Turkey and Armenia are set to normalize relations today. They’re setting up a commission to establish the history of the Armenian Genocide (doubtless carefully skirting that term). Boy, that’s going to be one of the most scarily politicised pieces of work going!

Hillary Clinton is witnessing the signing. Wonder if she’s bringing with her Samanta Power, author of A Problem From Hell and once-and-future Obama advisor.

Le Figaro poll on whether Obama deserves the Nobel peace prize currently at 29% yes, 71% no.

Der Spiegel also pretty sceptical. Global Voices rounds up similarly bemused reactions from the rest of the world.

On the never-vanishing topic of Islam in France, this article in the FT is pretty good.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, director of research at France’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of French Muslims do not practise Islam at all. Fasting during Ramadan is considered a basic duty of the religion, yet only about 70 per cent of French ­Muslims even claim to do it. In short, European Islam has many of the same problems as European Christianity.

Via Art Goldhammer, unsurprisingly

This list of topics for a design magazine was composed in the year I was born. Nothing, it seems, has changed: they’re still interesting, still important, still underexplored. Disappointing, that, it a way.

I am, like Art Goldhammer somewhat baffled by the French government treating the Roman Polanski as a matter of artistic freedom, rather than rape. There aren’t

many

situations in which I’m on the side of Law and Order, but this must be one of them.

This, to my utter surprise, is not just usable but something I’m honest-to-God likely to use. Wonders will never cease.

Looks like there’s a new squat just outside Paris. Wouldn’t count on it lasting more than a few days, but you never know.

Meanwhile I’m sat at home, already in bed (it’s only 8:30), feeling uncertain and oddly morose. My life currently has a lot of moving parts, and I’m not entirely sure I have them all lined up. Alternatively, it could just be lack of sleep.

Warren Ellis has lately been writing a great series of articles, off in some dingy corner of the Net that I’d never otherwise have found. He seems to be working out some need to be the wise elder, reciting the tribal history of comics to a circle of youngsters. Mostly done in staccato, telegraphically-condensed fragments, with the disembodied head of Jack Kirby occasionally chipping in from beyond the grave.

Most lately on the long history of comics — or their marketers — trying to escape scorn by using just about any term other than comic. ‘Graphic novel’, obviously, but also its aborted kid sister ‘visual novel’. Then there’s Original English Manga, which has its own precursor in ‘UKBD’, a British attempt to assimilate the style of francophone Bandes Dessinées.

I seem to finally be running into a fair number of interesting places in Paris. So last night I finally saw Momus, the (currently Berlin-based) writer/singer, reading from the French edition of his new ‘Book of Jokes‘. The venue, La Société de Curiosités, is a comfortable looking one-room space. It’s run as a private club, which I think is basically a legal hack so you’re allowed to smoke there.