BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran denounces Oxford scholarship
So, as I said, I have been feeling guilty about not posting about the goings on Iran of late, and I am beginning to formulate some posts I’d like to write, but this news article caught my eye. No matter how much I might disagree with and oppose the government in Iran, there is no way that the Iranian embassy is wrong about establishing a scholarship in the name of Neda Agha-Soltan. It is, by definition, political:

Life Imitates Art: Iran’s Opposition and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Story of Zahhak and Kaveh) �
I’ve been feeling guilty that I haven’t posted about the recent goings on in Iran. People were out in the streets protesting again, and the basij were there to try to beat them back, and it’s important–especially because of the negotiations happening now about Iran’s nuclear program–that we in the United States know that the opposition movement in Iran has not simply retreated. I just have not had the time to gather the pictures I have seen, the articles and witness accounts that I have read, and write about them in a way that will make sense. So–and even this is late–I am reposting here something I wrote on my other blog

Where I’ve Been and Where I’m Going, Part 1
I’m not sure what I feel like writing about tonight, just that I feel like writing. It was a hectic day. I woke up early to get a little bit of work done on my Shahnameh introduction–nothing new, mostly typing up notes I took while I was in DC last Wednesday–and then, after I dropped my son off at school and came back here to make myself breakfast, I rushed out to school to get some paperwork and emailing done before my first class of the day, Asian American Literature. I gave my students the assignment for The Joy Luck Club, which most of them have not yet finished reading. That’s okay, though, since they will have two class periods to work through the short es

Richard Jeffrey Newman on The Power of Poetry
This past Saturday, my colleague and friend Marcia McNair interviewed me about my book of poems, The Silence Of Men, on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen. Marcia is a perceptive reader and wonderful interviewer and her questions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the conversation was about the poem called “Working The Dotted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girlfriend and I had sex, and she was a virgin. What I liked best abou

Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question — from The New York Times
The Supreme Court in England is set to rule by the end of this year on a case involving a question that has vexed Jewish communities throughout the world for centuries: Who is a Jew? The case began because a 12-year-old boy whose father was born Jewish and whose mother converted to Judaism was denied admission to an Orthodox Jewish high school on the grounds that, because his mother was converted not in an Orthodox synagogue, but in what the Times article refers to as a “progressive synagogue” (which I assume corresponds to something like Reform here in the States), she is not really Jewish; and so, therefore, neither is he. The boy’s family decided to sue the school for d