Douze Lunes

No regrets for outcast of Vivendi (IHT) ~ Que devient J2M? Il vit à New-York et il a créé une petite unité d'investissement, appellée "Messiers Partners" où il est passé de la direction de 380 000 employés à un seul. Messier sees himself largely as a victim of outside forces: market rumors, nationalistic French politicians and a coterie of powerful business leaders who turned on him. "I didn't pay enough attention to them," Messier said. "When I was in a weak position, they took advantage of me." Still, Messier said, he is not dwelling on the past. "I'm not looking to who betrayed me," he said. "I'm looking forward. I have a great future in the U.S. and Europe. I want to build a new story."

Michel Houellebecq relaxé des poursuites pour ses propos contre l'islam (Yahoo Actualités)

In Sam Shepard, echoes of a distant father (IHT) ~ Bel article sur Sam Shepard, écrivain, acteur et surtout auteur de théatre américain. Ses livres de "short stories" et de poésies sont de petites merveilles de littérature de l'errance et de l'Amérique profonde. Il est interviewé ici à l'occasion de la sortie d'un nouveau recueil de "short stories": "Great Dream of Heaven" . J'ai une grande admiration pour Sam Shepard, depuis son rôle de Chuck Yeager dans "l'Etoffe des Héros" et depuis qu'il a co-signé le scénario d'un de mes films culte: "Paris Texas" de Wim Wenders. He is not, he said, one for psychological exploration. His interest is more generic: "Hopefully, the greater view has to do with the land, history, time and the fabric of America." Although he is not often regarded as a political playwright, in his work there is a concern for power plays between people, what he refers to as ...

History man (Telegraph) ~ Interview with Simon Schama. Schama ascribes this perfectionism to a powerful sense of his own inadequacy, which I guessed at when reading his account of John Stuart Mill in the latest volume of A History of Britain. Like Schama, Mill had a father who pushed his gifted son "mercilessly" and Schama describes him as "cowed by the burden of his assigned mission to Know Everything that Mattered". "Oh yes, I feel inadequate," says Schama. "But feelings of inadequacy are the sine qua non of good work. Every writer I respect is haunted by such feelings."

Debating Human Happiness ~ Steven Pinker & Martin Seligman debate in Slate on human nature and happiness. ( second part , third part , fourth part ).

L'inclassable Clint Eastwood (L'Express) Au risque de se répéter, mais là semble vraiment être la clef du personnage, la carrière d'Eastwood, tel un miroir à sa vie, creuse son sillon sans jamais craindre le faux pas. Personne ne le guide. Il apparaît, juché sur ses désirs et ses obsessions, comme un artiste qui avance avec, derrière lui, ceux qui veulent bien le suivre - voyez Josey Wales, l'un de ses rôles préférés, parfaitement raccord avec l'homme. Il joue le solitaire en quête de rêve, il est l'enfant baladé à la recherche d'une famille. L'homme qui filme ses pulsions et la complexité humaine, loin d'un noir et blanc manichéen. Il n'est pas chaleureux avec l'étranger mais disponible et ouvert.

Don't blame the west ~ Clive James (Guardian) [...] let us allow, for the moment, that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible construction on its pervasiveness. Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or, at any rate, they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues. The consensus will die hard in Australia, just as it is dying hard here in Britain. On Monday morning, the Independent carried an editorial he...

Sarah Vowell interview (Identity Theory) ~ Sarah Vowel is the author of the excellent "Take the Cannoli". I do feel incredibly reverent about the big old-fashioned things like the idea of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And all of the great inventiveness of this country. But I know it came at this huge cost. How many of the original inhabitants were murdered or enslaved? How many people were left behind and squeezed out and downtrodden by the Darwinian process that built the bridges and laid down the railroad and all that. My parents didn't go to college. My grandmother was dirt poor, picking cotton to feed her children. I have lived the kind of nice middle-class urban lifestyle that I have because of a lot of their sacrifices. I celebrate that and I appreciate them. I come from all these people that had it hard. All those Cherokee that were kicked off their land or Swedish immigrants that plowed their fields. And eventually here I am. Thanks to some good parents a...

Weaker Al Qaeda Shifts To Smaller-Scale Attacks (Washington Post) ~ "Recent suicide bombing attacks and plots against Westerners show that al Qaeda loyalists are heeding their weakened leadership's call to initiate a new terror campaign using rudimentary, smaller-scale operations aimed at creating economic hardship, according to U.S., Western and Arab intelligence officials and experts."

In the NYT today a bunch of interesting pieces: - The governor race in Arizona. ~ Charges about indulgence to polygamy among Mormons followers in northern Arizona flare against the poll's favorites. - Officials See Signs of a Revived Al Qaeda. ~ The attack in Bali is, maybe, the expected one. - America's For-Profit Secret Army. ~ They have a name: mercenaries. They call themselves the new business of war: "private military contractors" are thriving. And the Pentagon already can't do without them. Still, the records and conducts of these companies are far from clean. "Motivated as much by profits as politics, these companies — about 35 all told in the United States — need the government's permission to be in business. A few are somewhat familiar names, like Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Company that operates for the government in Cuba and Central Asia. Others have more cryptic names, like DynCorp; Vinnell, a subsidiary of...

Close your eyes remplace Sax & Sunshine... Thanks Alex!

Seroxat: The real story (part one) , ( part two ) (Observer) ~ "Seroxat is set to overtake Prozac as the world's favourite antidepressant. With 100m prescriptions in more than 100 countries, it is aggressively marketed as the addiction-free answer to our anxieties. But thousands of patients are now saying their dependence on the dream drug has all but destroyed their lives."

Bombs Kill Almost 200 in Bali Tourist Nightspot BALI, Indonesia (Reuters) - Bombs ripped through a packed nightspot on Indonesia's traditionally tranquil tourist island of Bali overnight, killing at least 182 people, many of them foreigners. The Saturday night blasts, which the United States denounced as a "despicable act of terror," followed persistent reports that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network was trying to establish a foothold in the world's most populous Muslim nation. Police said the dead included nationals from Australia, Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, but declined to speculate on who might be responsible. It was one of the world's most devastating attacks against tourists in one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.

5 Little Oryxes and the Big Bad Lioness of Kenya (NYT) ~ This lioness has found an odd way to fame: nurture what is considered by lions as food. She is at her fifth antelope, separated from the antelope's mother and starving to death under the lioness care! But the other day the afectionate lioness seems to have a craving for a little snack, she ate her fifth baby antelope!

Quelques infos du jour. Comme d'habitude le monde est quelque chose entre effrayant et désespérant. Ainsi au moins sept morts dans un attentat près d'Helsinki (Finlande) , pourquoi la Finlande, le pays des mille lacs, du Père Noël et des téléphones portables? Et aussi, le tireur embusqué des USA a fait une huitième victime à une station service de Virginie, avec un bléssé (un gamin qui allait à l'école) c'est neuf personnes qui ont été tirés comme des lapins dans cette banlieue de Washington D.C.. Percée des islamistes aux élections pakistanaises , Paris confirme la thèse de l'attentat contre le Limburg et un membre présumé d'Al Qaida arrété en Belgique ... J'en passe! Mais ouvrir la page "A la une" de Yahoo! Actualité un samedi matin vous donne envie d'aller vous recoucher!

John Scalzi on why writing is important and why would-be authors shouldn't restrain to write. A response to Joseph Epstein .

The New Yorker reviews the last Beck . On BBC: Suede and Supergrass .

England's dreaming (Telegraph) ~ Peter Ackroyd's last work: "Albion", after the biography of London, the biography of England?: He traces English qualities across the ages: discretion; embarrassment (sex is hardly mentioned in the book); sweetness; a love of pattern, rather than full-blooded form; a certain dreaminess combined with its opposite, stoicism and grit; a constant imaginative return to the demands and challenges of a brutal sea and ice-encrusted moor; a distrust of inflatedness and an ever-hungry appetite for the actual and the pragmatic, for truth that can be felt on the skin; a belief in the governing importance of character (but also in its opposite: the notion somehow that Englishness resides in the landscape not its inhabitants); a constant fascination with, and absorption of, the foreign (Ackroyd maintains that translation is the most characteristic English art); a repeated search for the poetry in the particular; a distrust of waffle.

Palin's Travels ~ Michael Palin, un ancien membre des Monty Python's, et grand acteur comique, est aussi un grand voyageur. Il a déjà produit plusieurs reportages de ses voyages, où il se met en scène, pour la télévision, sous forme de séries de plusieurs épisodes. Des livres ont été tirés de ces reportages. Il a ainsi parcouru le monde en 80 jours, puis du Pôle Nord au Pôle Sud le long du 30ème degré de longitude, enfin autour du Pacifique. Mais ça ne suffisait pas à cet infatigable voyageur qui vient d'achever une exploration du Sahara. Chaleureux, plein d'humour, intelligent, extrêmement british, Michael Palin est un personnage attachant. Son site est très beau. On y trouve le texte de ses trois premiers livres et une somme importante de documentation et de photos. Superbe! [via Plep ]

L'égoïsme français (Le Monde) [...] le fond de la nouvelle logique nationale est livré par le ministre, que l'on peut seulement féliciter pour sa franchise : "Nous sommes encore dans une Europe où la politique budgétaire et la politique tout court d'un Etat restent sous son contrôle." Francis Mer oublie tout simplement l'euro, monnaie commune qui dépend des disciplines communes qu'ont décidé de suivre les pays qui l'ont adoptée. L'euro et d'ailleurs l'Europe tout entière ne tiennent que par ces règles de droit que les membres acceptent. Il n'y a pas d'autre ciment européen que le droit. Sans cette autodiscipline, tout s'écroule. Francis Mer a tort : le budget n'est pas la propriété des seuls Etats membres. Sans l'euro, le déficit budgétaire français vaudrait à la France une attaque spéculative en règle contre le franc, et la Banque de France aurait dû élever les taux d'intérêt pour le défendre, plongeant l'écon...