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...model in these stories, Paul Bowles, travel can often be about dissolution, a slow and irresistible unraveling. In The Elephanta Suite, a set of brilliantly evocative and propulsive novellas, he shows us how India, with its furious intensities, its gift for confrontation and its quirky mix of dusty British terms ("jocundity") and the latest American ambitions, might be made for him and his ironic pen. He also reminds us that few travelers can pick up a place with such casual vividness, see Indian script "like washing hanging on a clothesline", or hear both the innocence and threat...
...know your film festival is a hit when people nearly kill each other to get into the screening of a movie they couldn't be paid to see elsewhere. At last year's Toronto International Film Festival, that film was the British docudrama Death of a President, which imagined the assassination of George W. Bush and the tracking of his killer. Outside the theater, people begged to get in as if it were the one and only Beatles reunion. Yet when the film opened in North America a month later, it earned just $519,086. No matter, at least...
...Geldof's absence is also about pride. The Irish singer raised $100 million through Band Aid, a supergroup of British pop stars that set the mold for charity records to come, and Live Aid, which did the same for worldwide charity concerts. The money was to help alleviate the devastating Ethiopian famine of 1984-5, in which more than a million people are thought to have died. But Ethiopia, a nation of nearly 80 million people, now boasts consistent economic growth of 10%, and in that context the famine, and Geldof, are remembered with more than a tinge of humiliation...
...That doesn't take a vivid imagination, however - the reality on the ground is that Iran-backed militias and their political allies already control large parts of the country. And as this week's violence in Karbala demonstrates, those militias are fighting each other for supremacy as U.S. and British influence wanes...
...Meanwhile, the continuing American and British policy is to draw down, not increase, their military presence in southern Iraq. The British are in the midst of pulling out of the port city of Basra. The long-standing American policy has been to defer to Shi'ite religious sensibilities and keep as low a profile as possible in holy cities like Karbala and Najaf...