Qatari poet jailed for life after writing verse inspired by Arab spring

The poet was accused of insulting Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, pictured.

Officials claim Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami’s poem encouraged overthrow of Qatar’s ruling system

Associated Press in Doha

A Qatari poet has been sentenced to life in prison for an Arab-spring-inspired verse that officials claim insults Qatar’s emir and encourages the overthrow of the nation’s ruling system, his defence attorney says.

It was the latest blow in a widening clampdown on perceived dissent across the Gulf Arab states.

The verdict in a state security court is certain to bring a fresh outpouring of denunciations by rights groups, which have repeatedly called for the release of the poet, Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami. It also marks another example of tough measures by judicial and security officials in the Gulf against possible challenges to their rule since the Arab spring revolts began last year.

The poet’s lawyer, Najib al-Nuaimi, said he planned to appeal.

“This judge made the whole trial secret,” said Nuaimi. “Muhammad was not allowed to defend himself, and I was not allowed to plead or defend in court. I told the judge that I need to defend my client in front of an open court, and he stopped me.”

Ajami was jailed in November 2011, months after an internet video was posted of him reciting Tunisian Jasmine, a poem lauding that country’s popular uprising, which touched off the Arab spring rebellions across the Middle East. In the poem, he said: “We are all Tunisia in the face of repressive” authorities, and criticised Arab governments that restrict freedoms.

 

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F-bomb makes it into mainstream dictionary

Associated Press

NEW YORK — It’s about freakin’ time.

The term “F-bomb” first surfaced in newspapers more than 20 years ago but will land Tuesday for the first time in the mainstream Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, along with sexting, flexitarian, obesogenic, energy drink and life coach.

In all, the company picks about 100 additions for the 114-year-old dictionary’s annual update, gathering evidence of usage over several years in everything from media to the labels of beer bottles and boxes of frozen food.

So who’s responsible for lobbing F-bomb far and wide? Kory Stamper, an associate editor for Merriam-Webster, said she and her fellow word spies at the Massachusetts company traced it back to 1988, in a Newsday story that had the now-dead Mets catcher Gary Carter talking about how he had given them up, along with other profanities.

But the word didn’t really take off until the late ’90s, after Bobby Knight went heavy on the F-bombs during a locker room tirade.

“We saw another huge spike after Dick Cheney dropped an F-bomb in the Senate in 2004,” and again in 2010 when Vice President Joe Biden did the same thing in the same place, Stamper said.

“It’s a word that is very visually evocative. It’s not just the F-word. It’s F-bomb. You know that it’s going to cause a lot of consternation and possible damage,” she said.

Many online dictionary and reference sites already list F-bomb and other entries Merriam-Webster is only now putting into print. A competitor, Oxford University Press, has F-bomb under consideration for a future update of its New Oxford American Dictionary.

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‘Three Cups’ author was overwhelmed

 

By MATT VOLZ

“Three Cups of Tea” author Greg Mortenson says the dismissal of a civil lawsuit that accused him of fabricating book passages to make money for himself and his charity confirms his faith in the U.S. justice system.

Mortenson told The Associated Press in an email Monday that he has been overwhelmed at times dealing with the lawsuit, a Montana investigation into the Central Asia Institute and surgery to repair a small hole in his heart.

“At times, facing so much was overwhelming and devastating, however, my attorneys always offered steadfast encouragement to stay positive and keep the high ground, even when subjected to false allegations, vicious name-calling and slander,” Mortenson said.

U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon rejected the civil lawsuit Monday, dismissing claims that Mortenson, his publisher, his co-author and his charity conspired to make Mortenson into a false hero to sell books and raise money for the charity. Haddon called the claims overly broad, flimsy and speculative.

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​Author faces civil suit over ‘Three Cups of Tea’

  

  By MATT VOLZ |

Regardless of whether claims are true that author Greg Mortenson fabricated portions of “Three Cups of Tea,” neither he nor his publisher can be held liable because the First Amendment protects exaggerations or lies in memoirs, his publisher’s attorney said Wednesday.

Penguin Group (USA) attorney Jonathan Herman and attorneys for Mortenson, co-author David Oliver Relin and Mortenson’s charity, the Central Asia Institute, asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by four people who bought Mortenson’s bestselling books.

The lawsuit was filed after “60 Minutes” and author Jon Krakauer published reports last year that Mortenson fabricated parts of “Three Cups of Tea” and “Stones Into Schools,” which recount his efforts to build schools in Central Asia.

The suit claims Mortenson and the others committed fraud, deceit and were involved in a racketeering conspiracy in publishing lies.

Mortenson headed the conspiracy to set himself up as a false hero so that he could sell millions of books and raise tens of millions of dollars for his charity, the plaintiffs’ attorney Zander Blewett said.

“Mortenson obviously is the main, main liar,” he said. “He has just drafted himself a web of deception … and used it to raise $62 million.”

In arguing to reject the case, neither Herman nor Mortenson attorney John Kauffman addressed the specific fabrication claims.

Herman said the proper place for someone to object to the books is in the sphere of public debate, not in a courtroom to be prosecuted by self-appointed “truth police.” ”The First Amendment permits someone who writes an autobiography to exaggerate or even lie,” Herman said.

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Award-winning poet Ruth Stone dies

Ruth Stone, a poet for whom tragedy halted, then inspired, a career that started in middle age and thrived late in life as her sharp insights into love, death and nature received ever-growing acclaim, has died in the U.S. state of Vermont. She was 96.

Stone, who for decades lived in a farmhouse in Goshen, died Nov. 19 of natural causes at her home in Ripton, her daughter Phoebe Stone said Thursday. She was surrounded by her daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Widowed in her 40s and little known for years after, Ruth Stone became one of the country’s most honored poets in her 80s and 90s, winning the National Book Award in 2002 for In the Next Galaxy and being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for What Love Comes To. She received numerous other citations, including a National Book Critics Circle award, two Guggenheims and a Whiting Award that enabled her to have plumbing installed in her Goshen home.

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Jesmyn Ward wins National Book Award for fiction

From left, National Book Award winners Stephen Greenblatt, nonfiction; Thanhha Lai, young people's literature; Nikky Finney, poetry; and Jesmyn Ward, fiction. (Tina Fineberg, Associated Press / November 16, 2011)

Ward’s second novel, ‘Salvage the Bones,’ about a family affected by Hurricane Katrina, is the surprise winner for fiction. Nikky Finney wins for poetry, and poet John Ashbery receives a lifetime achievement award.

By Carolyn Kellogg

Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” about a family hit by Hurricane Katrina, receives the National Book Award for fiction. The novel, her second, is a surprise winner.

On a night of literary honors, Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” about a family hit by Hurricane Katrina, received the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday at a black-tie gala in New York. Ward’s novel, her second, was a surprise winner.

The National Book Foundation, which sponsors the awards, presented two of its five major prizes to African American women. In addition to Ward, Nikky Finney won the National Book Award for poetry.

The 62nd National Book Awards were hosted by actor John Lithgow, who published a memoir in September, and included an appearance by poet Elizabeth Alexander, who read at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Poet John Ashbery, 84, was presented the foundation’s lifetime achievement award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In his acceptance speech, he noted that since he began writing, “difficult poetry” had lost traction in the literary world.

Finney’s acceptance speech for her award for the poetry collection “Head Off & Split” combined poetry with a gorgeously stated discussion of race, writing and reading. “That was the best acceptance speech for anything that I’ve ever heard in my life,” Lithgow said, after the applause finally died down. Finney lives and teaches in Lexington, Ky.

Ward, too, is from the South and considers her town of DeLisle, Miss., her inspiration.

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Lesbian publishing house founder Grier dies at 78

By BILL KACZOR

Barbara Grier, a founder of what once was the world’s largest publishing house of literature about gays and lesbians, has died. She was 78.

Her partner in life and business, Donna McBride, said Grier died of cancer on Thursday at a hospital in Tallahassee, Fla.

Tallahassee-based Naiad Press was best known for publishing “Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence” in 1985. Fifty-one former or current nuns contributed to the book. It described relationships in their religious communities that sometimes turned into love affairs.

“It was her belief that through literature she could make lesbians feel good about themselves and find a happy life,” McBride said from her home in nearby Carrabelle, Fla.

Naiad was publishing 36 books a year before she and Grier sold the company to Bella Books, another publisher of literature about lesbians in Tallahassee, and retired in 2003, McBride said.

Grier was “a savior to isolated lesbians all over the world, many of whom feel intense gratitude,” author Karin Kallmaker told The Associated Press. “I have no doubt that books save lives and Barbara put books into the lesbian universe at a rate no one in that era matched.”

Kallmaker’s first novel was published by Naiad Press in 1989 and she’s now editorial director of Bella Books.

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Thriller told from perspective of Alzheimer’s-afflicted murder suspect wins medical lit prize

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A thriller told from the perspective of an Alzheimer’s-afflicted murder suspect has won the medical-themed Wellcome Trust Book Prize, organizers said Wednesday.

Alice LaPlante’s debut novel “Turn of Mind” takes readers inside the mind of Dr. Jennifer White, a former surgeon whose eroding memories could carry the key to the mysterious death of her best friend.

In a statement, the judging panel said the book’s “superbly evocative first-person narrative brings the reality of Alzheimer’s to life.” Science writer Vivienne Parry, the panel’s chair, said the book “emphatically confirms the ability of literature to tell us more about the heart and soul of an illness than any textbook.”

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To Fan Fearing Wrecking Ball, the City Is Dorothy Parker’s

Associated Press

By JOSEPH BERGER

As Dorothy Parker once said, New Yorkers like her “take New York personally.”

What she meant, as she explained in a 1928 magazine essay, “My Home Town,” was that she felt tenderly “maternal” about the “nervous and fevered and dashing place” where she had lived most of her life and that anyone insulting the city would risk her vinegar wit.

So, in that spirit, Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, a 45-year-old aficionado of everything Dorothy Parker, has taken personally an effort by a landlord to tear down a piece of it — one of Parker’s several childhood homes on the Upper West Side.

To say that Mr. Fitzpatrick is passionate about Parker could be an understatement.

He runs the 3,000-member Dorothy Parker Society, manages its Web site, has written a book about Parker’s New York and conducts monthly walking tours of places associated with Parker, like the Algonquin Hotel, where she was one of the lights of its bon-mot-generating Round Table.

Now Mr. Fitzpatrick is championing the preservation of the 1890s limestone row house at 214 West 72nd Street, where Parker lived until she was about 5. He wants the local community board to recommend to the Landmarks Preservation Commission that the building be included in a proposed West End Avenue historic district.

“I believe any residence where an author lived is important, even if they weren’t writing there, because it shaped that person,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, who works as a project manager on mobile applications for The Associated Press.

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Eastern writers in buzz for Nobel literature prize

By MALIN RISING

Is it time for the Nobel Prize in literature to come from the east?

After last year’s South American win and years of European dominance, many experts expect the Swedish Academy to do just that when it announces this year’s winner on Thursday.

Many of the big names in Asian and Middle Eastern literature, including South Korean poet Ko Un and Syria’s Adonis, have been mentioned as possible candidates for years, but still haven’t received the prestigious, 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) award. The same goes for Algerian poet Assia Djebar and Israeli author Amos Oz.

“I know the academy doesn’t think in this way, but I still feel it would be timely to give the prize to a Syrian poet during this period of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa,” said Maria Schottenius, a literature expert at the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. She has Adonis as her top bet and Oz as her second favorite.

Goran Sommardal, a culture critic at Swedish radio, said he hopes the Chinese female avant-garde author Can Xue or Chinese poet Bei Dao wins the award.

The jurors at the Swedish Academy don’t give any hints of who will win the prize, but Permanent Secretary Peter Englund says the secretive academy has started to work actively to broaden its scope beyond Europe and the English-speaking world.

In the past two years the academy has boosted to between 10 and 15 the number of freelance experts proposing works in languages that jury members haven’t mastered, he told the Associated Press.

Europeans have won seven of the last 10 prizes and the Swedish Academy has previously been criticized for ignoring writers from other parts of the world.

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