It is that time of the year again - when calendars are sold at traffic lights in Amman. Two days ago I refused to buy a calendar from a man so intent on selling me one that I prepared two to three excuses to voice my rejection.

This December sun is a trick I tell you. This pleasant weather, moderately chilly around the evening and cool during the night, is a farce. The special bit about the trick is that we surrender to it and cannot protest because the Performer is not only masked, but also cunning. This leaves me quite unimpressed with us, human creatures.

The man at the traffic light did not seem to want to listen to me. I daresay he did not hear a word I said. He kept insisting that I buy one of his calendars and did not afford me enough room to explain why I do not buy calendars. I wanted to tell him, and in turn force myself to understand, that I do not understand the passage of time. I do not understand time, at all.

When I was still a little girl at school, there was this lesson where they taught us how to express time and the hours in English. It was all very British - quarter to two, half past eleven, five to ten. I could not grasp the concept no matter how diligent at studying it I was. Just say “to” if it’s before a certain hour, and “past” is it’s after it - my mother would tell me. It is possible that the operation was complicated because it was simplified so - time is not to’s and past’s.

In the exam about this lesson, the teacher tricked us by drawing digital clocks instead of the old-fashioned round-and-clear ones. That made me miss out on time even more.

The man at the traffic light started knocking on my window and pointing to the bulk of calendars he had with him, imploring me to purchase one. I thanked him time and again and motioned to him to go try his merchandise at another buyer’s window. The only use I have of the calendar hanging by the living room is reading the poetry lines printed on each day.

When you rip the pages off the calendar, you acknowledge the passage of your life. Each page is a day that you physically remove from your time on earth. The calendar printers take mercy on you, miserable person, and aid you to do it with style — they cleverly add a line of poetry to each day.

In my denial, I do not take pages out of the calendar by the living room. I find them later on lying about on some table somewhere and read their poetry, thinking that I had out-smarted almighty time. Secretly, I know this little game I play does not, cannot, see my triumph. I play it because I know of no other game that cheats both the digital clock and my naïveté.

Celebrate the approach of the new year thinking of your proximity to the end of all your years, miserable person.

He started to walk away, the man at the traffic light, finally submitting to my rejection. I bore my heart heavier with every step he took strolling to other potential customers. I realized that our calendar by the living room will be changed for a much younger one very soon and I envisioned the year, now dwindling into nothingness, thrown in the trash bin- what a sad reminder of the way we are compelled to discard our days.

I am slowly progressing in Forster’s A Passage to India, a book that I had bought some two years ago but never got the chance to explore properly. For one reason or the other, it always seemed to climb down on my reading list instead of climbing up.

Now at page 15, I think I understand why I prefer to read classical Greek dramas and epics instead of, well, anything a little younger. I enjoy the supernatural events, the Gods and Goddesses, the numerous intertwined plots and families, and the grandeur of mythology. I also appreciate the language (of the translations, naturally) immensely and there doesn’t pass a page without infusing me with linguistic inspiration.

Can a modern writer pull such fantasy off in the now and be considered anything but a hopeless sci-fi wannabe writer? Better yet, can a modern writer devise similar compelling plots and not borrow any from Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides? Do these stories engage the reader so, that he cannot escape them to creativity?

This sort of argument is really inseparable from the knowledge that, fiction or fact, these Greek stories made part of a people’s religion. Separate from their religious setting, there is neither cause nor purpose for these stories. Drama was born during festivals celebrating Dionysus, and they were born to do exactly that - celebrate the God of wine. To want to imitate these masterpieces merely for their dramatic or stylistic or even linguistic value would, in my opinion, be a feeble attempt at matching something quite unmatched - something that traveled beyond the common nature of literature to the heights of belief.

Una canzone da Franco Battiato che mi sempre arresta le emozioni; una canzone che stavo ascoltando oggi sulla strada per l’ufficio; una canzone che dedico a qualcuno che non la capisce; E ti vengo a cercare

E ti vengo a cercare
anche solo per vederti o parlare
perché ho bisogno della tua presenza
per capire meglio la mia essenza.
Questo sentimento popolare
nasce da meccaniche divine
un rapimento mistico e sensuale
mi imprigiona a te.
Dovrei cambiare l’oggetto dei miei desideri
non accontentarmi di piccole gioie quotidiane
fare come un eremita
che rinuncia a sé.
E ti vengo a cercare
con la scusa di doverti parlare
perché mi piace ciò che pensi e che dici
perché in te vedo le mie radici.
Questo secolo oramai alla fine
saturo di parassiti senza dignità
mi spinge solo ad essere migliore
con più volontà.
Emanciparmi dall’incubo delle passioni
cercare l’Uno al di sopra del Bene e del Male
essere un’immagine divina
di questa realtà.
E ti vengo a cercare
perché sto bene con te
perché ho bisogno della tua presenza.

Download E Ti Vengo a Cercare qui

It’s back by popular demand. I am uploading a second Adiga music sample (find the first Adiga music sample here)

This piece is by Omar Bazoqa.Enjoy it everyone.

Casino Royale sheds a little light on the beginnings of legendary British agent and notorious heartbreaker James Bond. The movie touches on Bond’s promotion to his 00 “double O” status and his rather bumpy-yet-interesting relationship with M. It is also most revealing of the background of 007’s emotional life.

In the series of movies covering Bond’s career, spectators are used to his introducing himself with the famous line; “Bond, James Bond.” In Casino Royale, however, spectators do not see 007 using the line until the end of the movie - when 007 has fully matured into the larger-than-life figure that they are used to in other movies telling of subsequent periods of his career.

The usage of this famous line was not the only aspect that was slightly modified in Casino Royale. In a certain scene, Bond shocks fans by declaring that he does not care if his Martini is shaken or stirred. In another scene, Bond confesses his love to Vesper Lynd - a female character introduced, doubtlessly, to explore the tender side of the naughty licensed killer. Interestingly, Vesper Lynd saves Bond’s life three times in Casino Royale, and that just might be a record number. On top of all that, one cannot help but notice that the song in the introduction of the movie did not feature any female figurines - quite unusual for a story on a charmer.

Personally, I thought the movie was great. This is a thrilling movie that I would watch over and over again. I enjoyed every second of it in varying degrees and I thought it was a spectacular treatment of the emotional and professional growth of Bond. I found that the movie gradually took me from Bond’s early rash days to his wiser, more mature ones with convincing eloquence and comfortable sequence. I did not find much to be “out of place” but I would have preferred it if the villain, Le Chiffre, was more wicked.

The one scene I found unconvincing was when Bond cracked a joke while bound to a bottomless torture chair. “Everyone’s going to know that you died while scratching my bottom” - I believe that’s what he said. I hated the laughter that followed, both from the spectators and from Bond himself, and that is one thing I would take out of the movie if I could.

On Daniel Craig’s performance, I thought it was satisfactory. I found he did an excellent job, both with his physique and his acting, and I salute the choice that placed him as Bond (Although I still feel sore about Eric Bana’s not making the cut). That aside, I failed to catch a glimpse of the Austin Martin’s gear.

For the serious, here’s an interesting bit of a review/article on a book titled The Man Who Saved
Britain by Simon Winder. Article by Michiko Kakutani, titled The Empire’s Sun Has Set, but James Bond Is Forever. Good things come from Yoda:

While Britain was coping in the 1950s and 60s with unemployment,
inflation, strikes and demoralization, and making the humbling
transition from empire to welfare state, “a solitary Englishman” — who
embodied the old-fashioned belief that a single individual could save
the day through sheer guts and expertise — was almost single-handedly
maintaining “the country’s reputation.”

While “the magic, the romance and the often squalid reality of
dominion over the world which had animated millions of emigrants,
sailors, soldiers, traders, journalists for so many generations came
to an absolute, unrecoverable, bewildering end,” Mr. Winder writes,
somewhere on the globe, in a luxury hotel, one man was secretly
“slipping a .25 Beretta automatic into his chamois-leather shoulder
holster, examining his rather cruel mouth in the bathroom mirror,
putting on his dinner jacket and going out into the night to save
their world.”

In real life James Bond would be in his 80s now, but he is one of
those literary characters like Peter Pan who never age and never
change. Just as the books and movies follow a familiar formula, so
Bond himself, as Mr. Winder writes, is at his most reassuring when
“like a hamster with his wheel, he performs the same narrow set of
functions over and over — the scenario, the seduction, the foiling of
the plot, the killing of the villains.”

For Mr. Winder, Bond, like the queen, remains a curious “fossil
remnant” of an imperial attitude that has long since vanished from the
rest of Britain.

“The queen must presumably spend some part of the day,” he writes,
“moping about how her dad had been king-emperor, had the allegiance of
a quarter of the planet and had been treated in some quarters as a
god, whereas she has to wander around the streets expressing interest
in the lives of ladies holding plastic flags with ice cream dripping
down their fronts. Bond shows no such introspection or reskilling. It
is a very odd aspect of contemporary Britain that a country which is
almost unrecognizable from the one which nurtured Fleming (aside, of
course, from the occasional survival, such as a seemingly unstoppable
urge to despoil Iraq) should still, for so much of the world, remain
the country of James Bond.”

Upon recommendation from the cinematically-informed readers of The Box, I watched the two volumes of Kill Bill this weekend. The movies were a pleasure to watch and somewhat true to life. I thought they were a real girl-power story and, of course, the dismembering and bleeding were fit.

Watching Kill Bill, I felt a most special urge to return to martial arts. I found the most pleasure in watching the Kung Fu movements of Uma Thurman during the movies and I honestly missed the old days. Other than that, I didn’t find the blood-spray trend very convincing and, while I liked the deepish dialogue, I still didn’t find that convincing either. Pulp Fiction talked to me better.

I had previously criticized action movies that feature females in leading roles because they were not rough enough and constantly strove to preserve the “pretty” image of those characters. I protested because I see it suitable that when a person gets hit, the person gets hurt, and that means pain and blood. In Kill Bill, Uma and other female actresses were stripped out of this limited view of female action figures and were portrayed as - surprise surprise! - real human beings (in a cinematic fashion, naturally).

The girl vs. girl scenes did not go away, however. There was jealousy, there was a sadistic air to female characters’ behaviour throughout the movies, and there was some floating in the air done. At this point, I am not necessarily stating that Kill Bill is similar to Charlie’s Angels, but merely drawing on the predominant themes in movies featuring female action figures.

I am not entirely sure what I expect a perfect movie to be and how precisely it would have to be for me to accept it as true to life. Maybe I’m just a difficult opinion to win over, or maybe I am too hooked up on documentaries. In any case, I wanted to thank the readers who recommended Kill Bill because vol. I and II entertained me thoroughly this weekend.