MEMBER BLOG TAG: aclu
| Friday, April 30, 2010 10:01AM | | | | The Invisibles | Tags: torture, ACLU, Freedom to Write Committee, fashion, Lawrence Weschler, Sofi Oksanen, Mohsin Hamid, Irakli Kakabadze, Alina Bronsky, valter hugo mae, Elias Khoury, Rodrigo Fresan, Aleksandar Hemon, Peter Schneider, Randa Jarrar, Katyn, General Medina, Uruguay
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“Face to Face: Confronting the Torturers”—streamed on the PEN Web site to audiences worldwide—was a 90-minute, late-night program of readings at Joe’s Pub, a cabaret venue associated with The Public Theater, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Squeezed against the bar or one of the little tables, one could settle into a “classic gimlet,” accompanied by a “classic bruschetta with tomatoes,” while imbibing 11 tales of classic horror. I was able to stay for all but the last of the readers (the American writer Randa Jarrar, who read “Revenge,” by the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali); I also never got to hear the promised remarks by Jameel Jaffer, of the co-sponsoring ACLU. Given the fact of the ACLU’s participation, I expected to hear... | | | | | | | Friday, April 27, 2007 11:48AM | | | | Dirty Wars | Tags: torture, rendition, habeas corpus, guantanamo, abu ghraib, aclu
| | | The evening’s unintended lesson seemed to be this: when you’ve got the hard facts about torture, secret detention, extraordinary rendition and the assault on habeas corpus, writing a fiction about such events can be a self-indulgent bust. I felt both annoyed with and embarrassed for Dorothea Dieckmann who read an excerpt from her forthcoming novel Guantánomo, informing the audience that she wanted “to imagine what it was like inside the prison,” exploiting our current moment with banal on-demand prose to be published in the U.S. later this year, perhaps to the chagrin of Antoine Audouard who can’t get the memoir he co-wrote with Mourad Benchellali, A Journey to Hell, published in our country (it appeared last year in France), a book which... | | | | | |
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