Complicated Quote by Elliott Colla

“There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood…” quote by Elliott Colla — Download Open image

“There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood would be Hollywood, that neighborhood would be Manhattan, and that one's Madison, you're going to drive down Oak and take a left on Main Street.”

Elliott Colla

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Complicated Decent Familiar Main street Moving Neighborhood Reality

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There are certainly times in history where power associates itself closely with fields that we would call the humanities, like rulers surrounding themselves with…

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A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell you something. There are no Baathists, no one believes this stuff, this is stuff you read in school because it's assigned to you. Maybe someone believed it, but no one really believes it." And I thought…

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Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

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Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

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In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an…

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You always have regime-friendly poets like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, whose career basically spans the twentieth century. He's an anti-imperialist, friendly with the Communists, and somehow survives all that and is shuttling between Baghdad and Damascus depending on which way the winds are blowing with the Baathists and their competition. But he's not a regime stooge, he's independent.

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Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't…

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Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have…

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Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

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Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how…

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The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power. There's no core to what Michel Aflaq has to say that results in this. That was a key to looking at Michel…

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I think the ethics and morals of genetic engineering are very complicated. It intrigues me.

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Geometry, which should only obey Physics, when united with it sometimes commands it. If it happens that the question which we wish to examine is too complicated for all the elements to be able to enter into the analytical comparison we wish to make, we separate the more inconvenient [elements], we substitute others for them, less troublesome but also less…

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I have learned so much from my dad. Perhaps the biggest thing I've learned from my dad is how to be prepared at all times... whether it's for a big court case or a hostile media interview. My dad always says "Stick to your points, focus on what you are there to get across, and try not to get sidetracked."We…

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