Hi, everyone. My name is Massud Alemi (pronounced masōōd aaleh-mi), and I was born and bred in Tehran, Iran, where I went to a Catholic school called Don Bosco.
All the gory details of my sordid life prior to coming to the U.S. can be found in this essay I wrote a few years back
http://www.massudalemi.com/Rootlessness-essay.htm
but the gist of it is that I came to America in 1977 to go to college, very little prepared for what was going to happen within a couple of years. As a result of the mess otherwise known as the Islamic Revolution, my family was scattered all over the globe. With the exception of my father and a brother, we’re all in the States now, have made it our home here. I would argue that I along with my family and the rest of the Iranian-Americans are the first victims of what is now known as Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism.
I worked at different jobs to put myself through school. Aside from paid positions such as a stock-boy, bus-boy, cook, cabdriver, ice-cream scooper, courier, and non-paying gigs such as a political activist and consultant, I was for ten years a graphic artist, working for various print houses around Washington DC. That’s before the computers were so prevalent. When computers (Macintosh) began to invade our workplace, I was the go-to guy for fixing glitches and printing problems. We output (printed) images and text into lithographic films, which were then photo-chemically burned into plates, and those were put on printing presses. There was pressure to get everything right the first time, since the lithographic film and plates weren’t cheap. Anyways, I became interested in computers for the precision they offered, the low margin of error. I excelled in making them talk to each other and that's how I insinuated myself into computer networking.
I'd received my BA a long long time ago in history from George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia. I even went for masters in history, but responsibilities caught up with me and I dropped out.
The networking field, as diverse and colorful as it is, was able to hold my interest for about 10 years, enough time for me to figure out that as an Information Technology specialist I was very much interested in the uses of IT to help underprivileged communities overcome the side-effects of globalization. I developed a curiosity for the new emerging field of ethics in global business, and read up a lot on it and even went back to school and got an MBA in technology management.
I think globalization has created numerous opportunities in every field of human endeavor. The most interesting aspect of it is the diversity of people and geographical entities that are gravitating toward it. I live and breathe it, and I think there is a lot that is going on in the world that we all need to stay alert and learn as much as we can in order to make a positive contribution. Globalization has also presented tough challenges to governments and businesses around the world. People (from both ends of the political spectrum) are beginning to see the impact it is having. Depending on their understanding of the global changes, people are reacting to it, sometimes seeing only the negative effects. I feel that globalization brings with it a wealth of resources that can be employed to lessen the negatives.
In all these years of working and living in the United States of America, I was fortunate enough to find out what my true passion is. A lot of people go through life not knowing what they are born to accomplish in the narrow space and time they are given on this earth of ours. I consider myself one of the lucky ones. In addition to writing essays and stories, both in English and Persian, I finished my first novel, “Interruptions,” which is coming out in January 2008. Writing is my way to decompress, on my time off from work and family.
“Interruptions” is about how interruptions in our daily lives define who we are. Rushdie once said something about how every nation has a caricature. The caricature of the French, for example, is their vainglorious notion about their cultural superiority. The caricature of America is the idea of goodness. That no matter what happens God always sides with America. I was always curious to know what caricature would fit the idea of Iran. I searched a lot in books and came up short. Until I decided to examine the idea closer, and write a story complete with real characters that would help me understand who we are and what we are made of. The result of that search became the book that you will hopefully read and enjoy come January 15. I basically maintain that we as a nation, or people, are defined by the interruptions in our lives, in the life of our society, history as well as our individual lives.
No sooner had my publisher signed my book with the Library of Congress and applied for its ISBN number and Copyright, than I started hearing about the so called “reviews” I’ve been getting in the websites connected to the regime. My book, Interruptions, is not due out until mid January, and I am already getting badmouthed from the sites associated with the Islamic republic of Iran. One of them (MehrNews.com) has called my novel “anti-Iranian,” “bleak” and “pessimistic.” Another, (JahanNews.com) says Interruptions “is set to negate the revolutionary values on which the Islamic Revolution is based.” Pretty hefty charges, I say. A third one, which is run by the circle around Tehran's mayor, Ghalibaf, (FardaNews.com), retracted the page that had called my novel “anti Iranian” among other things, after I complained to them a couple times. They sent me a brief email saying in effect, it’s not their fault and that they copied the news item from jahanNews.com, etc… as if it makes a difference to me. The page now reads a bland retraction. No apologies, no explanations. That’s the norm by which the news media in that totalitarian state operate. They trash something they don’t have a clue about, and when you complain, they just act as if nothing happened.
But that's not all; other Iranian sites are continuing to disparage my as-of-yet unpublished book. There is a whole slew of them. I tried to keep track, but there is such a thing called life, and one just has to learn to get on with it.
Pre-Order Interruptions
Controversial Novel Banned by IRI