Link Salad, the Eastside Scribblers Edition
-- The Troubles at Home - Caelainn Hogan, Harper's Magazine, Oct. 27, 2016
"Back then, Khaled remembers the Irish tricolor draped out every window along the streets of Catholic areas, until it met with the British Union Jack, each territory marked out edge to edge with flags. As if to strengthen the divide, Protestant areas would hang Israeli flags and Catholic areas would fly the Palestinian colors. More recently, Khaled had passed a muralist in West Belfast painting a tribute to Palestine. He suggested he paint something for Syria. “Which side?” the man had asked him. When Khaled said he supported the revolution, the painter told him, “Walk away from here, kiddo.” He supported Palestine, siding with Hezbollah against Israel. Hezbollah supported the Syrian regime against the revolution and so by default so did the muralist."
-- After the Fall: Women Writers on Post-Revolutionary Egypt - Marya Hannun, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 9, 2016
"REVOLUTIONS ARE STORIES we tell in perfect arc. The language used to describe them contains all of the inexorable momentum that drives grand narratives. Words like movement, gathering, uprising culminate in an overthrow, a toppling, a fall. It is the stuff of good Aristotelian drama. This inherent drama is at the heart of what Egyptian novelist Youssef Rakha has cynically described as the “Arab Spring Industry,” referring to the glut of cultural production that followed in the wake of the 2011 revolution. Documentary works like Mona Prince’s Revolution Is My Name and Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution captured the heady moments of transformation - the coming of age of an entire generation of Egyptian writers and activists."
-- There is no such thing as western civilisation - Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Guardian, Nov. 9, 2016
"There were no recognised rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Cordoba’s ambassador to the courts of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman empires. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of Cordoba’s Jewish community in the middle of the 10th century, was not only a great medical scholar, he was the chairman of the Caliph’s medical council; and when the Emperor Constantine in Byzantium sent the Caliph a copy of Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, he took up Ibn Shaprut’s suggestion to have it translated into Arabic, and Cordoba became one of the great centres of medical knowledge in Europe. The translation into Latin of the works of Ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the 12th century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. He was known in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as “The Commentator”, because of his commentaries on Aristotle. So the classical traditions that are meant to distinguish western civilisation from the inheritors of the caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them."
-- Fried Fish - Thomas Chatterton Williams, London Review of Books, Nov. 17, 2016
"The mundane nature of the evil in such tossed-off remarks demands attention, whereas there is always the danger that the reader has become inured to yet another elaboration of a back-splitting lashing in front of a drooping willow tree. The matter-of-factness of Whitehead’s prose allows him to have his Southern Novel of Black Misery and stand ironically apart from it too. One can’t avoid the impression that, for Whitehead, the subject matter is always in service of the intellectual and narrative dexterity on the page. It’s all so theoretical and cerebral, the book could come with a disclaimer: no author was harmed in the making of this novel."
-- Black Life And Death In A Familiar America - Eve L. Ewing, FADER, Nov. 10, 2016
"Mt. Greenwood is on the South Side, but not in a part of the South Side that you have heard of. You have no reason to hear about Mt. Greenwood. We have heard of it because we were told not to go there, to avoid it. Mt. Greenwood is one of the residential pockets on the city’s South Side that harbors a fierce, raging, furious whiteness. This is a stop-at-nothing whiteness, a whiteness that says “It’s your life or mine” and means it. The neighborhood is like a snapshot of that supposedly once-great America we’ve heard so much about in the last year - the one where you know the postal worker and the pharmacist by name, where children play outside unbothered, and where they kill black people in the streets with impunity."
"Back then, Khaled remembers the Irish tricolor draped out every window along the streets of Catholic areas, until it met with the British Union Jack, each territory marked out edge to edge with flags. As if to strengthen the divide, Protestant areas would hang Israeli flags and Catholic areas would fly the Palestinian colors. More recently, Khaled had passed a muralist in West Belfast painting a tribute to Palestine. He suggested he paint something for Syria. “Which side?” the man had asked him. When Khaled said he supported the revolution, the painter told him, “Walk away from here, kiddo.” He supported Palestine, siding with Hezbollah against Israel. Hezbollah supported the Syrian regime against the revolution and so by default so did the muralist."
-- After the Fall: Women Writers on Post-Revolutionary Egypt - Marya Hannun, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 9, 2016
"REVOLUTIONS ARE STORIES we tell in perfect arc. The language used to describe them contains all of the inexorable momentum that drives grand narratives. Words like movement, gathering, uprising culminate in an overthrow, a toppling, a fall. It is the stuff of good Aristotelian drama. This inherent drama is at the heart of what Egyptian novelist Youssef Rakha has cynically described as the “Arab Spring Industry,” referring to the glut of cultural production that followed in the wake of the 2011 revolution. Documentary works like Mona Prince’s Revolution Is My Name and Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution captured the heady moments of transformation - the coming of age of an entire generation of Egyptian writers and activists."
-- There is no such thing as western civilisation - Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Guardian, Nov. 9, 2016
"There were no recognised rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Cordoba’s ambassador to the courts of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman empires. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of Cordoba’s Jewish community in the middle of the 10th century, was not only a great medical scholar, he was the chairman of the Caliph’s medical council; and when the Emperor Constantine in Byzantium sent the Caliph a copy of Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, he took up Ibn Shaprut’s suggestion to have it translated into Arabic, and Cordoba became one of the great centres of medical knowledge in Europe. The translation into Latin of the works of Ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the 12th century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. He was known in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as “The Commentator”, because of his commentaries on Aristotle. So the classical traditions that are meant to distinguish western civilisation from the inheritors of the caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them."
-- Fried Fish - Thomas Chatterton Williams, London Review of Books, Nov. 17, 2016
"The mundane nature of the evil in such tossed-off remarks demands attention, whereas there is always the danger that the reader has become inured to yet another elaboration of a back-splitting lashing in front of a drooping willow tree. The matter-of-factness of Whitehead’s prose allows him to have his Southern Novel of Black Misery and stand ironically apart from it too. One can’t avoid the impression that, for Whitehead, the subject matter is always in service of the intellectual and narrative dexterity on the page. It’s all so theoretical and cerebral, the book could come with a disclaimer: no author was harmed in the making of this novel."
-- Black Life And Death In A Familiar America - Eve L. Ewing, FADER, Nov. 10, 2016
"Mt. Greenwood is on the South Side, but not in a part of the South Side that you have heard of. You have no reason to hear about Mt. Greenwood. We have heard of it because we were told not to go there, to avoid it. Mt. Greenwood is one of the residential pockets on the city’s South Side that harbors a fierce, raging, furious whiteness. This is a stop-at-nothing whiteness, a whiteness that says “It’s your life or mine” and means it. The neighborhood is like a snapshot of that supposedly once-great America we’ve heard so much about in the last year - the one where you know the postal worker and the pharmacist by name, where children play outside unbothered, and where they kill black people in the streets with impunity."