What to do when you haven’t finished a book but find yourself with something to say about it?
Convention dictates that one should finish a book before reviewing it (although I have my doubts about any number of published reviews), but on the other hand, the market for reviews of revised editions of books on France originally published in 1998 is bound to be small. So out with the convention, in with the thoughts.
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I came to the webcomic thing late. But living in Bucharest, I can’t easily get US newspapers. So there was a niche waiting to be filled: the three or four minutes I used to spend every morning, flipping through the Washington Post’s excellent comics pages, chuckling over Boondocks or Doonesbury.
These days that niche is filled by a dozen or so webcomics. And, truth to tell, I like ’em better than most of the comics in the dead-tree papers.
(Oh, most webcomics are just dreadful. But with a bit of effort, it’s not hard to find ones that you, personally, are going to like.)
So I’m pretty regularly clicking on Achewood, Rob and Elliott,, and various others. Which is all fine, except… one day I noticed that they were all, without exception, American. (And about half seem to be from California, but never mind that now.)
So, the bleg: good European webcomics?
— I can read French and, slowly, German. But never mind that; let’s make this a more general inquiry. Italian, Dutch, Estonian, doesn’t matter. What’s out there and good?
February in Paris, 1983. A group of student leaders are ushered into the presence of President Mitterand by huissiers. They stay slightly more than an hour, discussing Marxism-Leninism, youth, and society with the ever-inconsistent, sometimes brilliant, sometimes crooked, sometimes socialist and sometime fascist president. Years later, one of them, Jean-Claude Cambalebis remembers the three questions Mitterand advised him to deal with if he wanted to “avoid becoming Minister of Public Works”.
They were as follows: the first, he said, was Poland, or more specifically that spiritual power had defeated political power there. The second was the way Britain would never be European and would always prefer to maintain ties with its favoured trading partners in the Commonwealth. For the third, Mitterand produced an electronic listening device (un puce electronique) from his pocket and remarked that such things would “turn the organisation of work upside-down”.
23 years down-range from that meeting with the UNEF executive committee at the Elysée Palace, and ten years on from Mitterand’s death, how do those part-predictions, part-suggestions stack up?
More in the geek hole..
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It has now been a year and a half since I moved to France. I am not going to bore you with all the domestic challenges the move caused me, do not worry, but I need to mention this since I have only just begun to explore life in France. This post about France will therefore be rather impressionistic. Yet I am sure our esteemed guest poster Emmanuel, and hopefully our French readers, will chime in with corrections, elaborations and the like. I also need to mention that I live in the countryside of Brittany, which means there is some distance between me and whatever happens in Paris and the rest of France.
The first thing I noticed about France is that my day-to-day life has not changed much compared to my extended stay in Belgium. People basically talk about the same things: life is expensive, the weather is relatively mild for the time of the year, the bathroom needs painting, sports, etc. And naturally there has been some cultural talk, since I am a new kid on the block with a heavy foreign accent, mostly about culinary and linguistic differences. Every now and then the conversation turns to politics and society. Rarely so, but still.
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Last night I went to see the film Luther – which unsurprisingly enough is a biographical epic which focuses on the life and works of Martin Luther. I have always felt a strange attraction to Luther, not for his religion, but for the ‘here I am, I can do no other’ part. This post, however, has little to do with the film, except in that it is about how small changes in our ways of thinking can have big impacts.
You see all through the film I couldn’t help thinking about the recent act of ‘personation’ carried out by the Spanish radio station cadena COPE, and about just how stupid the people behind it really seem to be.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single quotation on the cover of a book is not a reliable guide to its contents.
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The German newspaper whose website is now a little better organized (but no so well organized, you understand, that I can actually provide a link to the story in question) published what ought to be an interesting tale of changing tastes in toys, “Per Modellbahn aufs Abstellgleis” or, roughly, “By Model Train onto the Siding.” There would even seem to be comparative advantage in such a story, as toy-making is one of Germany’s traditional industries. Or as defenders of the romantic image would have it, handicrafts.
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You will likely have heard by now that George Best — Northern Ireland international, star of Manchester United and, later, player for a long list of increasingly obscure clubs — has died. Best was a weak and pitiable alcoholic, and also one of the greatest footballers ever to grace a pitch. My own thoughts on the matter at T6I.
Sorry, this is not a post proclaiming a political theory of everything. It’s a note saying “‘Tis done!” I picked up Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World sooner than I thought and finished it up right quick.
Previous posts on the Baroque Cycle are here, here, here and here. The argument of the trilogy and further thoughts below the fold. Spoilers abound. Doug Muir, I’m finished, we can discuss.
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Malcolm Gladwell tells great stories. In Blink, his latest book, he relates how the Getty Museum nearly bought an amazing forgery, why Warren Harding became US president, how to tell if a married couple will divorce and why coronary care can improve if doctors have less information.
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