Arts I Have So Much to Do…
…and I’m not doing any of it, because there’s a short story by Miranda July in the new New Yorker. (Saw it at a bookstore just now and bought it, even though a copy is destined to arrive in my mailbox tomorrow or so. Yes. I am that much of a nerd.) Unless I blacked out at some point, this is the first time she’s ever been in this here favorite magazine o’ mine. She had some funny, wonderful ones in The Paris Review before The Paris Review changed editorial staff and began to suck.
I’ve read the first page so far. It’s so good.
[Frizzelle ducks under desk as Mudede throws a lamp at him.]
Speaking of the New Yorker: The Lawrence Wright story in last week's 9/11 New Yorker (Lawrence Wright, who wrote the definitive New Yorker article in 2002 on al Qaeda...and who wrote the great book I reviewed in last week's Stranger on al Qaeda) is worth reading. He quotes a lot of contemporary radical Islamist tracts and plots out dynamics and relationships between all the moving parts: Qaeda, Islamic Group, Hezbollah etc...
The Islamists' strategy is comfortingly (and surprisingly) unsophisticated. And, it seems to me, despite Wright's alarmist tone, doomed to failure.
As I like to sing: How's your pseudo revolutionary bullshit, Osama?