Tariq Ali is to appear at the Sydney Opera House on October 3rd for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, a series of talks that seek to explore the boundaries of the unsayable.
His talk, "What We Can Learn From Terrorists", focuses on the flipside of terrorists' actions, asking
is there anything that terrorists have to teach us—about the single-minded pursuit of purpose; about the necessity of puncturing the consensus of mainstream politics and culture? Or about the need to feed the ever-hungry media beast?
Tariq Ali will deliver the 2010 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, "The Future of Palestine," at the University of Adelaide on Saturday 9 October.
Tariq Ali's new book The Obama Syndrome is out now in the US, and is coming soon to the UK and rest of world.
Tariq Ali recounts a cheering encounter in a New York hotel:
A few months ago, tired after an event, I returned to my hotel, desperate for a sandwich and a glass of wine. I was served in the small bar, dominated by a small group listening to music and extremely noisy. Waiting for my food I took out a book I had first read decades ago and which had just been re-issued by Verso with a stunning intro by John Berger. I ignored the noise and dipped into the book, relishing both the ideas and the structure of the sentences exquisitely translated by Anna Bostock for Penguin all those years ago. Suddenly the noise decreased. The young people apologised for being so loud and switched off the music. One of them insisted on buying me a glass of wine. They had no idea who I was so I asked why? "A week ago my boyfriend read the book you're reading and thinks its awesome." We toasted the book. It was The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer. The episode cheered me enormously. A really good book will always find a home.
Tariq Ali opens his US tour for The Obama Syndrome with an appearance on GRITtv with Laura Flanders and Alexander Cockburn.
We've had a lot of talk this week about the Left: where is it? Why does the media ignore it? What can we do to rebuild it? And whose fault is any of this? The mainstream media might ignore voices from the Left, but here on GRITtv those are just the voices that matter—and today, for a special feature, we welcome two you may have heard of: Tariq Ali and Alexander Cockburn.