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August 17, 2008

About the Turkish musalsalat dubbed in Arabic

An interesting muqabala from Al Jazeera in Arabic.
Thank you O.W.

I am reposting this because the topic is close to the previous one and I have in the meantime received an interesting comment :

Saracen Says:
August 17, 2008 at 12:27 pm

They’re both so convincing I feel like a Buridan horse (ego too frail to put up with ass). But seriousness aside, this turkish drama business does smell of the figurative rodent. Each year, a screen drama of some kind seems to be causing a life drama for the arabs. And it’s incredibly hard to tell why. Consider this. A syrian series is currently on MBC. It’s aired only two hours before Nour. It features several stories, one of which involves an extra-marital pregnancy with the woman being muslim and the man christian. The bastard refuses to convert, hence leaving my creed-sister in the metaphorical sh*t. On the Arab-cultural-rage seismometer, that would give a higher reading than Nour et al. But still, it didn’t cause an uproar of any kind. The dramatic calibre of the aforementioned syrian series is also superior to the Yahya/Lamees dross, but it couldn’t attract even half the audience.

Somesing iz vierd..

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Noor… What’s your secret?

Salonaz Sami ponders

The palatial mansion of Mohamed Aboud Afandi overlooking the Bosphoros is the setting of the Sha Ughlo family in the series; Noor and Mohannad

We’d been chatting on the phone a little while, and things were going smoothly. But once she’d realised it was 9:50pm, I could hear how my mother was growing fidgety. And I knew the reason why: 10 minutes later her favourite soap opera, Noor, was due to begin. Annoying though this was, given that I was watching my own mother choose Noor over talking to me, I could barely complain given that it had been me who had introduced her to the Turkish TV serial. But in her addiction, my mother is by no means alone. Gèmès or Noor as we know it in the Arab world has become a social and behavioural phenomenon, worthy of study.

Granted, men presume we watch it for the sake of the blue- eyed-blond and Best Model of the World 2002, who plays the lead male in the series. But the truth is far from that, explained Farida Ahmed, a housewife who is also hooked to Noor. “Mohannad, the main character, has indeed glued women to their TV sets, but it is not only because he is cute,” she told Al-Ahram Weekly. “It’s mostly because he offers things many of us lack nowadays in our lives — including romance, compassion, loyalty, and a partner who is supportive to his independent wife. He has become the role model against which many women have started to compare and judge their significant others,” she added.

READ ON

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Darwish encore : The Palestinian Che Guevara ?

by Marty Peretz

I don’t mean to harp on the death of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and it would be somewhat ghoulish to do so. But this clutching at his remains by the Western press seems to reflect more a desperation by journalists to prove that the Palestinians are a poetic people than the more banal reality of the case. The FT has already reported this story thrice. The Boston Globe also, I think, three times.

The last of these dispatches ironically makes the very point I made in the first of my two previous postings. Or rather a point I quoted Darwish as making himself: A poem about his mother was not about Palestine. It was about his mother, whatever his mourner thinks or feels.

As it turned out the funeral was not the kind of mass mobilization the reporters expected. An article in today’s Los Angeles Times by Ashraf Khalil reports that the crowd was a mere 5,000, much less than would turn out for the interment of any martyred young jihadi in Jenin.

It also turns out that Darwish was a communist. “So what?” you say. But he was a noted communist, and so he was honored by one of the most brutal regimes in history with two prizes: the Lenin Prize and the Stalin Prize. And how many poets did these fathers of the revolution murder? Too numerous to count.

One mourner at the memorial observed that he was a Palestinian Che Guevara, an apt analogy.

And, by the way, according to Thursday’s FT, “hundreds of Palestinians living in Israel were also ferried in on buses.”
article here

One answer I liked :

boneill said:

How, Marty? How was it apt that some know-nothing jackass called him a Che? Back it up. Darwish always humanized the enemy. Even if he didn’t like them, and even if you don’t like his politics, the man as a good poet. Not “good” as in “could write decent verse, but “good” as in hit the painful contradictions of human experience (and with good verse).

Jack, my friend, maybe he wasn’t as brave as Akhmatov or even poor Mandelstem, sent to his horrid grave made insane by a madman’s system. But: who among us is? The comparison is impossible.

Marty, stop writing things that are stupid. Yes, a poem about his mother is just about his mother. That makes him far closer to Camus than Sarte. So why the fuck do you insist on tarnishing him? Have you read anything he has written? Ever?

Seriously, back up how he was Che. Che was a murderous, sociopathic killer, whose “poetry”, or ferocity of prose, is only admired by those who think Jim Morrison is a Deep and Meaningful artist. Darwish was not of that ilk. Your pathologies distort you. Anyone who cares for poetry or art or the complex and hideous contradictions that make us all would at least appreciate Darwish. All you can do is call him Stalin and Che.
August 15, 2008 12:50 AM

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