Word: desertion
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...helped the Arabs overthrow the Ottoman Empire only to see their dream betrayed by politicians in Europe, is a figure whose elusive charisma is perfectly captured in screenwriter Robert Bolt's epigrammatic dialogue, in Peter O'Toole's brilliantly bold portrayal and in Lean's images of a vast desert that one small Englishman filled with his idealism and ambition...
...the kind of art critic who spends all his time in museums. He's the kind who finds himself trudging up the side of Mont Ste.-Victoire, the peak in Provence that was Paul Cézanne's perennial motif. Or getting lost in the darkness of the Nevada desert while pondering Michael Heizer's massive earthworks. Or setting out to visit the world's largest collection of light bulbs, only to detour to a museum of hunting decoys, musing all the while on the history of connoisseurship and the evolving notion of the marvelous...
...Nevadans warn, and you could upset a complex web of aquifers that run as far away as California's Death Valley and western Utah, where Snake Valley partly lies. That could do irreversible damage to plant, wildlife and human populations all sipping from the same limited supply. For every desert population center, there is a similarly limited supply of water and a similar potential for political warfare...
Some otherwise serious bloggers have spent the summer fascinated by a niche in romance literature with its own fan website: Sheikhs and Desert Love. Eerie, a contributor to 'Aqoul, a blog mostly about news from the Middle East, noting a significant increase in the number of romance novels featuring handsome desert nomads, provided a helpful graph documenting their rise. Yin Shui Si Yuan dismissed these romance novels as "incredibly ill-informed, orientalist, romantic fantasies involving oil sheikhs." Political Animal's Kevin Drum and Abu Aardvark's Marc Lynch have found the subject an amusing distraction from the August doldrums...
...discussions turned more scholarly recently when an article in al-Sharq al-Awsat, the Arabic international daily, complained about Penguin paperback books 70th anniversary publication of excerpts from Gustave Flaubert's letters from Egypt. The article's author, Susan Bashir, complained about the provocative new title, "The Desert and the Dancing Girls" and the cover's "half naked girls." Abu Aardvark echoed Bashir: "Is this what Penguin thinks the Arab world really is...empty deserts and exotic dancing girls?" Meanwhile, as the genre's 51 million readers pump gas this summer, will they be dreaming of oil sheikhs in exotic...