Oil is destroying History once again * ... While muslims are only half aware that Mecca and Medina are being destroyed and turned into some kind of pseudo-religious Las Vegas.


* There's supposed to be a link there but it's gone ... (trying to retrieve it).

Mitosis

This blog being a bit of a draft, nothing quite definite, I decided to duplicate it with a more specific blog, dedicated to the arabic novels and books I'm reading. I'll leave this blog for the rest, the books in other languages and the bits and pieces I sometimes post here.

Ce blog étant un genre de brouillon, rien de défini, j'ai décidé de le dupliquer avec un blog plus spécifique, consacré aux romans et livres en arabe que je lis, et je laisse ce blog pour le reste, les autres livres que je lis, dans d'autres langues, et les choses et autres sur lesquelles j'écris de temps en temps ici.

هذه المدونة يشبه مسودة أكثر من أي شيء محددة فقررت أن أنشأ مدونة أكثر مخصصة ... مدونة عن الكتب العربية التي أقرأها وأترك هذه المدونة للكتب الأخرى في اللغات الأخرى والأشياء المختلفة أكتب عنها هنا

Yep ...

I really liked both movies as movies in themselves, but here are good articles to be read about them, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, and makes you remember that cinema is rarely inoccent. And that you can't oversee the context. On of my litterature's teachers tried to convince me otherwise, that context and author were irrelevant to the understanding and analysis of a given text, and I never heard something sounding so stupid. The glaring evidence are these movies : can you ignore the whole geopolitical stuff in which these movies have been made ?

Exactly like orientalist art and knowledge, you can appreciate them for themselves, even believe some of their authors were genuinely interested in the people they depicted with the minimum of racist/politial thinking behind it (though I highly doubt was the case for the movies), but still, ignoring the politics, ignoring the whole context would be absolutely dumb. It's there whether you like it or not, whether the authors liked it or not, they acted in, around, with it.
And this good article, and this one, about Homeland TV series ... The storytelling was gripping, but yes, for anyone who knows anything about the middle east, you laugh a lot.