Sunday, August 15, 2004



Requiem for a Great Slavic Poet, the Polish emigre writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, in part for a powerful pre-mortem dissection of communism, in part for observing that the defection from the homeland would not be easy, but that it would be worth it! Czeslaw Milosz will be burried in Krakov; about odd 77 km from the village of my birth, Vrbov.
Bernard Lane's oddly timed World according to Milosz
Like Czech exile Milan Kundera and Polish exile Hlasko (meaning voice), Czeslaw believed that reading and storytelling have historically functioned as the most dependable form of nourishing our moral compass.
Ach, before we cast the first stone at Khouri, we should examine what kind of pressure the reality of the publishing industry places on migrants in order to see their bloody stories in ink. I am not sure whether Norma is a good or a bad woman, but one thing I know is that everyone has her/his Amerikan/Jordanian/Bohemian story (real or imagined) of the way he became to live a life of a surreal stranger. For what is a stranger, if she is not a wondering creator of post cards who dreams of being a gypsy? Everything inside the world of a gypsy is preordained by mysterious and implacable forces. It is a world without history or geography. In such a world even raw and powerful human-interest stories of rootless migrants are helpless. Rarely someone can help invented or true stories to see the light of the day. Back in 1999 on the 1st Floor of 20 Alfred St Milsons Point I was advised by Jane Palfreyman of Random House fame that my story was evocative enough, but too risky even for the esteemed power house of the publishing industry. When a great publisher admits such a reality, it is a blow that shatters our whole image of the world.
Shakespeare suggests to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. Images that to others seem simple or even banal become a raging and screaming truth. Without any doubt, the act of writing stories of survival threatens the storyteller with dual curses: that the stories will be overdone, that the tragedies will be understated ...

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Publisher pulls Khouri book
The Australian publisher of Norma Khouri's book Forbidden Love has withdrawn it from sale permanently after she could not prove her life story was true.
Earlier this week Ms Khouri submitted documents to Random House to demonstrate the book was a factual account of her life in Jordan.

Bribery (sic) Island (Most of the time the publishing PR experts provide the tools to develop a complete public relations strategy, win media favor and deliver any message effectively); [Money plunges modern literature into chaos Are lovers of literature a dying breed in Russia?]
• · After lucky 13 years of experimenting, veteran Net publisher Adam Engst has finally stumbled on a good business model -- fast-turnaround e-books
• · · The openness of Weblogs could help explain why many readers find them more credible than traditional media. Can mainstream journalists learn from their cutting-edge cousins? Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere
• · · · Arna's Children won the Best Film award at Prague's One World Film Festival in April 2004. Days later, it received the Best First Documentary award at the Canadian International Documentary Festival. The following month, it was named Best Documentary at New York's Tribeca Film Festival. Sadly, by the time Arna's Children received this international recognition, all but one of the movie's leading characters were already dead We are losing the good film habit; [Multicultural Literature Recommends Vibrant Suggestions How to Up your sex life
• · · · · Orhan Pamuk: I Was Not A Political Person... Turkey is a somewhat surreal country, where secular nationalists and theocrats compete to impose what seem to be equally dubious ideas of how to force people to be free ; [ Real reading, real writers, real issues; [Colin Friels: We are so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture, that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about ... I want to try to tell our own stories in our own place]
• · · · · · Literature and Sociology Unbound: It is like a bone-deep memory that binds us deeply to each other