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First of all thank god for all those piecemeal digressions

du Plessis Gray criticizes or there's be no reason to read the book after reading the article.

I had a very unpleasant experience with Azar Naficy once. It was at the end of 2003 when I'd just immersed myself in Persian studies and coincidentally there was a huge Iranian film festival at Asia Society in New York. I saw every film. After one of them there was a talk among various invited Iranian and Iranican artists, Naficy being one of them. At that time she was the most well-known Iranian voice in the US, no holes barred.

There was this self-absorbed nobody of a young New York Iranican painter who I suspect had been invited because Shirin Nesrat and others couldn't come. She was vacuous and she spoke very proudly about how she told people she was Iralian because of the anti-Iranian prejudices. Naficy simply gushed about how wonderful she was and how honored she was to be on the same stage. The mostly Iranican bourgeois audience of course was amused because they did the same thing. I raised my hand during the audience q & a to protest that I hadn't come there to listen to Iranians talk about how great it was to say they were Italian and it was a kind of moral treason, especially getting the seal of approval from someone like Naficy who really was at that time the public voice of "Iran" in the US media..

People have accused Naficy of being a neocon and god knows what else. I don't see her that way but ever since that day I've never been able to see her as anything but someone who'll pander to anyone for publicity, and as for Lolita, yes she struck me as an at best mediocre "intellectural". Mediocre and slimey, that's all I can see..

But what do I know. Maybe I'm blind or maybe she was just having a bad hair day.

Thanks for the feed.

Roxy