Last year, I hosted a screening of the cinematic adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis. We had a decent turnout including some of my students, a few faculty members, and some other students and community members. This screening was done to promote my, at the time, brand new international student scholarship.
Weekly Reader
Here is the last few weekend’s worth of weekend reading…
The Guardian offers a few excerpts from Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear & Fantasy In Post 9-11 America. A lot of what is discussed in these excerpts were the sort of thing that freaked me out “post 9-11″ and prompted me to start writing notes for what would become War Prayers later.
The Nation recently reprinted one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut pieces, The Worst Addiction Of Them All.
Two from The Quarterly Conversation: reviews of Junot Diaz and Vasily Grossman.
The Little Professor offers a lengthy, and very thoughtful, review of Marc Bousquet’s How The University Works.
Our weekly two from The Quarterly Conversation: reviews of Mari Akasaka and Jose Maria Eça de Queirós.
Mother Jones interviews Marjane Satrapi.
Three from The Quarterly Conversation: Natsume Soseki, Ron Currie Jr., and Selah Saterstrom.
Marjane Satrapi Has A Blog!?
She has only updated it three times in eight months, but why didn’t anyone tell me Marjane Satrapi had a blog!?
Weekly Reader
The Reading Experience has another post about John Dewey up.
One of my favorite pieces of Transformers fan fiction is A Chance In A Million. Now that I think about it, it might have been the first one I ever read too when I got back into the fandom in 1997.
Veronica over at Conversational Reading finds War & Peace to be a bit of a disappointment. I started reading it back in high school but never finished it. Maybe I will pick that up again this summer.
It seems that I link to a Marjane Satrapi interview almost every week. This week’s interview is from Nerve:
I have to tell you something: I never felt as free as when I wrote Chicken with Plums. When I write about women, and obviously when I write about myself like in Persepolis people relate [the text] to me. In this book, the main character in is a man. I could hide behind him, yet in some ways, he is me. I can be very cynical, but I can also die of love.
Incoming Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is interviewed over at Mother Jones:
Third, I want to take a look at some of the good things that are being done around the rest of the world that are almost never discussed in the United States. How often is it discussed that the American people work the longest hours of any industrialized country in the world? The two-week paid vacation is almost a thing of the past; meanwhile in Europe you get four to six weeks vacation, and maternity leave with pay. We don’t know about these things. I want to take a look around the world and see what workers are receiving, and compare that to the United States — from an educational point of view.
More Marjane Satrapi
We have more Marjane Satrapi interviews to offer. Nerve has one up now and so does Salon. Don’t forget about the ones I’ve previously blogged about.
Blogged at least partially via Conversational Reading
Marjane Satrapi Interview
In honor of my finishing of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis here’s a link to the interview Book Slut did with her a few months back.