Tuesday, slip over Tuesday, or reflection Tuesday, or Tuesday passover. No we don’t seem to have come up with anything yet for Tuesday. I am just aware that tomorrow is Write on Wednesday and I’m going to be somewhere in London on a Team outing, eating, and perhaps even Salsa dancing. Me? I don’t even know what it is supposed to look like or move like, but then after having spent two days up and down to Wales I am not really that bothered one way or the other.
Last night I stayed in a hotel somewhere on the edge of Wales, with little internet access (I took a long walk while my blog was downloading, so that when I came back I could write a response to the comments left on my Sunday post) and near to no mobile telephone connection, but one of the tv channels was working and I watched a programme on Islam and the different interpretations across the Arab world and Iran and I was a bit gobsmacked; I pondered how terribly influential these Books are (Books with a capital B, the Koran and the Bible) and how they seem to have this mesmerising and devastaging effect on people’s lives. In particular of course I felt hugely uncomfortable with the effect of Islam on women in these countries and also how women themselves seem to embrace what they see as the comfort of islam, the use of chador and veil, the hiding of faces and limbs, as if they are too extraordinary for others to watch without these others subsequently descending into some kind of sin and lust. I just cannot quite put it all together, I have never been able to and it has always preoccupied me. It is something that I am working on in my own writing.
But, come Write on Wednesday, tomorrow, I may not be able to contribute much as I am out somewhere in London. Nevertheless, I will catch up with you some time after, either Thursday night or Friday. I promise.
In the meantime, I am writing notes in my notebooks and thinking.
O yes, just for a change, let’s call this music/film Tuesday just for this week, and if you have the chance, do listen to Mark Kermode’s review of Mama Mia on iTube (the film), it is the most hilarious review I have listened to (on my iPod, in the car, on the way to Wales, and then, again, on the way back simply because I could not get enough of it) ever. It left me laughing out loud as I was driving along and I was in Birmingham and past it before I even noticed. Kermode definitely is one of the best film reviewers I have come across, ever. And yes, I also loved the Abba songs when they first came out…. they are, as he says, indestructible.
51stories 
I started reading the novels of Assia Djebar several years ago and was astounded by her representation of women in Islam (she is an Algerian writer who writes in French and is available in translation). Islamic women, for instance, have no right to say ‘I’ and the younger ones may only speak in whispers. I recommend Women of Algiers in their apartment and Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (I think that’s how it translates, the original is called L’amour, la fantasie).
I think she’s an amazing writer.
By: litlove on July 16, 2008
at 8:59 am
litlove: Many thanks for this. I have not read any of these, or in fact any of her novels. In fact I have added Women of Algiers in their Apartment to my next shopping list…. thank you
By: seachanges on July 17, 2008
at 6:10 pm