A Dance to the Music of Time

This is the discovery I have made for my pains for watching a series (the first Staffel anyway) in which they make the same actor play a character both when he's 15 and 25! maybe it is a subversive comment on the passage of time...

Don't talk to me about Matisse

talk to me instead

of dinner parties

of monsters with champagne breath

and reclining on the sofa

how names and learned and forgotten

Germany will tear us apart, again

I watched the delectable Sam Riley play Ian Curtis in Control- and brushed up on my Brit Punk. They started off as Warsaw and then renamed themselves after the prostitution section of concentration camps, it appears. The film ties in nicely with the German film Requiem which I've watched recently with equally interesting dance scenes and where the young hero/ine goes into fits. In Control Ian Curtis's doctor was also played by an actor with a German accent, and then he goes and falls in love with a Belgian girl- played by an actress again with a German accent- a German citizen of Romanian origin. Alexandra Maria Lara (Plătăreanu- the surname that dares not speak its name) also happens to be Sam Riley's girl friend and they live in Berlin, if you please.

Ah, this is what I so much love Europe for. Do take a seat dear, just mind you leave your name outside.

On another note, it was so touching (dare I say refreshing?) to actually see a man break (and a pop-star at that) into pieces because he cannot handle his relationships- rather than leave the usual wife- girlfriend- wife- mistress trail.

Inter Milan as Aumerle (of Richard II fame)

Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks, Saracens (IV.1)

this must no doubt have been going on in the mind of the lawyer who filed a suit against Inter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/12/wfootball112.xml

It is not for nothing that Turks are the most symbol obssessed Volk and have been talking about yet another 'symbol' for the last few months.

Cairo Reading

I have been trying to finish my Cairo reading and have at last gotten somewhere, although not quite the end. I finished reading The Yacoubian Building today by Alaa Al Aswany. The style was so much like Mahfouz, I even thought Aswany must be his pen name. I had actually started reading Midaq Alley to see whether there was a particular thread in Egyptian literature that I could follow--- and lo and behold, I had chosen the very two books that seemed to be part of a trilogy.

Aswany's more risqué, of course, written as it is in the new millenium, however the themes of honest girl sells her body for money, the young man's hopes are thwarted, the greedy merchant who considers getting a second wife and who gets into politics gets his comeuppance, political 'stands', the cunning crippled and the unrepentant sexual deviant... And for Mahfouz's World War II, there is Aswany's even sexier terrorism. Whereas Mahfouz's novel takes place around Halili, Aswany's takes place downtown on Talat Harb.

However, one more novel wants to get into this discussion here, and that is Shafak's Flea Palace. Yacoubian Building and Flea Palace both hark back to La Belle Epoque, levantine cosmopolitanism, whatever you may want to call it. And they do this also through the fact that both apartments' original owners are Armenian. Exiled Armenians and their apartments in ruin has become an Eastern Mediterrenean topos of lost multiculturality. I think there's a paper in there somewhere.

Eastern Promises- II

Today, having made my way through the blizzard, and seeing many interesting sights on the way, like the opened iron gate of a Greek church that is always closed up, and the path that looked so enticing but...
I was on my way to discover Kurdish sufis, however, when I entered the apartment I was met with smiles and one particular one I couldn't quite place and which bugged me during the whole conversation. Like the smile of the vanishing cat in Alice in Wonderland (thank you Zizek), the lamella, the undead, the excess that bugs you until you have attached a body unto it.

Forty days
After forty days of having to see the faces you have to see
shaking the hands you have to shake

Forty days,
in a man-forgotten land
surrounded by man-forgotten tombs
man-forgotten tombstones on which
are inscribed the lives of the undead
in a man-forgotten language
as you go looking for
errors committed
in a man-forgotten alphabet

and yet how that smile
opens a thousand gates
pulls you to a thousand shades
of eastern promises
kept
and unkempt
till you put a name to it
in that man-gotten, man-forgotten
alef-be.

The Conversation That Did Not Take Place at the Cecil Hotel

Her heart skipped a beat when he
told her this one story about the man she loved.

***
Many, many moons ago
on a beautiful winter evening
as wintry as it could be in Alexandria
we had stopped to take
the usual ablutions
the usual salutations

entering the white washed mosque
there were children waiting
holding hands
holding shoes
and when we had taken enough photographs
taken in as much as we could
I stepped out alone

to be hailed
by his friend who took me to one side
and offered me coffee
as we sat on
rickety chairs and placed our cups
on a rickety table
he told me how he knew him,
how everyone knew him
how two men stranded on a desert island knew not each other
but knew him

thus chid
I went back to the bus
back to those known constellations
back to the hotel with the pyramid view.

Islamic Law: Everyone's Talking About It

After the 'Friday sermon' delivered by the staunchly secular opposition party leader in Turkey on Wednesday on the correct way to wear Islamic dress, quoting from the Koran and speaking of "Big Sins" and "Smaller Sins" (I think he was trying to say that not wearing a headscarf was a smaller sin that should easily be committed if one wanted to go to university) with the know-how of an Islamic televangelist, today the Archbishop of Canterbury says that implementation of Islamic law is unavoidable in Britain. I quietly refer him to Nadeem Aslam's apocalyptic "Maps for Lost Lovers" if he wants a depiction of what that could lead to. Britain has been forewarned.

Here the archbishop:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080207/tuk-sharia-law-unavoidable-archbishop-6323e80_1.html

Here Nadeem, the oracle:
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2004-02/aslam.htm

Joseph's Inmate's Dream in Saqqara Tomb

"12.36": And two youths entered the prison with him. One of them said: I saw myself pressing wine. And the other said: I saw myself carrying bread on my head, of which birds ate. Inform us of its interpretation; surely we see you to be of the doers of good.

Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörder

Returning from Old Cairo where the Coptic community still live, we were accosted by a group of taxi drivers who all wanted to take us to our next destination- The Citadel. The brouhaha was caused because the first one we stopped did not speak English and hence revealed our origins- we were looking quite Egyptian a minute ago. A rather complex and intriguing bargaining happened between the drivers and we were led to a rather dingy looking car- that was it, we were going to reclaim our freedom, and so on we walked, with three taxis driving behind us in our walking pace. We walked, we crossed the streets- and yes, ended up taking a taxi that was involved in the very first argument. There was no escaping the net. We could've tried a bit harder, but we had to make it to the bus that was to take us to the airport quite fast.

This made me think of the various networks of the city and reminded me of Fritz Lang's Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörder, where the networks of beggars and burglars join the police to search for a child killer, as all these groups have men covering certain parts of the city. The Cairene incident made me think that one should add the Taxidriverbund to the list.