I like photographs involving water.
I like photographs involving reflections.
I like photographs involving the autumn light.
I like photographs involving the morning sun.
Here we have all four taken just last Thursday down in Sullivan's Cove!
I am currently enjoying Timothy Gaton Ash's excellent History of the Present. If you don't know his work, he's an academic/historian/author/journalist with a way with words. I will probably expand on my thoughts when I've finished it, but one brief comment struck me as I read it on the bus this morning.
It concerns a point early on in the siege of Sarajevo. There was a bombed-out post office with a common piece of graffiti/political comment, "This is Serbia!" Apparently someone had scrawled underneath the retort, "No, you idiot, it's a post office".
I like that. It pretty much captures the sort of inanity that drives people to war, ethnic cleansing and all of the kinds of atrocities within.
It's a post office. It collates and distributes letters. Get on with your life.
12 comments:
I like the picture, its beautiful! and now I'll have to look up this book your reading- "No you idiot, its a post office." brilliant!
Findingmywingsinlife, I read quite a bit of his work when I was at uni, and am enjoying reflecting upon his commentary of the 1990s in Europe with a decade or so under the belt.
It's difficult for me to reconcile the fact that events of the Yugoslav civil war (for example) are something like 15 years ago now.
Time flies.
THANK GOD that it has been 15 yrs! My very limited, unremarkable theory of that war is that the people had to separate & become separate nations (so very, dreadfully sad that it happened with so much violence) only to come together again, in 20-30 yrs. BEAUTIFUL photograph - look forward to more.
Have you seen "No Man's Land"? Really well done but disturbing.
Tash, I have seen that film and would recommend it to others. The thing about Garton Ash's account is that - as an expert on Central Europe who primarily writes in English - he really manages to convey the complexities at play, but doesn't ever presume to be anything but an outsider to the conflict, and that's a relief as a reader.
I like Garton Ash's work a lot. My PhD is eastern Europe-related and although he hasn't written much specific to my area, his overviews are really excellent.
I love the photo by the way.
wow!
I'd recommend a nice Maeve Binchy for your next reading old boy
Awesome picture. Well, what's the use of telling that!? You already know it. Whoever wrote it must have wrote it during the war. I salute that person who still kept his/her humanity and sanity intact during such times. All of us should develop such attitudes over everything.
Jackie, he writes very well. The best of the academic/journalists around, I feel.
He seems to know everybody too. His reflections on the Havel/Klaus dynamic in the Czech Republic is good stuff.
Candie, WEE!
Tania, I'm not sure that Maeve is much up my ally.
KL, sanity in war is a good thing.
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