Dibs

Vida Samadzai

On her site Lifeofamodel.com, model and fashion commentator Kelly England invites her fellow models to report “dangerous incidents to help to make the fashion world a safer place for young women and men.” England is working on a book about how “modelling can lead to human trafficking, exploitation, eating disorders and drug dependency. Unlike the smoke and mirrors that insist that modelling is a safe and fun career, we tell it like it is.’’ For the book, she interviewed Afghani model Vida Samadzai, who wore “a red swimsuit and high heels, causing mass outrage” during the 2003 Miss Earth pageant, which she won. “She is the ongoing subject of scorn and potential prosecution and regularly suffers from death threats,” England writes. Samadzai told her: “I understand beauty is appreciated everywhere around the world. However, it is intelligence that doesn’t fade…. Behind every successful man, there is a woman. We have heard of this quote before. F. D. Roosevelt’s wife was his advisor for the most part.”

Like a spider sucking away the bodily contents of its prey, Sara Jane Gutierrez stole nearly a thousand books from public libraries in Greeley, Colorado and sold them to a local secondhand store. Twenty years old and pregnant, Gutierrez pleaded guilty to theft and forgery in May and was sentenced this week to three years of probation and 120 hours of community service, according to the Vail Daily. Over many months, she obtained library cards under seventeen different false names, using other people’s discarded magazines and mail to apply for the cards, according to her arrest affidavit. With the possible help of accomplices, she then used the cards to check out over 800 books — worth around $30,000, according to Weld Library District officials. Using ten different false names, she then sold the books for around $8,500 to Hastings Books, Music & Video in Greeley. “A Hastings store manager would not allow his name to be used for comment about the store’s book-buying program,” according to the Vail Daily, which adds: “Greeley police have a warrant for a co-defendant, David Michael Garcia, 24, who Gutierrez told police was her boyfriend. The two would use bleach and glue to ‘clean’ the library books so they could be sold… Gutierrez was part of an apparent ring of people who fraudulently checked out the books and sold them back…. When she showed up for an evaluation by the probation department, Gutierrez tested positive for meth and marijuana…. She will have to complete parenting classes, substance abuse treatment and a mental health evaluation as part of her sentence.” So the next time you’re on the checkout line at your local library behind a panting, sweaty, wild-eyed figure who reeks of pot and is clutching six hefty art books, Ann Coulter’s Godless, Noam Chomsky’s Failed States, plus the entire ouevre of Beatrix Potter, your suspicions will probably be entirely correct.

Byzantium is the forgotten empire. Spanning the ancient world and the new, the Byzantine Empire emerged at the fall of Rome and lasted all the way to the Renaissance. Perhaps because it thrived during the misnamed “Dark Ages,” and because it was headquartered where Europe and Asia meet (Byzantium is now called Istanbul), it is seen as being neither here nor there, old nor new, and as such is pretty much ignored in our modern education system. Colin Wells tries his best here to set the record straight, to rehabilitate Byzantium’s reputation, and stake its claim as the actual fulcrum of world events. Sailing from Byzantium is not a straightforward recounting of the empire’s history, but rather is a detailed acknowledgement of its immeasurable influence on three different surrounding worlds: the “West” (i.e. Europe), the Islamic world, and the Slavic world. Wells makes a convincing case that Byzantium’s transmission of ancient Greek classics and philosophy helped inspire the Renaissance, was the main fuel to the golden age of Islamic learning, and brought civilization to Russia and eastern Europe.

The book’s final section is the most dense, as Slavic culture remains a mystery to most Americans even to this day. And the influence of the Byzantine world on the Renaissance is somewhat well-known already. But of particular interest is Wells’ documentation of the connection between Byzantium and the growing Islamic caliphate, and how Byzantine Greek and humanist philosophy transmuted Muslim desert warriors into an empire of astrologers and alchemists, interested in knowledge for the first time.

But alas, it was not to last: while Europe built upon the Renaissance and created our modern world, even a thousand years ago Islamic fundamentalists decried the knowledge and humanism of the “infidel,” and eventually they won out over the Muslim intellectuals, plunging the Middle East into its own Dark Ages from which is has not yet emerged. Eventually, in 1453, Muslims invaded, sacked and destroyed Byzantium, changed its name to Istanbul, and obliterated the refined Byzantine culture forever. In this respect, Sailing from Byzantium tells the hidden story behind the world events of today. But the book is not for the casual reader, and might be off-putting to anyone not already cursorily familiar with the Middle Ages; Wells plunges into his material like a scholar on fire, with just the briefest introduction into the fundamentals of Byzantium’s story.

One final note: The press release accompanying the book was truly embarrassing, rife with egregious errors and mis-statements, and misrepresented the book and essential historical facts. The unfortunate practice by modern publishers of assigning uneducated young interns to write the publicity materials for books that scholars spent years laboring over, thereby rendering a lifetime of scholarship moot with a few tossed-off ignorant lines after a riffle through the manuscript, has simply got to stop.

Grade: B+

Buy this book at Amazon.

Dibs! is still wondering what Lindsay Lohan is famous for doing. But life is just too short to undertake the research into this matter on a summer day. So, crassly joining the dogpile of reporters reporting on the actions (and even planned actions) of a puzzling figure who is famous for stuff, Dibs! would like to inform you that, according to a press release from the World Entertainment News Network, Lohan is about to be an author: “The 20-year-old is keen to shed her image as a child actress and plans to show off a new raunchy side to her personality in the book, which will be called NARCISSIST.” Hmmm. It’s “a new book of sexy snaps of herself, in a bid to transform her from teen star to Hollywood icon…. She says, ‘It’s my body. And I like my body. And I like my breasts. And no, they’re not fake. I think a woman’s body is so much more sensual than a man’s. I’m not saying strip off all your clothes, but there are certain photos I like people taking of me, where I’m comfortable.’”

Nostalgic Berkeleyans enter Cody’s for the last time.
Notice the “For Lease” sign.

Dibs! saw grown men cry during the farewell ceremony today at Cody’s, a big bookstore on Berkeley, California’s famous Telegraph Avenue whose impending closure was lamented recently in the New York Times. (The Times reminisced: “Cody’s, which was founded in 1956, was considered a business innovator for years, adding readings, talkbacks and kaffeeklatschen to the book-buying experience long before Barnes & Noble…. In the 1960’s, the Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio worked behind the counter at Cody’s, and tear gas was known to waft in occasionally when Vietnam War protesters clashed with police…. Cody’s was a must-see.”) Hundreds arrived on the store’s fiftieth anniversary — which is also the day before it closes — to sip punch and nibble cookies as speakers including

  Maxine Hong Kingston, Mistress of Ceremonies.

emcee Maxine Hong Kingston, owner Andy Ross, founding co-owner Pat Cody, feminist Susan Griffin and historian Leon Litwak mourned aloud. “How poignant and unbelievable we feel,” Kingston began, shakily. Ross hailed Berkeley as “America’s most unique and intellectual community.” (Sorry, Cambridge! Greenwich Village and Austin and Seattle, he seems to be saying that you suck!) “Sales have just plummeted,” Ross explained, noting that while the store pulled in about $10 million a year in the early ‘90s, it was down to $3.5 million these past few years “and going down and down and down.” Also during these past few years, as sales were plummeting, Ross opened not one but two additional Cody’s stores, which aren’t closing — on Berkeley’s chichi Fourth Street and in San Francisco, near several large established book emporia,

A screen displayed a nostalgic slideshow all afternoon,
including this picture of Andy Ross and Gilda Radner.

including fine old indie Stacey’s and a vast Borders. Even a toddler would call this overexpansion a monumental business blunder: arguably greedy, and a truly puzzling move when the book business in general isn’t exactly … well, it’s not whipped iced-coffee drinks. Yet as all of Berkeley buzzes about the Telegraph store’s demise — blaming (as did the Times) chain stores, the Internet, the lack of parking, and the war in Iraq — Dibs! has found that few want to hear Dibs!’s opinion, which is that Cody’s killed Cody’s. And if you’re going to spend fifty years as a radical counterculture hub on a radical counterculture street in a radical counterculture town, championing books about smashing the capitalist state, then should you be surprised when your clientele takes that advice and stops shopping? Speakers at the farewell ceremony lashed

 Former co-owner Pat Cody and current honcho Andy Ross.

out at familiar targets: George W. Bush, technology, the shrinking American mind. And did we mention chain stores? “Does the Internet teach us the meaning of life?” Ross queried. “American cities are becoming one big Walnut Creek, with the ubiquitous Bed, Bath and Beyond,” he mused, dissing a nearby middle-class suburb, then began to sob. Someone read aloud a farewell-to-Cody’s letter from Salman Rushdie, whose The Satanic Verses inspired someone to lob a firebomb through the store’s window in 1989. Ross described “the Rushdie affair” as “Cody’s great historical moment” and “our finest hour” because his store stocked the novel after “the chain stores had already pulled [it] from their shelves.”

Salman Rushdie hovered over the proceedings, while a
camera flash gave Andy Ross a saintly glow.

Reminiscences of that incident — its attendant shock and dread, Ross and his family going into hiding — went on and on although no one mentioned Islam, Muslims or who threw the bomb. But the audience burst into spontaneous, derisive laughter upon hearing the word “FBI.” In his letter, Rushdie wrote: “Thanks to that little firebomb … it became an important store to me.” Ross added, “Nothing sells better than a good banned book.” Kingston, who began visiting Cody’s as a UC Berkeley student in the ’50s, called the store “my haven and home” and said she dearly regretted not having been there on the night when Anaïs Nin did a reading and “was showered with flower petals.” Susan Griffin, author of Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature and The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues, spoke darkly of McCarthyism,

  Susan Griffin.

decried Wal-Mart — which “acts as if there is no labor history and no rights for working people” — and lambasted chain stores because “they aren’t community places.” Richard Silberg read a poem he’d written about watching other poets reading at Cody’s. Snatches from the poem include: “Lipsticked, Bopeeped/he declaims/cranking the wings and pulleys of his surrealism … all sex all brainglow/these catwalks/threading the secret city.” Leon Litwak, author of Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery and Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, urged his listeners to browse at Barnes & Noble, to lounge in “their comfortable chairs” while handling the merchandise, but then to “come back” and buy the books at chairless indie stores. Litwak intoned a rhetorical question and answered it: “What has our country become?

Chain-store birthday cake.

An empty arsenal.” Behind the curtain that served as the speakers’ backdrop, a large white sheet cake emblazoned with the bookstore’s name awaited the ceremony’s end. It hadn’t been unpacked from its plastic box yet. Umm … did we mention chain stores? As its sticker revealed, the cake came from Safeway.

On Friday, Dibs! reported on dozens of new libraries being built in rural Afghanistan. Now the San Francisco Chronicle notes that Afghanis in the town of Herat, freed from years of shariah law, are getting back into the habit of reading … Shakespeare. At a performance recently as hundreds watched, “five women took off their veils. Ripples went through the crowd. Five years ago, under Taliban rule, Herat’s women could scarcely leave their houses.” But now, the Chronicle reports, a troupe of actors was presenting Love’s Labour’s Lost in the Dari language, “suitably filled with witty Dari couplets, humor and heartache…. In the five years that the Taliban ruled Herat, they whitewashed paintings, banned music and dancing,” as bullets flew. In this localized version of the play, “the king of Herat and his three best friends sign a pact to dedicate their lives to study for three years, with little food and sleep and no contact with women. As they sign it, however, they remember that the princess of Kabul is due to arrive that day. Despite their contract, the king and his friends fall in love with the princess and her companions…. During the performance, there are times when the women’s scarves come off their heads, an act that would have been punishable by beating under the Taliban. During the singing and dancing scene, the men hold the women’s hands and go without their shirts, another punishable offense.”

A Jordanian who used free-access computers in an Ohio public library to visit jihadist Web sites and send and receive emails about nuclear bombs and other weapons claims that he isn’t a terrorist — he’s just writing a book. According to Ha’aretz.com, Mohammad Radwan Obeid aroused the attention of a librarian in Troy, Ohio, who contacted the FBI. Subsequent investigations showed that among many such correspondences, Obeid emailed an undercover cop, claiming that “he wanted to start an operation that would be bigger than the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” After Obeid’s personal computer was searched, his lawyers “challenged authorities’ interpretations of his e-mails and contended he was conducting research for a book on terrorism and world religions.” That’s such a cool defense. Charles Manson was researching a book on how to stab the pregnant. “Immigration officials said they believe Obeid entered the United States through marriage fraud,” reports Ha’aretz. “He married an American woman in Jordan and came to the United States in 2001, according to court papers. The marriage was annulled five months later.” After being convicted of lying to the FBI, he was sentenced to a year in prison and faces deportation in November.

Not one, not two, but 26 entire libraries have been created and filled with books around Taloqan (depicted at left), the formerly Taliban-held capital of Afghanistan’s war-torn northeastern Takhar province. Within recent memory, rifle fire and exploding bombs were part of the daily retinue in this remote town and its surrounding district where women wear full-body burkas. Even before US forces arrived, the region was a hotbed of battles between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. In one raid shortly before 9/11, for example, a Northern Alliance contingent seized from their rivals fifty Kalashnikovs, 23 PK machine guns, three ZPU-1 machine guns, two 82 mm recoilless rifles, 19 RPG rocket launchers, two truck-mounted ZSU-23 machine guns, one 82 mm mortar, two pickup trucks and ten wireless communication sets. But now relative peace reigns and it’s reading time, with the help of NGOs and $130,000 from the US Agency for International Development, according to Pakistan’s onlinenews.com: “The people will read in libraries free of cost. The purpose behind construction of the libraries was to enhance education level of the people in these areas. … Mohammad Nadir, a farmer of Khwaja Sabz village of Taloqan, said: ‘I have studied to 6th class, now I can read books besides farming work.’ He said: ‘Book is best friend.’”

She posed nude recently for Playboy and now she’s about to become an author! Cindy Margolis — described on her Web site as “a desired Supermodel, accomplished Host, Actress and Producer … a self -made icon of the of the Twenty-First Century” — hey, we cut and pasted that verbatim … is now writing her first book. It’s about infertility, based on her own experience as the mother of a son born via in-vitro fertilization and twin daughters born via a surrogate, and she is pitching it to publishers this month. The self-taught Sunkist and Coors model who became 1999’s most downloaded Internet image (though, as Wikipedia notes, “her aureolae were never exposed”), often, according to her Web site, “taps into her base of over 43 million fans to promote her projects [and] steer her in the right career directions. Her fans never have a shortage of products, projects or show idea’s for her to conquer…. [She was] one of the first celebrities to have her very own on line gaming casino…. CindysPoker.com was an idea inspired by her fans and many will enjoy playing with her.” She is also working with artists on “the animated series ‘Cindy B.C.’ … you can expect to see her very soon as the brilliant, sharp witted and irresistibly sexy High Priestess with a mission to save mankind! The series is in development with Playboy Enterprises.” Keep your eyes wide open for the new book from this long-legged multitasker whom you might know from such productions as Shasta McNasty, Retrosexual and The Great American Celebrity Spelling Bee.

Kola Boof —author of such books as Diary of a Lost Girl, Flesh and the Devil and Long Train to the Redeeming Sin, who claims to have been held captive by Osama bin Laden for several months in 1996 and, in her own words, “shared his bed” — is now offended (according to a press release from Boof’s publisher, Door of Kush Books) by a New York Post story that calls her Osama’s “sex slave.” But it’s not only the Post. Boof, who in accordance with a rule of her own making, appears topless in her book-jacket author-photos, is also called the master terrorist’s sex slave in the Times of India, Hindustan Times, GQ, New Kerala, FishbowlLA, MyWay.com, Digg.com, Onlypunjab.com, Vibe, and dozens of other venues, including Dibs! last month. In a press statement released today, Boof — who now writes for the soap opera Days of Our Lives — denies being anyone’s slave and objects to the Post‘s use of “nastiness they would never inflict on a white author, and then they go on to trash my work on the television serial, ‘Days of Our Lives,’ [suggesting that she is] supposedly bringing a ‘Bin Laden-like’ character to the show, which is nonsense… I, Kola Boof, would like to say now… that since the day I have tried to tell my story in this country, I have been unfairly lied on and outrageously maligned by the press. Whether it was Connie Chung’s alleged assertion that Bin Laden would never have a ‘black’ mistress … or the New York Times and their hatchet job claiming that I didn’t exist … I have been met only with racism, snobbery and all around privileaged ignorance by the pot-heads who edit and write for the newspapers in the United States, and since we all know that I could give two camel humps about being popular … I have given my heart and soul to the work that I did at ‘Days of Our Lives,’ because I learned English watching that show as a child.” Boof’s upcoming novel from Random House is allegedly called The Sexy Part of the Bible.