The French corner - Jonathan Littell

He won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix de l'Académie Française, the two most important litterary prizes in France. He did not come to get them and stayed playing with his children in his house in Barcelona. He does not like the media, that is probably why the media like him. He wrote in French although he's american. For Les Bienveillantes, he meticulously investigated the mecanisms of the concentration camps, and the extermination of jewish and disabled people. He managed to write a novel and not a report. The French like him because he seems to despise them.

You can (finally!) listen to him on http://www.bloghandicap.fr/

"The Germans came up with a lot of ideas to get rid of the jews. Many of those ideas were not executable. Murder appeared to be the only solution"

Playing international poker

So let's get together and play poker. Poker, just a game? Have you ever imagined that it could just be another of those silly western ideas? I never thought about that in fact... My father taught me how to play when I was 8 because he was tired of doing some repetitively boring babysittings. Once my mother came back from her night class, and saw my depressed genitor and my unlucky self getting fleeced by my sister Ariane (4 year old at the time). We were just playing matches anyway...

So for some poker is just a funny, exciting, addictive game, for others it is complex, useless, boring, and... completely illogical. For me, it is just about getting to know your friends better...

Yesterday there was 1 half American/half Palestinian, 1 Vietnamese, 2 Indians, 1 South African, 1 Bahrain(ERR)ese(?) and 2 French players. Most of them were complete beginners, not always getting the point of the game. Everyone complained of the Vietnamese who was constantly raising too high and leading the rest of the world to bankrupcy. However, the American said that it was the rule of poker, to what my French self replied that it was just an expression of the expansion of capitalism across the world. My fellow citizen tried to beg money to the Vietnamese. She eventually stole some admitting at this point of the game she had no pride. There was a desperate South African attempt to get a straight... She was elected the queen of the night when she finally got one. And finally, the girl from Bahrain won her first and last turn with a pair of nine: she was so happy I thought her smile was gonna make the table blow.

Friendle

That Internet junky.

The Westminster staff will be happy to read that my interest for the media has significantly increased last weekend. M&R visiting from Pariggi. Spent the weekend in the most crowded bars and websites of the world. YouTube became our best friend and turned us into complete doofus: we typed "Sacha Baron Cohen", "Silent library" and "Les dix commandements" after listening to that insane - but talented - French singer, Anais, on radioblogclub. A quick glance at Gad Elmaleh's character, "John-Fashion-London". Obviously, one of the first thing we did was to watch the deleted scenes of Eurotrip. Dimwits. Curved backs. We sat there on my bed, laughing too loud and eating sweets.

In America

S. said today: "yes I knew the democrats were gonna pass. I didn't expect it was going to be that close though... I think the Americans want to tell the rest of the world that they regret 2004. They want to say 'sorry, we take it back, we made a mistake!'".

For our TV class today we had to imagine we were going to interview Donald Rumsfeld and write the cue for our dreamed report. Rumsfeld was just an unemployed man, feeling regrets for the way he dealt with the war in Iraq.

Environmentalism

From globalisation to moderation...

I feel there is something new about our planet. The way we look at it, the way we eventually start to worry about it. It's like an endless love story, almost forced, between mankind and nature, with a lot of ups and downs. Finally the man looks at his girl again and realises how mean he's been to her.

After Stern, after Nairobi, I feel this concern does not emerge from the governments, but from the citizens. I like the idea that the people shows the way forward (see previous post): it has always been like that, and will always be... making its way through various types of manipulation. Unexpected.

Praise the people, but work with the governments. Recycling, bying bio, wearing Veja shoes is expensive. Completely illogical, so... completely modifiable. An era of rarity, and the only way to adapt is moderation... I know some won't like that concept. It's like telling a little boy "you've had enough candies now". And the little boy cries.

It's like a story.

Punish horror with horror

Couldn't help watching Sadam with emotion today. Not much objectivity in this blog I'm afraid, not much sensibility either.

Being forced to watch that judge humiliating Sadam in front of the rest of the world, that judge asking him to stand up so that he could fall better after hearing he was going to die? Proud like a man, small like a man. Whose superiority was he really serving? Reviewing the different steps of the trials, one can just realise that no justice was made as it was planned in the beginning: it is not the people from Iraq who judged the Hussein. The people is glorious, the man alone is evil.

I could imagine Sadam Husein's last steps to the scaffold filmed by CNN. The images will cost a fortune and the Americans will be the first to see them. They will watch their bellybomb.

Read (again): Les Misérables.

Dream

20 minutes ago I was at an interview to be a sport journalist. I remember thinking "I'm not qualified at all for this job and I know nothing about sport but maybe I can get it... they like me I think" That was the most worrying bit!