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Mamihlapinatapai
From kottke:
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…’”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.
The Morals of Dervishes
I saw a holy man on the seashore who had been wounded by a tiger. No medicine could relieve his pain; he suffered much but he nevertheless constantly thanked God the most high, saying: ‘Praise be to Allah that I have fallen into a calamity and not into sin.’
If that beloved Friend decrees me to be slain
I shall not say that moment that I grieve for life
Or say: What fault has thy slave committed?
My grief will be for having offended thee.
As found here.
A.J. Jacobs - The Year of Living Biblically
This really was one of the better books I’ve read in a while. Informative, entertaining and highly worth your time. I borrowed a copy from library (because buying books new is always a pricey proposition) but I’m considering buying one for myself in the future.
The interesting thing about this is that honestly, in New York, he’s not really that out of place.
excerpt from Asad’s The Road to Mecca
“One day I asked a hajji, who understood a little English: ‘Do you really believe that God expects you to show Him your respect by repeated bowing and kneeling and prostration? Might it not be better only to look into oneself and to pray to Him in the stillness of one’s heart? Why all these movements of your body?’ As soon as I had uttered these words I felt remorse, for I had not intended to injure the old man’s religious feelings. But the hajji did not appear in the least offended. He smiled with his toothless mouth and replied:
‘How else then should we worship God? Did He not create both, soul and body, together? And this being so, should man not pray with his body as well as his soul? Listen, I will tell you why we Muslims pray as we pray. We turn toward the Kaaba, God’s holy temple in Mecca, knowing that the faces of all Muslims, wherever they may be, are turned to it in prayer, and that we are like one body, with Him as the centre of our thoughts.
First we stand upright and recite from the Holy Koran, remembering that it is His Word, given to man that he may be upright and steadfast in life. Then we say, God is the Greatest, reminding ourselves that no one deserves to be worshipped but Him; and bow down deep because we honour Him above all, and praise His power and glory.
Thereafter we prostrate ourselves on our foreheads because we feel that we are but dust and nothingness before Him, and that He is our Creator and Sustainer on high.Then we lift our faces from the ground and remain sitting, praying that He forgive us our sins and bestow His grace upon us, and guide us aright, and give us health and sustenance. Then we again prostrate ourselves on the ground and touch the dust with our foreheads before the might and the glory of the One.
After that, we remain sitting and pray that He bless the Prophet Muhammad who brought His message to us, just as He blessed the earlier Prophets; and that He bless us as well, and all those who follow the right guidance; we ask Him to give us of the good of this world and of the good of the world to come. In the end we turn our heads to the right and to the left, saying, Peace and grace of God be upon you and thus greet all who are righteous, wherever they may be.
It was thus that our Prophet used to pray and taught his followers to pray for all times, so that they might willingly surrender themselves to God which is what Islam means and so be at peace with Him and with their own destiny.
…
I began to feel an unwonted humility whenever I saw a man standing barefoot on his prayer rug, or on a straw mat, or on the bare earth, with his arms folded over his chest and his head lowered, entirely submerged within himself, oblivious of what was going on around him, whether it was in a mosque or on the sidewalk of a busy street: a man at peace with himself.”
From Muhammad Asad’s The Road to Mecca.
Kurt Busiek & Gail Simone @ SWF 07
Kurt Busiek (Astro City, Avengers, Conan) and Gail Simone(Birds of Prey, Agent X, Wonder Woman) will be in Singapore on the 1st and 2nd of December as part of the Singapore Writers Festival. Mark Waid was supposed to be able to make it, but unfortunately had to pull out. The official page isn’t terribly navigationally friendly, but I’ve copied the text for these events below. There’s a lot of other interesting stuff of course, but far too much for me to reproduce here. All events listed below are free, with those on the 1st of December taking place in the Chamber of the Arts House and those on the 2nd taking place in the Play Den.
Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude
Dean Street, Brooklyn
Originally uploaded by KurtisK.
It’s a novel that covers almost everything I find interesting: comic books, graffiti, race, pop music, Brooklyn and ties it all into a strange concoction. It’s very hard to sum up what the novel is “about” really, but it revolves around Dylan Ebdus, the offspring of liberal white Jewish bohemian types, and Mingus Rude, the son of a member of a black 60s soul group, united by having been abandoned by their mothers and by growing up on the streets of Brooklyn (coincidentally Motherless Brooklyn is another Lethem title). It’s a fairly grounded gritty novel except for one thing: the two are in possession of a super powered ring. Don’t let that throw you off though, since it almost never directly affects the plot and is rarely used. I’m in two minds as to whether this constitutes magic realism, but in my opinion the ring is like everything else the boys experience together: a distraction. The ring doesn’t save their lives or turn them into supervillains, no matter who wears it. Dylan and Mingus fuck up their own lives themselves, and in Mingus’ case it’s damn near a tragedy.
Powell’s Books - The Fortress of Solitude
New York Times: When Dylan Met Mingus
Fortress of Solitude: PopMatters review
New Partisan: Back to the Fortress of Brooklyn and the Millions of Destroyed Men Who Are My Brothers
Curled Up: Poornima Apte’s review
Curled Up: Michal Lemberger’s review
Fasting
There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.
We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox
is stuffed full of anything, no music.
If the brain and belly are burning clean
with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire.
The fog clears, and new energy makes you
run up the steps in front of you.
Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.
Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.
When you’re full of food and drink, Satan sits
where your spirit should, an ugly metal statue
in place of the Kaaba. When you fast,
good habits gather like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Solomon’s ring. Don’t give it
to some illusion and lose your power,
but even if you have, if you’ve lost all will and control,
they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing
out of the ground, pennants flying above them.
A table descends to your tents,
Jesus’ table.
Expect to see it, when you fast, this table
spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.Jalaluddin Rumi
Thanks to Yakoub Islam. I’m trying to find a better translation though, especially after seeing things like this.
Singapore You Are Not My Country (For Noora) - Alfian Sa’at
Singapore you are not my country.
Singapore you are not a country at all.
You are surprising Singapore, statistics-starved Singapore, soulful Singapore of tourist brochures in Japanese and hourglass kebayas.
You protest, but without picketing, without rioting, without Catherine Lim,
but through your loudspeaker media,
through the hypnotic eyeballs of your newscasters,
and that weather woman who I swear is working voodoo on my teevee screen.
The New Adventures of Hitler by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell
One of my favourite comic book writers is Grant Morrison, although I’ll probably betray all my credibility when I say I first took notice of him when he started writing the relaunched JLA title in the mid to late 1990s. He’s a pretty wacky dude and he’d done a whole bunch of other stuff before that, including great runs on Animal Man and Doom Patrol (which I’m only now getting into) that are considered some of the foundation texts for what is now DC’s Vertigo imprint. It would seem weird that somebody with a track record for the offbeat would write something as straight laced as the Justice League but as his work on JLA and other superhero titles shows, he genuinely loves the genre and the medium of comic books.
What concerns us now is one of his earlier writings from the late 1980s for a magazine in his native Scotland. I first got wind of this through a link on another blogger’s page (on the off chance you’re reading this, I’m sorry I can’t remember the URL or how I got there) and I thought it was rather interesting. The New Adventures of Hitler, as you can imagine, was a very controversial comic. He has some strange ideas admittedly, but Grant Morrison isn’t a Nazi or a fascist or a racist by any standards. It works on a very surreal level but I think the political satire comes through as a statement on the nature of authoritarianism and tyranny comes through, and of course being a British writer in the 1980s there is a comment on Margaret Thatcher in here as well. And really, how can you miss a comic that has Morrisey singing in Hitler’s closet?
I thought these panels in particular make for especially interesting reading.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
“Dazzling. Chabon has not so much attempted the great American novel as brought to life the idea that it had already been written - week by week, in the humble heroism of the comic book.”
I read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay a couple of months back, and I have to say it’s really good. It’s easy to see why it got a Pulitzer. It’s about the Golden Age of American comic books, sure, but it’s about so much more than that. It would seem that the Holocaust and homosexuality being hot button issues would give this novel a publicity boost, but they’re not gimmicks to draw the reader in. Instead, they form an organic whole together with the rest of the ideas that tie this book together. Notions of Judaism and Jewish identity (especially since so many creators in the early days were Jews) weave their way through the text, and it’s interesting to see how the concept of the Golem relates to that of the superhero. The idea of escape is, paradoxically, inescapable throughout the text. The character Joe Kavalier (himself an escape artist) and his cousin Sammy Clay come up with is named the Escapist, a tip of the hat to Jim Steranko and the character he inspired, Mister Miracle, and through his name is inextricably linked to the notion of superhero comics as an “escapist” medium. The point, I believe, Chabon is making is that in a world caught up in war and the falling apart of the nuclear family, among other burdens that life puts on us, escape would in itself be a higher purpose.
So anyway, it’s a good book. Don’t let the thickness fool you, it’s engaging enough to be a fast read. Come on, you know you want to pick it up. It was on The OC. There are no higher accolades than that.
On Adam Crocker’s recommendation I’m currently reading Perdido Street Station
MichaelChabon.com
The Amazing Website of Kavalier and Clay
Powells.com interview with Michael Chabon
