already knows who I am and he is angry at that person.

Man: What are you going to do with that? [Meaning, I suppose, the Arabic.] Be an interpreter for the U.S. government?

Me: No.

Man: You got student loans?

Me: Not for this. [I motion to my Arabic notebook.]

Man: You know, if you work for the government ten years they'll forgive your student loans, all of 'em.

Me: [Look up at him.]

Man: That's the problem with you kids nowadays. [I swear, these are the exact words that came from his lips.] You all want to be freelancers. Don't want to be managed. Just want to manage.

Me: [Look up at him.]

Man: You know what's going to happen? [No pause.] Our whole country's going to be run by [he might have said "illegal" here] immigrants.

Me: [Look up at him and feel a bit frightened by what I interpret as a hateful sneer and begin to have the urge to tell him to shut up.]

Man: You know where all this comes from? [No pause.] Lack of religion. No one wants to be told what to do.

And then he walks out of the cafe.

I've been thinking a lot lately how San Francisco, especially my 'hood, is like a bubble. It's all preaching to the choir. Everyone agrees. And as a result, people don't go deep, which leads me to judge them as ignorant and boring, which upsets me because I'm really working at being non-judgemental, but it's hard.

Maybe god sent me this guy to interrupt that recurrent thought.

i'm from the east

...the east coast is where my parents (and some cousins and an aunt I am honored to be named after) live, northern Virginia, to be exact. And its where I spent seven years of my childhood, not all at once but in spurts. I have friends there I've returned to, again and again. And places--shopping malls, schools, highways, museums--that I've revisited over and over. It happened again last weekend. I flew home and spent a few days with family and friends, who, in my everyday, are faraway people I know through telephone calls and photos posted on the internet. And it was great. I baked a raspberry-peach crumble with my sister, a finale to one of my mother's famous dinners. I got a good haircut at a cheap Vietnamese place, and my mom bought me a pair of sweet shoes. Took a drive south with my family, meandered some back roads, ate a satisfying yet unimaginative lunch at an old downtown inn. We are cosmopolitan folk, not overly impressed by ranch dressing and ice burg lettuce. I was jealous of my mom who ordered the crab cake. Lumps of amazing fresh meat smashed together on a toasty bun. The weather there was humid, and hot, strangely so for mid-October. The humidity made my hair curl and frizz, and my face broke out in a constellation of unsightly pimples. I felt like a teenager, which is inevitably how I feel when I am in my parents' house. Not necessarily a bad thing, I think. None of the leaves on the trees had turned color, as they normally do this time of year. They told me they heard that the drought means there will be none of that this year. The leaves will immediately turn a crisp brown and fall away crackling. A warm winter is in store. What is a warm winter? My mom and I saw an incredible film for free at the Smithsonian, a documentary about women in Afghanistan that followed the lives of three very different women from that country over a number of recent years. Amazing lens with which to look at the insanely unfortunate history of that country, as well as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. "View from a Grain of Sand." Watch it if you can. I drank sangrias and ate amazing sandwiches with three friends I've known since kindergarten. I visited another friend who has been very sick. It was late on Sunday and we couldn't/didn't want to drink and so sat outside a 24-hour Taco Bell sipping sodas and talking about how much cooler it is in San Francisco. And at my house, eating fruit after dinner as we've always done, I complained to my mother the orange she peeled for me (my mom loves me!) was dry and she had a piece and said it was fine. "But they are so much better in California!" And the strawberries were pinkish and were Driscoll's, the same brand name and farm as the juicy, red ones I buy here. And then I flew back to San Francisco.

i am absent

...from this page but things keep on keeping on. the weather in san francisco is gorgeous again this weekend, though days end earlier and there is a nip in the air that sneaks up on you. and a man just walked into the cafe i am sitting in wearing a full leather ensemble--black leather pants, black leather button up shirt. i wonder if he's on his way to the folsom street fair, which is today. yesterday was lovefest. san francisco is all about the street parties lately. i went to one the other night. the 15th anniversary of critical mass here. enough for me for a while. so i am absent, sitting in a cafe, thinking about street parties and attempting to write.

Massacre

I invite you to consider the events at Sabra and Chatila. Ok, so maybe wikipedia isn't the best source for info, but it's at least a starting point, a brief and arrayed sketch of what happened in the Palestinian camps south of Beirut 25 years ago this week. If you are into Robert Fisk, you'd be into what he says about the event. Here's what he wrote on the 19th anniversary. And if you aren't into him or don't know him, you should consider it anyway. After all, he was one of the first foreign journalists admitted to the blood-drenched, corpse-strewn area after the attack finally stopped. Promise me you won't take the things Bernard Lewis says about the fateful day seriously.

Anyway, it was a quarter century ago...who cares, right? I know that you know that things are still pretty bad and these sorts of scenes don't seem so far-fetched or far off or unlikely, particularly in places outside North America and Western Europe, and maybe Japan and Australia. Even though, it's true. We have our own problems, our own devastations. But I think I better sign off for now, leave all this to the experts.

Days of the Week

In my Arabic class, we have just learned the day s of the week, which is pretty cool since they basically correspond with the numbers. Can you imagine that? What if we had One-Day and Two-Day. Well, I guess we do have Tuesday. Um. So today is Tuesday but I wish it was Wednesday because Tuesday is super-busy at my work and Wednesday is my day off when I spend all day alone writing and reading (and often doing laundry) and then have class from 4pm to 10pm. I was expressing this wish to my friend and she told me not to worry, that it would be Wednesday soon enough, like tomorrow. And it touched me that she had that thought and expressed it to me in order to soften the pain of Tuesday. For real, I was touched, even though of course Wednesday comes after Tuesday, just as surely as four comes after three. And it'll happen again next week, until Apocalypse or Armageddon or something like that.

modern ruins

In the past week, I have had the pleasure of going to two fascinating places just outside San Francisco--Angel Island:


and Jack London Park:

They are both sites of incredible natural beauty--respectively: an island in the Bay with gorgeous views of the city, and a redwood and eucalyptus forest nestled in some hills above the wineries of Sonoma County. But the thing about each place that most touched my imagination were the modern ruins, pictured above. On Angel Island, in various states of disrepair, the buildings of that island's most recent history as an immigration checkpoint and army base still stand, eerily. And, in Jack London Park, we marveled at and wandered through Jack London's dream home, which burned to the remaining stone foundation just a few weeks before he was to move in. For additional and assorted photos of both of my excursions, go here and here. Better yet, visit the ruins yourself.