Visit 2 to the Feira do Livro 2006, last Friday 9 June.Wandered about, looking in all directions. Suddenly my eyes are accosted by the BACK of a book-hut (no folks, nothing to do with pizza...unless, maybe, the link is that their junk-food tastes as bad as this junk-book reads...well I'm trying, arent' I?) and my sharpened Pavlovian response to this man & his oeuvre kicks in hard. I shoot the pic, before I run there like a crazed Ninja warrior on acid and breathe white flames and scream maniacal laughter until the hut burns to ashes and I am carried away by 19 private segurança boys, while the crowd's applause is for MY action, not the segurança boys'.
Well, actually, I just exercised my newly-acquired Portuguese socially-acceptable-in-most-company habit of spitting voluminously on the calçada of Parque Eddie 7th and walked on.Later, over on that side, and probably very close to the said hut, I found a sandwich board in the middle of the path publicising the work you see on the left.
Loving it immediately without so much as the briefest of browses, I shot this one. Then went in search of the book. I'd never heard of it, but felt sure that it had to be the fruit of Brit wit. Sure enough, on finding the book and browsing, I learned that Mr Toby Clements is - in his day job - the literary critic of the Daily Telegraph., well-known for its campaigning, subversive dissident, radical fundamentalist stances against ....well, anything that might be slightly to the left of 1 or even 2-nation Tory-Party England.
And what's this on the cover? A reproduction of the famous Gioconda as Dope-Head? What's going on? I do NOT care anymore, it's a spoof on Dan-the-Bland Brown, and that is good enough for me. Did I buy it? No, people no. If I have to read it, it will be in its original language.
But has anyone out there read "The Stravinci Code"? Or any of the 1000s of spin-off books? Or seen any of the zillions of TV docs in which Catholic priests march through the streets of Western Capitals banging their heads with their copies of the "The Strav. Code" until blood flows? Or seen the Hollywood movie version, directed by Mel Gibson & starring Topol & Barbra Streisand? I want, no, NEED to know...
7 comments:
That book is really pretensious. Not because of the theory that is developed in the book, but the way it is exposed...
Now, your shots: very, very good. That perspective, a photojournalistic view. Very accurate!
Thanks!
And the sardinhas? I can't believe that none of you took a camera to Alfama! Did you see Tocá Rufar leading the Marchas?
And what about the TB.org????
if you go there, you'll see that I've a BlogRoll already.
http://technicx.blogspot.com/
How i did it? I don't know if there is an easier way to do that, I just tried to find it, but it wasn't suceed. So, in the Admin mode, I changed the Template code and insert it. How to do it? I can give you and example code... then, you just have to paste it in the template code...
:)
I've devoloped long ago a serius prejudice against any book I see abundantly in tube trains. The names Margarida Rebelo Pinto, Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown trigger a rash immediatly.
Ana, meaning that you haven't read it, I take it. I have always been that way too, even more so re. films. it started early and has just intensified. I temporarily put MY code aside to read this over Xmas 2004. You know all those clichés like, "Didn't want it to end!!" & "Couldn't put it down till I'd finished it!!". Well, this read was an unprecedented experience for me, because while I was getting irritable by page 3, instead of throwing it in the garbage as I would normally have done, I persisted till the end. Unprecedented because it bored & annoyed me so much that I could hardly wait to put it down when I'd finished it! I honestly couldn't wait for it to end. Prejudice, yes I admit. But much more than that, I honestly wasn't expecting it to be so badly written, so flawed, with a plot so underwhelming, plus a hugely dodgy "bending" of historical fact that he refuses to acknowledge; for me a real charlatan, fraudster & the product of the kind of society that I'm just not endeared to. I mean, I had never read any book (this was a US paperback edition)in which the first and most glowing author's acknowledgement is to his publisher's MARKETING DEPT!!! That said it all for me. Sell it to a gullible, force-fed, herd-like, conditioned mass of 'consumers' with a growing desire to escape into conspiracy theories &...Big Bang, sales to rival the Bible and a pseudo-cult. So what? This is century XXI, when 'Nothing Is Real'(cit.J. Lennon) & The New Way is no more than a fad, built to last just long enough until it is superceded by the Next Big Idea arrives in the hypermarket. 2000 years of a religion that, whatever & whoever inspired its oringins, has a great deal STILL to answer for. A self-convinced,smooth-talking author of trash novels is CANNOT be the person to ask any of those questions. Not today, not ever.
Ana, you must know the play of E. Ionesco, 'Rhinoceros'? Now, THAT is a valid commentary on society! I had to study it at univ. as part of my French degree. It became one of my eternal 'bibles'. OK, já chega. Strawberry Fields Forever.
PS, I think I like using my blog this way, but e-mail would also be good....
Seeing lots of people reading Ionesco in the tube, that would be refreshing. I stay away from most best sellers, I just don't trust them. I gave The DaVinci Code a trial run: I offered it to my sister (yes, I made Dan Brown a tiny bit richer, I confess). She absolutely loved it, so I knew I would hate it. I dislike almost everything about those books: the covers, the hype. It's like they have a huge neon sign spelling 'manure' over them. I sometimes pick them up in a shop, open them randomly and bingo, there's the stupid metaphor, the ludicrous description, and my personal pet hate, the unbelievebly tacky sex scene.
Ana, I had to tell you this before getting started on this day's postings (15/6).
Before escaping through the porta aberta beckoning me into sleep at 1 a.m., I suddenly had a sharp image in my mind. It was that tube carriage, full of passengers deeply concentrated on their copy of "Rhinoceros". Beautiful, Ana! Don't know what Ionesco would have made of it, but I immediately saw it as a scene of a great théâtre de l'absurde drama, which to me so much of everyday real life is. With a juicy touch of irony: the mass of humanity turned on to reading about the ever-present danger & ease with which the masses can be turned on to behaving like a de-individualised, de-humanised herd, malleable in the hands of the powerful, whether for political or (these days)commercial ends. Yesterday's "UGLY" is today's "BEAUTIFUL", "We Are The Champions!", "Kill the Jews/Gypsies/Moslems/Christians/Gays/Reds/Blacks!!!". Except your vision holds out the possibility of reversing all this dumbing down, that the same mass may just be capable of being directed upwards, all the way until they all reach the Highest Ground. Thanks for that, love it! Dream on!
Post a Comment