So you have in Iraq some people falling prey to the system, some people managing to negotiate independence, and other people becoming outlaws, and being imprisoned and dying. You have all sorts. I don't know any other society where poetry has such a place.

Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis.

In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.

The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power. There's no core to what Michel Aflaq has to say that results in this. That was a key to looking at Michel Aflaq as a sideshow. He's the intellectual father of an ideology that no one probably ever believed in. At that point I began to appreciate him in a funny way.

Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.

We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.