Looks like Michael Moore has Miramax’s backing and marketing savvy for his new documentary, Fahrenreit 911, which is about the alleged relationship between the Bush and Bin Laden families. The movie will be out before the next elections. Should be interesting.
In case you haven’t heard, Baghdad blogger Salam Pax is now back online. Go check him out. Then come back and tell me what you think.
“Many of [these poor Moroccan] youngsters see the road out of poverty not in some apprenticeship, but on a map. For them, hope begins in nearby Ceuta, a Spanish outpost on the tip of North Africa that is Europe’s door, just eight miles from mainland Spain.
In a pattern alarming social workers and irking Spanish politicians, these children, who range in age from 10 to 17, are immigrating to Spain on their own, often risking their lives as they cross the Strait of Gibraltar.”
The Christian Science Monitor has an article on the tragedy of Moroccan child migrants who risk their lives to go to Spain. A must read.
Sacred Law
They say that life has waned in my
body, that my veins emptied themselves
like wine presses; I feel only the relief in
my breast after a great sigh!
–Who am I, I ask myself, to have a
child on my knees?
And I answer myself:
–One who loved, and whose love
asked, when she received the kiss, for
eternity.
Let the Earth look at me with this
child in my arms, and bless me; for, yes,
now I’m as fruitful as the palm trees
–Gabriela Mistral
LA SAGRADA LEY
Dicen que la vida ha menguado en
mi cuerpo, que mis venas se vertieron
como los lagares: yo se lo siento el
alivio del pecho despues de un gran
suspiro!
–Quien soy yo, me digo, para tener
un hijo en mis rodillas?
Y yo misma me respondo:
–Una que am, y cuyo amor pidi,
al recibir el beso, la eternidad.
Me mire la Tierra con este hijo en los
Brazos, y me bendiga, pues ya estroy
Fecunda como las palmas.
Gabriela Mistral
Unexpected (but happy) events have kept me from blogging. I hope to start posting again soon, perhaps as early as Sunday. Stick around. There’ll be lots of new stuff.
It was almost a year and a half ago that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan, a country that the Administration counted as an ally in its declared war on terror. The official version of Pearl’s death is that he was due to meet a man who may have inspired Richard Reid to become the shoe-bomber. Pearl was kidnapped at the meeting, and the man who was subsequently arrested for the crime turned out to be Omar Sheikh.
In an explosive new book (Qui a Tue Daniel Pearl?) published in France this week, Bernard-Henry Levy, the widely respected French philosopher and writer, draws portraits of Pearl and Sheikh. Both had double nationalities: Israeli-American for Daniel Pearl, and Pakistani-British for Omar Sheikh. Both had middle class childhoods. Both went to very prestigious schools. So how did they end up on opposite ends of this conflict? In addition to the human side of this conflict, Bernard-Henry Levy also followed the facts. He spent a year retracing Pearl’s itinerary in Pakistan. His findings? That Omar Sheikh worked for the ISI, Pakistan’s secret service, and that Daniel Pearl was killed because he was about to uncover links between the ISI and Al-Qaeda, links which could have included the transfer of nuclear weapons.
The book is already in best-seller lists in France. But fear not, dear anglophile reader. It will be published in the United States and Britain by Melville House books in just a few months. There’s even a blurb about it in the NY Post.
McSweeney’s has recovered the “lost DVDs” of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, deconstructed by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Fun stuff.
Link via SubIntoc.
I liked Karl Iagnemma’s story “Zilkowsky’s Theorem” in the 2002 BASS so it was a special treat to discover he has a new story in the current issue of Zoetrope-All Story: “The Phrenologist’s Dream“. And while I’m at it, I might as well mention he has his own website.
still holds strong, despite the recent crackdowns on dissidents, with people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I saw this bit on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show a couple of days ago: Governor Bush vs. President Bush.
