1. Orpheus, shambling & drunk on shadows, sees sunlight & emerges into what he thinks is the world; into what with a blinking look around he decides with only a shade of uncertainty is not merely widening in the passage itself, a kind of rough natural vestibule, but must surely count as the outside. He starts to turn & honestly he supposes it does occur to him before he’s completed the movement that he’s still roofed by stone, that the fresh air really starts about three metres on. & still fractions of a second before he’s caught Eurydice’s eye, still, he would have to admit, in time to stop & walk a few steps on, he decides two things at almost the same instant. The first is that This is ambiguous, not quite tunnel nor quite outside, & that’s not fair; the second, half-predicated on the first, nervously so, is Oh I’m sure it’ll be fine. 
2. Orpheus, at the last, is so afraid of the light that he needs the moral support of a smile to enter it, needs it more than he needs Eurydice back. 
3. Orpheus can’t remember the injunction. He tells himself he can’t, anyway. He tells himself he’s turning to ask Eurydice what it was he was or wasn’t supposed to do. It’s a complicated kind of cowardice with which he looks at her. 
4. Orpheus has never forgiven. Never. He plans all the long way up. He slows as he approaches the threshold, listening to her ghost feet. He stops. Still just in shadow. He hisses, spins around, stares in hate & triumph at Eurydice’s shocked & receding face. 

Stand down: literature has defeated the Thought Police. Belgium’s supreme court has defeated the mischief-making of the whining PC brigade. Tintin is not banned. Huzzah!

The badness of the bad faith involved in the commentariat’s discussion of this issue, the relentlessness of their categoric elisions, the unpleasantness of their crowing over the victory, should come as no surprise. This was never, at root, about banning. Yes, Bienvenue Mbutu Mondondo was applying to the court to have Tintin in the Congo declared unacceptable under the Belgian race relations law. However, he had made clear for years that he would be satisfied if, as in Britain, the book was published with a visible warning, a reminder of the context in which it was written (maybe even of the toxic ideology enshrined within). What Mondondo wanted was an official recognition that this text was a spitting in his face. That it came down to what was always clearly a nuclear option was due to the steadfast refusal of the publishers to countenance this - and thereby take responsibility for what they publish. The Belgian establishment went to cultural war, & it did so not for free speech, but for their right not to apologise for racist slander.

Keep reading

Gilad Schalit is showing signs of malnutrition. What have his captors done to him? Such shocking revelations must mean fresh scrutiny of those who have held him. 

How could it not? What kind of power, after all, would deliberately starve even the youngest captives, according to chillingly cynical calorifico-political calculation, as a matter of publicly stated policy? 

Butter. Because natives won’t exterminate themselves.

Delicious jam:

Gaddafi himself has on occasion cut a rather comical figure, with his eccentric dress sense and insistence on greeting dignatories in a desert tent…

…the eccentric colonel, where some wonder if he may now make his last stand. There he would hold court in a huge Bedouin tent…

…eccentric tendencies. He dressed flamboyantly, insisted on sleeping in a Bedouin tent…

…the eccentric despot… In the center of the complex, surrounded by lush vegetation, stood Gadhafi’s Bedouin tent…

Gaddafi himself, when he wasn’t the dramatic figure of iconic evil, was a murderous eccentric who pitched his tent in the gardens of the Elysée…

Shit:

A letter from an MI6 official to Mr Koussa stated “No 10 are keen that the Prime Minister meet the Leader in the tent. I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is that the journalists would love it.”