Sierra Prasada

A 1994 interview with Robert Gottlieb, former editor in chief of Knopf; Simon & Schuster; and The New Yorker, is so much more thanks to the creativity (and connections) of Larissa MacFarquhar – a window into the golden age of publishing, a side-to-side view of the writing and reading experience, and a portrait of the editor as a mind at work.

Joseph Heller:

When I finally completed my second novel, “Something Happened”, The New York Times interviewed me about having finished the book, and I talked to them about Bob’s value to me as an editor. The day the interview ran, Bob called me and said he didn’t think it was a good idea to talk about editing and the contributions of editors, since the public likes to think everything in the book comes right from the author. That’s true, and so from that time on, I haven’t.

Robert Gottlieb:

Of course, if anybody says nice things about me in print it’s pleasant. But the fact is, this glorification of editors, of which I have been an extreme example, is not a wholesome thing. The editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one. The last thing anyone reading “Jane Eyre” would want to know, for example, is that I had convinced Charlotte Brontë that the first Mrs. Rochester should go up in flames.

The most famous case of editorial intervention in English literature has always bothered me — you know, that Dickens’s friend Bulwer-Lytton advised him to change the end of “Great Expectations”: I don’t want to know that! As a critic, of course, as a literary historian, I’m interested, but as a reader, I find it very disconcerting. Nobody should know what I told Joe Heller and how grateful he is, if he is. It’s unkind to the reader and just out of place.

Read the rest.

In Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient, one character offers instructions to another on how to read Kipling, in general, and the novel Kim in particular:

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

Each author I come to know through this project stays with me. I look forward to revisiting them, given the inspiration, as this decade of directed reading plays out.

First up, the revolution will be televised: Click on the image above (or here for the Arabic) to see a trailer of Top Goon, puppet political satire from Syria.

The Guardian dubs 2011 the year of the translator and The National considers the “steep upwards trend” in Arabic literature in translation.

If you ever wondered exactly what Andy Warhol was all about, here’s your answer from Intelligent Life.

It’s going to be a while (2013-14) until this blog tackles World War II and, in the meantime, you can experience it in real time via Twitter thanks to this innovative feed.

And if you missed it: Check out remarks made earlier this year on what it means to be well-read from NPR’s Linda Holmes and Roger Ebert.

From my latest piece for MainGate, the alumni magazine of the American University of Beirut:

When Charles Raad (BA ’55) decided to gift an old medical textbook from his grandfather to AUB, their shared alma mater, he yielded up a material link to the institution’s earliest days when Arabic was the primary language of instruction.

“The book was like their bible,” Raad says, referring to his grandfather and his five classmates who, in 1871, formed the medical school’s inaugural graduating class and became the Levant’s earliest locally trained doctors. “How to treat people, how to save people. When you read it — it’s ridiculous today. Modern medicine is a different story.”

Read the rest. Read more of my work here.

There’s no end in sight for what Arabs have embarked on this year but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling, and the Carnegie Middle East Center‘s annual greeting card nicely captures the energy and spirit of 2011 and the great hopes for 2012.

I recently interviewed the Libyan professor, columnist and speaker Mansour El-Kikhia and he told me:

I don’t really think it’s an Arab spring per se. I think it’s a global spring. If it was an Arab spring it certainly has spread…Maybe Arabs should pat themselves on the back and say ‘We did something for the world.’

I’ll raise my glass to that and to the varied news sources that keep me informed (and amused), as much as ever in this last week:

On Carnegie‘s website, Muhammad Faour and Marwan Muasher call for the education of students who know from “a very early age what it means to be citizens who learn how to think, seek and produce knowledge, question, and innovate rather than be subjects of the state who are taught what to think and how to behave.”

Over at The New York Review of Books, Yasmine El Rashidi points to a new clarity as to the ongoing political reorientation in Egypt, and Christopher de Bellaigue marks the end, in Iraq, of “a century of ill-judged invasions, coups, and other attempts by western powers to manipulate events in the Middle East.”

The Economist recalls the colorful history of a café that has, for more than 100 years now, been a “sanctuary for observers of Egyptian public life” and that may yet enjoy a second act in step with the revolution.

And thanks to the Arabist for linking to Sandmonkey’s latest “rant,” which exemplifies the inclination toward self-reflection that seems hard-wired into the human calendar come the dark days of December. The Egyptian revolution, he writes, suffers from confusing the Symbol and the Cause:

For example, the case of Khaled Said was not about Khaled Said himself, it was about Police brutality and lack of accountability towards those who are paid to protect us and instead have no problem killing us. The cause was to end this, not to try the murderers of Khaled Said. But instead of focusing on that cause, we focused on the symbol, and we ignored the cause. Police killing without accountability still happens to this day, but The killers of Khaled Said received a verdict, so Justice is served. The same goes for Alaa, who wanted- through his bravery- to give the cause of stopping the military trials for civilians the push and international pressure it needed, but instead, and in spite of his intentions, ended up becoming the Symbol that everyone rallies around, ignoring the cause. All got jubilant when Alaa got transferred to a civilian court, all the while, more than 12,000 other Egyptians are still serving year-long sentences they received in military trials that took on average 15-20 minutes for the entire trial. The Symbol and the Cause.

I’ve opted to blog today, but I support Wikipedia’s black out. Read up on what it’s all about at The Washington Post.

I often link to Wikipedia here on the blog, not because it’s perfect, nothing is, but because:

(1) it’s free and widely accessible;
(2) it’s easy on the eyes and intuitive to navigate;
(3) it survives and thrives on acts of good faith collaboration;
(4) it draws on both the common sense of the masses and the expertise of elites;
(5) it’s been shown to be comparable in accuracy to standard encyclopedias with which Wikipedia is typically, otherwise unfavorably, compared and, perhaps most importantly . . .
(7) it never pretends to hold the final word on any subject.

As for the value of good, old-fashioned books? Well, at this point, it should be pretty clear where I stand on that.

An excerpt from this talk delivered by Anthony Shadid last year at TEDx Oklahoma City:

To me the antidote to conflict, the antidote to violence, is a shared sense of universal values and – it sounds very basic but it’s hard when you try to execute it in journalism – the sense that we all are human. There’s a humanity that bonds us together. In Baghdad, I tried to write about conflict as a background narrative, as white noise in a way, and make the stories about people.”

I never met Anthony Shadid, but I’ve been reading his work for years – his book Night Draws Near and his journalism in The New York Times and, before that, The Washington Post – and the best way to meet a writer, anyway, may be to read him. With his exemplary, ever-curious, empathetic reporting, he demonstrated how much a journalist can bring to readers when he’s immersed in the language of the region he’s covering. He wrote about subjects and for them.

The New York Times coverage of the Middle East will suffer without him. Americans in particular have lost an essential voice from within. Let’s remember not only Anthony Shadid but what he worked for. Let’s keep listening.

Update: An excerpt from Shadid’s memoir House of Stone, due out next month.

What role has Lebanon played in the Arab uprisings? Why did revolution break out in Tunisia? Libya?

For some answers, browse the the Arab Spring-themed issue of MainGate and read my latest work, including a feature on feminism in Lebanon, a profile of a Tunisian doctor who’s taken the pulse of the revolution and a Q&A with Libyan-American professor and dissident Mansour El-Kikhia.

Can’t get enough of Dr. Freud’s online incarnation? Browse on:

Doctoral student Benjamin Y. Fong, in a contribution this month to the NYT’s Opinionator blog, makes a case for the enduring relevance of “radical talking”:

What Freud proposed, and what remains revolutionary in his thought today, is that human beings have the capacity for real change, the kind that would undo the malicious effects of our upbringings and educations so as to obviate the need for “breaks from real life,” both voluntary and involuntary.

Edward Bernays pioneered another use for Uncle Freud’s psychological insights in the new field of “public relations,” according to a 2005 NPR report.

Essayist and actor David Rakoff once scored an unusual gig playing Freud in a Barney’s window display and he talks about it in a 1996 episode of This American Life.

Time Magazine deemed Freud cover-worthy five separate times in between 1924 and 1999.

Literary critic Harold Bloom anointed Freud in 1986 as “the greatest modern writer” in The New York Times:

No 20th-century writer – not even Proust or Joyce or Kafka – rivals Freud’s position as the central imagination of our age. We turn to Freud when we wish to read someone absolutely relevant on any matter that torments or concerns us: love, jealousy, envy, masochism, cruelty, possessiveness, fetishism, curiosity, humor or what we will.

W.H. Auden paid tribute to a man who is “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion” in the 1940 poem In Memory of Sigmund Freud.

And a 1910 watercolor by Adolf Hitler may once have hung on the wall of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna practice, prompting speculation (after the painting’s reemergence in 2010) that the two men may have met.

If you haven’t watched Sunday’s premiere, well, go do it already…and then come back and read:

Rob Sheffield’s pitch-perfect commentary in Rolling Stone, sampled here:

Many fans were horrified to see Don act like a starry-eyed sucker [last season], instead of the cool customer we need him to be. It turns out this guy believes in Hollywood happy endings. He’s not satisfied to sell the American dream – he wants to believe. And if even Don Draper falls for his own promises, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Nelle Engoren’s predictions as to what will make Mad Men history over at Salon:

While provoking countless fights between parents and children, shorter skirts and longer hair (on both genders) were only the most visible signs of the (not just sexual) revolution. It’ll be amusing to see if Don finally washes the Brylcreem out of his hair and whether Pete appears in a Nehru jacket, but the real question is who will adopt the new fashions of the mind.

Vanessa Quirk’s meditation on the Mies in Mad Men:

The show draws in audiences with a meticulous, sumptuous set design that allows a nostalgic journey back in time: when design was innovative & clean, architecture was confident (cocky even), and modernism still held its promise.

And Terry Gross’s interrogation of Matthew Weiner the man (behind the man) of the moment on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Off next week: Back to blogging on April 9 with The Jungle.