Amanda.
Or rather, Hal.
Amanda Stern's one word interview this week is with Hal Hartley, whose book True Fiction Pictures and Possible Films we're publishing in the Fall—see below for a couple of spreads.
[Amanda's first One Word Interview was, appropriately methinks, with Moby.]
In honor of my new-found ability to upload images to the blog (who knew it was so easy) and of my newly-refound ability to publish Get Your War On (Oh, yeah, Operation Publishing Get You War On is back in the motherfucking house!!!), herewith one of David's latest
And, to make myself a little clearer, we're publishing the next Get Your War On book, which will function as the only History of the War on Terror you'll ever need.
For five years Rawle, Stakhanovite of the scissors and paste, has labored 17 hours a day, seven days a week, assembling 40,000 fragments of text from women's magazines to produce a tale that moves with the pace of a thriller, with as many cliffhanging chapter endings and swerves of story. But there's the added excitement of a typographical rollercoaster: each page features nearly 100 variations as we lurch from sedate Times Roman to the full-blown exclamations of advertisers' fancy capitals.—The Guardian
As an artifact, it's stunning: a blackmailer's letter, a typographical archive, a sly game of chance and a labor of love…. Norma inhabits a world of Rayon, homecrafts and delicious Fray Bentos suppers. But this world is fractured, and its secret is quickly uncovered: imagine Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge rewritten by the creators of Little Britain. By borrowing the vocabulary of an era in which magazines were just inventing the defensive hard-sell of "femininity", Rawle allows Norma's stricken identity a heart-wrenching poignancy, as she spirals out of control. —The Scotsman
A brilliant invention, allowing full lyrical use of the available material, which Rawle gathers and pleats into rhapsodic riffs of garment ecstasy...Woman's World may prove to be metafiction's first bestseller.—The Guardian
What begins as an exquisitely wayward work of art and outright comic masterpiece transforms into a galloping plot of serious literary intent. Woman's World is charming, chilling, sinister, surreal and utterly unforgettable.—The Scotsman
The most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade . . .This book is a work of genius.— The Times
As mad and believable as a dream. Dreadfully funny and oddly unsettling. I think Graham Rawle may be a genius. —Joanna Lumley, yes, of Ab Fab.
So, as some of you have heard Soft Skull Press plans to be acquired by Winton Shoemaker Co. LLC—click here for the press release.
In some respects this is a sudden development, in other respects one could say this has been a long time coming. What it all means really remains to be seen. While it might seem appropriate for me to start pontificating here, the category under which I am posting this is, in fact, "Anticipatory."
This is certainly a paragraph in a key chapter in the history of American publishing, a chapter prefigured by the sale of PGW to AMS in 2003, and one that begins with the sale of Consortium to Perseus in the summer of 2006. I do not believe this chapter is over—for reasons which have to do with a difference between how PGW and Perseus account for returns, the full cash flow impact of the AMS/PGW bankruptcy will not be felt until July.
There are any number of regrets—that I was not able to keep the staff, currently Kristin Pulkkinen and Luke Gerwe is a big one, and there are other, that shall remain private—but I beg the readers of this blog to not indulge in apocalyptic thinking about independent publishing. The process of consolidation is, yes, relentless, but it is not eternal.
True, it is hard, in some respect, not to feel elegiac. As I've been preparing materials for a process known to those who buy and sell companies as "due diligence," it became clear how many people have contributed to allowing Soft Skull to publish the truly important books it has published over the years—my thanks to you now, my thanks to you eternally.
Yet Soft Skull is not over. As our wonderful author Sparrow said when he heard the news: "Soft Skull is dead. Long live Soft Skull." Soft Skull continues as an imprint. Soft Skull is not no longer independent. Had I won the lottery and bought Counterpoint from Perseus, instead of Charlie Winton buying Counterpoint and then Soft Skull, we would not have ceased to be independent.
Especially given the recent announcement by Perseus that it was closing Carroll & Graf and Thunders Mouth, it seems to me quite culturally valuable for Shoemaker/Counterpoint/Soft Skull—a group clearly embracing the imprint idea, clearly also eclectic and idiosyncratic—to be operating from a more solid financial foundation that hitherto. Allowing Soft Skull at least, to be less flakey.
I'll be blogging for a long time to come, and in the days, weeks and months to come, I promise to take some time out every so often to report on the transition, and I also promise to be as candid as possible about the process, about the ways in which things are harder, as well as the ways in which they're easier.
One little bit of hell right now is that we are seriously b-r-o-k-e for the next 6 weeks because this deal is not scheduled to close until June 30th. So, as a result, 40% off virtually everything on the Soft Skull website! Buy early, buy often! (Believe it or not, we need the ducats now far more than we did during the days of the PGW bankruptcy, this is one crazy-assed business...)
So in the lead-up to the publication of A Woman Alone at Night, its author Tamara Faith Berger's been writing up a storm—check out her story Key West on Nerve and, on Nerve's new sister site Babble Tamara's got something quite lovely on being chastised by the Sleep Lady: Train Wreck.
Like the book itself, a mild excerpt of which you can read here, her writing is hot, fierce, smart so check them out...
The new Soft Skull catalog is now available for download. By way of whetting your whistle herewith my "Dear Reader" letter...
Dear Reader,
The catalog contains multiple blows to three conventional wisdoms:
1. The Farm Team Theory. We’re putting the lie to the theory that authors leave the independent press. Notwithstanding the tremendous success of Matthew Sharpe’s TODAY Show Book Club selection The Sleeping Father, he’s back with us for his tragicomic, dystopic, visceral political-farce-cum-love-story Jamestown. Former NBCC finalist
Wayne Koestenbaum returns with Hotel Theory, David Ohle concludes his epic trilogy with The Pisstown Chaos, Daphne Gottlieb follows her 2003 Audre Lorde Award with Kissing Dead Girls and we get to reissue Lydia Millet’s 2002 PEN-USA Award-winning My Happy Life.
2. The No More Translations Theory. No fewer than five of the Spring list are works of translation, and they include two of the fifty writers selected by the French book magazine Lire as the writers to watch in the 21st century—Asli Erdogan (Turkey) with a stunning fictional evocation of Rio de Janeiro, and Alain Mabanckou (Congo Republic), recently honored with the 2006 Prix Renaudot, with African Pyscho. Then, from Japan, Mari Akasaka’s Vibrator, from France Camille de Toledo’s thrilling takedown of the Establishment Left, and from Germany a quietly devastating fictional account of a Guantanamo prisoner.
3. The Stick To Your Niche Theory. We have a memoir of a man who tried and failed to save the American typesetting industry, a progressive relationships/dating book, a progressive pro-free trade book, a fictional biography of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s marmoset, gang literature, an amputee’s guide to sex (that is in fact a poetry book), a novel—laid-out like a ransom note—characterized as a work of genius both by the Times of London and Absolutely Fabulous’s Joanna Lumley, water politics, politics in art, historietas, histrionics, hysterics, and an Orthodox Jewish performance poet’s young adult novel, Candy in Action.
And now, our candy, for you...
All the best,
Richard
So we've a book coming out in November called Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of Williams S. Burroughs, Jr., the memoir of the "Son of Naked Lunch." But, because this book has been so long in the publishing (long story to tell, I'll spare you...), some folks are already writing and talking about it...this from today's International Herald Tribune and then, next week, you can do an online chat about Billy Burroughs with writer David Ohle, who compiled and edited Cursed from Birth and who is also the author of the Soft Skull book The Age of Sinatra...
When I am tired, it is easy to believe that my exhaustion is the reason I am depressed and lonely and uninspired. But when I am well rested, I can realize that these negative feelings are not a result of too little sleep. They are a result of my being a miserable, hopeless, misanthropic wretch.—John S. Hall
Even though I usually don’t know what I want, I often find that I am very disappointed. Even when I don’t have goals or direction, I can tell when I’m going the wrong way and I can get very nervous and upset. I don’t have to have a plan in order to feel completely thwarted.
Once a week, when I'm too lame to come up with original content for this blog, I will post a daily reflection by John S. Hall, of the bands King Missile and King Missile III, author of the Soft Skull book Jesus Was Way Cool, and of the forthcoming Daily Negations. It is from this latter work that I will draw that day's reflection. This will continue, periodically, until the book's publication in early November...
For Mark Swartz's H20, a Flash trailer...
But what's the book about?
I leave it to Donna Seaman, Associate Editor of Booklist—a great critic and a genius of the summary review—to tell you:
Swartz portrayed a dangerously alienated loner brooding in Chicago's central library in Instant Karma (2002). Here he zaps forward in time to depict Chicago as a chaotic city-state with a burgeoning homeless population and a failing infrastructure. Tap water is but a cherished memory, so toxic is Lake Michigan. In fact, the earth's entire freshwater supply is imperiled, which is good for the mega corporation Drixa, which is gearing up to produce synthetic water. Or is the fake water fake? Hayden Shivers, a hapless filter and drain engineer who discovered the water-making properties of a rare fungus off the coast of Malta, can't figure out if he is about to be promoted, fired, or worse. Is the African mail-order maid who destroyed his marriage actually an undercover operative? What's up with the beautiful environmental rights protestor, Aqua Bella? Swartz's shrewd, jittery, and noirishly atmospheric speculative tale about a bumbling antihero and dire environmental trauma brings an irreverent and parrying voice to ecofiction and casts a fractured light on follies petty and catastrophic.
For all you movers and shakers, galley-whores and product pimps, cheap-wine-swilling-bad-coffee-burping BEA attendees...the offical Soft Skull program for Book Expo America...
Friday, May 19th, 10:00-11:00am: Laurel Snyder signs Half/Life: Jewish Tales from Interfaith Homes, which Publishers Weekly hails as “engaging, funny, and provocative.” Snyder is a frequent contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered and an editor of the award-winning magazine Killing the Buddha.
Saturday, May 20th, 11:00am-Noon: Australian author Delia Falconer signs her second novel The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, the follow up to her debut The Service of Clouds (FSG, 1998). Falconer is one of the top writers of her generation in Australia, but virtually unknown here, so far. Her new novel is a fresh look at Custer and the Battle of Little Big Horn...through the eyes of the soldiers who did not go to his aid. And, as Colleen Mondor describes it in this month's Bookslut, “Lost Thoughts is part of a tiny field of books that reach inside the minds of men at war—of men of war—and seeks to explain and define and recognize them as the conflicted and confused and heroic and cowardly creatures that they are.” “A splendid and absorbing novel” says Jim Harrison and "a timeless work of human history," says Barry Lopez, National Book Award winner. Note: Delia Falconer will be available all three days of BEA to meet and chat.
Saturday, May 20th, 1:00-2:00pm: Roger Allen Skipper signs galleys of the only debut novel Soft Skull is publishing this year! Tear Down the Mountain is an epic love story set in modern day Appalachia by a laborer and luthier who never left the mountains. “Tear Down the Mountain is a welcome addition to fiction set in contemporary Appalachia. This book is terrific. Roger Skipper knows the landscape, the people, their values, how they feel, and what they say to each other. These characters live real lives in hard circumstances in a land that’s under assault. I loved it.”—Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight
And don’t forget to pick up a galley of American Genius, Lynne Tillman’s first novel since the 1998 NBCC Finalist No Lease on Life!
Also, for the first time since 2001, I won't be able to go myself (off getting married, as I promised Jenny D I would say on the blog, tucked away here down at the bottom...), so be nice to Kristin Pulkkinen, our amazing Publicity Director, and go get books signed, and introduce yourself to Delia Falconer who came all the way from Australia to be at BEA...(And if you don't see her at BEA, check out her touring schedule in Philly, Portland and Seattle...)
Back in three weeks!!!
...has a new online magazine. I'd like to think I'd be telling you this if they didn't preview three of our books but hey, that's how I knew, originally.
Features, inter alia: Jhumpa Lahiri, Chris Abani, Etgar Keret, Arthur Phillips, Dale Peck, Lisa Selin Davis, Pauls Toutonghi, Anthony McCann, Joshua Beckman, Noelle Kocot, Nancy Agabian, Victoria Gomelsky, David Unger, Daniel Alarcon, Meg Giles, Noria Jablonski...
Oh but which three books you ask?! I can't believe I forgot to mention—click to hear what the KGB folk think of these upcoming books...
The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers
Surfing Armegeddon: Fishnets, Facists and Body Fluids in Florida
H20: A Novel
But, if you really must, check out All Tied Up: Four Centuries of Graphic Sex in Japan & Eiichi Yamamoto’s The Belladonna of Sadness
So I just got an e-mail from Salman Rushdie that reads as follows:
Here's a blurb for Electric Flesh:
This is an astonishing piece of delirious, supercharged prose. It makes one think of Pynchon, of Joyce, of various kinds of Fear and Loathing. It's a short, intense burst of high linguistic voltage, and the translation is simply outstanding. There's nothing much like the zing and heat of ELECTRIC FLESH in these cautious, undercooked times.
It's a nice day, when you get an e-mail from Salman Rushdie (though, of course, I've not ever gotten to meet him, unlike Laila.)
We've also gotten lovely blurbs from Percival Everett and Tom Robbins and it has certainly made me realize that pace Mr. Orthofer and Peder Zane we need all the help we can get when it comes to publishing translations in the United States. These blurbs are basically what gives us our shot at breaking even on these books since we have to sell three times as many units as non-profits like Dalkey Archive—Chad Post was a happy man at the London Book Fair with a surprise NBCC win under his belt—and Archipelago.
Which leads me to this: we're having a devil of a time getting blurbs for another great French book, SuperHip JoliPunk by Camille de Toledo. And I suddenly just thought that, since I'm already using this blog to try to mooch a computer, why not also use it to gather suggestions for blurbers for this? Especially given that the blogosphere has made it pretty clear it wants to see more international writing published in the US. So if a book described as part Naomi Klein, part Hakim Bey, part Upski sounds appealing, check out this sample chapter and fire me and e-mail with ideas...
Herewith a semi-promotional, semi-unselfinterested item: a plea from the director of a DIY film called Quality of Life (" tells the story of two young graffiti writers who struggle to maintain their friendship as their lives unravel and the cops close in.") to pre-order a ticket this week so as to encourage the Pioneer Theatre to give them a longer run...
It's a semi-promo item because we'll be publishing a book based on the film in August. Called Putting the Pieces Together, it included interviews, photos, the screenplay, and also a "DIY film school"—how to make your own DIY movie...
It got some lovely reviews at the festivals:
"Extraordinary" —Berlin International Film Festival Jury (WINNER - Special Mention)
"The film is amazing"—WoosterCollective.com
"A powerful and emotionally satisfying film"—Jane Ganahl, San Francisco Chronicle
"Excellent"—Jeff Anderson, San Francisco Examiner
"Supreme acting and great music...captivating"—Stockholm International Film Festival Jr. Jury (WINNER - Best Youth Film)
"Streetwise honesty...powerful"—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
There's a cool trailer...
And, as another of our authors, Josh McPhee wrote, in that lovely low-key hyperbole that exemplfies the DIY activist artists we know:
I hear this movie is phenomenal, and the director seems like a pretty cool guy, interested in sparking a real dialogue about the role of graffiti in society and a serious questioning of the results of the criminalization of the art...
so, if you are interested, maybe buy a ticket and help them out!!
PLEASE HELP QUALITY OF LIFE GET A WIDER RELEASE!
As you know, we are self-distributing Quality of Life in limited theaters before we release the dvd this summer. We played in SF for 6 strong weeks and are now set to embark upon our national release, including New York City April 6-12 (Pioneer Theater, 155 East 3rd Street between A and B)
A strong showing in NYC will open doors for future screenings. At this point, the theater in New York has us booked for one week, one screening a day. We have proven that there is a strong and hungry audience for this film. However, since we are self-distributing and do not bring ad dollars to the table, the theater owners remain unconvinced. Which is where you come in.
The NYC theater has agreed to schedule more screenings if and only if we are able to sell a few tix this week. (Unlike a traditional booking which gets held over based on actual Box Office performance, calendar houses like this must book months in advance.) Please buy your tix today and help give us an opportunity to prove the film has legs.
Well here is the first ever streaming video trailer for a Soft Skull book...Nothing earth-shattering in the annals of book publicity, but still, an effort to enter the 21st century.
One interesting aspect of this book, by the way, Surfing Armageddon, by George Tabb, is that he's the second of our authors to be seriously working MySpace, the other being Lisa Crystal Carver. There are many many folks out there with a lot more to say about MySpace than I can say, but it's pretty damn clear to me that in most cases an author with a strong MySpace presence is an author that will make Amazon.com happy. The speed and fluidity of word-of-mouth in that network exceeds any we at Soft Skull have seen.
Just two lovely items, a stunning review of Paul Berman's POWER AND THE IDEALISTS in this week's Washington Post Book World, and a really lovely excerpt Oy Tannenbaum" from the forthcoming HALF/LIFE: JEW-ISH TALES FROM INTERFAITH HOMES (edited by Laurel Snyder, forthcoming 04/2006) in Saturday's New York Times Opinion Pages...
Thought the links are above, here are a couple of nice little excepts, to give you the flava...
Oy Tannenbaum
By KATHARINE WEBER
MY earliest Christmas memory: I am 5 years old, sitting on the bench seat close beside my father in our aqua and white Buick, the one that looked like a saddle shoe, on a mission to get the best Christmas tree we can find.
We drive and we drive, until we are at last in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. We park in front of a corner lot with colored lights strung along the top of the chain-link fence...
The tree man sees us. He has a long black beard and wears a round fur hat, and he is bundled in a big coat that looks as if it has been made from dead animals.
His dark eyes meet mine and I look away, embarrassed, certain that I have already done the wrong thing. I reach up for my father's hand but he is no longer beside me, and I turn to find him, then trot after him, playing my part of the little girl here to select a Christmas tree with her father.
The tree man has a large knife stuck into the leather belt that holds his coat around him, and a moment later I see him use it to slash at the twine binding a tree in order to shake it open for a customer.
"What do you think of this one?" my father asks, standing an enormous tree upright. I shake my head. It's the wrong kind, with long, sharp needles. I like the denser kind of tree that has short needles. People who get those long-needled trees are the same people who decorate with white lights and tinsel but no ornaments, or with no lights but only one kind of ornament, just shiny purple balls all the same size, like a department store...
Talking 'Bout His Generation
The tale of how a Marxist tough became Germany's foreign minister helps explain today's Europe.Berman's thoughtful book is a valuable history lesson, especially for those too young to remember much about the tumultuous 1960s or '70s. He draws the curtain back on the era of the "New Left," a time when capitalism and American power were considered the chief culprits for the world's woes and when a global peasant revolution seemed not merely possible but something that college students could help spark. But what makes this book more than merely a collection of reminiscences of intellectual arguments from the glory days -- earnest if long-forgotten quarrels that largely unfolded in obscure journals -- is that many of these activists have assumed positions of influence in Europe. Fischer's fellow '68ers include Bernard Kouchner, the French founder of Doctors Without Borders, who became the first international administrator of post-conflict Kosovo, Javier Solana, the former NATO secretary general who now serves as the European Union's foreign policy chief, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the great U.N. diplomat who was murdered by a suicide bomber in Baghdad in August 2003...
As this is happening, the '68ers are in their twilight. It is a fitting coincidence that just as Power and the Idealists was published, Fischer announced that he would be leaving the new, more conservative German government headed by Angela Merkel. "Young people must write the new chapter," he said. Now this new generation -- defined not by 1968 but by 9/11 and the Iraq War -- must grapple with the arguments that their predecessors could never resolve.
This final paragraph, in some way, represents why Soft Skull Press published this book, given the flak we expected—and got—over publishing a "liberal hawk." We must all write the sequel to the Generation of 1968 and the more we understand about the emergence, development and passing of that generation, the more effectively we will be able to express our own goals.
Probably the first blogging author Soft Skull put under contract, Michael Standaert, has just launched yet another blog (he has a rather nice stable in fact.)
But this one, Skipping Towards Armageddon, this is rather closely related to the book he is doing with us, the eponymous Skipping Towards Armageddon
Over the coming weeks, it will encompass all you ever need to know about the man who not only invented the Left Behind series (over 75 million books sold) but invented political Evangelicism—from the Institute for Creation Research back in 1972, to the first Evangelical organization to get involved in electoral politics (Californians for Biblical Morality) to the Moral Majority (Lahaye persuaded Falwell to create it, and served at the organization's first chairman). James Dobson is nothing on LaHaye (and LaHaye's wife Beverly, founder of Concerned Women of America), nothing.
The book publishes in Febuary 2006 and you can get a hint of the book from Michael's article in the NthPosition, but we suggest you head over to Michael's blog now to give yourself a crash course on the fundamentalist Right.
From the Australian newspaper the Herald Sun on the subject of This Day in History (it's already November 2nd in Australia...)
2003 – The Rev Canon V Gene Robinson is consecrated as the first openly gay bishop of the US Episcopal Church, a move that threatened to tear apart the worldwide Anglican community.2004 – A filmmaker who was the great-grandnephew of Vincent van Gogh is slain in a daylight attack, and police arrest a Dutch-Moroccan man after wounding him in a shootout. Theo van Gogh made a movie criticizing the treatment of Muslim women.
I came to this information via the poor man's clipping service Google News Alerts, because of the reference to Gene Robinson, and I'm keeping up-to-date with him because we're publishing a book about him next June, entitled Going to Heaven written by Elizabeth Adams, herself possessed of a lovely blog.
I then notice, as did you, immediately beneath, that November 2nd is also the day (the following year) on which Theo van Gogh was assassinated in the Netherlands. And we're in discussions about doing a book about that also (a translation of a Dutch book, publishing today...). Shoudl we end up doing it, I'll devote a post to it, as it touches on several things of concern to Soft Skull and publishing (and the Frankfurt Book Fair).
So this coincidence—Gene Robinson and Theo van Gogh—compells me to note, earlier than I might otherwise have planned to, that Soft Skull is embarking on a plan to start publishing a good deal about religion and how it plays into politics and society. And it's not all anti-clerical, either, though I can assure you that it is also not going to involve books about how the Dems can win in 2008 by being more religious. What it is about is recognizing that the U.S. is by far the most religious country in the West, and if we're to tussle with understanding this country, we have to engage with religion, and we're going to have to get our hands dirty with it. And, notwithstanding the relative secularity of the rest of the West, and notwithstanding my massive antipathy towards utterly ahistorical Huntingtonesque theories about clashes of civilizations, to also seek to understand the role religion (theological religion, let's say) plays when cultures (Algeria and the Netherland, Somalia and Italy, Morocco and Spain, etc etc...) interpenetrate.
Interestingly enough, almost everyone writing for us on this subject is in blog land. Michael Standaert is writing on Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind series in Skipping Toward Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire; Laurel Snyder is editing Half/Life a collection of original essays on growing up half Jewish; and David Griffith has written what is probably the finest title for a book we'll publish this year: A Good War Is Hard to Find which we're describing as a Catholic Regarding the Pain of Others or as Joan Didion meets Flannery O'Connor...the first chapter of the book is online here.
So we're hitching a couple more horses to the Soft Skull non-fiction chariot: intellectual property as readers of my Google post will have noted, and religion, as I'm saying here. Making ever stranger bedfellows with queer studies, music, foreign policy, electoral politics, and so on...
Do we know what we're doing, putting all this together? No. But we're doing it so we can find out why we're doing it.
Being is this is a blog, and being as we are publishing a book about/by Iranian bloggers, it does behoove me to alert you all to the great coverage this book has been getting in the UK (where it has already been published, by a wonderful new independent called Portobello Books).
First off Boyd Tonkin writing for The Independent has the nicest things of all to say about it:
This is not the first example of a book made out of blogs; the Iraq war spawned a couple. It does, I think, count as the finest so far: an eye-opening collage of extracts from the (roughly) 64,000 Farsi-language bloggers now at work in Iran, threaded by Alavi's illuminating analysis. The title aims to tease, and to provoke. This online Iran - young, liberal, freedom-seeking and rights-hungry - sounds a world away from the electorate which, this spring, gave a presidential mandate to the Islamist hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But the blog selection does make room for many political dissidents and reforming clerics, as well as for a host of fun-starved youngsters to whom figures such as Marilyn Manson, Harry Potter and David Beckham matter more than any mullah. Though even the mullahs have moved - the clergyman Hussein Khomeini, to take one stunning example, has stated that his grandfather simply did not have the authority to slap a fatwa on Salman Rushdie.Alavi's theme-by-theme compilation, with the background filled in by her expert commentary, adds up to a vibrant portrait of a dynamic but thwarted nation - two thirds of Iranians are under 30. Bloggers may not yet rank as typical citizens, in Iran or anywhere else. Nonetheless, their energy, mischief and sheer courage - with jail a real risk - allow us to "eavesdrop on the clandestine conversations of a closed society".
The form of We Are Iran counts for as much as its content. Weaving the web material into a seamless narrative, with photos and cartoons scattered throughout, Alavi deserves to attract an audience far wider than the usual specialist readership for works on Middle Eastern affairs. Many literary folk have been quick to complain that online ventures steal from the culture of print. Yet the traffic, as this book proves and others surely will, can profitably run both ways.
The primus inter pares of Iranian bloggers, incidentally, is Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder. He's the guy that turned on Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Middle East correspondent onto We Are Iran; Dickey wrote a great preview piece on the book earlier this summer, with the wonderful title Writing Lolita in Tehran.
A curious query from Iran: “Has everyone noticed the spooky absence of graffiti in our public toilets since the arrival of Weblogs?” I confess, this little detail of modern life in Tehran—which tells you so much about young people desperately in need of self-expression—might have slipped right by me if I hadn’t been sent a new book called “We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs.” Written by Nasrin Alavi (a pseudonym), and due for international publication this fall, it’s a survey of the personal diaries that Iranians post online. Five years ago, there were none. Now there are many tens of thousands. And you won’t get a better glimpse of the obsessions and frustrations that exist behind the imposed cliché of the black chador; ideas and passions that thrive despite the rule of what Alavi calls “mutant Islamists.”Some of the bloggers’ language is very tough: “I s--- on the whole of Hezbollah.” Some is deeply evocative: “Have you ever been forced into exile? Has it ever happened that you just can’t get the pattern of those tiles in your Mother’s kitchen out of your head (for three nights in a row), but you just cannot remember the color? Has it ever come about that you call your Mother up from far away and ask her to describe the color of those tiles—at which you both uncontrollably sob?” Many Iranian women write with brilliant bitterness from their anonymity, and about it. “In the obituary columns instead of my picture, they place a picture of a rose,” writes one. “[Because] the image of a woman can ensnare a man.”
As mentioned in a previous post, Nasrin Alavi will guestblog here around the end of November, and we'd love to have her do what Kevin Smokler calls a Virtual Book Tour, so if any bloggers out there are up for hosting Nasrin arounfd the end of November, please do give me a holler.
(Update: Nasrin reacts to the vile comments by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on OpenDemocracy.net. "The speech of Iran’s president calling for Israel’s destruction is a sign of domestic weakness not international strength," she says.)