Hussein: What's in a Name?

When I was in South Africa recently, there was great hysteria amongst the Jewish community (ok, my family), brought on by an e-mail that was being sent around on the Internet claiming that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim. I tried to explain to my mother that even if Obama was a Muslim (which he isn't), it didn't make him a militant suicide bomber. She regarded me suspiciously, wanting to believe. In Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue a profile on Obama addresses these accusations thus: Todd S. Purdum writes that Obama told me [him] that he could only laugh at the false press accounts that portray Soetoro [Obama's stepfather] as some kind of radical Muslim who had sent him to an Islamic school. "I mean, you know, his big thing was Johnny Walker Black, Andy Williams records," Obama said. "I still remember 'Moon River.' He'd be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing."
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And today on Salon.com, there is a longer discussion. Take a look: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/02/28/hussein/

A Different Shoulder to Rub

I mingled with the literati at the National Arts Club last night where the finalists for the LA Times Book Award were announced. Made me think that I should get myself a job in book publishing (that's not to say I don't have a book in me). Thinking went like this: If magazine journalism has become just like selling thanks to the rampant consumerism of our time then I am nothing but a sales person. And if I'm nothing but a sales person, what is the one thing I wouldn't mind selling? Other people's novels. I'm looking into it.

By the way, the National Arts Club is a fascinating place. It is housed in the historic Tilden Mansion (15 Gramercy Park) and has been there since 1898.

Architect Philip Johnson called the mansion, "among the most beautiful in New York."

The awards will be announced in April.

And the nominees are....
Fiction

Junot Diaz, THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO (Riverhead)
Andrew O'Hagan, BE NEAR ME (Harcourt)
Stewart O'Nan, LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER (Viking)
Per Petterson, OUT STEALING HORSES (Graywolf)
Marianne Wiggins, THE SHADOW CATCHER (Simon & Schuster)

ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION

Antonia Arslan (Translated by Geoffrey Brock), SKYLARK FARM (Knopf)
Rebecca Curtis, TWENTY GRAND AND OTHER TALES OF LOVE AND MONEY (Harper)
Pamela Erens, THE UNDERSTORY (Ironweed Press)
Ellen Litman, THE LAST CHICKEN IN AMERICA (W.W. Norton)
Dinaw Mengestu, THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS (Riverhead)


Biography

Nancy Isenberg, FALLEN FOUNDER: THE LIFE OF AARON BURR (Viking)
Tim Jeal, STANLEY: THE IMPOSSIBLE LIFE OF AFRICA'S GREATEST EXPLORER (Yale)
Simon Sebag Montefiore, YOUNG STALIN (Knopf)
Robert Morgan: BOONE: A BIOGRAPHY (Algonquin)
Michael J. Neufeld, VON BRAUN: DREAMER OF SPACE, ENGINEER OF WAR (Knopf)


Current Events

Ishmael Beah, A LONG WAY GONE; MEMOIRS OF A BOY SOLDIER (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Tom Bissell, THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS: A MARINE, HIS SON, AND THE LEGACY OF VIETNAM (Pantheon)
Ronald Brownstein, THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HOW EXTREME PARTISANSHIP HAS PARALYZED WASHINGTON AND POLARIZED AMERICA (Penguin Press)
Naomi Klein, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM (Metropolitan)
Elizabeth D. Samet, SOLDIER'S HEART: READING LITERATURE THROUGH PEACE AND WAR AT WEST POINT (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Sibling Revelry

I was invited to a screening of That Other Boleyn Girl, which I couldn't make, but I did cut out of my master class in fiction to attend the lavish dinner that followed at Christie's. I mean who wouldn't cut class for a chance to view Natalie Portman, in a floor-length velvet gown, up close and Meryl Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer. Plus, the table decor featured macabre miniature guillotines with trick blades that stopped short of chopping off your digits. "Off with her fingers!"

Indie Love at the Oscars

Didn't you just love all the gushy sentimentalism at last night's 80th Academy Awards ceremony? From Juno screenwriter, Diablo Cody thanking her parents for loving her just as she is, to the short documentary winners' urging that you can fulfill your dreams. Most priceless is this "morning after the Oscars" picture on Cody's Myspace blog.
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Healing the Art World

Filip Noterdaeme, my art lecturer, who is also the artist, activist, educator and director of HoMu, the Homeless Museum of Art, took me for tea to Bouley Bakery in Tribeca this past Wednesday. We bought our coffees and our mini pastries (although we eyed those illegal Ispahans that Bouley still carries despite being accused of copying them from some other baker-genius) and were forced to go downstairs and take them in between a raw fish counter and a wine cellar. It was a most bizarre place.
Filip told me about his upcoming performance art project (although he assures me that this is not a performance, "I'm serious about it," he says): "I want to heal the art world one person at a time -- weather permitting."
Filip will take to the streets of Manhattan this Spring with his booth that resembles the one that Lucy uses in Charlie Brown. It is labeled "The Homeless Museum of Art -- The Director is IN" and indeed you will find Noterdaeme there to give counseling sessions to the willing.
Filip told me that he was at his least creative when he was doing yoga and therapy, but he didn't discount therapy the way Rilke does. He says it's about controlled madness. For more info go to www.homu.com

On Letting Go

How is a magazine editor supposed to deal with the below? One might say that the three rules of magazine editing are judging, controlling (managing), and being on trend (or right).

"There are only three things you need to let go of:
judging, controlling, and being right.
Release these three and you will have the whole mind
and twinkly heart of a child. It really is that simple."

-Hugh Prather, The Little Book of Letting Go

Peter Akinti, Debut Author

I met Peter Akinti in September 2007 at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Days later we had a drink in Harlem before he got onto a bus headed to Jena, Louisiana to see what the race riots were all about. He still says he wishes I'd gotten on that bus with him... And I still laugh at the thought of a white South African being anything other than problematic on that particular journey.
Akinti began his novel Forest Gate just before we met. It has nothing to do with Jena, but everything to do with race -- this time though it's race issues in the U.K that are looked at. In early January this year, it was acquired by Jonathan Cape. It will be published in a year from now. Look out for this new voice.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/53274-teen-suicide-novel-to-cape.html

Brent Stirton, Photographer

Brent Stirton, the great love of my twenties, recently won 1st prize Contemporary Issues Singles at the 2007 World Press Photo Awards for his photos of the evacuation of dead Mountain Gorillas discovered in Virunga National Park in Eastern Congo. The story broke in August last year in Newsweek. Take a look at the winning photograph and more of Stirton's phenomenal work at http://www.brentstirton.com/feature-gorillas.php

Reading Like a Writer

I am reading Francine Prose's book Reading Like a Writer. I am fascinated by people who have surnames that foreshadow their future career. I once heard about a guy who had a surname that portended his bisexuality: Waddilove.
But that's not why I am reading Prose's excellent book. I am studying sentence structure. And she has made that very, very simple.

I like what she says here: "You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written."