Little clay pig.

Did Will Shortz piss in Ron Rosenbaum’s cornflakes? Over at Slate, Rosenbaum goes all red-faced and spittle-flecked (for three pages!) over our national epidemic of crosswords and sudoku:

But somehow crossword types think that their addiction to this sad form of mental self-abuse somehow makes them “literary.” Sorry: Doing puzzles reflects not an elevated literary sensibility but a degraded letter-ary sensibility, one that demonstrates an inability to find pleasure in reading. Otherwise, why choose the wan, sterile satisfactions of crosswords over the far more robust full-blooded pleasures of books?

But, again, let’s try to take seriously the self-image of puzzle people as brainiacs. (Come on, try!) Isn’t it a tragedy, then, a criminal shame, that all their amazing brainpower gets wasted on word games? If they’re as smart as they think they are and there were some way to channel their alleged brainpower to something other than word games, we could cure cancer in a month!

Next week, Rosenbaum curses us for spending our mornings primping in the mirror when we could have been knitting sock puppets for orphans.

I can’t imagine how long this must have taken: The first three minutes of Beckett’s Endgame, in stop-motion Lego animation. The ragtime music is a nice touch. (Via Choire Sicha.)

This week’s NYT Mag has an excellent profile of the recently CBE’d Hanif Kureishi by Rachel Donadio:

Although Kureishi recognizes the sense of powerlessness and sting of racism that have helped push many young British Muslims toward radicalism, he is intolerant of such intolerance. “The antidote to Puritanism isn’t licentiousness, but the recognition of what goes on inside human beings,” Kureishi wrote in the title essay of “The Word and the Bomb.” He added: “Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination.”

Incidentally, Donadio’s now listed as “the incoming Rome bureau chief of The Times.” Rough life, huh?

I don’t read mysteries very often, except for the occasional burst of Dorothy Sayers when I’m feeling soppy. So it’s likely that if I didn’t happen to know Zoë Ferraris from grad school, Finding Nouf would have passed me by. This would have been a shame. I imagine that there are compulsive mystery readers who will pick up Finding Nouf because a bookstore clerk places it on the “New Mysteries!” display shelf—and damn, with a cover that gorgeous, how can you resist?—and they’ll certainly be drawn in by the mystery itself. But I’m guessing that what will ultimately linger with them is Finding Nouf’s up-close depiction of a world that many Westerners know only through the lenses of political rhetoric and oft-questionable media imagery.

Our sleuth hero in Finding Nouf is Nayir, a Palestinian-born desert guide living a solitary existence in the Saudi Arabian port city of Jeddah. When Nouf ash-Shrawi, the sister of a wealthy friend, disappears into the desert outside Jeddah only days before her wedding, Nayir joins the rescue effort. A few days later Nouf’s body is found, and all decide that her death was an unfortunate accident—but an assistant at the Jeddah medical examiner’s office, a woman named Katya, insists that the evidence points to something else. Her supervisors refuse to listen, but Nayir decides he must uncover the truth. To do so he must venture into the cloistered world of Saudi women, whose day-to-day existence he knows almost nothing about. And he must accept the help of Katya, whose independence and forthright attitude don’t quite square with his idea of a virtuous woman.

Zoë Ferraris spent close to a year in Saudi Arabia soon after the first Gulf War, living with her then-husband’s family, and in Finding Nouf she draws on that experience to deliver a story laced with small, illuminating details of ordinary Saudi life. (For instance, you can tell the real religious policemen from the vigilantes because the vigilantes wear better clothing. And it’s unfashionable for a Saudi to wear glasses, since they take great pride in their Bedouin heritage and it’s a popular belief that all Bedouin have perfect vision.) Last month I met with Ferraris and talked with her about the work that went into Finding Nouf, how not to plan a mystery, and the difficulties of writing a book about Middle Eastern culture for a mostly Western audience.

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If you’re in the Bay Area and looking for something to do, here’s a couple of readings featuring two awesome authors:

Zoë Ferraris, author of Finding Nouf
Wednesday, June 25, at 7:00 p.m.
Books Inc.
601 Van Ness, San Francisco, CA

Dan White, author of The Cactus Eaters
Thursday, June 26, at 7:30 p.m.
Mrs. Dalloway’s
2904 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA

You can read my interview with Dan White here. (And stay tuned for an interview with Ms. Ferraris, as soon as I can get it transcribed.) I’ll be at both readings, so stop by and say hi!

Aw, dammit: Cody’s Books has shut its doors for good. I was pretty shocked when I got the email from their listserv Friday night. I figured the new Shattuck store wasn’t going to make it, but I didn’t think they’d end it this quickly. No mention of a fire sale, which is kind of disappointing. The 4th Street moving sale was a real neighborhood event, and I imagine a going-out-of-business sale would have been even more so. Like a memorial service where everyone leaves with a bag of books.

Hey, didja see the Lorrie Moore profile in the Guardian? Didja didja didja? She says a whole lot of stuff about writing and relationships and discipline but none of it’s as important as when she says she’s about to turn in her third novel which I’ve been hearing for years now but OMG PLEASE let it be true. This one I’m gonna buy in hardcover. Reading a new Lorrie Moore is like getting a phone call from an old friend I don’t talk to often enough. I assigned so much Moore to my classes in NY that I realized I had to stop, or they were only going to learn how to write mordantly funny stories about broken relationships.

One of my writing teachers in Seattle once said that all the guy writers he knew had massive crushes on Moore, because they imagined her as someone who’d laugh at their jokes. I can’t think of many contemporary writers who inspire a similar caliber of admiration, envy and intellectual lust. She writes exactly what we would write if only we could write it like her.

(Via About Last Night.)

Via Maud, I just read this essay by Chris Adrian, published back in May in the NYTimes Magazine. His novel The Children’s Hospital, about the second Great Flood and the denizens of a hospital that becomes an ark, was easily one of my favorite books of the last few years. It made me late to a birthday party because I was almost done and I couldn’t leave without finishing it. The whole thing was leading up to this giant, sweeping (and yet oh so minutely drawn and finely tuned) ending, and there was no way I was gonna put it down with a mere forty or so pages left. When I finally got to the party I was in a deep melancholy daze and of use to no one for purposes of birthday cheer.

In the essay, Adrian recounts his decision to get a tattoo after a painful breakup. I’m sure it would have been easy to deliver a “Modern Love” sort of column, all rueful, breezy overshare. But instead Adrian creates a quiet portrait of a man looking to something outside himself for guidance. The last line has become my mantra for the rest of this week, if not the next few years.

Everyone’s talking about the Kindle again, thanks to Jeff Bezos’ recent presentation at Book Expo America. I’ve got a certain amount of interest in the Kindle, though I certainly don’t have the budget to buy one. Priced as it is, the Kindle’s mostly a status gadget for literate business managers. (Plus there’s no getting around the fact that the thing looks like a Speak ‘N’ Spell. I mean, Amazon, c’mon. Watch Apple and learn.)

I stopped using my Treo last year when its drawbacks (rickety software, clunky size, sucked as an actual phone) started to outweight its advantages, but the one thing I really miss is using it to read books. I have to say, it was pretty awesome to have a book on me at all times, especially during those hours spent stuck on subway platforms or in the taxi queue at La Guardia. And holding up the Treo in bed was much easier on my wrists than an actual book. I was on a grad school budget, so I kept mostly to public-domain works and the occasional cracked file (shh), but even so I still managed to find a lot to read. And after a while I found that my reading habits changed. With the Treo, it was much easier to dip into a book for a few minutes and come out again. I didn’t have to fumble in my bag for a book, turn to the right the page, move the bookmark. I just turned on the Treo and there it was, exactly where I’d stopped reading. I started to discover little pockets of reading time I hadn’t had before, in grocery store lines and elevators lobbies. Granted, I couldn’t read anything too demanding this way—I wasn’t about to catch a few pages of Ulysses while waiting for my takeout order—but the time really started to add up. A few acquaintances expressed horror at the thought of reading a book on a screen, but I mostly shrugged. If I’m reading more, what’s the problem?

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If anyone out there is looking for creative writing advice, here’s my number-one, not-so-original pick: Write stuff down when you think of it. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll remember, because you won’t. You just won’t. Okay, you might, but in my own experience I actually succeed in remembering roughly one time in four. And even then, by the time I get around to it, inevitably the sentence or idea or whatever has lost some of its power. Sometimes I screw up the word order or misremember an adjective—oh man, I know it sounded better than that—but a lot of the time it’s because that sentence, that idea, was a window into something larger, and I let the moment pass.

The problem is that it’s just so much easier to bask in the glow of that perfect thought than mess with it by trying to put it down on paper and figure out where it goes exactly, or what comes next. There’s the fear that pinning it down will kill it—you’ll realize that the sentence isn’t so perfect after all, or the idea isn’t really all that. (It doesn’t help that a lone sentence on a piece of paper looks like someone standing in an room in their underwear, all awkward and exposed.) But this is the only way anything actually gets done, so carry pen and paper around at all times. If you’re like me, writing things down in public will make you feel like the emo kid on the school bus, but try to do it anyway.

If I sound kind of preachy here, it’s because I’m actually yelling at myself. I was cleaning up the apartment yesterday (we’re staring down three consecutive weekends of houseguests) and I started writing a blog post in my head. It was a great post, but I was in a groove, dusting and decluttering and listening to the new Morcheeba album, and I didn’t feel like stopping. I told myself I’d remember it later. This morning I spent close to an hour trying to recreate the post. No dice. It’s stilted and awful. I might carve something acceptable out of it, and I might not. But I really wish I’d written it yesterday, like I knew I should have.