the shade of swords
They're interviewing M.J. Akbar on NPR; they just asked him what he wouldn't be able to do as a Muslim in Pakistan. "Well, I wouldn't be able to vote freely," he says. "I also wouldn't be able to have a drink, which I can do as an Indian Muslim. A lot of people will be upset to hear this, but I am a believer, and I do believe that Allah is merciful, and so I ought to give him a reason to be merciful to me later on." He laughs. "You think I am being facetious, but no, I am serious."
The sage does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone; and I have fallen into the exact opposite. I have nothing but time and no time to do anything. Possibly this is because I have been sleeping too much. Possibly this is because I hate my book. It's ludicrous to discover you've tied your entire sense of self to a 341-kilobyte Microsoft Word file; even worse to make said file the litmus test for whether you will be able to live the only life that seems bearable, just because an earlier draft prompted someone to throw you some money. No, it's not very good. It's just a story, and a really sad story, and rather tedious in many parts. I don't know that the world needs it—but of course I'll keep at it. What else is there?
Well, there's the university police beat:
They noticed that two of the women were stumbling and one man was using a wall to keep balance, reports stated. The three students, all under 21 years old, had an odor of alcohol coming from them. This is just the way I walk, one student said after denying stumbling, reports stated.
The three students admitted to drinking alcohol. One female student repeatedly gave police a fake phone number. One of the fake numbers she gave had 12 digits, reports stated.
And Amber reports from the front lines of the Iowa City Public Library:
Middlesex SORT of kicks ass. I'm finding it a little loosely written. The New Yorker seems to edit the fuck out of their excerpts. Remember the one from Eggers' A Staggering Work...? It was yards better than the real book. They did the same with Mary Karr's Cherry (which I'm horribly embarrassed to admit I read, but the impulse was based solely on the New Yorker's endorsement), the excessive dross of which was somehow arranged, by the pen of a clever excerpt editor, into a minor symphony. They're propelling me to the library quite without just cause, the bastards.
