It has become clear to me that there will be no enduring peace without justice. History shows that there will be another Darfur, another exodus, in a vicious cycle of bloodshed and retribution. But an international court finally exists. It will be as strong as the support we give it. This might be the moment we stop the cycle of violence and end our tolerance for crimes against humanity.Read the whole article here. Thanks to Hil for sending it my way!
What the worst people in the world fear most is justice. That's what we should deliver.
2.28.2007
Angelina Jolie on Darfur
From the Washington Post, Angelina Jolie on Darfur:
Slim Lit...
From the Guardian:
Two leading publishers have hit on the idea of boiling down classic novels for modern audiences who are too busy/stupid to read the real thing. Orion was first off the blocks with its Compact Classics, which will appear in May - Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss, David Copperfield and Wives and Daughters, all reduced to not more than 400 pages for "less confident readers". Soon after come Bleak House, North and South, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Portrait of a Lady, similarly straitjacketed.Find the article here.
Without falling into the trap of condemning all abridgement - it happens on radio without a squeak of protest - at least half these titles should not be on the list. The fact that Moby-Dick is a digressive, unboildownable whale of a book is the whole point; The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Middlemarch are straightforward reads - page turners, even for less confident readers, though in the case of Middlemarch there are admittedly a lot of pages to turn. The rambling David Copperfield is ripe for cutting, but Bleak House, in which Dickens was consciously widening his scope as an artist, is not. A great novel is more than its plot; it is an ecosystem, a world. Tamper at your peril.
Meanwhile, HarperCollins is reducing War and Peace from almost 1,500 pages to 900. It says it will give us less war. Perhaps it has hit on the answer. Why not The Only Child Karamazov, Le Misérable, A Tale of Two Medium-Sized Towns, Limited Expectations and A Couple of Days in the Country? That should do the trick.
Professor John Sutherland of UCL has suggested that it is far better to do the abridging yourself. My recollection of reading what we must now call The Odd, Isolated Skirmish and Peace is that Prince Andrei is fascinating and Pierre a bore, so when the latter appeared my reading/skipping speeded up, though I always tell myself I will one day go back and read it properly (ditto Proust, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Chaucer, Milton, Don Quixote, Romola, Ulysses, and everything by Thomas Pynchon).
Harry Can Act!
The reviews are coming in and it appears that the young man behind the boy wizard can actually act. Daniel Radcliffe has been getting very positive reviews for his performance in Equus -- read about it here in the Guardian.
Quelle Horreur!
It's hard for Americans to scandalize the French (well, unless they're commenting that they're astounded by how prudish and stupid we are), but here's a fine example of an American author writing in French and shocking them all.
Escapism or Egotism?
The Guardian looks at authors writing about authors in their books:
The central character in a TV adaptation of an Ian Rankin short story being shown tomorrow is a policeman called John Buchan who has been bested in love and other areas of life by a rich, sexy, witty, bestselling novelist called Jack Harvey.
Most viewers will spot that the policeman's name is an allusion to a famous Scottish novelist - the author of The 39 Steps - but fewer may pick up that Buchan's nemesis is also a Caledonian literary reference. Jack Harvey is the pseudonym under which Ian Rankin published three early novels.
Read the whole article here.
The central character in a TV adaptation of an Ian Rankin short story being shown tomorrow is a policeman called John Buchan who has been bested in love and other areas of life by a rich, sexy, witty, bestselling novelist called Jack Harvey.
Most viewers will spot that the policeman's name is an allusion to a famous Scottish novelist - the author of The 39 Steps - but fewer may pick up that Buchan's nemesis is also a Caledonian literary reference. Jack Harvey is the pseudonym under which Ian Rankin published three early novels.
Read the whole article here.
2.27.2007
Only in the movies...
Once again, scientists kill a perfectly good movie technique... you can't actually ignite a petrol/gasoline fire with just a lit cigarette.
PEN/Faulkner Award to Philip Roth
Roth's short novel Everyman has won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Read about it in the Guardian or the NY Times.
2.26.2007
Lady Chatterly Best Film at the Cesars
Reported by the BBC: "Lady Chatterley has taken the award for best film at the Cesars, France's glitzy equivalent of the Oscars." Read the article here.
Rowling Sues eBay Over Pirated Books
From the Times:
In fiction his enemies are evil wizards and magical beasts, but Harry Potter’s latest adversary is a real corporation with a turnover of more than £2 billion.Read the whole article here.
J. K. Rowling, Harry’s creator, is suing the online auction hosting service eBay after unscrupulous sellers used the Indian version of the website to sell unauthorised versions of her books.
War of Ideas
From the Guardian:
The film Casablanca (1942) has become a permanent icon of a certain kind of educated culture, at least among older generations. The cast will still be familiar, I hope: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Marcel Dalio, Conrad Veidt, Claude Rains. Its phrases have become part of our discourse, such as the endlessly misquoted "Play it again, Sam" or "Round up the usual suspects". If we leave aside the basic love affair, this is a film about the relations of the Spanish civil war and the wider politics of that strange but decisive period in 20th-century history, the era of Adolf Hitler. Rick, the hero, has fought for the republicans in the Spanish civil war. He emerges from it defeated and cynical in his Moroccan café, and the film ends with him returning to the struggle in the second world war. In short, Casablanca is about the mobilisation of anti-fascism in the 1930s. And those who mobilised against fascism before most others, and most passionately, were western intellectuals.Read the whole article here.
Today it is possible to see the civil war, Spain's contribution to the tragic history of that most brutal of centuries, the 20th, in its historical context. It was not, as the neoliberal François Furet argued it should have been, a war against both the ultra-right and the Comintern - a view shared, from a Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Ken Loach's powerful film Land and Freedom (1995). The only choice was between two sides, and liberal-democratic opinion overwhelmingly chose anti-fascism. Hence, asked in early 1939 who they wanted to win in a war between Russia and Germany, 83 per cent of Americans wanted a Russian victory. Spain was a war against Franco - that is to say, against the forces of fascism with which Franco was aligned - and 87 per cent of Americans favoured the republic. Alas, unlike in the second world war, the wrong side won. But it is largely due to the intellectuals, the artists and writers who mobilised so overwhelmingly in favour of the republic, that in this instance history has not been written by the victors.
Hardback Mountain
This Wall Street Journal Opinion Page piece discusses the painful act of cutting back a personal library.
Why We Miss Susan Sontag, Volume 1
From the New York Observer... "Why We Miss Susan Sontag, Volume 1."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)