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Press Contact: lenbracken@hotmail.com

As Bush Prepares for War with Iran,
Bracken Launches Persian Love by Omar Khayyam

WASHINGTON, D.C.—A third carrier battle group arrived in the Middle East during January 2007 while the Bush regime heightened its rhetoric against Iran, accusing the nation in a questionable intelligence dossier of supporting anti-American attacks in Iraq. In fact, most of the attacks against the U.S. occupation force in Iraq have come from Sunni and not Shiite Muslims, and the United States and Britain have already begun a clandestine war inside Iran using Special Forces troops and local rebels to set off bombs and spread civil strife. The U.S. plan, as revealed by European allies who are horrified by the prospect of a full-scale assault, is to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and occupy its oil fields.

Persian Love
Omar Khayyam

In this bellicose climate, Len Bracken releases his adaptation of Omar Khayyam, which he calls Persian Love as a challenge to believers in the United States and Iran to value the finer aspects of life over war—wine and food, beauty and truth. The people and things one loves. Of the estimated one-thousand verses written by Khayyam, the eleventh century mathematician and astronomer from Nishapur, Bracken has arranged sixty-nine passages that draw on translations from several languages and personal inspiration. “This adaptation was originally recorded over music, so the words should roll easily off the tongue and be immediately comprehensible,” Bracken says.

While cautioning readers not to misinterpret the new title as taking an idealistic view on love, Bracken insists that this noble sentiment exists between American and Persian peoples at the level of human spirit. “Everyone who waters the plant of love never wastes their lives,” Khayyam writes, adding, “And that’s so if they submit to the will of god or if they simply desire physical pleasure and raise the glass.” What a waste of life war would be, Bracken says, when we could instead be happy as Khayyam writes in a stanza used in the film Unfaithful: “Be happy for a moment, that moment’s your life.”

Persian Love

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February 2006

Author contact: lenbracken@hotmail.com