Daily · Dreamtime

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030700987.html?hpid=features1&hpv=local

But his laugh -- infectious and accompanied by a wide grin -- comes through every time.

In a few days he will travel 110 miles down the Hudson to Town Hall in Manhattan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of "Things Fall Apart." Toni Morrison will speak, as will, among others, his fellow Nigerian-born writers Chris Abani and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Abani will remind the packed house that they've come together "because we are in awe of the way in which one human being's imagination can intervene in all our lives."

But right now, the owner of that life-shaping imagination is trying to explain that he is not entirely certain just how "Things Fall Apart" came into the world.

"It's a little mysterious in some ways," he says. The book "seized me, and almost wrote me. I'm not quite sure I wrote it."

Looking to elaborate, he invokes his "chi," the personal spiritual guardian that Achebe's people, the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, believe accompanies each individual from birth to death. The concept is hard to translate, but one's chi, in effect, personifies one's fate.

"It was almost like my chi was making me into what I was to be," Achebe says

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030700987.html?hpid=features1&hpv=local

Bjork chanted the name of the Chinese-ruled Himalayan region after performing her song "Declare Independence," which she has used in the past to promote independence movements in other places such as Kosovo.

The performance "not only broke Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feelings of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist," the ministry said in a statement quoted by the official Xinhua news agency.

"Any attempt to separate Tibet from China will definitely be opposed by the Chinese people and all righteous men across the world."

The ministry said it would investigate the concert and handle the matter according to the law. It did not elaborate.

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DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD

By Sebastian Horsley.

328 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $13.95.

From time to time, residents of England produce advancements in that nation’s major art forms: narcissism, glibness and camp. Steven Patrick Morrissey corrupted an entire generation in the ’80s with his important work regarding self-involvement and the treatment of pain with sarcasm. A decade later, Jarvis Cocker quite successfully mixed that self-indulgence with class rage and the love of a good chemical.

In this fine and useless tradition comes Sebastian Horsley, a Withnail with more money, one of Malcolm Bradbury’s artistic youngsters with a spike full of heroin, a nephew of Quentin Crisp. His entire life’s work, his memoir explains at length, is to take the idea of lifestyle and elevate it to uselessness.

        "Kill A Hundred Turks And Rest…"

I WAS reminded this week of the old tale about a Jewish mother taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve in the Czar's army against the Turks.

"Don't exert yourself too much," she admonishes him, "Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again…"

"But mother," he exclaims, "What if the Turk kills me?"

"Kill you?" she cries out, "Why? What have you done to him?"

This is not a joke (and this is not a week for jokes). It is a lesson in psychology. I was reminded of it when I read Ehud Olmert's statement that more than anything else he was furious about the outburst of joy in Gaza after the attack in Jerusalem, in which eight yeshiva students were killed.

Before that, last weekend, the Israeli army killed 120 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of them civilians, among them dozens of children. That was not "kill a Turk and rest". That was "kill a hundred Turks and rest". But Olmert does not understand.