Miller’s first “fictional-diary novel” depicts his life in Paris as a failed writer — or upcoming one who hasn’t yet find the right path to fame — who struggles to get his daily food and encounters a colorful variety of personalities.

The main character is Miller himself, going from one Parisian hotel to another, squatting where there is place and, if he can grab a free meal in the process, so much the better. His second home (or rather shelter) consists of prostitutes’ rooms, a place that disgusts him but also allow him to fall in love, for a few seconds, a few minutes maybe.

Miller’s life is a series of small jobs and redundancy, time that he spends in the various cafes of Paris, making acquaintances with people he loathes (alcoholics, ideologists) but to whom he can still connect his shredded life.

The book is at least as shocking as it is poetic. Every part of the woman is lust for, tasted, tried and described, almost reviewed in the most gruesome manner but that end up being genuine prose. No wonder why his books were banned from the US conservative readership for a good thirty years.

Being the first author’s book, you’d expect it to be a first try. And in a way, it is. You can see Miller’s improvement in writing during the first 100 pages. You can see the confusion at first, the jumble of ideas. It’s almost as if it was written at once, without being reviewed — an impossibility when you know one of his jobs was proof-reading. Only after 100-130 pages, descriptions become deep, very long and clear as pristine water.

By the end of the book, you don’t know if you have to pity the writer for his poor life or praise him for his intelligent views on the society and the people who surround him. You don’t know if humanity is some kind of “lice” (as Miller often describes it) or some manure that lets exotic, eccentric vital flowers to eventually blossom. It depends on your personality, I guess.

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller, published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 318 pages, £9.99.

The Edge of Heaven (directed by Fatih Akin) could be easily summed up: “A man looking for a woman”. But the many characters who act as links between them and who also have their reasons to be there – for the mere sake of getting on with their lives – invalidate this simplistic summary.

The film tells the story of Nejat Aksu (David Davrak) who teaches German literature at the University of Hamburg. Every once in a while, he goes to Bremen to visit his retired father Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) who spends his life between his bets for horse racing and the services of a Turkish prostitute called Yeter (Nursel Köse).

Yeter has a daughter, Ayten, but hasn’t seen her for many years. When Ali decides to live with Yeter to end his solitude, Nejat grows more irritated with his father. This distance will only increase as Yeter accidentally dies from Ali’s hands; Nejat decides to go back to Istanbul to find Yeter’s daughter.

Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay), Yeter’s daughter, is a young Turkish activist chased by the police for her links with a terrorist group. She decides to go to Germany and meets Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Staub (Patrycia Ziolkowska) who decides to help the refugee to get a political asylum. As Ayten decides to find her long-lost mother with Lotte’s help, a police control on a motorway will force Ayten to go back to Istanbul; Lotte decides to go there to support her friend.

After Lotte’s death, Susanne Staub (Hanna Schygulla), Charlotte’s mother, decides to go to the place where her daughter died and help Ayten to gain her liberty. She meets Nejat, to whom Lotte rented a room while helping Ayten to get out of prison, and they soon find themselves thinking about the past, their mistakes and their lives.

This intriguing triptych between pairs of actors (Nejat and Yeter, Lotte and Ayten, Nejat and Ayten) takes the spectator by the hand into the characters’ lives. This construction is enforced by the division of the movie in three parts: “Yeter’s Death”, “Lotte’s Death” and “From the Other Side”. The death of Lotte and Yeter being announced at the beginning of each part doesn’t necessarily remove the shock of their death but rather introduce it as a natural, almost obvious ending of anyone’s life.

The characters cross their countries’ borders because they are forced to do so, or because they feel their lives have to head there. The two countries become a giant painting on which people’s impulses are personified by indistinct shapes that cross, connect and move away from each other, drawn by the colours of youth, regrets, the present and the past. Only when the spectator steps back from this painting does he understand the real implications of the characters’ decisions.

Auf Der Anderen Seite – literally meaning “From the Other Side” – is firstly the direct image of the other side of the border – the German’s or the Turkish’s, depending on the motivations of each character. But it is also about the other side of the appearances, that an apparently good man can be also disrespectful that a woman of pleasure has more than one reason to do what she does (and that mother and daughter, although in every way different, are only so because of the circumstances of their lives.

The Edge of Heaven won the Best Screenplay Award and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as well as a plethora of other awards in the Cinemanila International Film Festival or at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival.

The movie is accompanied by an enchanting music, with languorous tones that reflect, maybe, the lights of an ancient splendid Turkey, old pomp that every national song still tries to deliver. It is a music that smells of missed meetings, of chassé-croisé between people who have yet to meet each other, who should’ve met and who will never meet.

Picture courtesy of Essay Recordings.

Whenever there’s a big piece of news, all the newspapers have their front page about it. However, it is easier for someone to go on the internet and to look up on any news site that exists — say, the BBC.

So far, newspapers can still cope with the delay they experience due to the printing and distribution process because a piece of news doesn’t need constant update to keep its relevance (knowing live the count of the AV vote doesn’t bring that much to a reader, does it?).

On the contrary, when people are willing to have news minute by minute, a newspaper simply isn’t quick enough.
I remember following the situation in Japan very closely: I was aware about anything there in a matter of minutes (thanks to the BBC again, as well as several other news sources). I also bought the papers everyday.

Going through their articles, I read with stupefaction that there was yet another explosion at Fukushima. I gathered my thoughts and tried to remember what I had heard live. I found out that this explosion wasn’t something new but just one of the firsts that happened, at least 24 hours before I saw it on the page.
I decided not to buy any papers for the following days, preferring to find the news on the internet instead.

The problem there was not that I came across the same information twice — only at a different time — but that the Japanese earthquake had taken absolutely every single page in the papers. Quid of Gaddafi for example? (What a relief this earthquake must have been for him…)

The thing was that for someone who was eagerly following the news live, buying a paper was totally useless; there was no incentive at all to buy them as information were out-of-date and there was nothing more than that in them.

I must precise that this problem really only appears when a major event happens, otherwise, there is a big enough variety in news to talk about several important things that will inform the reader. But the problem seemed so obvious that is stroke me more than any time before.

The other question could be: do we need instant news? Can we not wait for the morning (or the evening for the papers hitting the newsstands at that time) to know what’s happening? Do we really need to know each minute of the situation at Fukushima or in Afghanistan or God knows where else?

I am not particularly convinced we need that spontaneity so bad — what does it really bring in the end?
Well, I might be a bit too “old school” to like waiting and I’m afraid most of my friends aren’t like that.

The way newspapers can overcome this situation could be to give readers more detailed, in-depth argumentation rather than pure row data. Newspapers are a formidable way to explain things: why not trying to specialize in actually bringing news to an “upper” level where specialists give advice and causes and consequences are analised twice?
Even if it means having to publish the story a day later…

But hey, wait a minute: if a story takes too much time to be analyzed and is only published after a few days… Isn’t it a king of magazine? Should newspapers be transformed into magazines then?

Oh, I’m only realising this question is very complex indeed…

Image courtesy of ToonPool.com.

At first, only a handful of contaminated are enclosed in the asylum. Among them, an ophthalmologist; his wife; the first blind man; an old man with a black patch on his eye; and a young woman with dark glasses. This group will try to keep their humanity while the living conditions worsens and the number of internees increases.

Soon, problems between the army — preventing the detainees from escaping — and the members of the different wards of the hospital arise and what made them human disappears as they become beasts fighting for a bread crust or a drop of dirty water.

Only one woman is spared from the mysterious disease: the doctor’s wife. She will be the eyes that describe the hideous environment the people are forced to live in. She will also see how inmates interact between each other, soon forgetting their names, only remembering the pitch of the voice to recognize who’s who.
To me, this woman is only there because Saramago needed her to see what was happening. He didn’t want to write as if he was external to the situation, only describing the events. He wanted someone who could see for him so that he could write about it. She is the author’s body in his story.

The interactions between the blind people put under light, at least at first, the virtue of communism. Indeed, food is distributed by the army without much concern whether there will be enough for everybody. The distribution is therefore done regardless of the age, sex or wealth of the detainees. To stick to human principles and kindness is the key to survive in harsh conditions.

Saramago was a communist till his death, last year, and he wrote about it in many of his books. Along with detailed descriptions of the unnamed characters’ lives (they are always referred as “the old man with the black eyepatch“, “the girl with dark glasses“), the story is there to describe a system that could take place in such occasions; possibly communism. Certainly anarchy.

There is a strong emphasis on the way people lose their humanity in degrading conditions (the blind people start defecating on the floor because the toilets are flooded with urine and defections after a few days). This wrong humanity, given by a capitalist society, is replaced, in a sense, by a fairer one, communism.

The style of writing is incredible: everything is mixed, there is very little visual help for the reader (you have to stay focused to understand what’s going on). For example, speeches and discussions are introduced only by a coma and a capital letter (p.120):

“That’s how things are out there, the old man the with black eyepatch concluded in his account, and I don’t know everything, I can only speak of what I was able to see with my own eyes, here he broke off, paused and corrected himself, Not with my eyes because I only had one, now not even that, well, I still have it but it’s no use to me, I’ve never asked you why you didn’t have a glass eye instead of wearing that patch, And why should I have wanted to, tell me that, asked the old man with the black eyepatch (…)”.

The absence of punctuations underlines the uselessness of many of the sighted people’s codes, invented out of complexity but not necessarily out of necessity: to tell a blind man the introduction of a speech or the end of a sentence, only the tone of the voice is important.
Additionally, the absence of names is there to increase the uniformity of the people: everybody becomes like “Comrades” with their voice for unique difference.

Another interesting feature of Blindness is the constant reminder of the importance of the words. Here is a passage that nicely sums it up (p.266):

“Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say, The doctor’s wife has nerves of steel, and yet the doctor’s wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels (…)”.

Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, is definitely an author worth reading, for his unique style and his deep and intelligent work on our society.

Blindness, by José Saramago, published by Vintage Classics, 309 pages, £7.99.

Image courtesy of GoodReads.com

Here is mine:

A Buddhist monk, dressed in a white yukata and protected from the sizzling sun by a large crescent-shaped bamboo hat, his joined hands holding a wooden bowl, was waiting for offerings from passers-by. He had omitted a detail though: he was standing in Nara’s railway station. The crowd, busy as bees, didn’t even look at him.

“That,” though I with a joyful sensation, “is Japan.”

Image courtesy of ETF Trends.

A little of background first: the story is set during the 11th century, a period of great troubles for England, as it had to resist the invasion of the Danes, also commonly known as the Vikings.
Even though the plot follows historical events — notably the struggle for succession between princes Canute and Harald Lavard — the main focus is on Thorfinn, a young Viking who has vowed to kill his father’s murderer, a man of great intelligence called Askeladd and commander of a small Viking band.
This simple story of vengeance would be somehow boring if Thorfinn and Askeladd didn’t have a peculiar relationship, the former being the slave/henchman of the latter.

The rarity of a manga telling Viking stories makes it worth having a look at but the real grip comes from the psychology of the characters.
Thorfinn is only a young boy when his father gets killed by Askeladd. In order to keep an eye on the murderer, Thorfinn decides to follow him and waits the moment when, one day, he’ll be strong enough to get revenge in a formal duel — an obligation forced by Thorfinn’s noble blood and proud character.
The two men’s lives will go through a great deal of dangers and fights that will eventually bring them in an interesting relationships.

The problematic of vengeance is quite easy and straightforward: one living for revenge can spend, or rather waste, his whole life on this and, if revenge there is, what’s left, except the emptiness of a life lived for a finite goal that came to an end? And the longer it takes for the revenge, the less likely a happy ending.

Thorfinn and Askeladd, however, live and fight together, which shapes their relationship differently. Although the teenager only thinks about revenge, the dangers of the battles will force the two to feel secure only with one another.
Askeladd knows that he cannot be betrayed by the proud Thorfinn and will ask him to carry out actions he couldn’t do (like sneaking into an enemy camp).
The young man, on the contrary, is willing to develop his fighting skills through Askeladd’s mission to attain the mastery needed to kill his father’s murderer.
The almost natural evolution of their relationship is brought to a climax when Thorfinn realises that Askeladd acts as a father to him.

The plot, full of political twists and betrayals, military strategy and historical events is very addicting. The author uses narrative ellipsis that gives just the right speed to the story: it doesn’t stay stuck on boring moments, always jumps from a battle to a diplomatic treaty to a more personal approach and story of the characters.

To finish, the drawings are very realistic — a technique used in the previous work of Yukimura in his first manga Planetes.
Some joky expressions lighten the heavy atmosphere of the manga — battles and bloody killings are very often depicted in it — but the objects, furniture and other ancient architectures are carefully drawn and burst with details.

The use of large brush strokes to “write” the sounds (example here) increases the violence of the fights and the care with witch facial expressions like anger (example) or pain are drawn makes it a very mature manga.

At chapter 71, the story is left when a new adult Thorfinn has decided to become a true warrior without using violence.

Image courtesy of Fuxkrazyman.

Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is a dreamer (some would say a slacker) who spends his days in his flat in search of inspiration. In the meantime, he is left by his girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) — tired to pay the bills –, told off by his publisher who wants a manuscript and harassed by his landlord (“Where is my rent?!“).
In a way, he’s better drinking pints in a bar rather than thinking too much about his life…
A habit that’ll lead Eddie to meet one of his exes’ brother who decides to give him an experimental drug.
Eddie accepts to try it… and finds out that the drug really works. There starts the problems, from dependance to violent money loaners as well as a bunch of people who are ready to kill for a pill.

The plot is full of twists that aren’t that obvious and entertains quite well till the last scene of the movie. No doubt the spectator will benefit from his ticket.
As well as showing a smiley Cooper able to predict the variations of the financial market because of his IQ, the movie also shows the problems drugs can lead to: they are addictive. The magic pill, if not taken, gives headaches that eventually kill the junky. Better think twice before being Einstein.
It also shows how far we could go when we’re addicted: killing, even drinking a victim’s blood in order to survive. Nasty behavior…

However, to me, there’s something more problematic there.
We live in a society that wishes to have everything at any time and without waiting. Even knowledge.
Who has never felt the wish to know something without putting the effort into it? We’d prefer hit the book on our head to acquire what it contains than reading and learning it. Even the Internet goes towards that idea, we can’t even wait a second for a web page to open — Google search: 10million results in 0.09sec.
So the fact that a drug is created to boost the brain isn’t so crazy.

Fortunately, the movie shows another interesting point. There’s a moment in it when Cooper is talking to De Niro that shows how much experience is needed.
Very high intelligence — artificially given or not — doesn’t replace experience; give a 10-year old an encyclopedia, that won’t teach him how it feels when burnt by a flame.

At least, we still need older and wiser people to show us some tricks in life.

Photo courtesy of Green Tea Movie.
Image courtesy of Bill Watterson.

UPDATE: 29/10/11
PLEASE, NO NOT READ THIS AS FACTS; THEY ARE NOW ALL WRONG AND OUTDATED AND THIS POST IS NO LONGER RELEVANT TO THE ACTUAL SITUATION. Sorry about the waste of time… (but I mean, check the posted date…)

According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake that stroke Japan on Friday 11 March was the biggest the country had ever encountered since it’s started to measure quakes.

Compared with Haiti’s, which had a power of 7.3 magnitude, the Japanese tremor was slightly bigger, but it is the locations of their epicenters that made such differences between the two countries.

Haiti’s Léogane city was right under the quake and was consequently wiped out; in Japan, the epicenter was approximately 80 miles away from the Miyagi prefecture. Sendai, the closest city from the earthquake’s epicenter, took massive damages as a 10m tsunami broke on in the country northern shores.

The biggest difference between Japan and Haiti comes from the number of dead. The Land of the Rising Sun has, so far, 687 dead and around 650 disappeared — even though several other reports point out that ten of thousands are still missing.
On the other hand, Haiti had more than 230,000 dead. So many, in fact, that epidemic spread and killed numerous other Haitians, adding weight on its death scale.

Another difference comes from the cost of the earthquakes’ damages.
Thanks to the Japanese measures to counter earthquakes, the material losses were not as great as they would’ve been had the earthquake stroke Tokyo, situated 190 miles away from Sendai. Even if it’s still too early to know the exact cost of the damages, JP Morgan has estimated they were between £1bn and £2bn.
The Haiti earthquake was many times more expansive than that, reaching £7bn. Knowing that the economy is much weaker than in Japan, the ratio simply is immense.

As a note, the 1995 Kobe earthquake cost Japan around $100bn (£72bn), according to the eFinanicalNews.

The most alarming factor with the Japanese earthquake comes from its nuclear plant situated at Fukushima.
The reactor Fukushima 1 is threatening to cause another Three Mile Island catastrophe, the American nuclear station which saw one of its core partially melting, releasing radioactive gases.
So far, the situation seems to be under control as the Japanese authority said there was no unintentional leaks of radioactive materials — some gases were left out of the reactor to avoid its explosion.

If you want to read more about what’s happened in Fukushima, there is an article that explains the situation.

For constant news about the situation, the BBC website is broadcasting information on the Internet.

Image courtesy of Connect.In.com

The man. His Lordship Vincent Jordy, Bishop of the diocese of Strasbourg, a major town of Alsace, a French region situated next to the German border.
He’s a bit far away from his hometown, Perpignan, a thirty-minute drive from Spain. But he’s been living many years in Alsace now; he moved there aged only ten, and stayed around pretty much since then, with the exception of his five years theological studies in Rome.

His job: to look after the message of Jesus and to spread it around the world.
It wasn’t always clear for him that he would do that. In fact, most of his teen hood was spent with a firm atheist belief, aroused by a lack of religious support, as well as some institutional changes, as it was “the time when the Church, in a move to rejuvenate its image, had decided to implement guitars and drums in its choir”; slightly too noisy for the young Vincent Jordy.
After this disappointment, and having graduated from his law and political science studies, he was ready to become a lawyer.

Only this wasn’t the wish of God.

“I felt that everything I had decided to follow was collapsing: all my certitudes, everything I thought I could count on suddenly disappeared,” recalls Bishop Jordy. This small event, the call of the Holy Spirit “that only lasted for two minutes”, remained so strong that it shaped his life forever: he decided to start religious studies and entered the French Seminary in Rome.
Five years later, in June 1992, he is ordained priest.

Before continuing his pious path, Vincent Jordy had to test another aspect of his faith, as to push it further. He wanted to feel what it was to live as a recluse, in the silence of a monastery. “This experience taught me a lot regarding the understanding of my being, as well as the connection I had with God through solitude and silence.”
Even though he then understood it was his duty to share the message of God – thus leaving his reclusion –, he still remembers his experience as the only way to truly explore his mind. In our world, where everything is measured and quantified, “there still lies a virgin and infinite territory to discover: our hearts.”

After twenty years at the service of God, Vincent Jordy endorsed the role of bishop. A tricky one: “How to reconcile Christian faith with knowledge we acquired throughout science?” asks the bishop.
Indeed, in our society, the Church has an incredibly difficult task to justify its presence and its usefulness.
Since Nietzsche’s theory on the death of gods, around a century ago, the Western society sincerely believes that nothing is worth believing in; science and money are the only viable answer to all of our pains.

These views on the reason of life are now wrongly displayed to the public by the powerful influence of the media.
“It is often the media that vulgarize those two values [faith and science] and shows them as opposed, whereas they actually aren’t antagonistic,” explains Bishop Jordy.
One of the Church’s aims is to shift these beliefs back to their original place, where an educated man already knows that faith and science are two different things that do not invalidate each other.

“But what about the interpretation of the sacred texts?” I ask him. After all, an educated man can very well find any explanation that suits him in the Bible, or in any other religious books, and then drag others into extremists views. The answer sparkles by its simplicity and the meaning it gives to a broader context: “The Church’s mission is to remind the Christians Jesus’s ideal: to live in communion with God, with the other human beings, and with yourself.”
This interpretation should never be forgotten or biased to suits other aims than the one Jesus taught humanity.

When it comes to the explanation of the utility of faith in our society, Bishop Jordy says that: “Faith prevents Promethean reason [the belief that humans can surpass gods through technical progress]; reason prevents fanatic faith.”
Thus, the two notions are each other’s guardians, balancing their drawbacks, enhancing their qualities.

It seems that education remains the only key to develop a better future and, as our government recently decided that universities are less important than bankers’ bonuses, it is a shame that it has become even more difficult to attain a wiser life.

Photo courtesy of Eglise catholique en Alsace.