{"id":97329,"date":"2016-04-25T09:32:59","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T13:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=97329"},"modified":"2016-04-25T10:15:53","modified_gmt":"2016-04-25T14:15:53","slug":"timbuktus-massive-book-heist-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/25\/timbuktus-massive-book-heist-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Timbuktu\u2019s Massive Book Heist, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_97331\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/timbuktu_ng_ancient-manuscripts.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-97331\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-97331\" class=\"wp-image-97331\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/timbuktu_ng_ancient-manuscripts.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/timbuktu_ng_ancient-manuscripts.jpg 5616w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/timbuktu_ng_ancient-manuscripts-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/timbuktu_ng_ancient-manuscripts-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/timbuktu_ng_ancient-manuscripts-1024x683.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-97331\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Abdel Kader Haidara in Timbuktu, 2009. Photo: Brent Stirton\/National Geographic<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Today in censored statues: in Italy, the fashionable thing to do with one\u2019s nude statues is not to display them but to conceal them with some plywood or maybe a heavy drop-cloth or whatever else you\u2019ve got lying around. The <em>Capitoline Venus<\/em>, which resides in the hall of the Capitoline Museums, in Rome, was boxed up last month to preserve the delicate sensibilities of the visiting Iranian president, but really this sort of thing happens all the time: \u201cTrue, some discussions were had. According to one journalist, questions were raised about the conspicuous testicles of Marcus Aurelius\u2019s horse in the equestrian statue which also graces the hall \u2026 <a href=\"http:\/\/bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com\/2016\/04\/the-strange-case-of-venus-in-box.html\" target=\"_blank\">This kind of artistic censorship is remarkably common in Italy, to the point of being frequently unreported<\/a>. As journalist Giovanna Vitale has pointed out, for instance, it had been only five months since a nude by Jeff Koons in a Florentine palace included in the itinerary of sheik Mohammed Bin Zayed al Nahyan was concealed \u2026 And\u2014in case you think it\u2019s only heads of state of the Muslim faith who are reserved this peculiar treatment\u2014it was eight months since posters of a Tamara de Lempicka exhibition in Turin &#8230; were covered to save the Pope from certain emotional trauma.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>A few months ago, I used this space to hawk Saul Bellow\u2019s ten-thousand-dollar\u00a0desk, which was not, at the time, a hot seller. But things have changed. That desk is gone. As Bellow\u2019s son Daniel explained to <em>Atlas Obscura<\/em>: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/saul-bellows-son-explains-how-guerilla-marketing-sold-his-fathers-unsellable-desk?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=atlas-page\" target=\"_blank\">All of a sudden, everyone from famous journalists to doctors from the Mayo Clinic contacted him about purchasing his father\u2019s desk<\/a> \u2026 In the end, though, Bellow\u2019s desk was sold to his son\u2019s\u00a0niece, who matched the top bid at the auction, and kept the desk in the family \u2026 The desk will be put in his niece\u2019s new home in Hudson, New York. As for the money from the auction, Daniel says he is going to use it to build a kiln chimney in his new pottery studio.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Faced with an al-Qaida invasion, librarians in Timbuktu oversaw a massive smuggling operation in which some 300,000 rare books and manuscripts were secreted away to safety: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/transcript\/transcript.php?storyId=475420855\" target=\"_blank\">The first thing we\u2019re going to do is get them out of these big libraries. We\u2019re going to take trunks<\/a>. We\u2019re going to pack them into trunks at night when the rebels are asleep, and then we\u2019re going to move them in the dead of night by mule cart to these various houses\u2014safe houses scattered around the city. And hopefully they\u2019ll be safe for the duration of this occupation \u2026 They\u2019re in about a dozen climate-controlled storage rooms in Bamako, the capital of Mali.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>In which Meghan O\u2019Gieblyn decides to give Updike a chance, takes <em>Couples <\/em>off the shelf, and finds \u2026 many things she expected and a few she didn\u2019t: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/paradise-lost-finally-reading-john-updike\/\" target=\"_blank\">There was plenty in the book that lived up to Updike\u2019s contemporary reputation: women who think things no woman would think (\u2018She had wanted to bear Ken a child, to brew his excellence in her warmth\u2019)<\/a> \u2026 There are many passages in which Updike\u2019s prodigious gifts as a prose artist are given over to the effects of gravity on women\u2019s bodies. Nobody can write the female body in decay quite like Updike. So clinical and unrelenting is his gaze, he manages to call attention to signs of aging that even I\u2014someone in possession of a female body\u2014had never considered. \u2018Age had touched only the softened line of her jaw and her hands,\u2019 he writes of Piet\u2019s wife, Angela, \u2018their stringy backs and reddened fingertips\u2019 \u2026 What intrigued me most about <em>Couples<\/em>, though, was the sense of doom that undercuts the orgy.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Jonas Mekas was the first film critic for the<em>\u00a0Village Voice<\/em>, and a new collection of his critical writing reveals \u201can artistic time capsule of New York at a moment of crucial energy\u201d: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/richard-brody\/jonas-mekas-champion-of-the-poetic-cinema\" target=\"_blank\">There\u2019s a live-wire spontaneity to Mekas\u2019s writing, an excitement sparked by his sense of beauty, by his sheer pleasure in cinematic imagination, and it\u2019s connected to a soulful sense of inwardness and empathy<\/a> \u2026 What energizes his discussions and exhortations is the impulse behind the films, rather than the films themselves\u2014the lives and dreams of the artists, the harsh demands placed on filmmakers by the effort to create homemade, self-financed, independent films, made by oneself and one\u2019s friends. These are films that repudiate openly the conventions of the commercial cinema, the norms and limits on subject matter and representation, while the filmmakers submit to a horrific range of deprivations and afflictions for the sake of their art. In effect, Mekas offers, both in and as film criticism, extraordinary and enduring sketches of downtown lives.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today in censored statues: in Italy, the fashionable thing to do with one\u2019s nude statues is not to display them but to conceal them with some plywood or maybe a heavy drop-cloth or whatever else you\u2019ve got lying around. The Capitoline Venus, which resides in the hall of the Capitoline Museums, in Rome, was boxed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[2968,616,478,79,21423,545,615,22056,8669,21566,1194,13786,22055],"class_list":["post-97329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-censorship","tag-couples","tag-criticism","tag-film","tag-heists","tag-italy","tag-john-updike","tag-jonas-mekas","tag-librarians","tag-mali","tag-saul-bellow","tag-statues","tag-timbuktu"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Timbuktu\u2019s Massive Book Heist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This and more in today\u2019s roundup.\" 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