Saw Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, about a blind master swordsman, an action movie far better than, say, Tarantino or those tedious "Crouching Tiger..." offshoots with ridiculous flying people.
Finished Gombrowicz, Schimmel's book on the feminine in Islam, and a bunch of comics: Alan Moore's and David Lloyd's V for vendetta, Moore's and Gibbons'"The Watchmen" and Osamu Tezuka's "Adolf" series, which disturbed me by its flat, if very powerful portrayal of human evil across the board: irrational killers both Nazis and Jews, the good and the bad, tutti quanti. I just saw a note on someone's site saying Japanese kids "learn" history from these manga--a hair-raising notion. The wholly fictional and crudely rendered premise about Hitler's big nasty secret (he's got "Jewish blood") doesn't begin to give a sustainable explanation of his ideology and behavior, nor can it substitute for the mesh of complexity underlying the causes and development of WWII.
I'm almost done with Orhan Pamuk's "My name is red": it didn't grab me, though it provides just enough "exoticism" for me to want to "travel" within the book to the end. But I keep sensing a huge debt to Eco, entirely thematic and stylistic, without any deep reflection to make it original and worthwhile, in the end. There is more juice and wisdom in any short story of Andric's, for example.
Post je objavljen 10.09.2004. u 05:58 sati.
