Guest Comments by Michael Moore
The writer, an American author and Academy Award-winning film-maker, frequently comments on politics and business. Here, he issues an ‘open letter’ to United States President Barack Obama.
MICHIGAN -- President Obama, I understand you may be looking to replace Rahm Emanuel as your chief-of-staff. May I humbly offer myself as his replacement?
I’ll come to Washington and clean up the mess that’s been created around you. Working for US$1 a year, I’ll help the Democrats on Capitol Hill to find their spines and teach them how to nonviolently beat Republicans to a pulp.
Plus I’ll help you to achieve what the American people sent you to do. I don’t need much, just a cot in the White House basement.
Don’t get too giddy with excitement about my offer because you and I will be up at 5 every morning. We’ll get you pumped up for battle each day by doing 100 jumping jacks as you repeat after me: “The American people elected me, not Republicans. I’m in charge!...”
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How does literature affect art? How do political and other ideas filter through culture, and how do the arts influence politics and society? In Hong Kong on March 15, join award-winning author Rachel Kushner as she considers these issues when surrounded by art in the Karin Weber Gallery. This event, titled Art and Literature: Shaping Politics and Culture, takes place from 6-7 p.m. Tickets cost HK$120 for the public or $100 for friends of the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Kushner’s debut novel, Telex From Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and winner of the California Book Award. She co-edits an art-theory-and-literature journal, Soft Targets, and has written widely about contemporary art.
Karin Weber Gallery, 20 Aberdeen Street, Central, Hong Kong
Rachel Kushner
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Memoirs of an Ice-Cream Lady (Part 40)
By Emily Ho
Editor’s Note: The author (email icecreamladyhk@gmail.com) runs an ice-cream parlor on Hong Kong’s Lamma Island. When time allows, she draws caricatures and writes. The following semi-autobiographical anecdote blends fact and fiction.
The Earth Tumbled, Emily Cried
“Madam, are you the shop owner? We’ve received a complaint that you’re fundraising illegally outside here.”
A policeman had appeared at Emily’s ice-cream shop just a day after she placed a UNICEF donation box on a table outside. A few days earlier, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake had struck China’s Sichuan Province killing nearly 80,000 people.
“How can it be illegal to help UNICEF?” Emily asked the policeman. “And I have a document from UNICEF.”
Actually, Emily had displayed the donation box for a few years since she first sold UNICEF cards and gifts at Christmas time.
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 A blend of genius, social misfit and violent psychopath, Lisbeth Salander, the protagonist in Stieg Larsson’s bestseller, The Girl Who Played With Fire (Vintage Books, 2009, translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland, 724 pages), ranks among the most fascinating of fictional young women. There’s nothing tedious about any page on which she appears.
Maybe it’s no wonder! The author who created this “frayed individual” has a remarkable history too. Fifty-year-old Larsson, an outspoken Swedish journalist, died in 2004 from a huge heart attack. Rumors swirled that he’d been murdered after receiving death threats for years of documenting and exposing extreme-right, racist and Nazi organizations.
Before his demise, Larsson wrote a trilogy -- three novels. One, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, appeared in 2005 and an English translation three years later. Another, The Girl Who Played With Fire, won a Best Swedish Crime Novel Award in 2006. An English translation of the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, appeared recently.
Ironically, The Girl Who Played With Fire’s plot features a media story, a magazine investigation into human-trafficking and Stockholm’s sex industry, turning too hot to handle. Someone murders the reporter and his criminologist wife.
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