A Treasure of Timbuktu

The legendary city of Timbuktu – a center for trade and learning for centuries and is the home of the oldest library south of the Sahara. Now, African and Saudi donors are joined in a contest to reframe the cultural heritage of a continent:

No one in Timbuktu has forgotten how the Moroccans conquered the city, plundered the libraries and dragged off the best scholars to Fes. Ahmed Baba, the philosopher, in chains! This is a source of embarrassment in Morocco today but the stolen manuscripts have yet to be returned to Timbuktu.

‘We were also colonised by the Arabs,’ says Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute. ‘It was an intellectual, cultural colonisation and it is still at work today in the notion that everything good about Islam came from the Arabs. It is like during the French colonial era when school children were taught only French writers.’ Soon, for the first time, texts in Arabic by native Mali authors will be appearing in textbooks, he says.

Read more about the manuscripts, architecture, and cultural legacy of Timbuktu at Sign and Sight.

A Heroic Corpse

On April 30, 1943, the body of Glyndwr Michael, disguised as Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, was dropped into the sea off Huelva on the Spanish coast. In his briefcase were letters, meticulously faked by British intelligence officers to give the impression that the Allies intended to attack Greece, and not Sicily.

So begins the remarkable story of “Operation Mincemeat” – an amazingly complicated and surprisingly successful operation by MI5. After finding a suitable”volunteer” from the among the vagrants’ corpses in a London morgue, operatives created a detailed back story and a convincing set of personal effects and letters.  A submarine deposited “Major Martin” a mile from shore with his attache case.  Many twists and turns followed, even after the Germans took the bait.  Here’s a thorough-seeming Wikipedia page on the operation.

The operation is detailed in a new book by Ben Macintyre which will be released in the U.S. in May 2010.  The Times [UK] has been publishing lengthy and fascinating excerpts [part I; part II].

This segment from a documentary film about photographer Sally Mann focuses on her use of 19th Century technology to capture haunting images of Civil War battlefields.  Appropriately spooky.

But Mann’s comments about photographic technique inspire greater respect for Matthew Brady and other period practitioners… they struggled mightily to avoid the “imperfections” Mann regard as stylish postmodern flourishes.

* Welcome new readers from Instapundit and elsewhere!  The New Modern will be launching in earnest soon, so please consider subscribing to our mailing list or our RSS feed (or following us on Twitter or Facebook) to see more along the lines of this post as we get rolling.  Thanks. -Andrew Hazlett

[Via @GreatDismal and @Charlie_Athanas]

This video clip is from What Remains – a 2005 documentary about Sally Mann’s work and family.  Her book of photographs of the same title is available from Amazon.

Bannerman’s Castle was already an enigmatic ruin in the middle of the Hudson River, a dreamy landmark for passing train travelers and a passionate cause for preservationists.

But then in the silence of last Saturday night, a large chunk of history suddenly disappeared when the castle’s stone, brick and cement sighed under a century’s weight of weather. Overnight, two-thirds of the eastern tower was gone, as well as one-third of the adjacent southern wall, leaving a gaping hole and concern over how to stop the crumbling.

A strange and beautiful American ruin is decaying faster than ever.

Read more: nytimes.com

[via @marklamster]

Posted via web from Andrew Hazlett