Two nights left...

I have a bunch of tabs open that I'd like to get rid of. Here are a few random links!


+ Phillip Pullman's essential reading list. I'm mostly linking this for myself. I'd really like to pick up some of these books. Not only do I really want to read some of these for myself, I also just like to see what moves other people.

+ Orwell Diaries. George Orwell's diaries posted exactly seventy years after he wrote them. There are ongoing discussions in the comments whether he is observant or uninspired, with regards to his more mundane entries, but I like the feel of the every day.

+Anomaly. Hilarious, awful comic. It borders on the legitimately offensive, but (in my opinion) makes up for it in funny. As a point of reference, here is the very first strip:




+ YesStyle.com. Caters to Asian women, but has -- or so I'm told -- very nice petite clothing. Not quite my thing, but linked just in case someone mentions clothing woes and I can't remember the actual site name. (I'm also really entertained by the fact that, in a few days, I will be in a place where pants means underwear! Hilarious!)

+ 'I fell in love with a female assassin.' They met on a train and fell in love. Then Jason P Howe discovered that his girlfriend Marylin was leading a secret double life – as an assassin for right-wing death squads in Colombia's brutal civil war. With their story set to become a major Hollywood film, he recalls an extraordinary, doomed romance.

She then hit me with a confession that would both thrill and confuse me. She explained that in the months that I had been away in Iraq her role within the AUC had changed; she had joined the urban militia and become an assassin. Her job was now to eliminate informers and traitors. So far, she told me, she had killed at least 10 people in the area. I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, Marylin looked at me through the smoke as I exhaled, waiting to see how I would respond to what she had just told me.

Strangely, her confession did not have the impact one would expect; I did not recoil in horror. The months I had spent in Colombia and in Iraq surrounded by violence had altered my perspective. I don't think that I had become immune to death or suffering but I had certainly become less easily shocked. The difference between victim and victor, rebel and refugee, often felt like only a matter of perspective.

The most striking thing about this article for me was not the relationship, but the depiction of the emotional and physical space in which they tried to cultivate it. Both of them were damaged in some way, and everything, from the way they got together to Howe's retelling of the experience, is given meaning and shape through this particular article. I haven't heard anything about the movie (I don't think?), but it'll be interesting to see how they shape this narrative. There're double mirrors of influence, from the way Howe frames his initial impressions as a Quentin Tarantino movie and how he tries to relate to her through the lens of a video interview to how Hollywood will, in turn, interpret it. Interesting stuff.