I'm weighing whether to spend several hundred dollars with a hard drive recovery service to retrieve some crucial data from my failed hard drive. With this in mind (and after receiving a quote for $400), here are this month's nuggets for the Toli Scrapbook. This time we have wistful zingers on the theme of war and a sense of ineffable waste - a sense which is certainly applicable to my current mood...
"And as I was going, I was just thinking how the war have spoiled my town Dukana, uselessed many people, killed many others, killed my mama and my wife, Agnes, my beautiful young wife with J.J.C and now it have made me like porson wey get leprosy because I have no town again.
And I was thinking how I was prouding before to go to soza and call myself Sozaboy. But now if anybody say anything about war or even fight, I will just run and run and run and run and run. Believe me yours sincerely"
Ken Saro-Wiwa - Sozaboy
A novel in Rotten English. 1985
We were the leopards, the lions. Those who will take our place will be jackals, hyenas. And all of us - leopards, lions, jackals and sheep - we'll go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.
Delivered with gravitas by Burt Lancaster as Prince Salina in Visonti's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (1963)
Aureliano doesn't understand "how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand". He is like Gary Cooper or Humphrey Bogart, unmoved by abstractions but provoked by cruelty, by the sight of victimization. This is the way that American isolation, another long solitude, ends in film after film.
Article comments
1 - Eric Berlin
Koranteng - Please use paragraph breaks in your posts -- thanks.