Saturday, July 29, 2006
tharoor at silverfish
Went to shashi tharoor’s reading at silverfish a few days back. This is one of the very few readings I’ve ever gone to….the last one was where Feisal Tehrani and Uthaya P Sankar read their pieces… and I can’t remember where and how long ago that was…
I made a point to go this time as he quite possibly will be our new UN top guy and if that happens it would be a very very long time before anybody will ever get to hear his next reading I guess…
And as the reading will be in Bangsar I thought well, may be there would be a few smashing looking girls present and I should look more presentable than my usual shabby self and so just to make sure everything is in order I went to the loo at that new shopping complex opposite that busy and popular Indian restaurant devi’s corner and checked myself in the mirror and what was that little loose string hanging from my left collar button? without thinking I tugged at it a bit and oh bugger, out came the little button spinning down the floor and careened to god knows where.
That made me worried sick as it was very obvious that I would look positively stupid with that button missing on one side of the lapels…and I know that literary readings events are not exactly Britney Spears’ concerts and it would be lucky if we get the whole of ten people present and everybody is bound to notice me…so I decided to buy and change into a cheap t-shirt and if it’s black I guess it would look quite ok but this being bangsar, the most image conscious and hypocritical spot in the whole of Malaysia the cheapest one you’d ever get here is for RM40 which I’d be damned if I were to fork out that much for a t-shirt that I could easily get for ten at giant or tesco just to impress some ladies who would most likely won’t notice me anyway…and as the time was nearly 6.00 pm I took my chance and hoped nobody’ll notice a trifle such as a missing button…
…but I need not really worry because for one thing the small bookstore was jammed packed with what I presumed to be tharoor’s fans…and I was mildly disappointed to see that they were mostly way past fifty and a few didn’t look exactly in good health and one more thing , almost all of them were Indians! Not that it mattered but it seemed strange , … this was soon made clear to me … the Indian high commissioner was present…everybody seemed to know each other except me who don’t know anybody so while everybody talked about tharoor’s books while waiting for mr tharoor to arrive (he was caught in the KL traffic jam) I edged myself to a shelf of silverfish new writings series and picked one up…the one with a forward by dina zaman….and I always like to read forwards… in fact I once bought a book by Celine (not dion ) solely because it has a forward by kurt vonnegut…. And one of the best forwards I read in the past few months was also by Vonnegut in one of his collection of short stories…but dina zaman’s forward!...well I’d better don’t say too much except that she sound like a school teacher addressing high school English class… not exactly my kind of literary forwards…and I noticed one of the selections in that volume was by one amir hafizi…. The very same guy who has an amusing and anarchistic blog (malay male) fixated on abusing women, anal sex and any kind of sex with thai girls…so I started to read a paragraph but it didn’t get me sucked in and so I flipped to short bios at the end of the book and saw one eighteen years old from damansara by the name of hanna alkaf’… and I read her piece and got hooked right there with her simple but quite stylish writing about a young girl being sexually abused by her uncle… it was a short piece ( 3 page long) and I read the whole story and this young lady showed some promise …( by comparison, I couldn’t string a coherent sentence when I was eighteen)… but she’s too young to develop the sexual abuse angle properly….obvious that she didn’t experience it herself or too repressed still to tell it all…probably amir hafizi would be better at describing this sort of things….but I ‘m digressing again…
When tharoor arrived at 7.00 pm there was standing room only and positively not a good situation for any kind of reading and after a short introduction by raman the silverfish owner ( tharoor being a cross between p.g woodhouse and jonathan swift…) tharoor went straight in, reading a small bit from his bioghaphy of nehru standing against the wall with everybody standing around him and after that a longer one from his last fiction ‘riot’… which was lucky for me as I have been reading the first 30 pages or so of this book the night before…he reads clearly , confidently and still looks boyish for a fifty year old and all his hair is still black and styled almost naughtily like a young man, definitely not the hairstyle you’d expect from a top UN guy…
Interesting point he explained about this book was that it could be read or start from any chapter any which way you like as it was designed such that each chapter was meant to give a point of view of the person narrating it…much like what the protagonist in this book explained how he wished a book should be written just like that… the bit that he read actually…
although ‘riot’ was his last fiction, the last published work was in fact a collection of writings titled poetically ‘bookless in baghdad’….and I was struck by a poignant story he told; the title came from his observation when he visited a book market in Baghdad where the middle class people had to sell their books to make ends meet in the aftermath of the first iraq war…how tragic! The Q&A following the short readings was not too interesting perhaps because the overcrowded situation wasn’t conducive to really relaxed discussion but a few interesting facts did come out…he admitted he’s single now (withiot anybody asking this question) , wasn’t a terribly good father to his sons but damned proud of them (and he went at length to explain about fatherhood and how the children are continuation of our genes and that sort of thing), that he’s an eclectic reader (his words) and mentioned three authors he loved…Garcia marquez, p.g woodhouse and kundera….and given a choice to become a UN sec gen or Indian PM what would he choose? Being a diplomat he is he rightly said that at the moment it is unrealistic to think about being a PM but added cheekily ‘ i guess mohan singh never think that he would be a PM if you asked him twenty years ago). That he like everyone else has multiple selves but unfortunately most people only identify with only one and that one is almost invariably the religious one which create all these tensions in the world… why don’t we identify with things we have in common?...and one of the most interesting Qs actually come from one young Chinese girl who came forward from the back and read her question from a piece of paper shivering like a leaf and she wanted to know whether fiction speak the truth or something to that effect…and tharoor beautifully expound on the beauty of fiction and what it does to you as opposed to other kind of writing (except if you read purely trash…his words)…but I guess you all know about that already…..
I made a point to go this time as he quite possibly will be our new UN top guy and if that happens it would be a very very long time before anybody will ever get to hear his next reading I guess…
And as the reading will be in Bangsar I thought well, may be there would be a few smashing looking girls present and I should look more presentable than my usual shabby self and so just to make sure everything is in order I went to the loo at that new shopping complex opposite that busy and popular Indian restaurant devi’s corner and checked myself in the mirror and what was that little loose string hanging from my left collar button? without thinking I tugged at it a bit and oh bugger, out came the little button spinning down the floor and careened to god knows where.
That made me worried sick as it was very obvious that I would look positively stupid with that button missing on one side of the lapels…and I know that literary readings events are not exactly Britney Spears’ concerts and it would be lucky if we get the whole of ten people present and everybody is bound to notice me…so I decided to buy and change into a cheap t-shirt and if it’s black I guess it would look quite ok but this being bangsar, the most image conscious and hypocritical spot in the whole of Malaysia the cheapest one you’d ever get here is for RM40 which I’d be damned if I were to fork out that much for a t-shirt that I could easily get for ten at giant or tesco just to impress some ladies who would most likely won’t notice me anyway…and as the time was nearly 6.00 pm I took my chance and hoped nobody’ll notice a trifle such as a missing button…
…but I need not really worry because for one thing the small bookstore was jammed packed with what I presumed to be tharoor’s fans…and I was mildly disappointed to see that they were mostly way past fifty and a few didn’t look exactly in good health and one more thing , almost all of them were Indians! Not that it mattered but it seemed strange , … this was soon made clear to me … the Indian high commissioner was present…everybody seemed to know each other except me who don’t know anybody so while everybody talked about tharoor’s books while waiting for mr tharoor to arrive (he was caught in the KL traffic jam) I edged myself to a shelf of silverfish new writings series and picked one up…the one with a forward by dina zaman….and I always like to read forwards… in fact I once bought a book by Celine (not dion ) solely because it has a forward by kurt vonnegut…. And one of the best forwards I read in the past few months was also by Vonnegut in one of his collection of short stories…but dina zaman’s forward!...well I’d better don’t say too much except that she sound like a school teacher addressing high school English class… not exactly my kind of literary forwards…and I noticed one of the selections in that volume was by one amir hafizi…. The very same guy who has an amusing and anarchistic blog (malay male) fixated on abusing women, anal sex and any kind of sex with thai girls…so I started to read a paragraph but it didn’t get me sucked in and so I flipped to short bios at the end of the book and saw one eighteen years old from damansara by the name of hanna alkaf’… and I read her piece and got hooked right there with her simple but quite stylish writing about a young girl being sexually abused by her uncle… it was a short piece ( 3 page long) and I read the whole story and this young lady showed some promise …( by comparison, I couldn’t string a coherent sentence when I was eighteen)… but she’s too young to develop the sexual abuse angle properly….obvious that she didn’t experience it herself or too repressed still to tell it all…probably amir hafizi would be better at describing this sort of things….but I ‘m digressing again…
When tharoor arrived at 7.00 pm there was standing room only and positively not a good situation for any kind of reading and after a short introduction by raman the silverfish owner ( tharoor being a cross between p.g woodhouse and jonathan swift…) tharoor went straight in, reading a small bit from his bioghaphy of nehru standing against the wall with everybody standing around him and after that a longer one from his last fiction ‘riot’… which was lucky for me as I have been reading the first 30 pages or so of this book the night before…he reads clearly , confidently and still looks boyish for a fifty year old and all his hair is still black and styled almost naughtily like a young man, definitely not the hairstyle you’d expect from a top UN guy…
Interesting point he explained about this book was that it could be read or start from any chapter any which way you like as it was designed such that each chapter was meant to give a point of view of the person narrating it…much like what the protagonist in this book explained how he wished a book should be written just like that… the bit that he read actually…
although ‘riot’ was his last fiction, the last published work was in fact a collection of writings titled poetically ‘bookless in baghdad’….and I was struck by a poignant story he told; the title came from his observation when he visited a book market in Baghdad where the middle class people had to sell their books to make ends meet in the aftermath of the first iraq war…how tragic! The Q&A following the short readings was not too interesting perhaps because the overcrowded situation wasn’t conducive to really relaxed discussion but a few interesting facts did come out…he admitted he’s single now (withiot anybody asking this question) , wasn’t a terribly good father to his sons but damned proud of them (and he went at length to explain about fatherhood and how the children are continuation of our genes and that sort of thing), that he’s an eclectic reader (his words) and mentioned three authors he loved…Garcia marquez, p.g woodhouse and kundera….and given a choice to become a UN sec gen or Indian PM what would he choose? Being a diplomat he is he rightly said that at the moment it is unrealistic to think about being a PM but added cheekily ‘ i guess mohan singh never think that he would be a PM if you asked him twenty years ago). That he like everyone else has multiple selves but unfortunately most people only identify with only one and that one is almost invariably the religious one which create all these tensions in the world… why don’t we identify with things we have in common?...and one of the most interesting Qs actually come from one young Chinese girl who came forward from the back and read her question from a piece of paper shivering like a leaf and she wanted to know whether fiction speak the truth or something to that effect…and tharoor beautifully expound on the beauty of fiction and what it does to you as opposed to other kind of writing (except if you read purely trash…his words)…but I guess you all know about that already…..
Monday, July 24, 2006
shashi tharoor for top UN post
Interesting to note that the sometime author /novelist Shashi Tharoor of India is one of the nominees for the UN Sec Gen post that Koffi Annan will relinquish in Dec this year. (the others are Thailand deputy PM Surakiart Sathirathai, South Korean foreign minister Ban Ki-Moon and Sri Lankan’s presidential adviser Jayatha Danapala).
I admit that I’m completely ignorant about the merits of any of these candidates but it would be very interesting if Shashi Tharoor do get this job. Lets see what a novelist can come up with to solve the world problems …not much most likely, but we’ve had enough politicians messing the world , now let’s have people of other persuasion take turn to mess it further, or who knows he might come up with some bright ideas , say , to solve the middle east problem (the chief reason why there is so much misery and the world is so unstable these days)…I’d give the odd at 1 in a trillion to that. Chief reason for failure?…the US and that war monger Bush will still call the shots regardless of whoever is in the driver’s seat at UN….and strangely , (I can never understand this), Bush and by extension the US government seems to be led by the nose by jewish interests….so really , you can say this to the jews , they are truly the chosen people (god don’t choose fools does he/she? But then again what kind of god plays favoritism eh? )… but as I was saying , despite virulent hatred and anti Semitism by the whites against the jews, they are still able to kick Bush’s balls at will to do their bidding…but I’m digressing…
Tharoor isn’t exactly a political novice as he has been in the UN all his life and appointed by Annan as Under Secretary-General for communications and public information since 2002, so he knows all the circus , shenanigans and going-ons at the UN. And a good thing is he may write a book about all these monkey business when he retires. I’m off to read his fiction related to the killings and riots in Bombay in the aftermath of the burning down of Babri mosque several years back for starters. The book was aptly titled ‘Riot’…
I admit that I’m completely ignorant about the merits of any of these candidates but it would be very interesting if Shashi Tharoor do get this job. Lets see what a novelist can come up with to solve the world problems …not much most likely, but we’ve had enough politicians messing the world , now let’s have people of other persuasion take turn to mess it further, or who knows he might come up with some bright ideas , say , to solve the middle east problem (the chief reason why there is so much misery and the world is so unstable these days)…I’d give the odd at 1 in a trillion to that. Chief reason for failure?…the US and that war monger Bush will still call the shots regardless of whoever is in the driver’s seat at UN….and strangely , (I can never understand this), Bush and by extension the US government seems to be led by the nose by jewish interests….so really , you can say this to the jews , they are truly the chosen people (god don’t choose fools does he/she? But then again what kind of god plays favoritism eh? )… but as I was saying , despite virulent hatred and anti Semitism by the whites against the jews, they are still able to kick Bush’s balls at will to do their bidding…but I’m digressing…
Tharoor isn’t exactly a political novice as he has been in the UN all his life and appointed by Annan as Under Secretary-General for communications and public information since 2002, so he knows all the circus , shenanigans and going-ons at the UN. And a good thing is he may write a book about all these monkey business when he retires. I’m off to read his fiction related to the killings and riots in Bombay in the aftermath of the burning down of Babri mosque several years back for starters. The book was aptly titled ‘Riot’…
Sunday, July 16, 2006
the metropolitan, bangkok
Stayed at ‘the metropolitan’ bangkok for the first time and the ambience of the hotel was quite zen like. Sparse, ultramodern interior decoration and the accent is heavy on the black and white.A good foretaste of my forthcoming travel to Japan ( Kobe & Tokyo) in a couple of week’s time. The Metropolitan is a very quiet hotel , surprisingly free of the usual gaggle of bandy legged and noisy western tourist types . All the staff, except the receptionists (white blouse black skirts) all the rest, male and female (all young) wearing all black - black t-shirt & black pants – all very hip looking, and what I really like is the background music in the reception area , a continuous loop of mesmerizing electro dance music (instead of irritating muzak )- I can just sit in the lobby doing nothing for hours. At about 4600 bhats a night it isn’t exactly cheap but the room is large, has a dvd player and good hi fi /cd player in addition to the usual tv , and if you’re on company expense, you’re not likely to lose sleep over it…and another good thing is it’s just 10 minutes walking distance to the famous sum luang night market and lumphini underground station and in the opposite direction just 15 minutes walking distance away from sala daeng skytrain station which is right in the infamous pat pong area . So a very strategic hotel to cater for all tastes.
Went to chatuchack week end market today but didn’t buy anything this time. Never fail to visit this sprawling (covered) and crowded weekend market which could possibly be the biggest in the world (even bigger than panyayuan in Beijing) and where you could almost buy anything from pets to clothings, from antiques to cheap paintings. If it were a few hundred years ago I imagine it may well have slave markets too. But these days the most risqué things you’d ever get in chatuchack market are those t-shirts with funny statements. The familiar hard rock café now becomes ‘hard cock cafe’: free entry. Another t-shirt has ‘ Sex instructor: first lesson free’.
But my favorite is a t-shirt with the blue UN logo with ‘united nation’ transformed into ‘united nothing’….i in fact bought this one about a year ago at Nana, another Sodom and Gomorrah area of Bangkok - where you can see all those old bandy legged male westerners with their young thai girls (or sometimes boys)…
Went to chatuchack week end market today but didn’t buy anything this time. Never fail to visit this sprawling (covered) and crowded weekend market which could possibly be the biggest in the world (even bigger than panyayuan in Beijing) and where you could almost buy anything from pets to clothings, from antiques to cheap paintings. If it were a few hundred years ago I imagine it may well have slave markets too. But these days the most risqué things you’d ever get in chatuchack market are those t-shirts with funny statements. The familiar hard rock café now becomes ‘hard cock cafe’: free entry. Another t-shirt has ‘ Sex instructor: first lesson free’.
But my favorite is a t-shirt with the blue UN logo with ‘united nation’ transformed into ‘united nothing’….i in fact bought this one about a year ago at Nana, another Sodom and Gomorrah area of Bangkok - where you can see all those old bandy legged male westerners with their young thai girls (or sometimes boys)…
Friday, July 07, 2006
the good game
Ok there’s no way of avoiding it…this football thing…before the start of this world cup extravaganza , this hoopla, this great madness…like some people I succumbed to England hype and thought this might be England year to become the champion…what with rooney lampard and the rest… they might make it… then when the first round started …everybody saw that England was the most boring team in the tournament …and I’ve never seen more rubbish in top flight matches than what this English team dished out…they played like sissies or pussies even…I even rooted for EQUADOR…and I made some predictions…and it turned out all wrong…so basically I’m no better than most people…I thought Ghana would win over brazil…my 85 yr old chimp told his school friends I predicted Ghana would beat brazil…they all laughed …but I was not too far wrong… brazil wasn’t that impressive… and they were beaten by france (yet again)…my other son stopped watching the world cup the moment brazil was out….but not me… I never liked brazil very much…so I continued to watch the games…every single one of them…not “watched” exactly …because I never fail to fall asleep 5 minutes into the game…and only woke up after the game finished and only became wide awake and watched the sometimes funny rubbish “shebby” and that british guy from espn doing their post match jabbering on Astro’s channel 83 ….shebby of course is serbegeth singh , a very elegant player in Malaysian national team during his heydays in the eighties…and after watching argentina played mersmerizing football and trashing Serbia and Montenegro and made them looked like Malaysian football team I congratulated my boss who is argentinian ( and who loved Jorge Louis Borges” by the way - “he’s a genius” – he once said to me ) and predicted that they’ll win over germany…and yes…I was wrong again…germany’s mental resilience and that extra luck in the penalty shoot out put them through the semis …but they went down 0-2 to Italy (my prediction was wrong again)…but surprisingly italy played better than I expected… everybody think italy played defensively and only put their players milling around their goal keeper much like that girl in “cather in the rye” who liked to keep all her pieces at the back when playing checkers…but not this time… and now here’s my prediction…italy will win the cup this time around… they’ll beat france by 2 –0…now lets see; tomorrow night… and I think germany will play their best game yet and beat the hell out of Portugal for third placing…they have nothing to lose now…they’ll be creative and entertaining and I think this will be the best game in the tournament yet…my forecast… 4-2 to germany…let’s see…let’s see…. But whatever the outcome…I won’t cry over it…I’m not exactly a fanatic supporter of any team… when I was a student a long time ago I supported my home team but they played the worst rubbish in the world… and I stopped watching them play a long time ago…though I’m still a strong supporter… world cup is the best thing the world has ever come up with for the common people…I can’t think of any other thing that make human beings more passionate than football game …apart from killing each other… eight years ago I was in Hanoi during a part of the world cup season and you could see numerous little shops with tiny black and white tvs that the owners put out on rickety chairs in the shop fronts beside the road and you would see a crowd of spectators who parked or simply left their fragile bicycles on the footpath like so many dead bodies and rooting for whatever teams that were playing..and I felt good…almost all the nations of the world is crazy about football except the US of course ….ironically one of the most well known football related books was written by an american…”Among the thugs” a very interesting book by a well respected GRANTA editor bill brufford chronicling his attempt to understand English hooliganism… and the only anomaly in this part of the world is the Philippines … but then again …philippines… what can you say , a nation that think US is it’s grandfather is a hopeless nation in my book…I was in davao Mindanao during a part of the last world cup and not a single tv station showed any matches…what a disaster…even the hotel where I stayed which was one the best in davao did not have satellite channel for world cup …people protested…and the management set up one tv in the cocktail lounge…I was lucky… most other hotels did not have anything… turned out my hotel was owned by Brunei royalty and the Brunei people loves football though it must be said that their national team is worse than the Malaysian team which is saying a lot!…. I was not so lucky for the world cup held twelve years ago…I was doing my hajj in mecca at that time and though we were there to do spiritual things and try to put away worldly things even just for a while..i did not entirely let go and made a little compromise and got my daily Saudi English newspaper every morning just to look at the match results…things people do for the good game...the world cup…it’s amazing….
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
the good jews
What’s happening in Palestine and specifically in gaza at this moment is very distressing. When Hamas won the election in January this year, all western aids to the Palestine state suddenly stopped. The US government in fact went one up further, it not only stopped the aid but pressured the hamas government to RETURN the already approved grants ( eg; 50 million dollars dedicated to building infrastructures on the west bank and gaza - a measly sum by American standard), and for good measure it flexed it’s muscle and bullied the powerless neighboring arab countries by preventing them from giving any monetary aids to the hamas government. So much for the US promotion of democracy in the arab world. The sad truth is, the US government has absolutely no concern about democracy in the arab world. As long as a government is ‘pro US’ it doesn’t give a damn if that government is the vilest dictatorship or corrupted up to the gills.
And now, for one ‘kidnapped’ (captured) teenage Israeli soldier, the Zionist state has found an excellent excuse to wreak havoc on the entire population of gaza and have rounded up a third of the legally elected Palestinian (hamas) parliamentarians including ministers and treating them like common criminals. And at this very moment the Israeli jets are flying bombing missions on the city of gaza and the army is threatening to invade the whole of the gaza strip again.
Oh, what a far cry from the old days when jews much rather live in muslim lands such as morocco or even Iran rather than endure anti Semitism in ‘christian’ countries or be subjected to Spanish inquisitions or Russian pogroms. Ironically and perhaps arguably the best era of jewish arab/muslim relationship was in the early nineteenth century, just a few decades before the formation of Israel when the jews and muslims lived peacefully in the place then called Palestine. They are afterall very closely related in terms of race (semites) and culture (abrahamic religions). It was during this time that one Leopold Weiss converted to Islam, took up the name of Muhammad Asad and wrote a world famous autobiography the road to mecca a must read book for any muslim university students who knows or care anything about Islam….and impressed by M Asad , Margaret Marcus, a new york Jewish girl converted to Islam, became “Maryam Jameelah” and contributed so much with her writings in defense of womens rights in Islam …these are the good jews, who surmounted their narrow jewish chauvinism and showed or tried to explain to the world the ugly side of Zionism … but sadly, with the formation of Israel and the polarization of arab and jewish political interests , the peaceful resolution seems unsurmountable now and the almost pathological hatreds that each has for the other is now too far gone and may be realistically impossible to overcome, at least not in the near future…
On a brighter note…
… a couple of weeks back I received a paperback The Orientalist , from an american friend, a book by an author who was until then unknown to me…one Tom Reiss, a book which is part biography, part travelogue (in Caucasus/Azerbaijan) part literary mystery about a now completely forgotten Jewish man Lev Nussimbaum who lived in Azerbaijan in the early nineteenth century, converted to Islam at the age of 18 , wrote a famous novel Ali and Nino under a very imaginative pseudonym Said Kurban . Ali and Nino (which I must look for some day soon) is about the only book available in English in Baku that anybody who backpack to Baku in the eighties ever read….and now that I’m absorbed with his quite fascinating adventure (the orientalist) , a rich life that intertwined in some ways with Mussolini , erza pound among others…. And looks like I have to leave aside the book I’m currently reading, gunther grass’ crabwalk’ for a while…..
And now, for one ‘kidnapped’ (captured) teenage Israeli soldier, the Zionist state has found an excellent excuse to wreak havoc on the entire population of gaza and have rounded up a third of the legally elected Palestinian (hamas) parliamentarians including ministers and treating them like common criminals. And at this very moment the Israeli jets are flying bombing missions on the city of gaza and the army is threatening to invade the whole of the gaza strip again.
Oh, what a far cry from the old days when jews much rather live in muslim lands such as morocco or even Iran rather than endure anti Semitism in ‘christian’ countries or be subjected to Spanish inquisitions or Russian pogroms. Ironically and perhaps arguably the best era of jewish arab/muslim relationship was in the early nineteenth century, just a few decades before the formation of Israel when the jews and muslims lived peacefully in the place then called Palestine. They are afterall very closely related in terms of race (semites) and culture (abrahamic religions). It was during this time that one Leopold Weiss converted to Islam, took up the name of Muhammad Asad and wrote a world famous autobiography the road to mecca a must read book for any muslim university students who knows or care anything about Islam….and impressed by M Asad , Margaret Marcus, a new york Jewish girl converted to Islam, became “Maryam Jameelah” and contributed so much with her writings in defense of womens rights in Islam …these are the good jews, who surmounted their narrow jewish chauvinism and showed or tried to explain to the world the ugly side of Zionism … but sadly, with the formation of Israel and the polarization of arab and jewish political interests , the peaceful resolution seems unsurmountable now and the almost pathological hatreds that each has for the other is now too far gone and may be realistically impossible to overcome, at least not in the near future…
On a brighter note…
… a couple of weeks back I received a paperback The Orientalist , from an american friend, a book by an author who was until then unknown to me…one Tom Reiss, a book which is part biography, part travelogue (in Caucasus/Azerbaijan) part literary mystery about a now completely forgotten Jewish man Lev Nussimbaum who lived in Azerbaijan in the early nineteenth century, converted to Islam at the age of 18 , wrote a famous novel Ali and Nino under a very imaginative pseudonym Said Kurban . Ali and Nino (which I must look for some day soon) is about the only book available in English in Baku that anybody who backpack to Baku in the eighties ever read….and now that I’m absorbed with his quite fascinating adventure (the orientalist) , a rich life that intertwined in some ways with Mussolini , erza pound among others…. And looks like I have to leave aside the book I’m currently reading, gunther grass’ crabwalk’ for a while…..
