Hi Big Guy, Couple of things today. More than two.
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| 2511.19 |
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| June 7 2024 |
Love you Dad!
TWO Persepolis posts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/world/middleeast/marjane-satrapi-dead.html
Marjane Satrapi, the
Iranian-French author whose graphic novel series “Persepolis” introduced
millions of readers to the struggles of ordinary Iranians during the turbulent
years around the Islamic Revolution, has died at 56.
The
office of President Emmanuel Macron of France announced her death in a statement
on Thursday, but did not specify where, when or how she died.
“Her
passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a
freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her
immense international acclaim,” the statement said.
With
the publication of “Persepolis” in the early 2000s, Ms. Satrapi became one of
the best-known exponents of a form of graphic novel —
influenced by Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” — that combined political history and
memoir.
The protagonist, Marji, was depicted living through some of the most difficult years of Iranian history, closely mirroring Ms. Satrapi’s own life.
Both
author and character were born in Iran in 1969. Both were about 10 when the
Shah was overthrown. Both lived through the rise of the clerics and the horror
of the Iran-Iraq War, and both left the country at 14 to study in Austria.
In
1994, Ms. Satrapi moved to Paris, where she wrote the “Persepolis” series. The
books were published in France from 2000 to 2003; the first volume of an
English translation was published in 2003, and the second volume was released a year later.
Millions
of readers bought the books, which became a popular school assignment and among
the widest-read works to explore the interior lives of modern Iranians. The
series was adapted into a 2007 film that was nominated for an Academy Award for
best animated feature.
“Persepolis,”
the author Fernanda Eberstadt wrote in a New York Times review of the book,
“dances with drama and insouciant wit,” its inky black-and-white drawings
modeled on contemporary comics and Persian miniatures.
Not quite two decades later, Ms. Satrapi set to work documenting another tumultuous moment in Iranian history: the unrest in 2022 that followed the death, in police custody, of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been detained and accused of violating a law requiring women to wear the hijab in public.
In
protest, women across Iran tore off their veils, in one of the most significant
cultural and political moments in the country since the 1979 revolution.
Ms.
Satrapi’s work on the subject culminated in 2024 with the release of “Woman,
Life, Freedom,” another work of graphic nonfiction. She contributed some
drawings, but told The Times that she was more of a “director”
of the project, which also featured work by other artists, activists, academics
and journalists.
“Even
basic human rights, they deny us,” she said of the Iranian government after the
book was released. “You don’t have the right to dance, you don’t have the right
to sing, you don’t have the right to do this, you don’t have the right to do
that.”
Marjane Satrapi was born on Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, near the Caspian Sea, and grew up in Tehran. She had aristocratic ancestors, and her parents were cosmopolitan leftists; her father was an engineer and her mother designed dresses.
They
opposed the Shah and protested against his government, but were disillusioned
by the political and cultural crackdown that followed the revolution and the
end of his rule. Marjane’s uncle was accused of being a Soviet spy, jailed and
executed.
Marjane
bridled against the new restrictions on dress and behavior. When she was 14,
she hit a school principal who had tried to confiscate her jewelry, and her
parents, worried for her safety, sent her to live with an Iranian family in
Austria. There, she was overwhelmed by the experience of a very different
world.
“At
her nadir,” Simon Hattenstone wrote in The Guardian in 2008, “she was peddling
drugs, homeless, and she almost died from bronchitis. After four years in
Vienna, she admitted defeat, put on her veil and returned home.”
Back
in Iran in 1989, she studied art in Tehran and had an early marriage that ended
in divorce, then returned to Europe.
“Probably I left Iran because I was not brave enough,” she told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2003. “I just needed to have more social freedom to be able to do my work.”
She
got a second art degree in Strasbourg, France, before moving to Paris.
“I
like living there because I can smoke everywhere, but it is going to change,”
she said in 2007, around the time that smoking was
banned in many public spaces in France. (Two years before, she had published an illustrated ode to smoking in The Times.)
Maybe,
she mused, she would move to Greece, which had yet to introduce such stringent
smoking restrictions.
Her
husband, Mattias Ripa, who helped translate “Persepolis” into English, died
last year. A list of her survivors was not immediately available.
Ms.
Satrapi wrote several children’s books and other graphic novels, including
“Chicken With Plums,” the story of the death of her great-uncle, which was also
turned into a film. Another of her works, “Embroideries,” depicted Iranian
women discussing love, sex and men over afternoon tea.
She directed several feature films, including “The Voices” (2014), with Ryan Reynolds, and “Radioactive” (2019), starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.
She
also won acclaim as a painter and was elected in 2024 to the Académie des
Beaux-Arts, one of the highest honors in the French art world.
Though
she created some of the best-known works in the graphic novel genre, Ms.
Satrapi told
The Times in 2007 that she never liked the category’s name.
“I
think they made up this term for the bourgeoisie not to be scared of comics,”
she said. “Like, ‘Oh, this is the kind of comics you can read.’”
She
wrote frequently about her perpetual sense of dislocation — living away from
her home country, but thinking constantly of it.
“I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word ‘home’ has only one meaning: Iran,” Ms. Satrapi wrote in a 2009 essay for The Times.
“No
matter how much I am in love with Paris and its indescribable beauty,” she
added, “Tehran with all its ugliness will in my eyes forever be the ‘bride’ of
all cities around the world.”
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- Days ago: MOM = 3990 days ago & DAD = 644 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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