My turn again. Guess your jams and jellies are just going to have to wait, Maaz.

Word to the wise: all the world’s holy texts have some Get-Out-of-Jail-Free clause, which allows its users to commit the occasional murder. Okay, perhaps not Buddhist texts – though I’m cynic enough to believe that even their works have that clause encoded between the lines somewhere.

To Rushdie With Love: Iranian Valentines better left unsentA lot of great links at 3 Quarks Daily today. Am wondering exactly what the “sort of Valentine’s card” the Islamic Republic of Iran sends Salman Rushdie every year. Are we talking a heart-shaped card with naked little cherubs brandishing AK-47s poking in every which direction, above an inscription which reads “Still thinking of you, sahib”? Am also wondering which is worse: an Iran headed by literal-minded clerics or clerics with a sense of humor like that; Thant Myint-U contributes an essay to the London Review of Books about a subject very dear to his heart (“What to Do about Burma”). Am just now getting into his book, The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as it’s been recommended to me left and right; and Tariq Ramadan, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile by Ian Buruma, offers “What the West Can Learn from Islam” for The Chronicle for Higher Education. It’s an embarrassment for this country to have revoked his work visa right before he was set to take up a professorship at the U of Notre Dame. It sends the message that the country is Islamophobic, and that’s a notion we ought not to be encouraging at this point in time.

One final thought: does Richard Dawkins strike you as the kind of guy who would get upset trying to explain to an uncomprehending child why Santa Claus doesn’t exist?

A post at Drezner’s site had me fuming for a few moments. That was “So How’s the Global War on Terror Going?”, which shows that the Center for American Progress, along with Foreign Policy magazine – not exactly a bastion of fiery left-wing propaganda – conducted a poll, asking respondents if they felt the world has become safer or more dangerous for the United States and its people. Survey says: 12% believe it has become safer, while 81% beg to differ. Was it the study that raised my temperature? Hardly. Below the YouTube clip of Caroline Wadhams of the CAP is a comment that seeks to cast aspersions on the whole study by pointing out that the CAP is, in fact, LEFT WING. Holy shit! What were those Foreign Policy idiots thinking even talking to those CAPpies?! That throws the whole enterprise into complete chaos! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!

At Crooked Timber, Scott McLemee reminds us, in “Boldly Uphold the Revolutionary Use of Stilted Language from ‘Peking Review’ Circa 1974!”, that English majors really have no place within Maoism. Dearest Fiona, how would you like to have received this message today? “Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!” Or “Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!”

Is that the swelling of violins I hear? Well, Happy Valentine’s Day, my dear.

Campus Crusade for CommiesActually, I remember back in my college days hearing some Communists speaking on campus in that very stilted speech, and not through a megaphone; so there really isn’t much room for parody here. They’ve already done a bang-up job for us.

Though I’ve grown quite fond of you within the oh-so-brief time we’ve been corresponding, Fiona, I must confess I’m also quite jealous of you. As you intimated in your last dispatch, you live in a city where you can run into writers and engage them in conversations about bloodshed. In Chicago, I’d be lucky if I might bump into a writer and get an “Excuse me” out of him/her – let alone a discussion on, say, Darfur. I’m thinking it’s got to be the weather.

Nothing much to say about The Elegant Variation today, except that it is required reading for the lit-minded. That, and if Floyd Landis wants to impress us with his honesty, he should hold off on the book and send us a urine sample. Now.

Finally: would have mentioned it before, but I didn’t want to blow my load in one post: excellent interview with John Waters at Nerve. Resolutely Uphold the Camp Aesthetic against the Incursions of Humorless Mullahs, Commies, Writers in a Hurry and Richard Dawkins Everywhere!!!

Love,

Helke