Saturday 25 June 2011

"And then there are French cameramen..."/"...but the dead are the mightiest, they can rend bits of heaven..."



Two pieces from toady's Observer. The first follows on from my last post about photographers covering wars. It's an extract from Janine di Giovanni's autobiography of her life as a war correspondent. Her book Madness Visible is on my longlist of things to read. I can't say I'm that keen for the film of it, as it's been by Julia Robert's production company and I suffered through about twenty minutes of Eat, Pray, Love on my last intercontinental flight.

The second is an article about a piece of historical detective work I'd also like to read more about. The historian Miguel Caballero PĂ©rez claims that he has solved the mystery of Federico Garcia Lorca's death in the Spanish Civil War by looking into Spanish police and military archives. I'll be keen to see if the  archaeology backs him up. Here's a link to a poem of his, Abandoned Church (Ballad of the Great War), which I think has themes that dovetail with di Giovanni's article.

Now, could someone do the same kind of mystery solving for Walter Benjamin's death?

No comments:

Post a Comment