A wide-ranging Philip Roth interview online at Web of Stories

Readers interested in  Philip Roth should check out the long, wide-ranging, and apparently little-known interview he gave in 2011 to the website Web of Stories. It's a 2-3 hour-long goldmine of Rothiana: 163 mini-videos (length ranging from under a minute to a few minutes each) in which Roth reflects on his life, work, opinions, attitudes, influences (including Henry Miller), the death-haunted genesis of Sabbath's Theater, writing about sex, arguing Vietnam with Updike, and much more. To give a taste of the whole, here's a sample from the transcript of the video titled "Living With the Character You Invent" in which Roth speaks of the unique way that both writers and readers can 'know' fictional characters:


ROTH: ... you invent the character and you live with the character. And the fact of the matter is that there's no one in this world you know, including yourself, as well as you know the... that character. We don't know people outside of books, of fiction, the way we know them when we either write the book of fiction or read the book of fiction. Everybody who's ever read Madame Bovary knows Madame Bovary better than they know any other woman in their life. This is the... this is the great charm and value of fiction, among others, and that is that we know in ways... the reader knows in ways he or she can't know in life.

THE HOUSE OF ULYSSES by Julian Rios

A superficial undergraduate seminar on Joyce's Ulysses presented in lightly novelized form, The House of Ulysses might be of interest to first-time readers seeking a reader-friendly guidebook to Joyce's great novel, but experienced Joyceans will learn little here. Considered as a novel, Rios' book is even less interesting. He gestures toward character-creation but fails to sufficiently differentiate his multiple speakers; he never successfully turns them from 'speakers' to 'characters.' And the book overall fails to achieve even the most limited autonomy from the far, far superior text it parasitizes. Rios seems to have been shooting for a Calvinoesque novel-as-seminar, an If On A Winter's Night a Traveler... of Ulysses; but he clipped the target on a corner, flipped it upside down, and produced this seminar-as-novel, a readable, jargon-free intro to Ulysses, and nothing more than that.

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V. Higgins

According to legend, the late Elmore Leonard switched from writing Westerns to a life of crime immediately after reading George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It's easy to see what impressed the Dutchman. Coyle is a crime novel, of course, and a good, atmospheric one. Higgins has a way with words and sentences that sets his book above the genre mean. But mostly this is a novel of talking, a book about the way people in a certain milieu (Boston organized criminals and the prosecutors with whom they exist in symbiosis (e.g., the career of James 'White Rat' Bulger)) talk amongst themselves. The story is told almost entirely in dialogue, good, colorful dialogue--as good as David Mamet at his best--and thus we receive the narrative obliquely, akin to the way we receive it in avant-garde fiction (John Hawkes' The Lime Twig , for example, or, more to the point, William Gaddis's JR). We get the whole story, but it's told in pieces by bent people who tell it slant. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a novel we overhear. Reading it is like listening in on a very high-quality wiretap. I recommend it. (I also recommend the remarkably faithful 1973 film adaptation by Peter Yates, starring Robert Mitchum in the title role and the ubiquitous Peter Boyle as Dillon, the part-time contract hitter who takes Eddie out. There's a beautiful Criterion Collection DVD rentable from Netflix.)

SPIDER by Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath's Spider is a superior psychological thriller, but considered as a 'literary' novel, as a work of narrative art in prose, it's pretty good but not mind-blowing. Formally, it's a monologic and fairly obvious unreliable narrator novel that contains a few genuinely chilling images of psychosis (I found the Battaile-esque descriptions of Spider's anatomical delusions to be especially powerful). It depicts, with creepily convincing success, the first-person consciousness, the twisted inwardness, of the type of psychotic most of us would surely cross the street to avoid. Ralph Fiennes did perhaps his best and riskiest work to date portraying this character in David Cronenberg's adaptation, a film that, far from 'spoiling' the novel, actually adds ironic sharpness to a few early, carefully understated passages. Knowing the story, we notice ironies we would probably have missed on a 'cold' first reading.

LUST by Elfriede Jelinek

Grim, grim, grim, unrelievedly grim, Elfriede Jelinek's Lust is a pornographic satire in the nauseating mode of Pasolini's brilliantly disturbing film Salo, but Jelinek's novel, unfortunately, is not brilliant enough to be truly disturbing. Lust is a deliberately ugly, intentionally unassimilable 200-page anti-bourgeois, anti-heterosexual diatribe that reads at times like the outrageously perverse sermon of a radical leftist puritan. Jelinek seems to have intended to compose a pornographic satire, but her ideas about pornography and sexuality are so ideologically warped in the direction of 1980s anti-porn feminist discourse that her pornographic imagination contains not an iota of lightness, not the slightest flash of comedy--not even dark, absurdist comedy (and human sexuality is nothing if not absurd). (The sole ludic element in the novel, Jelinek's wordplay, seems clumsy and clunky in Michael Hulse's translation and may be deliberately so in the original German.) Unlike her earlier, psychologically acute novel The Piano Teacher, which I admired after a second reading, Lust is little more than an ideological sermon: monotonous, humorless, soporific. There is no space for psychology here. Her characters are reduced to cardboard cut-outs and their actions are mechanical, robotic. The world of Lust is so (I repeat it) unrelievedly grim, so one-dimensional, so alienated from any recognizable human reality that Jelinek has defeated her own satirical purpose and produced a work of weird sexual surrealism, an unfunny cartoon in words, the unlovable bastard child of the Marquis de Sade, Robert Crumb and Andrea Dworkin. Jelinek called it Lust; if Roman Polanski hadn't preempted the title she might more properly have named it Repulsion.

The Nabokovian Singularity

Consider the singularity of Vladimir Nabokov's achievement: the Humbutterfly Hunter went from being one of the major Russian writers of the twentieth century to being an even more major English-language writer. If he had never written an English word (not a single plaintive and, not a single breathy the) his Russian novels alone would have assured his canonical status in world literature--and the same is arguably true of his English novels, if, by some strange historical accident, he had never written a Cyrillic nyet or a funny-looking da. It's a critical commonplace that Lolita, Pnin, Transparent Things, and (for some critics) even Ada are uncommonly fine, but less common, for some reason, is the idea that Despair, The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Gift can stand alongside any other Russian-language works of the grey and gloomy Soviet years--even Bulgakov's supreme The Master and Margarita and (to name a work Nabokov surely despised from the Olympian height of his brow) Doctor Zhivago. Offhand, I can think of no analogous case of a dual-language major novelist. There are multiple examples of novelists writing in 'non-native' languages: Conrad, Beckett and Kundera form a very strange troika of such double-tongued ones. But Conrad, as far as I know, wrote little of note in Polish; Beckett's English work is (probably unfairly) less highly regarded than the books he wrote originally in French; and Milan K. seems to have traded his position as a major Czech novelist for a late-life minor niche in the cathedral of French literature. Is Vlad the Inscriber's achievement unique, or is there an analogous case that's stubbornly staying out of my mind?


(A half-hour after sending out this post, a possible contender comes to mind: Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who has written major works in both English and the Gikuyu language of his native Kenya. And there are surely other examples from the formerly-colonized world...)

Islamic Festival Eid ul Azha - Rituals and Sunnah of Eid Prayer

Eid al'Azha

 Eid al'Azha also called the Feast of the Sacrifice, the "Major Festival", the "Greater Eid", Baqr'Eid  is the second of two religious holidays celebrated by Muslims worldwide each year. It honors the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to sacrifice his promised son, Ishmael (Ismail)a, as an act of submission to God's command, before God then intervened, through his angel Jibra'il and informs him that his sacrifice has already been accepted. The meat from the sacrificed animal is preferred to be divided into three parts. The family retains one third of the share; another third is given to relatives, friends and neighbors; and the remaining third is given to the poor and needy.

In the lunar-based Islamic calendar, Eid al-Adha falls on the 10th day of Dhu al-Hijjah and lasts for four days. In the international (Gregorian) calendar, the dates vary from year to year, drifting approximately 11 days earlier each year.

Eid al-Adha is the latter of the two Eid holidays, the former being Eid al-Fitr. The basis for the observance comes from the 196th ayah (verse) of Al-Baqara, the second sura of the Quran. The word "Eid" appears once in Al-Ma'ida, the fifth sura of the Quran, with the meaning "solemn festival".

Like Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha begins with a Sunnah prayer of two rakats followed by a sermon (khutbah). Eid al-Adha celebrations start after the descent of the Hujjaj, the pilgrims performing the Hajj, from Mount Arafat, a hill east of Mecca. Eid sacrifice may take place until sunset on the 13th day of Dhu al-Hijjah. The days of Eid have been singled out in the Hadith as "days of remembrance". The takbir (days) of Tashriq are from the Fajr prayer of the 9th of Dhu al-Hijjah up to the Asr prayer of the 13th of Dhu al-Hijjah (5 days and 4 nights). This equals 23 prayers: 5 on the 9th�12th, which equals 20, and 3 on the 13th.

Eid prayers

Muslims go to the mosque to pray the prayer of the Eid.


When is it performed

The Eid al-Adha prayer is performed any time after the sun completely rises up to just before the entering of Zuhr time, on the 10th of Dhu al-Hijjah. In the event of a force majeure (e.g. natural disaster), the prayer may be delayed to the 11th of Dhu al-Hijjah and then to the 12th of Dhu al-Hijjah.

The Sunnah of preparation

In keeping with the tradition of Muhammad, Muslims are encouraged to prepare themselves for the occasion of Eid. Below is a list of things Muslims are recommended to do in preparation for the Eid al-Adha festival:

• Make wudhu (ablution) and offer Salat al-Fajr (the pre-sunrise prayer).

• Prepare for personal cleanliness�take care of details of clothing, etc.

• Dress up, putting on new or best clothes available.

Rituals of the Eid prayers

The scholars differed concerning the ruling on Eid prayers. There are three scholarly points of view:

That Eid prayer is Sunnah mu�akkadah (recommended). This is the view of Malik ibn Anas and Al-Shafi�i.

That it is a Fard Kifaya (communal obligation). This is the view of Ab? ?an?fa.

That it is Wajib on all Muslim men (a duty for each Muslim and is obligatory for men); those who do not do it with no excuse are considered sinners. This is the view of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and was also narrated from Ab? ?an?fa.

Eid prayers must be offered in congregation. It consists of two rakats (units) with seven Takbirs in the first Raka'ah and five Takbirs in the second Raka'ah. For Sunni Muslims, Salat al-Eid differs from the five daily canonical prayers in that no adhan (call to prayer) or iqama (call) is pronounced for the two Eid prayers. The salat (prayer) is then followed by the khutbah, or sermon, by the Imam.

At the conclusion of the prayers and sermon, Muslims embrace and exchange greetings with one other (Eid Mubarak), give gifts (Eidi) to children, and visit one another. Many Muslims also take this opportunity to invite their non-Muslim friends, neighbours, co-workers and classmates to their Eid festivities to better acquaint them about Islam and Muslim culture.

The Takbir and other rituals

The Takbir is recited from the dawn of the ninth of Dhu al-Hijjah to the thirteenth, and consists of:

All?hu akbar, All?hu akbar ���� ���� ���� ����
l? il?ha ill? All?h �� ��� ��� ����
WAll?hu akbar, All?hu akbar ���� ���� ���� ����
wa li-ill?hil-hamd ���� �����
God is the Greatest, God is the Greatest,
There is no deity but God
God is the Greatest, God is the Greatest
and to God goes all praise