Turkish Delight

There have been massive protests in Turkey against the islamization of the state. As far as I'm concerned, it's a wonderful thing. Turkey is an anomaly among mostly Islamic countries in that it is truly secular and many people there do not want to follow in the footsteps of Iran or Saudi Arabia. Perhaps this will give other moderate Muslims some inspiration to counter the destructive rise of Muslim fundamentalism elsewhere.

Latin Literary Rock Stars

Yesterday, another panel of the PEN international writers festival, this time with 4 young writers from Latin America. The panel was called "Gritty Realism", as opposed to "Magical Realism", something that at this point we are all exhausted of. We want to get off the literary merry-go-round that seems to imply that anything ever written in Spanish has flying grandmothers and people who eat butterflies. So now we have writers who write about the world that surrounds them: a world in which the absurd is a daily occurrence, but as Jorge Franco (Rosario Tijeras), from Colombia, said, reality in our countries is exaggerated enough, the writer doesn't need to embellish.
Just for clarification, the greatest, and to my mind the only worthy example of magical realism is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and he has always been far more soundly on the side of the real than on the side of the magical. This is something his countless cheap imitators have never been able to grasp. So they come up with people who fly or eat mole with rose petals or see crabs in the sky for no reason.
Guillermo Arriaga, from Mexico, was there. He has written screenplays (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) and novels. Although his movies are highly melodramatic, he counts himself on the side of reality and action. A very charismatic guy, with a big personality. Rather macho.
Daniel Alarcón, a very young US writer who grew up in Peru, impressed me with his coherent, intelligent and terse comments and his refreshing lack of ego. I bought his novel, Lost City Radio, because he seems so smart.
One interesting thing of seeing panels of writers is that the transparency of the writer's ego is intense in person. Writers are a needy bunch and very few of them know how to be truly self-effacing.
Thus, Patricia Melo, a writer from Brazil, for some inexplicable reason, decided to give a lengthy prepared lecture on the source material for her novels, seemingly impervious to the fact that there were other three writers with things to say and that this was supposed to be a plural conversation.
Had invaluable pearls of wisdom come out of her, it was still completely inappropriate and sadly counterproductive. Instead of coming across as an interesting writer, she seemed full of herself. Poor Francisco Goldman, the moderator, didn't know whether to interrupt, which would have been dramatic, but called for. Luckily, after the hostages were freed, the conversation was able to begin. It was interesting but labored. It didn't flow easily. I don't know if this is because in Latin America everything is always very formal, or because this woman effectively killed the mood and the tempo. Also, and this is not the first time, the translator provided for Jorge Franco was a disaster. She interrupted him every second word, and added freely of herself, with a touch of hysteria. He was frustrated, but by Jove, all of us Latin Americans are very well brought up people: he suffered her with great dignity. Still, Jorge Franco, Daniel Alarcón and Arriaga were relatively spontaneous and natural in their responses.
Alarcón told a wonderful anecdote about Peru, that pretty much sums up the tenor of life south of the border:
Apparently the government of Lima decided to enforce a seatbelt law. Peruvians were bitterly unhappy about having to wear seatbelts. So some enterprising guy sold t-shirts that had a black diagonal band printed across the chest. You could wear this t-shirt to protest the seatbelt law, and even better, you could wear it to fool the cops.
And that in a nutshell is Latin America for you.

Ball and Chain Letters

I just realized this is the perfect venue for me to vent my bilious frustration at those people who use emails to send inane, moronic chain letters. No matter what the subject, whether national jokes, Jews in peril, great heroic causes, one can safely say that 95% of chain letters are retarded. If you are a friend of mine who does this and you are reading this right now, you now know what I think. I hope it does not affect our friendship.
I got two today. One claims that the British are going to stop teaching the Holocaust at schools because it offends Muslims. Mr. Ex-Enchilada warned me about this one. He got it in Mexico. I got it from a source here. It is obviously making the rounds. There are no sources for this piece of news. Like manna from heaven, this news fell directly from the sky into the internet. If this is indeed true, I want to know the source, because it sounds like an utter fabrication. My instinct is that it is one of those internet legends for Jews and by Jews that, as far as I can tell, only serve the purpose of keeping Jews safely paranoid about everything.
The other letter was a link to an Israeli video with a rap song about the Holocaust. The sender was concerned that people would find it offensive. What was offensive was not that some Israeli rapper is rapping the story of the Shoah, which is fine by me; what is offensive is the tackiness, the bad taste, the sight of artsy modern dancers smeared in ashes contorting themselves, a woman violinist dressed in some hideous folk dance garb, the entire thing with the look and the sound and feel and maturity of a very bad junior high school production. That is what bottles the mind, as Will Ferrell would say in Blades of Glory.
My favorite internet legend involves a supposed letter written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez at a time when he was very sick. This letter sounded like it was written by a bored housewife who had read way too many Hallmark cards. In it Garcia Marquez told us to enjoy every sunset, smell every flower, look at every seagull. Only an alien from another planet would confuse this sentimental snot with anything that this man ever wrote. Only an idiot would actually believe that this man would stoop so low and write something so hideous. It made the Reader's Digest seem like Cervantes. But that didn't prevent people from forwarding it ad nauseam.
Don't get me started on the ones that threaten you with terrible luck if you don't forward them. You are lucky I don't own a submachine gun.

Eggs Benedict

Pope Benedict XVI is turning out to be a major pain. First he goes to Auschwitz and wasn't going to mention the Jews in his speech except someone in his camp told him he had to (as was reported in the New Yorker). Then he offends Muslims by quoting some obscure medieval text where it says something to the effect that nothing good has ever come of Islam, inciting riots:

...many of the Vatican correspondents who, like Politi, travelled to Regensburg with Benedict doubt that there was anything accidental or inadvertent in the citation. They had received copies of his speech at six in the morning of the day he gave it, and, at ten, they assembled in the university’s makeshift pressroom and informed the Vatican spokesman, a Jesuit priest and Vatican Radio director named Federico Lombardi, that the passage was going to be incendiary. “The point is that at 10 A.M. somebody got the message that the text was explosive,” Politi told me, adding that when the Pope had gone to Auschwitz to speak, last May, “we got copies of that speech, too, and it never mentioned the Shoah, so we said, ‘Hey, where is Shoah?,’ and he changed it.” Putting aside the obvious question of whether reporters should be in the business of saving Popes from embarrassment, the question remains whether Benedict got the message.

Now he wants to go back to a Latin mass where there are prayers for the conversion of the Jews. He wants to backtrack from the reforms of Vatican II, which for the first time in centuries tried to mend the horrific, inexcusable, murderous, antisemitic attitudes of the Catholic Church towards the Jews. The BBC reports:

Concern is now focused on traditional mass's Good Friday liturgy which contains a prayer "For the conversion of the Jews". The prayer reads: "Let us pray also for the Jews, that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ."It refers to their "blindness" and prays for them to be "delivered from their darkness."

Well, I have news for Benedict: You wish. It ain't gonna happen.
Why the hell should Jews convert to a religion that has brought them death, persecution and nothing but grief for 2000 years?
Benedict is supposed to be an intellectual and a theologian, but I just think he is not interested in human beings or human suffering or human reality. His church is on decline. It has become irrelevant for a lot of people, for a number of reasons; from pedophilia scandals, to intransigence about issues of basic human nature, to displays of pomp and power but not of pity. He thinks that making it hardcore is going to make people flock back to it. Whatever.
I just hope that when they pray this stupid prayer, they don't provide translations. The last thing Jews need right now is a Catholic Church that rears its ugly antisemitic head again.

Viva Colbert!

Thanks to my new (yay!) friends at Immigration Orange, I was able to see this wonderful bit from the estimable Stephen Colbert, skewering some military idiot, Barry McCaffrey, who has proposed drafting illegal immigrants because nobody in their right mind wants to join the Army right now. Geez...
Enjoy!

Literary Rock Stars

A new installment of the PEN festival of writers. This year seems to me quite boring because the theme is "Home". And I just can't get worked up about it. Seems like a bit of a tired cliché to me. In any case, we sneaked into the big Town Hall reading where there were some nifty literary superstars. Unfortunately, we missed our favorite, Don DeLillo. But we saw Nadine Gordimer, and Salman Rushdie and Neil Gaiman, who is the most rock star of the literary rock stars and commands huge lines of fans. He writes fantastical things which is why I haven't bothered reading him. If you must know, I loathe fantasy and whimsy. Thus, I bought the new book by DeLillo, Falling Man, which is, in typical Delillean fashion, about 9/11. I figure if anybody can write about that day that I can stand to read about without cringing, is him. Libra is one of my favorite books of all time. I bought an autographed copy of Falling Man (duh!) so I decided I just wanted to take a look at the guy. In the flesh. To see if he indeed exists. My friend said: talk to him, why don't you. I wouldn't know what to say except that Libra is a fucking masterpiece and I liked White Noise too, so beautifully paranoid and I still haven't finished Underworld (who has?) and I love him to pieces, so no. He already knows that somehow. In any case, I find the whole book signing ritual slightly creepy and surreal. I want to sleep with writers, eat their brains, steal their talent, not get their signature. Anyway...
So as I turn the corner to see my beloved author, in typical Dellilean fashion, he is not there. Vanished without a trace. God bless him. But Rushdie is there, charming as always, and Nadine Gordimer is there, small, wrinkled and elegant, waiting for fans, and some new other flavors of the month are there, signing away, and Neil Gaiman has a line that goes down into the lobby (which unfairly makes me seriously not want to read him), and Tatyana Tostoya sits there, wanting to die because no one is bringing her a book to sign. This other writer with an Arab name, same thing. I feel so bad, I almost go down there and buy their books so they can sign them for me. Literary stardom is just as silly as any other kind of celebrity or worse.
That is why I eschew it altogether, my dear readers.

Do it, Mike!

Mayor Bloomberg wants to charge a congestion fee of $8 to cars that come into Manhattan from 6 am to 6 pm on weekdays. I say do it. I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape over $8. There is enough public transportation for people to come to the city without their cars. This city is not a parking lot. But it has become one. This city should actually be a bike town, making more way for bicycles and less for cars. What's with those horrible politicians in Albany that always hold everything hostage? They've been around since I moved here, Joe Bruno and Sheldon Silver and so far I have never seen them do anything for me or the city of NY. They are corrupt dinosaurs and they should go. Why do we need their permission to levy a city tax?
While you are at it, Mike, make the cabs smaller and less gas guzzling. Now that you are in Mexico, check out the VW beetle cabs. They are small, energy efficient and they work. Just don't import the penchant some drivers have for carjacking their passengers. I once wrote you a letter about this. It is beyond me why we are using those monstrous cars that take up space and waste gasoline. Maybe all cabs should be hybrid cars. Is anyone talking about this?
By the way, now that I have your attention in my fertile fantasy life. The store that used to be Astor Wines on Astor Place is now going to be a Walgreen's. There is another Walgreen's like three blocks away on 14th and 4Ave. How many freaking pharmacies do we need? When you look around Astor Place, this is what you now see: K Mart, Chase bank, Starbucks, FedEx Kinko's , Barnes &Noble and now Walgreen's. It makes me sick to my stomach.
I like you Mayor Bloomberg, but this city has become a chain store central because of you. That is not a good legacy.

The Poor Are Getting Fat

And it's not because they are getting rich, but quite the contrary. This must be a first in human history: poor people dying of obesity and its attendant miseries because they can't afford to buy fresh foods.
The poor used to be skeletal and emaciated, and in some countries of the Third World, they still are. But in most developed and developing countries, obesity has reached epidemic levels, and populations who used to be of normal weight are now fat.
I'm not the kind of person to blame the US for everything, but I certainly blame it for this.
As this article by Michael Pollan explains, it all comes from processed foods, which are always cheaper than fresh.
A scientist conducted an experiment:

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

Well, there you have it. And countries that always relied in fresh food preparation, like Mexico, are now inundated with junk and snacks and fat poor people.
Mr. Pollan explains further. The reason why everybody in the world is ballooning is because of the US government's farm bill, which subsidizes mainly carbohydrate crops like corn, wheat, rice and soy. So my instincts were right. The US is totally to blame for this eating crisis:

To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.

It's just depressing. Stop eating Twinkies.

Bees Scare Me

First it was the African Bee. I was living in Mexico City at the time, a place so polluted that sometimes birds would drop dead from asphyxiation. There were news that Mexico was invaded by killer African bees. I was very afraid. I remember seeing a huge black bee, like a wasp, on the outside of my windshield on a hot day in Mexico. Had it been on the inside I would have jumped out of the car. I closed the window immediately, so convinced was I of my imminent death at the sting of an African bee. Ever since I saw my friend Dina take a bite of an orange on which a bee was standing, I've been afraid of bees. Dina's lip was swollen to the size of a lemon.
Now it turns out that bees are disappearing and nobody knows why.

Genetic testing at Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer.

There is also, according to the NYT, a pesticide that has been banned in France. So we are making bees sick. That is very bad. Selfish as I am, I don't want to leave in a world without honey. But it's not all about me:

Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts.

Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees’ natural forage areas.

Don't tell me that even bees are made to eat junk food, because that just blows my mind. That is the last straw!
I hope they don't all come back and sting us.

PC is stupid

It's getting out of control. Now CBS has fired two DJ's that, quite on purpose, called a Chinese restaurant and asked for " shlimp flied lice". So some Chinese-Americans expected them to be fired just like Don Imus, and voilá, they were.
I have neither the time nor the patience to start explaining why the Imus comment was much worse. I'm sure the Chinese have a right to be offended, but if we're going to start firing everybody then we're just going to become a bunch of even dumber fucks than we already are.
America is funny. Let me rephrase that. America is weird. We love our freedom of expression but we are also very sensitive. We are far more sensitive as a culture and far less racist in practice, in my opinion, than our European friends, who treat their minorities like second class citizens pretty much across the board. We here pretend to be nice and we know better than to say horrid things aloud, though we may think them, although I have to say, I've heard people say some stupid ass things about Jews, gays, Blacks, and Latinos.
If it offends you, you should speak up. But if we demanded someone get fired every time we heard an ignorant racist comment, nobody would have a job.