Isak

Ploughshares

Ploughshares celebrates their 100th issue this season, in its 35th year of publication. That's no joke for a literary journal these days. Let's give props where props are due. (By the way, are kids still using the word "props" in that slangy way these days? How out of it am I?)

The milestone issue is edited by Ron Carlson and features stories by Amy Bloom, Michael Carroll, Gish Jen, Pam Houston, T.M. McNally, and Margaret Bradham Thornton.

And while you're at it, check out the Ploughshares blog and their overwhelming link collection.

The boys of the Supreme Court

Feministing points out some interesting information:

Despite the fact that women compose about half of recent law school grads, according to the American Bar Association, only 19% of the 2006 Supreme Court Clerks are women.

According to The New York Times, "Just under 50 percent of new law school graduates in 2005 were women. Yet women account for only 7 of the 37 law clerkships for the new term, the first time the number has been in the single digits since 1994, when there were 4,000 fewer women among the country’s new law school graduates than there are today."

Justice Ginsberg, who remains the only female on the bench, will have two women among her four clerks.

Justices Scalia, Alito, Souter, and Thomas hired only male clerks this year.

Along similar lines, only 3 of the 37 clerks this year are nonwhite.

Given that the clerks are the ones who actually research and write the most influential opinions in the country, these statistics are frighteningly archaic.

Check out Legal Times, Feminist Law Profs, and Linda Greenhouse's piece in The New York Times for more.

Mahfouz remembered

“The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition." ~Naguib Mahfouz

The celebration of Naguib Mahfouz's long and accomplished life are collected at The Elegant Variation and The Literary Saloon.

                         

E.L. Doctorow steals my ideas

Hey, I'm gonna teach a class on this. Except I'll take it to a much more micro level. I'm not even going to use Ragtime as an example,  though I enjoy reading it. Take that, E.L.

Oh dear

Egyptian novelist and Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz has died.

He was 94 years old and the only Arabic writer to ever win literature's top prize.

A real life don Quixote

Don't stop believing, friend. You're on to something.

Release

Democracy Now! takes a look at how the New Orleans criminal justice system is still staggering from the effects of last year's hurricane horror.

Amy Goodman interviews Katherine Mattes, a Tulane professor and deputy director of the university's Criminal Law Clinic. Mattes says:

"...we have people who have been in custody before Katrina and remain in custody and have to this day never spoken to a lawyer, have never been in court. What happened is we had a system that was, prior to Katrina, a system that was barely functioning. And when Katrina hit, all the systems that composed the criminal justice system -- the sheriffs, the district attorneys, the courts, the public defenders -- all those systems failed, and that failure continues today."

Oh but there's more:

"Unfortunately, during the hurricane, the inmates of the prison system here in New Orleans were not evacuated. They remained in custody at the jails in the central city part of New Orleans, which was flooded. The conditions that they remained in were horrendous. ... When they were evacuated, their records were not taken with them. They were taken to different facilities throughout the state, Department of Correction facilities, as well as local parish facilities, local jails and their -- who they were, where they were, what charges they were being held on, all that information was lost. It was not transported with them."

Read more here.

Art by Andrew

The Portable Muse highlights Andrew Woodward's paintings. I think they're beautiful. It got me going google-crazy, earning me more and more good stuff to look at.

PEN America, Part 7

The seventh and newest edition of PEN America is out.

Salmon Rushdie and Antonio Muñoz Molina contribute to a feature titled "Does Writing Change Anything?"--and we might assume that the very existence of the feature underscores an obvious "yesssss..."

More interesting is the feature on "Writers and Catastrophe," with works by Svetlana Alexievich and Carolin Emcke.

Also worthwhile: a conversation about "reinventing home" with Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche and Michael Ondaatje, and tributes to don Quixote from, among others, Laura Restrepo and Margaret Atwood.

Katrina, of course

One year ago, I spent the day playing in the waves at Manchester-by-the-Sea with my pals Mark and Ian. It was a ridiculously fun day in the most beautiful beach I've so far seen in the Boston area, full of frisbee and waves and seaweed, and we were a sandy, sleepy trio that leaned back in our seats on the commuter train for the evening ride back home.

"Oh, hey," I said abruptly. "I heard there's a hurricane coming into New Orleans."

I guess it's about that time, Ian and Mark said. So what else is new.

"No, seriously. I heard they're actually evacuating the entire city or something."

Well, I don't know if I believe that. Sounds a little too extreme to me.

"No seriously," I said feebly, having no more evidence for my thought. "That's what I heard."

I don't know, Anna, they said, oozing doubt.

A few days later, I come across Ian and Mark again.

You were right! they said. Holy shit!

Now, I typically as much delight in being right as anyone else.

But jesus.

Up and coming

Edward P. Jones' new story collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children, is well-loved by Dave Eggers.

"In his short stories, too, Jones is at his best when he plays God," Eggers writes.

Despite my distaste for Eggers, I'm willing to bet that he nailed this description of the amazing Mr. Jones.

Also in the current New York Times Book Review:

Emily Barton's review of Francine Prose essay collection, Reading like a Writers: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Who Want to Write Them.

Barton writes: "Delight? As a student, I rarely heard the word mentioned, although, like Prose, I became a writer because books gave me such joy. Her insistence on that pleasure informs her method: reading carefully to see what an author does on the page and between the lines. This casts learning in a positive light, unlike the typical workshop’s E.R. approach of trying to diagnose and cure the ailments of a story."

I'm not totally sure that writing workshops and reading texts critically are mutually exclusive. From my experience, workshops are designed to give students an opportunity to read well and to articulate what they see...an incredibly important skill for any writer...