There's a certain sort of person who will take a flashlight and go into a field of corn in the dark, but they only exist in the movies. I always think of those characters when I think of movie people in general: even in what is called real life, where people tend to have opinions and heart conditions and mortgages, film directors are largely unreal people who behave in unnatural ways. Especially in the first years after a big success, film directors of a certain sort are given to acting like geniuses, partly because a lot of desperate people have called them geniuses, but the conditions of success can serve to push them further and further away from their talent.

More:

[via 3quarksdaily]

Once a a group of people take it into their heads that they are unified by a national identity and that that identity is being prevented from achieving its full expression by another group of people, then that feeling/belief/identity usually trumps all other arguments.  Unemployment and corruption are very important issues but they are not at the races compared with the right to take your decisions while consulting only people that you regard as like you and without having to accept interference from those you regard as trying to oppress you.

Another important point is that new states, particular ones that have become independent through the use of force, are quite often basket cases in their early years.  When Ireland won a substantial degree of freedom from Britain in 1922 it quickly turned into an economic quagmire whose political and economic stability was founded on mass emigration. And there was the ever-growing power of the church, the banning of books and the gentle squeeze put on Protestants to consider too.  We made a hames of independence for a long time but it was our own hames.

I spent the afternoon at the botanical gardens in Kirstenbosch with Moira, a friend of a friend. She was in her late sixties, had grown up in southern Africa, raised her own family in Cape Town, all the while disapproving of apartheid. After the change of government, she taught nursery-aged black and coloured children of returnees from exile, in an impoverished part of town. ‘The country is being ruined by the greed and resentment of the Africans,’ she said as we had lunch. ‘They’ve got bad values – which is the result of cultural collapse because of the loss of traditional structures, but then again, cheating is the nature of Africans.’ She told me a ‘true’ story from a Zimbabwean farmer friend of hers, who got it from a friend of his, about an Englishman working as a foreman for a black landowner, who asked him: ‘How come you never cheat me?’ The Englishman, surprised, said: ‘Well, I’m just an honest man.’ The landowner roared with laughter. ‘We have always been cheats. That’s the only way to get rich.’ Moira explained that the character of the Trickster appears in all the traditional African stories. ‘They don’t have tales about kings and queens and heroes.’ She was adamant about this, though I suggested that the Trickster appears in some form or other in most traditions.

Then she told me another story that she assured me was ‘true’.

An Englishman, a Thai and an African were all together at Oxbridge. After some years the Englishman goes to visit the Thai who is hugely rich. ‘How come?’ asks the Englishman. ‘See that road? I own 10 per cent of it,’ the Thai tells him. The Englishman goes to visit the African, who is also hugely rich. ‘How come?’ ‘See that road?’ says the African. ‘What road?’ the Englishman asks.

Moira waited for me to burst out laughing, but it was a minute or two before I could make anything at all of this story. Besides, what were the overseas students doing in ‘Oxbridge’ in the first place if they weren’t rich already? Before I left, Moira asked me if I’d been to Robben Island. I hadn’t. ‘I went once – quite decent accommodation, and they were allowed to have their study groups and books. I left thinking it wasn’t nearly as bad as the Nazi concentration camps.’

Moira doesn’t think she’s a racist...

Full article here.

Vad sägs om en lång artikel om fyra romaner av Philip K Dick, inklusive Do androids dream of electric sheep? som blev en av mina absoluta favoritfilmer Blade Runner?

Dagbok från Sydafrika av älsklingen Jenny Diski, tidigare omnämnd här.

Dessutom om McMafia och Marie Antoinettes dotter, det här numret är som gjort för mig.

Ci sarebbero da fare un po' di critiche all'approccio della Diamond, e quindi anche a quello di Phillips: per esempio c'e' un po' troppa insistenza nelle presunte differenze fra la sessualita' (e l'omosessualita') maschile e le loro corrispondenti femminili. A parte il fatto che alla fine siamo tutti della stessa specie, non viene in mente alla Diamond, e a Phillips, che se la nuova ricerca sovverte pregiudizi sulla sessulita' femminile, forse anche una nuova ricerca sulla sessualita' maschile potrebbe portare a delle sorprese?

In ogni caso, questi sono i risultati principali della ricerca: (a) le donne intervistate lungo un arco di 10 anni hanno cambiato continuamente il loro orientamento sessuale; (b) c'e' stato un aumento della consapevolezza della possibilita' di cambiamento; (c) le prime esperienze sessuali non danno alcuna indicazione su quali saranno gli orientamenti futuri.

Il punto fondamentale del libro, e della recensione, e' quindi questo (mia traduzione):

La Diamond crede che finora c'e' stato "un modello troppo rigido della omosessualita'" e della sessualita' femminile in generale. Questo modello - il quale, dice, e' alla base di quanto riportato sia nei libri di testo, sia nei mass media - ipotizza che l'orientamento sessuale femminile si sviluppi presto, e che sia piu' o meno fisso poi per sempre. La sua ricerca ha invece rivelato che tale orientamento "puo' emergere piu' tardi in eta' adulta" e che le "sensazioni sessuali" possono cambiare "sia improvvisamente, sia gradualmente nel tempo".

Si tratta di una visione davvero rivoluzionaria: da un lato permette di andare oltre i soliti discorsi sull'omosessualita' come malattia o diversita'; dall'altro puo' addirittura riconciliare il pensiero di chi considera la scelta sessuale come qualcosa di personale, con il fatto che alcuni dicano di aver appreso come ritornare ad essere eterosessuali.

Semplicemente, c'e' tutta una serie di fattori da considerare, e il risultato e' una "sessualita' fluida" che si puo' solo accettare, cosi' come si puo' solo accettare il modo in cui una persona si vesta, o l'auto che abbia acquistato. L'aspetto "religioso" e' praticamente irrilevante.

L'unica cosa che importa, e' non farsi etichettare.

"Weitgehend kommentarlos steht der Text auf Jelineks Homepage. Spärlich strukturiert. Gar nicht lektoriert.... Im Prinzip äußert sich darin nichts als das Desinteresse am und die Missachtung des Lesers. Kilobyte um Kilobyte kotzt der Dichter ins weltweite Gewebe. Und nach ihm die Blattflut." Die Welt 24. 05. 08

Am 5. Juni 2008 schreibt Nicolas Spice dagegen in der London Review of Books :

"Part of the mission of this way of writing is to go down into the cellars of the language and unlock long buried relationships between words. For example, the phrase ‘Im Verlassenen’ is an invention, a gerundive formed from the verb verlassen, ‘to leave’, ‘desert’ or ‘abandon’. ‘Im Verlassenen’ means something like ‘in a place of essential abandonment’ or ‘in abandon-ness’, and it draws to the surface the derivation of Verlies – the word for ‘dungeon’ used to describe the Amstetten cellar – from verlassen. A Verlies is a place where you are abandoned."

So viel allein zur Sprache. Bedarf es ausländischer Magazine, um die eigenen Sprachspiele zu würdigen? Nicht zuletzt die Interpretationen ihrer Texte und Thesen, gewagte Zusammenhänge zwischen dem täglichen Pin-ups der Sun auf Seite drei ( oder der Bild Zeitung auf Seite 1) und Verbrechen wie solchen in Amstetten, einfach eine Kettenreaktion im Gedankenspiel "Frau als Ware und Wunscherfüllerin" der Männer? Brauchen wir für alles den Blick von Aussen? Und was ist mit dem Blick von Innen , wenn er unerträglich wird, weil er sich doch einen Funken besser auskennt, die dunklen Stellen doch am hellsten ausleuchten kann, können wir solche Einsichten nur zertrümmern statt würdigen und mit eigenen Assoziationen spielen?

Natürlich ist Jelinek nicht leicht verdaulich, natürlich will keiner hören, was sie sagt, wenn sie beispielsweise jeglichen Fortschritt für die Frauen in der Gesellschaft verneint. Es findet sich heute kaum mehr jemand, der nicht Angela Merkel oder Hillary Clinton als Gegenbeispiel nennt, vielleicht haben diese beiden Frauen der Frauenbewegung mehr geschadet als geholfen. So wie sich unter Schwarzen in den USA eine starke Elite herausbildet und zugleich eine Verschlechterung der Lebensumstände in den Ghettos zu vermerken ist, so bildet sich auch bei den Frauen eine immer größere werdende Kluft zwischen den Erfolgsfrauen und jenen, die von den Entwicklungen der letzten Jahrzehnte nichts mitbekommen, deren Zustand sich verschlimmert, aus welchen selbst- oder fremd-verschuldeten Gründen auch immer. Um nochmal den Nicholas Spice zu zitieren:

"While Jelinek has won just about every prize that is open to a writer writing in German, her reception by the defenders of the rights of the ordinary reader has often been venomously negative. When she won the Nobel Prize, the attacks became almost hysterical. Jelinek said that she had expected this but that even she was taken aback by the sheer nastiness of what was written about her – by Matthias Matussek in Der Spiegel, for example, or Iris Radisch in Die Zeit or Ruth Franklin in the New Republic. The destructive personal animus in these attacks needs explaining. The explanation lies more, I think, with Walter Klemmer than with Kurt Janisch. Walter’s rage and brutality, never far below the surface, is summoned by Erika’s literary imaginings. Her crime is to undermine his view of himself as a healthy, normal, loving young man. In Klemmer, Jelinek portrays the normal as monstrous and this is the crime for which, it seems, she cannot be forgiven."

Wie wäre es, über den normalen Wahnsinn zu sprechen, ohne vor ihm in die Knie zu gehen? Wie wäre es, anzuerkennen, dass unerträglicher Wahnsinn, Ekel und Abstoßung, wenn er literarisch verarbeitet wird, nicht der Literatur Übel genommen werden darf, sondern der Welt, in der all das entsteht? Wenn Jelinek ihre Informationen über die Welt, wie sie behauptet, aus dem Fernsehen bezieht, was ließe sich dann über die Welt sagen, die das Fernsehen vermittelt, und wenn man ihr Weltfremdheit vorwerfen möchte deshalb, so möchte man bitte nochmal die Statistik von der Anzahl der Fernsehstunden pro Tag und Kopf zur Hand nehmen und nachzählen für wie viele dieses Quadrat die Welt bedeutet...

From London Review of Books, Vol. 30 No. 10 · 22 May 2008:

And so I too – subconsciously – must have wanted to be caught. Caught and punished, in fact: ruined career in academia, ignominious return to law. But I wasn’t caught, unlike Albertine. For as far as I know, Eve’s never read the thing. (But what if she has!) Never seen my name above her work. Never noticed the plagiarism. Well, she will now. As will Bob, I expect. ...

I’m at some public school in the Midwest. Midwesterners, of course, are very nice. (Barthes would call this statement doxa, a bit of conventional wisdom – like the notion that students plagiarise so as to please.) And I do like my colleagues. But the students! Or rather, the English majors! Our department, you see, is the only one in the humanities not allowed to require that majors have a minimum GPA. (I imagine administrators saying: ‘They’ve got to major in something – and they speak English.’) So for the most part, we get the very worst students: students with GPAs of 2.0 or lower. ...

Kevin Kopelson's page at University of Iowa

Il capitalismo autoritario della Cina e' forse meglio della democrazia liberale (come "condizione necessaria e motore dello sviluppo economico")? E' piu' o meno quanto si chiede Slavoj Žižek, co-Direttore del Centro Internazionale per gli Studi Umanistici al Birkbeck College, una delle Universita' di Londra, nella sezione delle lettere sulla London Review of Books (volume 30 no. 8, datato 24 aprile 2008), dopo aver descritto in maniera straordinariamente equilibrata le relazioni passate e presenti fra Tibet e Cina (che, a proposito, non sono una storia di buoni e cattivi). Scrive Žižek:

Fareed Zakaria ha indicato come la democrazia "attecchi" solo nei Paesi economicamente sviluppati: se un Paese in via di sviluppo e' "democratizzato prematuramente", il risultato e' un populismo che si conclude nella catastrofe economica ed nel despotismo politico. Nessuna sorprese quindi nel notare che i Paesi del terzo mondo economicamente piu' riusciti (Taiwan, Corea del Sud, Cile) hanno optato per una democrazia completa solo dopo un periodo autoritario.
Seguento questo stesso percorso, la Cina ha fatto uso di un sistema autoritario per gestire i costi sociali della transizione al capitalismo. La combinazione bizzarra del capitalismo e del potere politico comunista e' risultata essere non un ridicolo paradosso, ma una benedizione. La Cina si e' sviluppata così velocemente non nonostante l'autoritarismo comunista, ma grazie ad esso.

In realta' c'e' da mettere i "puntini sulle i" a questo discorso. In primo luogo, Taiwan, la Corea del Sud ed il Cile si sono transformati "Paesi del terzo mondo economicamente piu' riusciti" dopo avere superato il "periodo autoritario". Con quelli come esempi, sembra che una dittatura possa fare da gestante ad un'economia di successo, ma che l'autoritarismo si trasforma poi in una madre soffocante, se non in una cattiva matrigna.

Ancora piu' importante, la Cina in se e' in un certo senso soltanto la piu' recente manifestazione di una "verità": una dittatura (economicamente) illuminata puo' essere molto piu' efficiente di cumulo di trucchi e trucchetti conosciuti come "democrazia". Voltaire probabilmente ha creduto in questo, e anche Platone e tantissimi altri, ed anche se il tutto suona come un concetto elitista, e' pur tuttavia ovvio: un Principe intelligente, che si preoccupa del suo Stato e dei suoi sudditi, politicamente ed economicamente saggio può decidere la cosa migliore per tutti nel giro di minuti, invece che sprecando mesi provando a convincere e negoziare, magari forse in interminabili Commissioni Parlamentari.

Un tal principe può anche garantire decenni di buon governo, davvero una benedizione per il suo popolo. C'e' un piccolo aspetto pero'. Immaginiamo che il Principe sia Ottaviano Augusto, e la pace e la prosperità sono di tutti.

Dopo viene Tiberio, e le cose cominciano a peggiorare con la sua paranoia. Tocca quindi a Caligola, e a Nerone non manca molto.

Le cose non sono cambiate granche' durante i passati 2.000 anni. Il problema dell'autoritaritarismo, e quindi del capitalismo autoritario, non e' la sua capacità di generare prosperità: piuttosto, la perfettamente analoga capacità di degenerare, rapidamente perché quasi senza controllo, arrivando quindi a impedire lo sviluppo della prosperita' se non ad ucciderla completamente.

Come si dice nel mondo finanziario: cosi' come un nuovo Amministratore Delegato puo' far risorgere o distruggere un'azienda, analogamente un Principe despotico (o un Comitato di Principi, altrimenti detto "Comitato Centrale del Partito Comunista della Cina") e' una ricetta per nuove opportunita' di guadagno e, per gli stessi motivi, per un aumento del rischio. E cio' andrebbe decisamente considerato, quando si vuol dare un giudizio circa che cosa scegliere come "la condizione necessaria ed il motore di sviluppo economico".

Dopo tutto, chi desidera scommettere continuamente tutta la sua ricchezza?

Is China's authoritarian capitalism better than liberal democracy (as "the condition and motor of economic development")? That's more or less what Slavoj Žižek, co-Director of the International Centre for Humanities at Birkbeck College, asks in the Letters section of the London Review of Books (Vol. 30 No. 8 · Cover date: 24 April 2008), at the end of a singularly even-handed description of the Tibet-China relationship (that by the way only victims of their respective propaganda machines will believe to be a story of good guys vs. bad guys).

Fareed Zakaria has pointed out that democracy can only ‘catch on’ in economically developed countries: if developing countries are ‘prematurely democratised’, the result is a populism that ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism. No wonder that today’s economically most successful Third World countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule.

Following this path, the Chinese used unencumbered authoritarian state power to control the social costs of the transition to capitalism. The weird combination of capitalism and Communist rule proved not to be a ridiculous paradox, but a blessing. China has developed so fast not in spite of authoritarian Communist rule, but because of it.

There are a few i's to dot, and t's to cross in Mr Žižek's discourse. First of all, Taiwan, South Korea and Chile became "today's economically most successful Third World countries" after getting rid of "authoritarian rule". So from those examples it appears that dictatorship may gestate a successful economy, but more often than not "Authoritarian Rule" transforms itself into a suffocating mother, if not an evil stepmother.

More importantly, China itself is in a sense only the last manifestation of a truism: an (economically) enlightened dictatorship can be much more efficient than the collection of dirty tricks known as democracy. Voltaire likely believed in that, just as Plato and countless others, and even if it does sound like an elitist concept, it is obvious nevertheless. An intelligent, caring, politically and economically wise Prince can decide for the best of everybody in minutes, rather than wasting months trying to convince, negotiate, win over people, perhaps in interminable parliamentary committees.

Such a Prince can also guarantee decades of good governance, truly a blessing for his (or her) people.

There is a small matter though. Say, your Prince is Octavianus Augustus and peace and prosperity is for everybody. Then comes Tiberius, and things start out ok: only, to worsen with his increasing paranoia.

Then you're stuck with Caligula. And Nero is not too far away either.

Things haven't changed much in the intevening 2,000 years. The trouble with authoritarian rule, hence with authoritarian capitalism, is not its ability to generate prosperity: rather, its perfectly equivalent capacity to degenerate, quickly because almost without control, thereby hampering the growth of that prosperity if not killing it off entirely.

Speaking the language of the financial world: just like a new CEO can resurrect or destroy a Company, so a despotic Prince (or committee of Princes, aka the "Communist Party of China Central Committee") is a recipe for increased earning opportunities and, for the very same reasons, for an increase in risk.

And that's something that should definitely be factored in in any judgement about what to choose as "the condition and motor of economic development". After all, who wants to continuously gamble all of one's wealth?

Mearsheimer e Walt parlano chiaro e parlano una lingua, soprattutto, conosciuta dai principali accusati. Si riferiscono, infatti, ai neocon sostenendo che gli interessi di questi gruppi di pressione semplicemente non corrispondono agli interessi strategici e diplomatici degli USA in un’ottica realista. Secondo gli autori, le lobby israeliane sono i deus ex machina della guerra in Iraq e sono fra chi più “spinge” per la guerra con l’Iran. La politica estera americana, improntata ad un aprioristico appoggio della politica di Israele in Medioriente, così come i tre miliardi di dollari annui di sovvenzioni, gli sconti sulla vendita di armi e i 34 veti nel Consiglio di Sicurezza ONU contro le risoluzioni critiche di Israele a partire dal 1982, non sono più giustificabili, in un’ottica di realpolitik, a partire dalla scomparsa dell’URSS. Con la fine della Guerra Fredda, vengono a mancare le condizioni di un appoggio incondizionato ad Israele. Mearsheimer e Walt giungono provocatoriamente a sostenere che financo la scomparsa di Israele, per quanto moralmente inaccettabile, non potrebbe comportare un problema per l’Impero americano. Le lobby israeliane, proseguono gli autori, hanno convinto l’opinione pubblica americana che gli interessi dei due paesi coincidono, quando, invece, non è più così. Ugualmente deprecabile è la tesi che Israele sia moralmente superiore rispetto alla controparte palestinese in virtù del fatto che è una democrazia occidentale. Mearsheimer e Walt ritengono che ogni protagonista del conflitto mediorientale si sia comportato in modo moralmente deprecabile; quindi ogni considerazione circa chi sia il buono o il cattivo è assolutamente improponibile. La politica estera si deve fare su un’esatta ponderazione degli interessi, non in base ad assunti non verificati. Gli autori, sia chiaro, non mettono in discussione il diritto di Israele a sopravvivere: ma il canale privilegiato che Gerusalemme ha con Washington è ingiustificabile.

Dietro questa etichetta di “lobby israeliana”, per gli autori, non c’è una categoria ambigua e ominicomprensiva, ma una serie precisa di think thank e advocacy coalition che hanno partecipato al progetto neoconservatore; come il Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), che ha arruolato personaggi come Dick Cheney e Paul Wolfowitz o l’American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

L’attacco dei due accademici ha, intanto, colpito nel segno, sollevando un vespaio di polemiche ed un intenso dibattito pubblico: che è, alla fine, quello che i due autori volevano. La forza del pamphlet, infatti, è quella di essere opera di autori non minimamente sospettabili di posizioni anti-sioniste sulla scia di scomodi intellettuali di sinistra come Noam Chonski. Quanto questo, o altri scandali come le pressioni delle associazioni dei petrolieri o dei costruttori di armi, possano portare ad una riforma del rapporto fra il Campidoglio e K Street (NdA, la strada di Washington dove hanno sede le lobby), è tutto da verificare.

Alessio Postiglione

It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.

Only the military discourse allowed? He has obviously never read Haaretz and can’t write a decent j’accuse without resorting to untenable generalisations.

Setting aside the clumsiness and exaggeration of the argumentation; what does the article amount to? A claim that Israeli journalists tend to favour their own side both in the discursive structure of their stories and in the credibility they assign to different actors in the conflict.

Isn’t that a surprise? Aren’t you just shocked to the core to discover this? I know I am. Just like you, I had imagined that Israeli journalists were maintaining a scrupulous equidistance between the claims made by their own side and those made by their enemies, that they were indifferent to the outcome of the conflict in which their nation is involved and were able to effortlessly abstract themselves from the political and social context which produced them and in which they live. After all, that’s what journalists everywhere do, isn’t it? 

"In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib?" ...

"Another example: in June 2006, four days after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from the Israeli side of the Gazan security fence, Israel, according to the Israeli media, arrested some sixty members of Hamas, of whom 30 were elected members of parliament and eight ministers in the Palestinian government. In a well-planned operation Israel captured and jailed the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, the ministers of finance, education, religious affairs, strategic affairs, domestic affairs, housing and prisons, as well as the mayors of Bethlehem, Jenin and Qalqilya, the head of the Palestinian parliament and one quarter of its members. That these officials were taken from their beds late at night and transferred to Israeli territory probably to serve (like Gilad Shalit) as future bargaining-chips did not make this operation a kidnapping. Israel never kidnaps: it arrests." ...

"Remarkably, there are no Occupied Territories in Israel. The term is occasionally used by a leftist politician or columnist, but in the hard news section it doesn’t exist. In the past they were called the Administered Territories in order to conceal the actual fact of occupation; they were then called Judea and Samaria; but in Israel’s mass media today they’re called the Territories (Ha-Shtachim).

- L.L. Wynn

Jeremy Harding reviews the second instalment of Debray's memoir in the London Review of Books.

Kenya’s current generation of political leaders is rotten to the core. Where alternatives can be found is another question. The country is ill-served by a colonial constitutional legacy that privileged executive power, patronage and ethnicity, a blueprint seized on by successive regimes to construct a political system that is unresponsive to the people, violent and corrupt.

Full piece here

Nicholas Guyatt, in his piece on the US Christian right, mentions that at the funeral of the notorious religious huckster Jerry Falwell, one lamb from Pastor Falwell’s flock was caught with homemade bombs in his car, claiming that he’d brought them in case liberal protesters threatened the cortège. In the event, the protesters weren’t ‘liberal’: they were members of an even more extreme religious sect, the Westboro Baptist Church, which denounced Falwell as a ‘corpulent false prophet’. The WBC, whose members believe the Iraq war is God’s way of punishing America for its permissive attitudes towards homosexuality, have weathered years of denunciation by more moderate clerics, such as Falwell. Yet when I interviewed them at one of their demonstrations, WBC members said they regard the US Constitution, including its provision guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion, as one of God’s greatest blessings. It’s a melancholy fact that many US Christians appreciate their Constitution only when their own beliefs are the ones ridiculed and suppressed.

Graeme Wood
Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

* By the way, I am wondering whether African political activists as well as intellectuals used to looking north would do well to look more closely at events in Latin America.

J.M. Coetzee (the South African novelist who emigrated to Australia] is a 'cold' person (apparently he thinks so himself) and wishes 'to live outside history.'

Michael Wood runs out of things to say about the Nobel Prize laureate's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, and Coetzee's book of essays, Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005, in the London Review of Books [you may need a subscription to access the material].

The European and North American papers give the impression that the main, if not the only, problem confronting Pakistan is the power of the bearded fanatics skulking in the Hindu Kush, who as the papers see it are on the verge of taking over the country. In this account, all that stops a jihadi finger finding the nuclear trigger is [General Pervez] Musharraf. Alas, it now seems he might drown in a sea of troubles and so the helpful State Department has pushed out an over-inflated raft in the shape of Benazir Bhutto.

In fact, the threat of a jihadi takeover of Pakistan is remote. There is no possibility of a takeover by religious extremists unless the army wants one, as in the 1980s, when General Zia-ul-Haq handed over the Ministries of Education and Information to the Jamaat-e-Islami [a Muslim fundamentalist group], with dire results. There are serious problems confronting Pakistan, but these are usually ignored in Washington, by both the administration and the financial institutions. The lack of a basic social infrastructure encourages hopelessness and despair, but only a tiny minority turns to jihad.

At the heart of this revisionism is Tim Jeal's Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer doing the rounds of reviews in mainstream American publications. For example, travel writer Paul Theroux mused, without blushing, in a New York Times Book Review write-up of the book, that:

Stanley’s life speaks to our time, throwing light on the nannying ambitions that outsiders still wish upon Africa. Among other things it is a chronicle of the last years of the Arab-Swahili slave trade, which was fairly vigorous as little as a hundred years ago, and which Stanley opposed. What would have happened if the Arab-Swahili slavers had remained unopposed throughout Africa? “Darfur provides a clue,” Jeal muses.

For a corrective, see Bernard Porter's review in the London Review of Books as well as Tim Gardam in The Guardian.

The film is truly 'the purest possible depiction of football' as Sydney, Australia-based blogger Dan Hill (his blog is CITY OF SOUND) summarized the film earlier this year:

Gordon and Parreno set up 17 cameras to follow Real Madrid 'galactico' footballer Zinedine Zidane through the course of an average La Liga game. That's it. They follow Zidane the player, not the match. The idea, in Parreno's words, was to 'make a feature film which follows the main protagonist of a story, without telling the story.'

(The game in question was Real Madrid v Villareal at Madrid's home stadium, the Bernabeau, and was played on April 23, 2005. The result was immaterial. Madrid won of course).

For non-football fans the film will be a bore, but not for those who love the beautiful game. The film is exactly 90 minutes. Zidane controls the ball for perhaps three or four minutes. Throughout, though, he seems very intense, smiling only once after he had set up Roberto Carlos for a goal). As Paul Myerscough writes in the London Review of Books: '... Even standing still, [Zidane] is working hard.' And Myerscough (an editor at the LRB) is right: 'Searching his face for 90 minutes brings us no closer to understanding his actions at the end of this game.'

Hill's discussion of the film on his bog (including its 'pre-production' elements and a mesh-up of a the film on Youtube) is one of the better reviews of the film I've read, along with that by Myerscough in the London Review of Books. A badly translated review in Cahiers de Cinema also stands out.

* The title of the post refers to the film Fußball wie noch nie translated to English as 'Football As Never Before' from the director Hellmuth Costard. Made it in 1971 and using only 3 cameras -- as opposed to Gordon and Parreno's 17 -- that film follows around George Best in a game for Manchester United v Coventry. I have sadly only seen clips of that film.

It had always struck me, as I'm sure many other readers, as surprising that someone capable of writing a piece of such piercing humanity as A Room of One's Own should seem so ambivalent towards certain others of her fellow beings; her feminist impulses, as has commonly been noted, were strangely limited to the middle and upper classes. 

The review (and so presumably the book) paints the picture of a woman not uninterested by or hardened towards her servants and the serving classes in general, but enormously perplexed as to the proper way in which to conduct relations with them: 

Her mother had ruled Hyde Park Gate with absolute confidence in the ‘old laws of life . . . a house, servants, establishments’. Without them her daughters were liberated, but also adrift... Released from Victorian certainty, mistress and servant were drawn into a different, more uneasily intimate relationship, which Virginia in particular found difficult.

Particularly fascinating are considerations of the ways in which Woolf's bouts of mental illness led her to depend on her female staff, and the further complications caused as a result.

I thought that those who had read the review might be interested in the following extract from our recent Woolf title, The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends.  Editor and Woolf scholar S.P. Rosenbaum notes that the piece entitled 'The Cook' 'is a reminiscence of the Stephen family cook of more than fifty years', and it's a lovely example of precisely the type of uneasy intimacy balanced by fear which apparently characterised Woolf's relationships with her servants:

Miss Ursula and Miss Kate and Miss Ann, Master John and Master Richard, and Master Hugh didn't dare, so they always said, to face old Biddy.  When they married, their first thoughts, so they said was, will Biddy like him or her?  She had a way of summing you up, with her very blue eyes, and her silence... Nobody has ever been able to say so much by saying nothing.

And that's got me reaching for To The Lighthouse, which is well overdue a re-read.

Ellie

Talking about Mbeki, he just fired a Cabinet minister. However, it is not Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister that supports his dissident views on HIV and AIDS and prescribes vitamins, garlic and beetroot as treatment for people living with AIDS, but the deputy health minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge who publicly repudiated his six-year denialism and who's appointment suggested massive change in the South African government's AIDS policy. Tshabalala-Msimang was treated in hospital for a liver transplant at the time, but returned to work in June this year when . The story gets South Africa onto Western news pages again, including the BBC, New York Times and the UK Independent. The latter piece is the most wide ranging and complete [ AIDS in South Africa presents a health and political crisis for the government with '5.4 million of South Africa’s 47 million citizens are infected with H.I.V'].

Last weekend the New York Times ran a feature story in its Metro Section on a group of refugees (Banyamulenge Tutsi) from Eastern Congo setting up home in upstate New York. The piece is not only factually challenged on the history of the conflict in the Congo and Rwanda, but also repeats all the outdated concepts when reporting about Africa (e.g. "tribes") and focus on their American saviors.

The Financial Times' Nigel Andrews analyzes the impact of Joseph Conrad's work (his "engine of demonism") on films like Apocalypse Now.

In the same edition of the FT, Alec Russell reviews another book by another white Zimbabwean, this time Judith Garfield Todd's Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe published by Zebra Press in South Africa (Russell notes: "... In the past few years there have been several powerful autobiographical accounts of Zimbabwe ... Many tell a poignant story of decay. Most have been largely peopled by whites, and, one suspects, were published with a British and white South African readership in mind. Through the Darkness is different. This is an account of the betrayal of the Zimbabwean nationalist dream, rather than the end of a white African dream.")

Finally, the Nigerian novelist Biyi Bandele went to check out Nollywood for the UK Observer's Film Magazine.

{image from Vienna-based photographer Jacqueline Godany's website; see Nobel Prize acceptance/monologue video with subtitles here}

Read: "Up from the Cellar" by Nicholas Spice in LRB (Spice on Jelinek on Fritzl)

Elfriede Jelinek's website, from which the selection of "The Foresaken Place" (translated by  Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger) is taken:

Austria is a small world in which the great one holds its rehearsals. In the even smaller dungeon of Amstetten, the performance takes place, daily, nightly. No performance is cancelled for any reason. Even giving birth is part of the daily routine and the performance. Actually only performances can occur here. No Iron Curtain, not even iron rods, bars are needed, because we built the concrete door cast between two steel plates, this seal is tight, it holds forever, the electronic equipment also lasts especially when the batteries are nicely replaced (it must have been cast down below, that huge plug of a door, one couldn't have hauled it downstairs as a single person), bars aren't needed where concrete doors are installed, bars could allow an outlook, which, constantly crossed out, would be more than no light at all, therefore it doesn't apply at all, not one bit: beyond a thousand bars no world. Here counts the word of the Father, who's actually already Grandfather, nothing special, Fathers and Grandfathers exist in one person, the Holy Trinity does also exist, one in three persons, here we have the Grandfather, who is all persons and executes all speaking (with the exception of the television set and the radio that were permitted down there). No bars, no iron rods exist here...