"I don't understand the Islamic world"

I heard someone say yesterday. He was commenting on the angry response to Pope Benedict's speech.

Oh really? Suppose a Muslim leader made a speech that deliberately linked Hitler's actions to his Catholicism? Pointed out that the Catholic church has never excommunicated Hitler? That many many Nazis were Christians? And then deliberately linked the widespread sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, brought to light in recent years, to the Catholic faith?

Catholics the world over would, of course, be utterly calm and accepting. Would welcome the invitation to dialogue.

art and fear

book that leapt off the shelf at me in my local bookshop yesterday. I've been in a 48-hour funk of icy terror.

Not enough time, not enough resources, I don't have the training or experience or level of craft to pull this off, it's going to be a gigantic disaster.......

Here's what David Bayles and Tod Orland say:

After all, in making art you bring your highest skills to bear upon the materials and ideas you most care about. Art is a high calling - fears are coincidental.

....disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others - indeed as anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot.

I was like, bingo, with each item on the list.
It nailed so precisely each factor that kicks in when I'm faced with the next step, and the next.

And then:

....those who challenge their fears, continue. Those who don't, quit.

I have a whole repertoire of quitting fantasies that I run when I wake up in the grip of panic at 2am. But I'm still doing the work. Imperfectly.

reading lives and thrives

judging by the 130-plus people who turned up at my local library tonight, to hear Maxine Hong Kingston, Jon Carroll, April Sinclair, and Cynthia Gorney, talk about what they read and why.

The free coffee and snacks may have had something to do with it. But they're not what made people stay, for 2 hours, in a hot muggy room. Listening to the panelists, coming up with my own responses to the questions:

How do I choose what I read?
What does reading do for me?

got me re-inspired again. About the magic of books for their own sake - not for research, not to stay current with what everyone else is talking about, not because I "should". Cynthia Gorney said she's currently indulging in an orgy of Wodehouse at bedtime, to counter the grimness of the research reading on her current work project. It relieved the sense of guilt I feel these days when I browse fiction, instead of reading stuff directly related to Migritude.

half of a yellow sun

the new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, comes out in the US on September 15th.

Her first book, Purple Hibiscus, blew me away. So I'm anticipating this one with the eagerness I usually reserve for the openings of friends' new shows.

Excerpt which struck me, from a recent interview with Adichie in Britain's Financial Times:

For all Adichie's fondness for the US, which she compares to a "rich uncle" who gives her pocket money, she detects a certain blandness there in some of the responses to her work. She finds this less the case in Britain, where the knowledge of Nigeria - while hardly very deep or wide - is perhaps greater. In the US, she says, a little wistfully, she will always be considered an African writer, whereas in Britain she is more likely to be viewed simply as a writer.

Adichie sees the contrast partly in historical terms. Britain, which dismayed the Biafrans and many others by arming the Nigerian military government during the war, has far more colonial baggage. The plus side of this, says Adichie, is that there is "more to engage with and more to fight about, which is more fun. I prefer more colour," she says, "whether good or bad, to a certain extent."

An intriguing character in Half of a Yellow Sun is a needy young Englishman called Richard, who finds love and a cause in Biafra. Near the end, Richard, of whom Adichie says she is "very fond", lapses into sorrowful, impotent racism against a military officer whom he fears is a rival for his Igbo lover. I ask Adichie if this reflects a pessimism on her part that there is something forever racist in the white European mind and education. She laughs and talks around the subject a bit, ending up by outlining the idea - relevant also, she agrees, to some of the activities during last year's "Year of Africa" in Britain - that it is possible to simultaneously love something and condescend to it.

"I feel that is a way a lot of liberal whiteness looks at African blackness," she says. "I don't doubt the love . . . but I also often detect that there is something condescending about it."

obliques and glutes

the muscles I didn't manage to awaken in my belly dance class this evening. They may have twitched a few times. But most of the hour was, like every dance class I go to, about releasing expectations. Repeatedly accepting the tightness and limitations of my muscles. Enjoying, for its own sake, the experience of just being with my body.

And of course, the deep pleasure of watching others in the class who are way ahead of me.

keep death upon your shoulder

it will remind you to love.

Carlos Castenada

it seems the wrong pronoun for death. I want to say she.

Subversive energy shot

The British artist Banksy, planted a life-size model of a Guantanamo prisoner inside a Disneyland ride. It's what I mentally term Acts of Art - clever, subversive, in-your-face, unabashedly political. Everytime I read or hear of one, it gives me a jolt of delighted energy - and gets my mind bubbling with similar ideas for my own work.

One of my favourite ones is to get volunteers across the world to print out copies of my parody of Memoirs of a Geisha, and trawl big chain bookstores, slipping a copy into every volume of the novel. I've just been too lazy to get it off the ground.