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Difficult to move with the screens. Of course the story was now available in animated form. What hope secondhand paper? Sales would be declining for the foreseeable future; shipping in bulk to the Philippines, South Korea & Africa.
The searchers in some corners needed actual human presence and voice, offered them by men like Tamil Joseph, who recent days had been doing a power of work at the Haig. Out on the sheltered walkway benches, or else concrete stubs on the Voids.
Chinese usually were in greatest need, though Joe reported Indians & Malays too. A lady in the neighbourhood had recently thrown away her walking-stick. Another pair overcome kidney-stones and asthma.
Up in Ahmadabad, Gujarat last month, there had been great numbers moved by the power of the Lord, Joe reported.
Joseph’s was an evangelical church with some sort of reach. Hundreds of thousands in open fields, it sounded like, without the Hindutva bothering.
Down in the basement at the library The Art of Cutting on the shelf opposite wouldn’t be of the destructive, contemporary kind. Made you wonder how young A. down in Melbourne was doing, picked up once with her father who didn’t have a car from a youth psychiatric facility.
Here there was little evidence, the young possibly coping better with the family holding more firmly and something of community not completely crushed.
Continuing slowly meanwhile with Baudrillard down in the basement on comfortable couches. The French Ambassador had gifted the Republic 50m of shelves a few years back, the hand grenades contained within harmlessly passing over the heads of the local mandarins.
Wonderful flashes of the French lightning, naturally highly relevant for the polis here.
In terms of collective drama, we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of those towers (9/11) was inseparable from the horror of living in them—the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel...
Were they cutting more than the strictly controlled media was reporting, especially with the curb on substances?
It (the complacency of the American position) comes from the fact that the Other, like Evil, is unimaginable. It all comes from the impossibility of conceiving of the Other—friend or enemy—in its radical otherness, in its irreconcilable foreignness. A refusal rooted in the total identification with oneself around moral values and technical power. That is the America that takes itself for America and which, bereft of otherness, eyes itself with the wildest compassion.
Had anyone put that better? Baudrillard, Debord, Virilio, Genet…
Was the CCTV picking up the regular foreigner leafing those volumes day after day? Perhaps the focus was on the Islamists. At that stage the goatee & moustache had not yet progressed.
The librarians seemed oblivious, just as most of them would have been of those authors they were managing.
Sangfroid. Cut the muttering. Steady on.
Down in Oz there was no such collection gathered like that in one compact lot.
Singapore 2011-24
Hypotheses on Terror, p. 63 Ibid.
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