Things You Should Check Out

October 09

My sister recently turned me on to Pandora.com, a site that uses the (phenomenal) Music Genome Project to help you build your own personalized streaming “radio” stations. I was skeptical at first--most of the bands I like are little and obscure--but Pandora found yet littler and more obscure bands similar to the bands I like, and streamed them for me. You can click on a song as it’s playing to buy it in MP3 from iTunes or Amazon. This is one of those “I love the internet/how did I live before this” kinds of things.

Different but similar is LibraryThing, which uses the same kinds of algorithms to suggest books you might like based on books you have in your library. (It also has a very funny ‘unsuggester’ to let you know what you shouldn’t be reading, in case you were curious...apparently I wouldn’t like Agile Web Development With Rails: A Pragmatic Guide. No surprise there.) I am an official Library Thing Author, so you can peek at my bookcase and see what I think about, you know, Henry James.

Three more days of Ramadan left.

Black Sabbath Iftar

September 28

On Tuesday Omar and I went to see the remnants of Black Sabbath (minus Ozzy Osbourne) in Denver. It was a unique experience to break the fast while cruising down the highway, calculating sunset with the dashboard clock and tucking into a styrofoam box of Chinese takeout at the appointed moment. Over the years, Ramadan has become, to me, a wholly Egyptian experience, celebrated with Egyptian foods at big ’azoomas of relatives and friends, capped off by soccer games. Ramadan in Egypt is how I learned to cook without needing to taste the food. Now that we’re back in the US, I can buy chicken stock in cans, already strained and seasoned--no need to go to a fararghi and select a live rooster, throw him in a pot, and season the broth myself, gauging the level of salt and onion by sight and smell alone in the last hours of fasting. In the west it seems there’s no need to cook by sense--everything is already prepared and measured out. It’s the perfect place for a fasting cook. There’s some small uneasy irony there that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Right. Here’s how other people are spending the holy month:

Ali Eteraz writes a series of Ramadan Reconciliations that are definitely worth reading, especially if you’ve kept up with his other work over the years.

Muse chronicles her first Ramadan in Cairo.

As the full moon makes its appearance, Aziz of City of Brass reflects on the halfway mark of the month.

War On Error

September 07

I’m featured in Iranian-American author Melody Moezzi’s upcoming book War On Error, available this November from the University of Arkansas Press. There’s a great introduction by renowned Islamic human rights scholar Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im. The book is a collection of interviews and commentary focusing on the diverse experiences of American Muslims, written with Melody’s funky, conversational wit. Should be an interesting read, and, tangential as this is, the cover is really cool. You can preorder the book from Amazon.com.