Returns

I've not updated recently. Unfortunately, eleven days ago, my MacBook's hard drive decided to preempt The Rapture and is, as they say, outta here. The geniuses at the Genius Bar in Regent Street have replaced it with a new brain. A new brain that now needs to be trained. This is my third Apple désastre; as they go, I'd rate it a 3/10. So that's some improvement. I've been relying on my iPhone to maintain contact with the outside world. Needless to say, where once I had a right hand, I now have a thrawn claw. But am I smiling? Why, yes!

It's all been happening in the meantime. Or has it? Well, The Rapture didn't. But given that the failed prophet went by the name of Harold Camping, you'd have thought more questions would have been asked ahead of The Time, even by the impossibly gullible. No win, then, for Camping. Or for his disciples. But a big win for the insurance companies offering Post-Rapture Care for Pets.

In other news, a storm in an egg cup has broken over Carmen Callil's retirement from the panel of judges for the International Man Booker Prize, in protest at Philip Roth's win. Callil has since pronounced that '[he] goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe.' Is this, though, not the quality of every great writer (though striking the sit on my face image, to spare Jane Austen's blushes)? You may now turn over your paper and begin. The public jury is out whether or not silence is golden, and whether or not Callil's retirement from the panel was sufficient to register her clear annoyance at Roth's honour. In any case, the issue goes on. And on. Social media has much to answer for.

Being apart from the Mac over the last eleven days has had its definite upside. For one thing, I've been able to lose myself in a truly engaging, beautiful and challenging anthology that records the twentieth century in the Middle East through literature. Edited by noted writer, scholar and activist Reza Aslan, Tablet and Pen is a remarkable and handsome book from Norton that takes the reader away from the hackneyed and so fatal view of the Middle East as a uniform, extremist region and towards a sophisticated and often enlightening vision of a rich political, social, cultural and artistic mosaic. Of particular note is the role women have played in the latter part of the twentieth century in shaping the literary landscape. I'll be talking with Reza this Saturday evening at the Hay Festival about the anthology, its contributors and their various contexts, and the power literature has to build bridges across cultures, to help us locate a shared humanity and to keep us clear of the easy backslide into prejudice. Do join us if you can.