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The Dissident

March 15, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

The Dissident is a movie that you should see. We watched it in the Virgin Media DIFF (Dublin International Film Festival) which was streamed to our living room. You may be able to catch it online from Prime from April 1st.

I spotted an interesting skyscape this evening.
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Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: bryan fogel, dublin international film festival, irish PEN, jamal khashoggi, movies, photos, saudi arabia, turkey, vmdiff

The Arts of War

December 17, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

How would you defeat the bias of language? I don’t mean a bias that demeans or excludes people. I mean the bias that results from the lack of comprehension. Communication of representational, figurative or abstract thoughts can be tricky, even with a common language. And harder still to convey as the overlap in the roots of language lessen. A Venetian might understand the gist of an Argentinian story but what’s clear when uttered in Japanese is almost certain to be opaque to someone who hears in Greek.

Five Golden Hour Harbour Abstractions
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Filed Under: Anchoritism Tagged With: albert einstein, brian turner, ed sheeran, imperial war museum, joan miró, michelangelo, nagorno-karabakh, turkey, war

Life Tripped Me Up

August 9, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

‘Life tripped me up’ is a line from a poem dictated in Turkish over a phone line from a prison, a series of which have held the poet since he was 21.

Participation in a protest over the government’s treatment of Kurds sent him into a cell as a young man. He confessed to crimes he had denied before torture that has left him scarred for life.

His pre-trial detention lasted for twenty-two years before his sentence to life imprisonment was confirmed. He wrote recently that he ‘can’t touch or communicate with other people or animals’.

Tern Freedom Denied Others
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Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: ahmet altan, booker prize, colum mccann, Covid-19, elif shafak, ilhan çomak, lia mills, nurcan baysal, parent circle families forum, PEN international, photo, the guardian, turkey

Authoritarian Ignobility

July 16, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Trending Authoritarianism

You can’t read I Will Never See The World Again without being affected by it. I challenge you to read what Ahmet Altan has written especially if you worry that you have become desensitised by the descending spirals of ever worsening news. Perhaps you are inured, worrying that you have a heart of stone. He writes with such elegance and equanimity that I am certain your heart will flutter several times.

Even those of us who are empathy-challenged will be troubled by many aspects of this book.

Three classic reads on my desk at the moment.
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Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: ahmet altan, america, booklink, Covid-19, ireland, nurcan baysal, PEN international, pre-crime, turkey

Ignobility Index

June 16, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

We heard the siren call of the seals this afternoon. Pod, rookery or harem, there were upwards of a dozen of the pinnipeds basking in the diffuse light on rocks exposed by a very low tide.

It was befitting of Bloom’s Day to see the seals in Sandycove where James Joyce spent six nights in 1904. ‘A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round’ was his description of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Could this have been inspired by the Sandycove ancestors of these seals?

Sandycove Seals
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Filed Under: Anchoritism Tagged With: başak ertür, bloom's day, booklink, china, climate change performance index, corruption perception index, gapminder, george monbiot, hans rosling, james joyce, johns hopkins, judith butler, photos, pre-crime, the guardian, turkey, ungrievable

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