Regis Debray takes the kind of theatre at the Festival d'Avigon this year to task in Le Point:

People fight, backstab and slit each others' throats. It all happens live, and those in charge don't stop rubbing it in: The world is violent. You want wit? Well don't count on us to sweeten the bitter pill. Have a good look at today's hard times, or leave the theatre. The argument doesn't carry a lot of weight. Is there no other suffering than psychosis and perversion? Debray contre les m'as-tu-vu d'Avignon.


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Ceuta and Melilla

The BBC and local paper El Telegrama report Morocco has admitted its border guards shot dead four African migrants trying to enter the Spanish enclave of Melilla earlier this month:

Six people were killed on 6 October in a mass raid on the double razor-wired fence which separates the Spanish territory of Melilla from Morocco.

You can get the back story in this piece from Der Spiegel [in English]

And if you missed Boubacar Boris Diop's reponse to the shootings in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, you can find it here.

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Diario de Noticias reviews George Steiner's book on the [failed?] idea of a common Europe.
"A Europa é feita de cafetarias, de cafés."
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Sean Scully, Thomas Kling, Egon Schiele at the Neue

Thomas Kling's last book of poems, essays and photographs,
Auswertung der Flugdaten [ Analysing the Flight Data], is reviewed in the TLS......

"the din of Thomas Kling's now defunct smithy will continue to resonate through the echo chambers of the German language, whose creative range he has sounded and expanded like no other poet of his generation."

The book features an incredible poem, 'Inhalator', about his battle with lung cancer:

anweise atemtelegramm. flatternd./ und wie von polarfuchs heiseres gebell,/ das blauflatternde, geflatterte ventil.....//hervorgestossnes: atemmail, wie metal aim

I direct breath telegram. fluttering/ and like a polar fox's hoarse barking,/ the blue-fluttering, fluttered valve.../pushed out: breath mail, like metal aim

As I begged before, someone please translate this book.

Harold Pinter is the Nobel Prize winner for Literature; the German press isn't thrilled.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: His last plays are ever more anaemic, dumb and hollow

Die Tageszeitung: 'an insult to world literature'

"The Academy's decision to award the prize to Pinter is almost wise: It hasn't destroyed their reputation, but it has very effectively lowered people's expectations."

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Pinter has good company in the new De Young Museum in SF:

"A rusty Star Destroyer," quipped an unimpressed observer of the new $202 million museum's angular, copper-clad exterior - a feature that also has inspired epithets such as "aircraft carrier" and "S.S. de Young."
"If they plant ivy right now," mused a newspaper reader in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, will it "grow fast enough to cover the de Young before anyone notices how ugly it is?"
San Jose Mercury News

Daniel Cohn-Bendit in Die Tageszeitung:

"The EU should open immigration offices everywhere in Africa where people wanting to migrate to Europe could register. The EU should then review the applicants' qualifications on location, and support enterprises that are already working there. If people have a legal chance of getting to Europe, many of them would try to use it. In that way illegal immigration could be reduced."