Dibs

She’s Osama bin Laden’s ex-sex slave, she’s topless and reading a Bible in one of the photographs that appears on her own web site, and she wishes people would stop calling her a Republican. Sudanese hottie Kola Boof, author of such books as Diary of a Lost Girl, Flesh and the Devil and Long Train to the Redeeming Sin, is now writing scripts for the American soap opera Days of Our Lives, according to Desifans.com, which notes that the network is trying to keep this information low-profile. Boof claims that in 1996, while she was a pursuing an acting career, bin Laden spotted her with a date in a Moroccan restaurant, lured her date away, then raped her and imprisoned her in a hotel room for four months. (she has also said, somewhat contradictorily: “I accompanied him and his men on hunting expeditions and fishing trips. I got to know a lot of his friends, such as his doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri.”) She also claims that in 1998 bin Laden threatened to kill her after reading some poems she had written that criticized Islam. A fatwa was declared against her by Sudanese diplomat Gamal Ibrahaim in London, who sentenced her to beheading. But she’s in hiding. Except for the topless stuff. Boof’s writings spotlight the ill-treatment of women in Arab culture, and on the page showing her Bible snap she explains: “I am topless to honor my mothers and grandmothers, my own African womenfolk who were always bare breasted in the sun…. They were not dirty and soiled by man’s greed and violence. They were naked because it pleases God.” Her publishing contracts specify that she must be depicted topless on the back covers of her books, asserts Boof, who told listeners to an Israeli radio program: “The media portrays me as an extremist and a supporter of Bush and the Conservative Republicans, which is an unmitigated lie. I am as liberal and as Democratic as any American black.” (Also from the web site: “Her former dress designer, Dooby Doo, stated: ‘Her breasts are real, natural, 100% God-given and most definitely spectacular, so she wants to show them off, the little bitch.’ Hmm, her former dress designer? Any relation to Scooby Doo?) Boof told an interviewer for Blacknews.com: “Osama is a gifted poet.” So … was he doing the quatrains and scansion thing while beating and raping her? Or was it haiku? “He was tyrannical towards his men and embarrassed about sex … but addicted to it.” Bin Laden biographer Peter Bergen has apparently called Boof delusional. An angry Boof tells Blacknews: “Peter Bergen doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, but I’m sure that the media would take the word of a white man who’s never met Osama against the word of a black woman who used to share his bed.”

Residents of Gabriel García Márquez’s Colombian hometown, Aracataca, failed last weekend to summon the energy to change its name to Macondo — the name of the fictionalized town in which the Nobelist’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude took place. A majority of voters approved the proposal on Sunday — 3,342 locals voting for the name-change and only 250 opposing it. But 7,000 votes were needed to make the results official, according to the World Entertainment News Network.

Sam Jones at Goldenrulejones.com links to a Chicago Sun-Times article in which that paper’s new literary editor introduces herself. In “A Book Lover’s Approach to Her New Job,” Cheryl Reed tells us that after devouring a biography of Simone de Beauvoir, she felt “as if I had lost a wise, old friend. In my grief, I drove to a liquor store and, though at age 24 I was not a Scotch drinker, I bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red because that’s what Simone drank. The bottle was expensive for a young journalist, and I had the clerk wrap it in red paper to further celebrate my extravagance. Then, in the privacy of my studio apartment, I held my own memorial for a great author, toasting the person whose determination to be a writer had so inspired me.” Okay. So if she spent thaaaat much time reading about this fine liquid, buying a bottle, watching it being wrapped, and doing a ritual with it at home, and if she’s a journalist, how could she manage not to notice that the proper spelling of its name is not “Johnny” Walker but Johnnie Walker. (Or did she spell it right originally and some wily copyeditor messed with her?) This kind of error will not inspire Chicago-area readers with confidence. Nor will this grotesque sentence, later in the article: “With slick advertising, vague book titles and artfully designed jackets, clever marketing has propelled mediocre books to the best sellers lists.” Best sellers lists? Reed reassures her readers: “You’ll also notice a greater focus on women writers and books that appeal to female readers…. Don’t worry. We’re not forgetting books that men enjoy. There will still be plenty of reviews on books about sports and business.” Ummm — imagine what would happen if a male literary editor announced, “We’ll still review books that ladies like: cookbooks, for example, and books on shopping and doing your hair.” Reed adds: “But there will be even more on biographies and nonfiction titles.” Umm … reviews on books, not of them? Weird! Or is it some kind of Midwestern slang?

Wendy, that sweet Peter Pan character, meets Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and all three have explicit erotic hijinx in a forthcoming graphic novel due out next month which representatives of England’s Great Ormond Hospital for Children, to which J.M. Barrie left the copyright of his classic novel, consider inappropriate. The graphic novel, The Lost Girls, has drawings by Melinda Gebbie and text by Alan Moore, who also created Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell. According to the Vancouver Sun, a statement issued by the hospital declared: “In order to be published or distributed in these territories, Alan Moore’s title would need our permission or license. From press coverage, we understand it deals with sensitive subject matter which does not initially seem appropriate to be associated with the hospital and with J.M. Barrie’s legacy to us.”

Hailed as a “spa day for your brain,” last weekend’s Book Group Expo in San Jose, California featured celebrity authors including Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Rabih Alameddine and others yukking it up for members of book clubs and reading groups. Allegedly the high point was a skit involving Tan (in disguise) with Sam Barry, Susanne Pari, Asa DeMatteo, Alameddine and others portraying “The Book Group From Hell.”

Pete Doherty is a British rock star with bad teeth who was recently photographed sticking a hypodermic needle into a young woman on a restroom floor, then claimed that he wasn’t injecting drugs into her but drawing her blood, because he happens to make art using human blood. Now we learn that his first book — of poetry and “drawings,” some of which may or may not be hemofingerpaintings —will be published next March. But Doherty has already failed to appear at his own poetry reading at a London launch party, according to andpop.com. Maybe enroute to the venue he encountered someone with a cut lip.

Australian sports celebrity Dr. Ric Charlesworth coached the Hockeyroos — the national women’s field-hockey team — all the way to world dominance including three Olympic gold medals. And he credits Shakespeare for his success, claiming that the Bard’s insights helped him help his athletes fulfill their potential. According to UQ News Online, Charlesworth will speak at the University of Queensland’s World Shakespeare Congress next month about his book, Shakespeare the Coach. “As a coach you are always looking for different ways to say things and for messages that came from someone else,” he told UQ News. Among many examples, he cited “Sweet are the uses of adversity” from As You Like It: “It means pushing people sometimes harder than they want to be pushed.” Charlesworth is a doctor of medicine and also a former Australian Hockey Team captain. He played with the Kookaburras for a record sixteen years. He was also a Federal Parliamentarian for a decade: “During my time in politics I was a patron of a playhouse in Perth. I used to go to a lot of theatre and in that time I got really interested in Shakespeare.”

The authors met while working in the kitchen of a trendy San Francisco restaurant. Now they’ve got two trendy Cal-Mex restaurants of their own in the Bay Area, one of which is in Berkeley and bears the same name as this book, which is a Mexified play on the authors’ names, sort of, and the weirdest thing of all is that Savitsky and Schnetz, who are only platonic friends, are both married to individuals whose surname is Moniz, though these Monizes are unrelated and were strangers to one another before meeting through Savitsky and Schnetz. This bizarre coincidence alone is worth half the price of the book. The authors concede, though not in so many words, that Doña is a feminine honorific and Tomás is Spanish for Thomas, lending the name of both book and restaurant a tranny flair. And Berkeley being Berkeley, the book’s foreword just has to include a gratuitous dig at the fine economic system that, umm, keeps trendy restaurants in business. “Capitalism, for example,” we are told in that finger-wagging Berkeley way, “took the simple, the good carrot, refined and bleached it of taste and nutrition, dyed it orange, boiled it in sucrose, and canned it.” Damn you, disposable income, damn you! Once the book gets down to recipes it will make you drool, from eggy-chippy chilaquiles to a tortilla soup based on a version the authors discovered in a Oaxaca restaurant. To perfect the formula, Schnetz ate three bowls at the Oaxaca place every day for a week. These recipes aren’t easy, so if your idea of Mexican food is a can of refried beans, microwaved tortillas and a mashed avocado — as ours certainly is — then wake up and smell the Kahlúa.

Grade: B

Tori Spelling angrily denies claims that she forcibly excluded her new husband’s ex from a recent awards ceremony in Toronto (a city which, according to a recent story posted here at Dibs! and confirmed by our Vancouver pal Emiko, everyone apparently hates). Canadian TV personality and film actor Mary Jo Eustace, ex-wife of the new “Mr. Spelling” Dean McDermott, says she was “ejected from the ceremony to avoid a clash with Spelling, who faced heckles of ‘homewrecker’ from the audience,” reports Starpulse.com. Eustace, who was married for twelve years to McDermott — the pair has a son and adopted a baby girl shortly before their breakup — has been shopping around a book she is writing about the end of her marriage called My Husband Left Me For Tori Spelling. Great title, Mary Jo! Allegedly, McDermott returned home from filming a TV movie with Spelling to inform Eustace that he and his costar were “soulmates.” Allegedly, Eustace “laughed at first.” Nevertheless, the book is not a comedy.

UPDATE: And now Aaron Spelling has had a stroke! Hopefully not because he heard about Eustace’s book. An angry Canada.com asks: “Why was Tori Spelling whooping it up in Canada while her father was ailing?”

According to CBS4.com in Boston, a new sex-ed book for preschoolers by a Cambridge grandmother has just been published and will go on sale July 25. It’s Not the Stork! is aimed at readers aged four and up. Robie Harris’ previous book, It’s So Amazing, covered the same topic for seven-year-olds. On her Web site, Harris — who is depicted there in cartoon illustrations with antennae and wings, as a humanoid bee — promises that the book will answer “young children’s questions about where babies come from and what makes a girl a girl and a boy a boy.” In addition to pages about pregnancy, affectionate elephants, and body parts, a page about families tells its tiny readers, “Some families have a mommy and daddy. Some have two mommies. Some have two daddies.” Hmmm, wait ’til the radio talk-show hosts get their hands on that.