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dear-wormwoods · 4 years

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hey there! i am curious about your opinion regarding the different approaches to eddie's death in every media. you mention it in some metas but i don't think i've ever seen an individual post directly talking about it. i dunno, i'm just really interested! 💕

I think by far the most well done version is in the novel, mostly because it focuses entirely on Eddie during his death scene. It’s told from his POV, it’s focused on his story arc and the things he needs to overcome and accept about himself, and it’s honestly really beautifully written. Eddie’s death is about Eddie, as it should be.

I mean... with prose like this:

“Far away. Unimportant. He could feel everything running out of him along with his life’s blood . . . all the rage, all the pain, all the fear, all the confusion and hurt. He supposed he was dying but he felt . . . ah, God, he felt so lucid, so clear, like a window-pane which has been washed clean and now lets in all the gloriously frightening light of some unsuspected dawning...”

And this:

“Fading, fading back. Becoming clearer and clearer, emptying out, all of the impurities flowing out of him so he could become clear, so that the light could flow through, and if he had had time enough he could have preached on this, he could have sermonized: Not bad, he would begin. This is not bad at all. But there was something else he had to say first.”

.... There’s really no competing with it. Absolutely nothing any adaptation tries to accomplish could ever match it; Eddie’s poetic acceptance of himself, and the washing away of his fear and doubt.

In the novel, Eddie makes the choice to do what needs to be done to severely wound IT, even if that means sticking his whole-ass arm inside its mouth. He knew what could happen. He’d known it since before he even got to Derry. He’d known it since he was a child, that he’d die for his friends if that’s what it came to, if that’s what they needed from him. That Eddie is facing IT head on when he dies is a display of his agency and his bravery, and he does enough damage to make it possible for Bill and Richie to finally kill it for good.

In the miniseries his death is kind of a joke, tbh. Like I get it, they couldn’t have much gore, they had a small budget, and were limited by the special effects at their disposal. But IT literally barely touches Eddie and then he falls like two feet and gracefully dies. The most that could’ve happened to him is maybe a couple of cracked ribs and a bump on the head. But that being said, the miniseries also had Richie carry him out of the sewers slung over his back like a Big Strong Hero, which gives it major points. And because of that, it actually leaves room for an alternate ending: that Eddie simply fainted, was fine, and the comedy partner that conveniently looked exactly like Eddie actually was Eddie. Obviously.

Ch.2... well, it made Eddie’s death entirely about Richie’s pain, not Eddie’s self-acceptance. Eddie wasn’t even facing IT, wasn’t allowed to make the decision to perform self-sacrifice, because the filmmakers wanted to make his death more traumatic and shocking for Richie. The entire thing is centered on Richie, and while Bill Hader certainly acted it very well, it was just a continuation of the same trends the entire film had been following: pushing Eddie’s arc aside, forcing him to take a backseat to Richie. In the end, he assumes the roll of Dead Love Interest, a character who serves no purpose other than to be Fridged in order to fuel the protagonist’s revenge/pain. And on top of that, Eddie died for nothing anyway because all the Losers actually had to do was, apparently, bully IT to death.

I get that it’s hard to translate text to film sometimes, especially for a character whose development happens primarily through inner monologue, but if they had given Eddie’s character arc any weight and attempted to stay true to his book characterization at all, his death would have been a lot more meaningful. If they had developed Eddie as a character instead of just... y’know, letting Ransone play JDG and JDG play himself, they could’ve really done something. And if they had bothered to develop Reddie at all throughout the movie, rather than leave it for a post-mortem reveal, Richie’s reaction would have hit harder too.

#asks #stephen king's it #it novel #it 1990 #it 2019 #ch2 crit #eddie kaspbrak #eddie spaghet tea #Anonymous

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atsoukalidis · 4 years

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The “Order of time” by Carlo Rovelli, is one of the most fascinating popular science books I have read, forcing me to rethink our relation to time and our place in the universe. And as the author says ““The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.” At the same this, this is a hymn to Man, the Creator of reality and an invitation to explore the beauty of the world that surrounds us. Great read!

“The Order of Time, a deeper, more abstruse meditation, elucidates some of the key developments in the philosophy and physics of time. Fortified with quotations from Proust, Anaximander and the Grateful Dead (Rovelli has a hippyish past), the book continues a tradition of jargon-free scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisation of the last century. Clock time, said Einstein, is an illusion. In his general theory of relativity (published over a century ago in 1915) he predicted that time passes more quickly “high up” than below, nearer to the Earth. So if a man who has lived at sea-level meets his twin who has lived in the mountains, he will find that his sibling is slightly older. Analogously, a clock placed on the floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table. So which of the two tells the real time? The question runs through Rovelli’s book. Einstein showed that there is no single 'now' but rather a multitude of 'nows' What is real? What exists? Einstein’s observation that time passes at different speeds in different places unsettled not just the anti-Jewish physicists of the Third Reich but the Roman Catholic church. Can it really be a sin to know? In the 17th century, curiosity-driven researchers such as Galileo had dared to put divine laws to the test. (“For in much wisdom is much grief”: Ecclesiastes.) In tasting of the tree of knowledge, Einstein quite as much as Galileo had offended against the established order of things, according to Rovelli. Beautifully translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, The Order of Time is an expression of the scientific desire to know and understand the world. “Physicists are not immune to talking nonsense,” says Rovelli, but physicists are said to go deeper than other scientists into the mystery of existence. The laws of physics – gravity, energy, motion, time – underpin those of chemistry, astrophysics and meteorology combined. So an understanding of the workings of time requires some understanding of physics. Rovelli’s book opens with a discussion of Newton’s idea of absolute “true time”, ticking relentlessly across the universe. This is how most of us still imagine time, though Einstein showed that there is no single “now” but rather a multitude of “nows”. Rovelli goes on to consider Aristotle’s belief that what we call “time” is simply the measurement of change: if nothing changed, time would not exist. Newton chose to disagree. If the universe was to be frozen, time would tick on regardless. Impishly, Einstein asserted that both Aristotle and Newton were right. Aristotle correctly explained that time flows in relation to a before and after; and Newton’s absolute time does indeed exist – but as a special case in Einstein’s “spacetime” theory of gravity, which treated space and time as one and the same. In Rovelli’s own elucidation, the Earth moves round the sun because of the distortion of “spacetime” by the sun’s greater mass. An analogy presents “spacetime” as a rubber sheet distorted by a heavy ball representing the sun; a smaller ball rolling by, representing a planet, will tend to fall into this depression, apparently attracted. In Einstein’s universe, this is what is known as gravity. Time runs slower wherever gravity is strongest, and this is because gravity warps or curves “spacetime”. The riddle of time may ultimately be beyond our “blurred”, Earth-bound comprehension, says Rovelli. All the same, in lucid pages, he manages to bring difficult ideas down a level. Not since the late Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time has there been so genial an integration of physics and philosophy.”

“If I ask whether two events—one on Earth and the other on Proxima b—are happening “at the same moment,” the correct answer would be: “It’s a question that doesn’t make sense, because there is no such thing as ‘the same moment’ definable in the universe.” The “present of the universe” is meaningless.”

“It is like the point where the rainbow touches the forest. We think that we can see it—but if we go to look for it, it isn’t there.”

“The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.”

“This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”

“Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.”

“Reality flows from the past, through the present, towards the future – and the evolution of things between past and future is intrinsically asymmetrical. This, we thought, is the basic structure of the world.”

“It is within my mind, then, that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective. When I measure time, I am measuring something in the present of my mind. Either this is time, or I have no idea what time is.”

“Time temporalizes itself only to the extent that it is human.”

“A present that is common throughout the whole universe does not exist. Events are not ordered in pasts, presents and futures; they are only ’partially’ ordered. There is a present that is near to us, but nothing that is ‘present’ in a far-off galaxy. The present is localized rather than a global phenomenon. The difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations that govern events in the world. It issues only from the fact that, in the past, the world found itself subject to a state that, with our blurred take on things, appears particular to us. Locally, time passes at different speeds according to where we are and at what speed we ourselves are mobbing. The closer we are to a mass, or the faster we move, the more time slows down: there is no single duration between two events,; there are many possible ones. The rhythms at which time flows are determined by the gravitational field, a real entity with its own dynamic that is described in the equations of Einstein. If we overlook quantum effect, time and space are aspects of a great jelly in which we are immersed. But the world is a quantum one, and gelatinous spacetime is also an approximation. In the elementary grammar of the world, there is either space nor time – only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is possible to calculate probabilities and relations. At the most fundamental level that we currently know of, therefore, there is little that resembles time as we experience it. There is no special variable ‘time’, there is no difference between past and future, there is no space time. We still know how to write equations that describe the world. In those equations, the variables evolve with respect to each other. It is not a ‘static’ world, or a ‘block universe’ where all change is illusory: on the contrary, ours is a world of events rather than of things.

At the same time, in the emergence of familiar aspects of time, we ourselves have had a role to play. From our perspective – the perspective of creatures who make up a small part of the world – we see that world flowing in time. Our interaction with the world is partial, which is why we see it in a blurred way.”

“We are not even clear about what it means ‘to understand’. We see the world and we describe it: we give it an order. We know little of the actual relation between what we see of the world and the world itself. We know that we are myopic. We barely see just a tiny window of the vast electromagnetic spectrum emitted by things. We do not see the atomic structure of matter, nor the curvature of space. We see a coherent world that we extrapolate from our interaction with the universe, organized in simplistic terms that our devastatingly stupid brain is capable of handling. We thing of the world in terms of stones, mountains, clouds and people and this is ‘the world for us’. About the world independent of us we know a good deal, without knowing how much this good deal is.”

“We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes...”

“I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.”

#philosophy #physics #time #order of time #carlo rovelli #life

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bobdylanrevisited · 4 years

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Bringing It All Back Home

Released: 22 March 1965

Rating: 10/10

Thus, we have arrived at the three greatest albums of all time. Dylan has gone electric and dropped the protest songs, much to the dismay of his loyal folk fanbase; they would later show up in force to jeer and boo at the man they once revered as a their new messiah. Despite having the nerve to plug in his guitar for much of this album, the B-side is still acoustic, and this is a perfect collection of songs that would prove rock ‘n’ roll could also be poetic and meaningful. Just because he had a backing band and was singing differently, Dylan was still honing his writing skills and experimenting with narrative, structure, and also quite a lot of drugs.

1) Subterranean Homesick Blues - This was my introduction to Bob at 13 years old. I remember seeing the iconic video, hearing the nasal voice, and being so confused by the words, but I was instantly fascinated and determined to discover more about this strange man. Fourteen years later and the song still has a wondrous effect on me, this folk/rock/rap is a perfect rant on youth and disillusionment with the establishment. Iconic lines like ‘20 years of school and then they put you on the day shift’ or ‘join the army if you fail’ are all time classics. This is a barnstorming opening track, which shows that the old Dylan is dead and the new Dylan is coming out swinging.

2) She Belongs To Me - A much more mellow track, about a lover whose artistic, bohemian ambitions must be pandered to. Dylan’s singing is brilliant, and it’s a nice little song in between two of the album’s rockiest numbers.

3) Maggie’s Farm - The farm in question is Silas McGee’s Farm in which Dylan played a civil rights protest show, and he’s making it very clear that he won’t be doing that again. A ‘fuck you and farewell’ song to the community he once led, this is a scathing attack on the folk scenes expectations of him and how they oppressed his creativity. Famously, he would play this at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965 and almost start a riot. However, this is another classic and has been regularly reworked and played live over the last 55 years. Whilst I’m sure Bob’s anger has subsided over that time, it proves just how perfectly this song captures feelings of angst and artistic freedom, something Bob had to deal with every time he shifted genres.

4) Love Minus Zero/No Limit - Another gentle love song that dissects infatuation in a beautifully poetic way, another song that would resonate and be performed live for decades, another song with perfect singing from Bob. Though his voice is slightly higher/more nasal on the louder tracks, the singing throughout this electric period is my favourite of all the ‘Dylan voices’. I’m always confused when people say he can’t sing, I think no matter how much he changes, he always sounds like Bob Dylan, and you can’t ask for anything better than that.

5) Outlaw Blues - Dylan is now an outlaw, on the run from his former peers and fans. This is another loud, energetic, bluesy rock song that proves Bob is changing his identity and is almost a villain like the legends of the Old West: ‘I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like a Jesse James’.

6) On The Road Again - A very surreal narration of bohemian 60s life, describing a nightmare family that Bob implores the daughter to move away from. Again, this could be interpreted as moving away from the folk scene, however it is more likely that this is just another absurdist and funny tale that Bob loved to write during this period.

7) Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream - In the same vein as the previous track, this is a long, absurd, surreal, confusing, hilarious, meandering, and just plain weird song that is essentially the story of the founding of America. It is by no means literal or historically accurate, but it seems to be taking swipes at the foundations of the country and capitalism as a whole. It’s a brilliant piece of work that again shows how far Bob has come with imagery and metaphor. Also, the false start on the track never fails to put a smile on my face.

8) Mr. Tambourine Man - Now we move to the acoustic side of the album, and what an opener this is. One of his most loved, most played, and most covered tracks, this is another one for the history books. Is Bob the Tambourine Man who is being begged to keep performing for the masses? Regardless, this epic poem is like experiencing a dream, with lucid imagery and psychedelic lyrics that make you feel as if you are tripping on LSD alongside Bob. I know I’ve said this about a lot of tracks, but it is the definition of a perfect song and I think it’s impossible to get bored of, unless you’re listening to The Byrd’s cover which a heaping pile of shit and I won’t hear otherwise.

9) Gates Of Eden - Much like ‘Chimes Of Freedom’, this is another biblical epic, this time focusing on identity and youth in the 60s. The words are snarled as Bob sings about innocence, sin, and conformance, and the songs feels more like a renaissance painting than a piece of music. It’s truly stunning, you almost sit in awe as you try to take it all in, realising that a 23 year old, 56 years ago, was more in tune with society and his generation than anyone before or since.

10) It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) - There’s a chance I may repeat this claim, as my opinion is always changing, but gun to my head I would say this is the finest song Dylan ever wrote, and would even go so far to say that this is the finest song anyone has ever written. It’s not even a song really, it’s a poetic stream of consciousness that takes aim at capitalism, authority, and of course, his audience. I could honestly write a book about it, dissecting each line and phrase, as there is not a single wasted word or beat. I really can’t do it justice here, just go listen to it or one of the many live versions, it’s always mind blowing to comprehend how anyone can write a song that feels like your brain is whispering the truths of the universe.

11) It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue - The closing song is, again, flawless and personally in my top 5 Dylan songs of all time (though you’ll learn my top 5 has about 30 songs in it at any one time). A morbid farewell to the folk scene, this is a beautiful song that captures the sadness of a relationship ending and, much like the rest of the album, it is filled with imagery that is both challenging and esoteric. This has also been consistently been played live since its release, and it’s a testament to how amazing the songs on this album are, as the majority of them have stood the test of time and been in Bob’s repertoire for over half a century. All in all, a perfect end to a perfect album.

Verdict: I hope I’ve made it clear that this album is one of the best things ever made, not only in regards to music, it’s just one of the best things ever. Despite my love of hyperbole, I do think these are 11 songs which certainly changed my life and how I view music/art/culture, and I hope it can have a similar effect on whoever reads this. What’s crazy is, even with all the fawning above, I actually think his next album is even better, which seems impossible. Dylan was on a roll and the backlash from this album, and his live performances, was only going to propel his songwriting and historical importance to new heights.

#bob dylan #bringing it all back home

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booksoanahasread · 4 years

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Tinerele Elite by Marie Lu

It’s not an easy book to pick up the first hundred pages, but afterward it becomes addictive. It’s well-written and beautifully crafted. A dark fantasy that springs to life and doesn’t let you have a breather before the next sequence of action begins.

The book is incredibly well structured. Its action is sensational and the characters are breathtakingly flawed. The main character is an antihero, which means the contour of the book is rather incomparable with other books I have read.

The characters in the novel are fascinating and well built. Each one of them has a particular set of strengths and weaknesses that the author showcases in the scenarios she throws them in. Their actions are hard to comprehend until the author shines light on their motives and backstory.

Adelina is such a frustrating main character, she never quite satisfies the classic heroine stereotype. Her motives are problematic at best, destructive and hateful at worst. She somehow continues to fool herself that she is a pure girl who has been wrecked by her father, her upbringing, and her society. While those do play a part in the so-called darkness in her soul, they do not eclipse the essence of her being.

She constantly adopts a “woe is me” attitude that is both annoying and detrimental to the safety of those she believes love her. She also thinks that everyone is using her, which to some extent is the truth, but the fact that she doesn’t understand how the world she lives in works is truly the one thing that destroys her relationship with others.

She loves making everything seem perfect in her eyes, especially her relationship with Enzo. In reality, there are multiple red flags that should have been observed, but neither of them are lucid enough to spot them or do anything about them. She isn’t able to deal with her emotions in a constructive manner which makes any of her friendships toxic for the others involved.

While Adelina is a gem for a villainous backstory, Enzo and his Society of Daggers are easily categorised as a group of morally ambiguous heroes. Their motto may as well be “the ends justify the means”, because the amount of crimes, especially murder, they commit is horrendous.

They are described as being incredible people with supernatural powers that somehow enlighten them. They are not enlightened, they follow orders just like everyone else. The one exception may be Dante, the one character I found truly relatable in the book. He always questioned the other’s judgement and wasn’t in any way, shape, or form going to take mysterious responses as an answer.

The whole kidnapping of Adelina’s sister was an easy way to get her to do Teren’s bidding. It wasn’t hard to understand or anything of the sorts. It did bring out a different type of moral aspect to the novel. Which would you choose, your family or the people who saved you?

To conclude, this is a great novel, but only for those who do like a partially unreliable narrator and morally despicable characters. I’m eager to get my hands on the next book in the series to see how everything progresses from here on out.

#tinerele elite #marie lu #young elites #ya #ya fantasy #young adult fantasy #book review #book #books #romanian

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im-royk-blog · 5 years

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The Fault In Our Stars: A Review

(Wrote it for my class 12 English Language Exam......) ____________________________________

Cancer is a dreaded disease, indiscriminate in its choice of victim, choosing with aplomb regardless of age, gender or status. There are a myriad of stories on this tragedy and most remain untold.

‘The Fault In Our Stars‘, a novel written by John Green, is in the form of an autobiographical account of a teenage girl, Hazel, who hardly remembers her life without cancer and has given up her hope on living. She hates socialising as she considers herself to be a grenade which will blow up anytime and all she wants to do is limit the number of casualties. This remark of hers brings tears to the reader’s eyes just as it brings to her father’s. But then as rightly pointed by her, “in the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life”, she meets Augustus whom she is drawn to immediately but initially pushes him away. When she finally gives in, her life becomes a “roller coaster which only goes up.”

Having a lot in common apart from the disease, they bond over films, books, travel and much more. Augustus completely changed her life by gifting her a “forever within the numbered days.” Their ‘little infinity’ which was indeed bigger than most others reminds you that even a doomed love story without a fairy-tale ending can be poetic, humorous, intelligent, full of life and positivity even with a questionable tomorrow. The novel ends with Hazel reading the eulogy Augustus had penned down for the girl he loved but had to leave.

Written in a simple and lucid style, Green did not sugarcoat any single sentence and at no point of time did it feel unrelatable or unrealistic. Most importantly, throughout the story, Hazel and Augustus were not defined by the dreaded disease eating them up day by day. It did consume them but it did not define them or dictate them how to live their lives. The novel has this miraculous ability of making one cry, laugh and smile all at once throughout. It is written so beautifully that one cannot stop reading but at the same time never wants it to end.

It is a novel that will appeal to all as it pulls at your heartstrings and teaches how valuable love is, how short a life can be, how just one person can change it in the simplest way and how it is possible to live a forever in the numbered days. Turning over the pages you are surely going to fall in love with this book just the way you fall asleep, slowly then all at once. While reading this book your thoughts are stars which cannot be fathomed into constellations because after all infinities are meant to be indescribable......

#the fault in our stars #john green #book review #fiction lover

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my-honourable-barbarian · 6 years

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Missing Scenes Chapter I

As promised, even though I’m actually too tired to look over them right now, here are the two Laurent POV scenes I have so far written for Chapter I. The entire thing needs more editing before I can change it, so this is (for now) an exclusive tumblr privilege. :)

* * *

It was not the first time Laurent had lived on his own, and it was not the first time he was unpacking his life. The difference now was that before, he had been able to move with only a few boxes. The bare necessities; clothes, books, childhood memories from a time before Auguste died. Things he did not want around his uncle.

There was more now. With his job, he had been able to pick out his own furniture. This place was big enough for him to be able to set up Auguste’s desk. His professional clothes were fitted and required careful handling, and there were even some comfortable pants and sweaters for him to wear when no one was watching. In law school he had rediscovered his love for reading and collected books almost obsessively, filling boxes over boxes with them.

Life had accumulated around him; a steady, controlled growth. Slowly, it was becoming his own.

After that clumsy oaf of a well-meaning neighbor had left, the movers had finished bringing Laurent’s things up quickly and they had not lingered after he had told them he would finalize the positioning of the furniture on his own.

He had prepared the money on the trip here, sitting in almost comfortable silence with his things.

“Look, I tried to tell him it wasn’t necessary, but Damen already gave us a pretty significant tip.”

Laurent had handed over the money anyway. Apart from their lapse of judgement, these men had done their work professionally. And Laurent may not be able to pay his entire rent on his own, but this was his money. He could do with it as he liked.

And as he did not know what would happen to him before he turned twenty-one, it felt only right to spend whatever he could spare.

“Do you expect a stranger’s actions to affect my own?” he said and passed Jord the exact amount he would have before he had received that information. “This is yours.”

Jord took the wad of bills, but didn’t count them. Laurent handed him a few additional notes.

“Please give this to Orlant, with apologies about his nose.”

They were Laurent’s apologies, since Nicaise was decidedly not sorry about having accidentally tripped him while he was actually trying to trip Laurent for not being allowed to ride with the moving truck.

‘You can come by next week-end,’ Laurent had told him, and Nicaise had said, ‘Pff, I don’t want to see your stupid new place anyway,’ and Orlant had cursed in the background. His nose was fine, but he had been very vocal about how much it hurt.

Jord accepted this money as well, but would not be dissuaded from his earlier topic.

“I’m just saying. He’s a good guy. You could have ended up with worse neighbors.”

A strange show of loyalty, even to a friend.

Laurent, who would rather have forgotten the entire encounter the second the man had pulled the door across the hallway closed behind him, narrowed his eyes.

“He invited himself to my things and then dropped a desk.”

Jord blew out a breath. A man not easily fazed, he looked only the slightest bit exasperated.

“Well, he didn’t expect- you know. You.”

There was nothing lewd about the way he said it, but the meaning was clear.

It was also unnecessary. It had been fairly obvious from the way this Damianos had acted, but truly, the last thing Laurent needed was a besotted neighbor. Aesthetically pleasing though he might have been, with that obscene white t-shirt sticking to well-sculpted abdominal muscles and a broad back. Bulging arms and strong thighs. A nice complexion. Dark eyes and a dimple.

It was the last thing Laurent needed.

“I believe that would be all.”

Jord nodded, gave Laurent something like a tired salute that likely meant something like ‘Good luck’ or possibly ‘I am very tired and the day’s work isn’t over’, and left.

Laurent closed the door behind him and turned to face his new apartment.

He took a moment just to stand there, breathing it all in. He had been planning the exact set-up from the first time he had been here, one among many applicants.

On the day of the interview, he had worn a subtle pair of glasses (fake) and the kind of outfit one might expect from a particularly serious student. He had asked only the necessary questions. When he had given the land lord a single small smile at the end, the man – who was obviously used to far bubblier and far more annoying candidates – had felt he had earned it, and Laurent had known with certainty that he would be the one allowed to move in.

It was a good space. It was a simple space.

It would be his.

* * *

(Cue edited pre-existing Damen POV scene)

* * *

Out of all the hardships he had faced, and the many that were undoubtedly still to come, pie had not been on Laurent’s list of expectations.

Yet here he was, staring down a beautifully baked, still warm apple pie where it was sitting on Laurent’s kitchen table.

He should not have accepted it. It was clearly a ploy to assure further contact, which was not something Laurent was looking for.

It was not what he was looking for at all.

He cut a small piece. It fell apart perfectly when he put it on a plate. It was the first time Laurent had needed a plate since moving in.

While he poked it with a fork – also previously unused – he considered all the nefarious things that could be wrong with it, and all the ways he had planned for it.

The most obvious was poison, possibly on Laurent’s uncle’s behalf. An unlikely scenario, as their earlier exchange had seemed rather like a spur of the moment type thing and Laurent did not actually think his uncle would resort to outright killing him until other options to keep him from inheriting had been exhausted.

Nevertheless, Laurent had both his phones in easy reach and charcoal tablets next to his plate, and his first bite was very, very small, followed by a longer pause as he waited for any effect to take.

It was annoying to wait. The pie was excellent.

A date rape drug was an option. In case this was true, Laurent had locked the door as well as barricaded it with a chair. It might not be enough to stop someone as massive and muscly as Damianos, but breaking in would hopefully cause enough of a ruckus for other people in the building to get alarmed.

When after a solid half-hour and a finished piece later, Laurent still felt the same – which was annoyed, but lucid – this theory could also be dismissed.

Which left the duller, more common causes for bringing a neighbor delicious freshly baked pie.

Clearly, Damianos did not find Laurent physically repulsive. As far as come-ons were concerned, it was certainly one of the most elaborate he had received yet, and while mildly intrusive, at least Laurent had something from it even when he decided never to open his door to his neighbor again.

Perhaps it actually had been an apology? The desk was undeniably expensive, even for the uneducated eye. Damianos could genuinely be ingratiating himself to make Laurent forgive the damage he had nearly caused.

He seemed simple. The likeliest was a combination of the last two explanations.

Nevertheless, the pie was good enough for Laurent to cut himself a second piece.

His phone rang to distract him for a bit, but after he had finished the call, the remaining slices were still there, taunting him. As enough time had passed, he could now be certain the pie had not been laced with anything other than cinnamon and cardamom. The only reason he felt vaguely queasy was his uncertainty over how to proceed.

That, and appetite.

The damage was done, anyway. He might as well enjoy something sweet while he overworked his brain.

Damianos had been sweet. Embarrassed. Clearly uncomfortable with Laurent’s cold demeanor. Rightfully not all that happy with Laurent, at the end.

He had been more attractive than Laurent had allowed himself to remember. Perhaps-…

Laurent stood up abruptly and walked out of the kitchen.

In the living room, he once more checked that Auguste’s desk truly was uninjured. As before, it held up against Laurent’s inspection.

Running his fingers over where the foot had come loose, he wondered whether Auguste had even used it all that often. It wasn’t technically his brother’s, but out of all the ostentatious furniture their parents had left them, it had been what he had kept in his room.

Laurent had countless memories of sitting underneath this desk, engrossed in a book. After school, before Auguste came home. He had probably been holed up in there when the undiscovered aneurism in Auguste’s brain had ruptured and killed him instantly.

It wasn’t where his uncle had found Laurent to tell him the news. It was not tainted that way.

The desk was stable and beautiful and Laurent was too tall now to be able to fold himself up underneath it. However, he could use it for its original purpose and sit at it to work, the way Auguste sometimes had.

On it lay an open case file. Vannes had told him he would get to fight this one out in court on his own.

Auguste would approve of what Laurent was aiming to do.

Auguste would tear the entire world in two if he knew why Laurent was doing it.

I’m trying, he thought at his brother, even though he did not believe Auguste was there to witness the progression of his life.

He returned to the kitchen to put the remaining slices into the refrigerator and wash up the pie tin.

#okay okay i need to sleep now i'm sorry #phone sex operator au

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pamphletstoinspire · 7 years

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In the Belly of Lent: Jonah and Us

Story with image:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/belly-lent-jonah-us-harold-baines/

One of my favorite features on the television show Sesame Street when I was growing up was a game entitled, “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.” As the song played in the background, we were challenged to find the one object out of the four that was different: an orange, an apple, a pear and a spoon, for example. Tucked in among the apples-and-oranges books of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible is a spoon!

The prophet Jonah is that oddball piece of Scripture. Written several centuries after the latest of the other prophetic books, this little book is short on prophecy but long on a narrative that satirizes a number of sacred cows and provides genuine insight into what following a call from God really means.

From the opening verses of the Book of Jonah it becomes clear that we’re dealing with an unusual hero. In response to God’s call to head out for the city of Nineveh (located at the center of the Assyrian Empire that encompassed parts of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia) and preach a call for repentance to its inhabitants, Jonah jumps aboard the nearest ship and gets moving — but not to Nineveh. He boards a ship heading for a place called Tarshish. While no one is sure exactly where Tarshish was located, the consensus is that it was somewhere along the southwest coast of Spain, the ends of the earth as far as the ancient Mediterranean world was concerned. According to the scriptural text, Jonah was on the lam, running “away from the Lord” (Jonah 1:3).

Your Assignment, Should You Choose…

It’s not hard for me to sympathize with this reluctant prophet. The Assyrians are notorious in the annals of the ancient Middle East because of their power and the atrocities attributed to them during their conquests. Assyrian stone carvings that have been uncovered in modern times proudly display corpses of defeated soldiers that have been decapitated or otherwise mutilated. In the background the ruins of the conquered city can be seen in flames.

How much of this was a form of propaganda designed to intimidate enemies and how much was based on reality is unknown, but as far as Israel was concerned the legend became a nightmare in 721 B.C. The Assyrian invasion of the Jewish homeland in that year resulted in the total obliteration of the 10 northern tribes of Israel, plus a prolonged siege of the city of Jerusalem that would have resulted in the city’s total destruction had the Assyrian army not retreated for unexplained reasons.

By the time the Book of Jonah was written, probably in the fifth century B.C., the now extinct city of Nineveh would have remained a symbol of the greatest abomination to God on the face of the earth in the eyes of the Jews. How could God possibly want to save those people?

Save Who?

Jonah’s flight from God is rooted in the basic human sin of pride, something with which I am all too familiar. Mystified by the ways of God that may seem totally irrational and unfair, Jonah presumes to know better, takes matters into his own hands and leaves God behind — or tries to.

As the psalmist expresses most eloquently in Psalm 139 (“Where can I go from your spirit… if I go up to the heavens you are there”), you can’t outrun God. As Jonah’s ship makes its way through the waters of the Mediterranean, a great storm hits. The captain and crew try everything to keep the ship afloat. Cargo is thrown overboard, prayers to any and all deities are attempted, but nothing works.

Finally, as the very destruction of the ship and loss of all hands seem imminent, Jonah ‘fesses up. As the sailors listen with horror, Jonah informs them that he is in the process of fleeing the God of the Hebrews and that the storm is the manifestation of the divine wrath. There’s an interesting bit of satire at work here, I suspect.

The attitudes of the sailors and, to some extent, Jonah himself, reflect the essence of ancient pagan approaches toward the gods and goddesses. Generally speaking, the various deities of pagan religions were seen as apathetic if not openly hostile to humankind and were to be more feared than respected, and certainly not loved. Crossing a god meant signing your own death warrant.

But we should know better, the author of this book seems to be reminding his Jewish audience. For when Jonah resigns himself to his apparent fate and allows himself to be thrown overboard in an effort to save the rest, this apparent capitulation to the vengeance of the gods becomes something very different. Jonah does not experience divine retribution. Instead, he undergoes the groaning and pain of a rebirth.

It’s a process that begins in the belly of the fish that God sends to swallow him. (That’s an anonymous sea creature, by the way. Never is it referred to as a whale!) The idea of the three days Jonah spent in the belly of the fish as the turning point of his life and the beginning of his true destiny was not lost on the Jewish Christians whose preaching formed the basis of the gospel tradition. You’ll find the comparisons of Jonah’s adventure and the resurrection of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and in Paul’s writings.

Hollywood Climax

What can one do when he or she is in the belly of the fish? In those lucid and transcendent moments of our lives, moments often brought into being during times of trial and struggle, when the vision of another way of living and a closeness with God we didn’t realize was possible just begin to crest over the horizon, all we really can do is what Jonah does: Pray. The bulk of Chapter Two consists of Jonah’s prayer of thanksgiving to God.

In some beautifully scripted verses that mostly incorporate verses from the Psalms, Jonah thanks God for sparing him. Once and for all, he denounces everything in his life which he has allowed to get in the way of hearing God’s call. “Those who worship vain idols/ forsake their source of mercy./But I, with resounding praise,/ will sacrifice to you;/ What I have vowed I will pay:/ deliverance is from the Lord” (Jonah 2:9-10).

Jonah leaves the whale belly (Caption for linked image)

In the context of the time period when this book was written, these words are perhaps the author’s clearest condemnation of the polytheistic practices which continually threatened to swallow up the monotheism of Judaism. Even though our idols are different, the words of Jonah continue to ring true through the centuries.

The true price of our relentless pursuit of money, power and popularity, for example, is to cut ourselves off from the source of our own lives. The way out of the belly of the beast is to acknowledge that only God can get us out.

With this prayer, the reorientation of Jonah’s life is complete. Having placed himself fully in God’s camp, Jonah is now open to being the instrument God intends him to be. Jonah finds himself on the shore — a wonderful image for the beginning of life and of Lent — having been spewed out by the fish.

As Chapter Three begins, Jonah sets off for the huge metropolis of Nineveh. And a miracle happens.

Jonah just begins to preach his warning to the people of the city when everyone, from the king right on down to the most humble peasant, listens and responds. Every person (and animal!) dons sackcloth, an ancient symbol in both Judaism and the early Church of a person who is in the midst of performing a genuine act of repentance. God sees all, and forgives.

From a Jewish point of view, Jonah has marched into the very pit of hell and God’s power has triumphed. Any Broadway or Hollywood production of this story could end right here, complete with a dancing chorus of Assyrians and appropriately joyous music in the background. But real life tends not to be so tidy.

Satirical Anticlimax

As we enter into the fourth and final chapter of the book, the focus shifts back to Jonah and what he thinks of the act of salvation demonstrated before his very eyes, an act he has played an integral part in achieving. Does he fall on his knees in thanksgiving once again? Stand silent and awestruck at the incredible beauty of God’s love? Settle down among the folks he has helped?

Actually, he’s not too happy about things. In exposing the logic behind the unhappiness Jonah expresses to God, the author of this book reaches the height of his skills as a satirist. Probably aimed at his own community’s ultranationalist feelings, the words still speak powerfully to any one of us “good” people who in our hearts have closed off the possibility of redemption for someone or some group.

“This is why I fled at first to Tarshish,” Jonah tells the Almighty. “I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God…” (Jonah 4:2). In other words, Jonah simply could not bear the thought that God might forgive these murderous wretches.

When I read these words, I think about how lukewarm or downright ambivalent my own prayers and actions toward the more “unlikable” members of my own community can be — a difficult student or colleague, for example — and begin to feel the hard edges of the boundary lines I’ve erected within my efforts to forgive without limits as Jesus did. What is most amazing about this insight is that the author is writing about 400 years before Jesus, at a time when a thought such as this would cross the line into heresy. Perhaps it still does.

So Jonah’s journey continues into a new and more difficult stage. It is tough to let go of our own self-centered desires and goals and consciously allow God into the business of daily living. But it is much tougher, I think, when we begin to see that the work God has set us to do is not what we expected it would be, when the results seem hard to find or even appear counter to what we thought holiness and goodness were all about.

The Gospels suggest, for example, a similar experience among the first women and men who followed Jesus. All of the Gospels include stories early in the ministry of Jesus which demonstrate the apostles’ decision to leave their former ways of life and adopt radically new life-styles in following Jesus.

But this initial commitment, important as it is, is merely the first chapter of their faith lives. The deeper understanding and openness to what it really means to be a follower of Jesus come only after their divinely aided struggle through the terrible reality of the crucifixion.

In Jonah’s case, we never learn whether or not his transformation is complete. This may be the most meaningful thought of all we can take away from this book as we each work through our own Lenten journey toward the ultimate celebration of the Resurrection beyond this all-too-limited physical existence.

God hears Jonah out and responds, not with flashing thunder and lightning or celestial visions designed to dazzle and overwhelm, but in a simple way. “Have you reason to be angry?” God asks Jonah (Jonah 4:4). Jonah does not respond.

Teachable Moment

God has sent a sign. As Jonah sits, brooding, on a hill overlooking the city that he helped save, baked in the hot Middle Eastern sun, God sends him a plant with large, shady leaves. For a moment, Jonah is comforted. But then, just as suddenly, God takes the plant away. When Jonah (inevitably) complains, God seizes the “teachable moment.” If you can feel such anguish over the loss of a plant, God says, can’t you find it in your heart to feel something for your fellow human beings?

We leave the reluctant prophet on the hill, bereft of shade and easy answers, pondering the questions God has posed. Struggling to free himself from his reluctance, egocentrism and pride, fundamentally determined to do as God wills but not fully understanding what that means, Jonah stands as a model for every one of us.

In what is perhaps the greatest irony of the story, the least prophetic of all of the prophets emerges as the most human. In the midst of all his ambivalence, Jonah is a most effective instrument of God. His struggle to come to terms with the power and love of God within his limited horizons of being is our struggle — during Lent and during life.

Story written by: James Philipps

#in the belly of lent

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ablog-about-offgame-blog · 7 years

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OFF Valentine Headcanons

“But Mun its already Jun-” No I didn’t hear you, didn’t hear you, didn’t hear you.

Anyway this will be kept under readmore, becuase I’m probably going to shove as much stuff as I can under it.

Receiving End

The Batter - He’s pretty confused at first. What is Valentine’s Day? Why are you giving him chocolate? But if you take time to explain to him, he still won’t get it, but he’ll accept the present anyway

The Judge - I don’t think you should give cats chocolate...

Valerie - see above

Dedan - is continually cursing up until you whip out that nicely wrapped package in front of him. Then time stops for him as he’s staring at you slack-jawed. You’ll probably have to shake him out of his reverie...nevertheless, he still thanks you for the gift. He’s practically squirming to run away out of shock, the poor guy.

Japhet - Can birds even eat chocolate? I mean, unless if he has the stomach for it. Just don’t give him chocolate. Might give him a stomachache.

Enoch - Will proceed to hug you immediately (I hope you don’t die from suffocation). Thanks you a million times over. Offers to give you something in exchange for the sweet chocolate you made for him psst its sugar don’t take it

Vader Eloha - She’s been so busy, she completely forgot about it. She’s completely taken aback for a moment, but quickly thanks you for the gift. Is it just me, or is she blushing a little?

Hugo - (Note: WRITTEN IN CONTEXT OF SIBLING RELATIONSHIP.) Thanks you most politely for the sweets. He offers to share some with you, but also puts some away waiting for his parents to come home so that he can give some to them.

Zacharie - You give chocolates, he says thanks. Two days later: “Was the chocolate you gave me for Valentine’s?” If you say yes, he laughs and says they tasted great. If you say no, he’ll still laugh it off - except he’ll forever tease you about the intentions behind those chocolates huehuehue

Sucre - Gives you a huge smile and bear hug when you present her with the chocolate. You tell her to please eat them without sugar. She complies. “haha, would you like a dance afterward?”

Bad Batter - Just throw them into his mouth and he will be happy...or so I’d like to say. Actually what you do is that you have to get his attention, make sure he’s lucid enough that he doesn’t see you as an enemy, AND then you can do the whole chocolate-throwing thing in mouth. Have fun.

Elsen - Are you sure? Are you really sure? I mean, sure, they would be really happy...a bit too happy...oh no please don’t tell me you used Enoch’s sugar in those chocolates. You did? ....snap.

Giving End (Spoiler - no one gives you chocolate.)

The Batter - Won’t give you anything unless you actually gave him chocolate before. And when he does give you a gift its something very simple, like a hat or bat he bought. Its not as though he secretly signed the gift or anything.

The Judge - You have to play through a series of miniquests to prove you’re worthy of said gift. Don’t worry, you just upgrade your competences. its not that bad- OH NO I DON’T WANT TO FIGHT 200 SECRATERIES

Valerie - No gift, but he offers to spend the day with you and his brother. You still end up fighting the 200 secrataries somehow.

Dedan - Acts pretty rude at first cause he’s a tsundere ha but when he actually gives you the gift he’s super polite. Its just a coat he made, but its surprisingly warm despite how thin it looks. How is this possible? Upon searching the coat, you find that Inside the pocket is a key to a private PO box...hm....

Japhet - Its a old book. Looks like its been used before. Japhet tells you that its his greatest treasure. Inside it details the history of the OFF world.

Enoch - i lied Presents you with a intricate chocolate castle. Its too pretty to eat, but if you try, good luck. Turns out that there’s chocolate furniture inside the rooms of the castle, not to mention the decorations inside it. You’ll probably die of indigestion just looking at it.

Vader Eloha - Gives you a beautifully crafted chocolate cake. On top are mini figurines of the cast of OFF. If you ask her who the dude in the baseball hat and the child are, she’ll tell you that its a story for another time.

Hugo - Is pretty shy when he asks you over. A comic of Ballman. Slightly used, but its in good condition. You end up reading it together with him. It might be just you, but as you closed the book and glanced over, you saw tears in his eyes.

Zacharie - This guy? Giving out free valentines? No chance. He’ll sell you handmade chocolates that he claimed to make it’s a lie, sucre made 80% of it. That’s the closest you get to getting something out of him.

Sucre - Her present for you is an stuffed bear...except its stuffed with sugar. If it was packed properly it might have been nice to hug, but alas, its super lumpy. It smells nice though...like cake.

Bad Batter - Gave you...this...broken heap of junk. it looks like an collection of old baseball bats, except they’ve all been broken. Upon closer examination, you realize some of them has blood on it.

Elsen - shoves the gift at you and attempts to run away, but you have to grab them by the collar to properly thank them. Turns out that they all worked together to make a collage of photos you took of them over the year, with you as the centerpiece. The kicker is that you never publicly showed them before, so how did they get them?

#mun rants #see this is what happens when i dont want to do hw #the cast (off)#and now time for the critics to come

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knowledgepointglobal · 5 years

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Yeah, this blog is dedicated to minds who presume writing nothing less than a nightmare, for the experience from top IELTS Training Center in Dubai.

As we get started let us highlight the difficulties a non native of any language faces while putting up his thoughts and ideas on paper and how can those be resolved.

“An Oar of vocabulary against the sea”. What does it imply…? Well, nothing but limited knowledge and use of words.-

How does one overcome it?

The trick here is tedious and full of toil; one has to cultivate the habit of reading.

The treasure of words books hold can be beautifully used if there is a hunger to outperform while writing any written examination. There is no substitute for this step.

Feeble grammar skills are a major turn off for any examiner while assessing you on your written answer. Grammar in any language is its spinal cord; likewise, its ignorance does take away those aimed bands for sure.

How could this be tackled?

Practically, to get hands-on with grammar one does need a teacher. A teacher who has the knowledge and can guide you and make your weakness as one of your strength.

Additionally, you can also purchase a few handbooks to practice it.

“My trip to Sri Lanka was just so relaxing, we had such a nice time, all my cousin were also there………” yeah you were confused for a moment right, how on earth the writer of this blog started to share his/her experience in the middle of writing lesson??? This is what exactly the examiners feel. When your ideas, facts, or statements are not in a line with the subjects or with each other. Poor cohesion and co-relation are the apex reasons for low bands in the writing assessment.

How to get it right?

So the idea is to answer every part of the question in an orderly manner.

Starting with the first things first and then linking it up with your next set of statements in a way where it appears to be valid or else simply forming next paragraph for every point or hinter. Time expressions play a vital role in it like initially, eventually, firstly secondly etc.

”Spelling police is here!!!” It goes without saying that how crucial correct spelling is in any language testing examination. Poor formation of words hampers the overall portrayal of the answer.

This is one of the weakest zones of many test takers.

How can we fix it?

Getting familiarized with the words which are quite probably is just going to help you avoid silly mistakes and shall boost your confidence while delivering the answer where you don’t have to bother of whether the spelling you came up with is correct or wrong.

The line: Drawings the line between a formal and informal approach in writing is as essential as any other aspect of writing that we have discussed above.

In fact, if this is messed up than all the work prior to it is in vain. The language of the question in itself clearly suggests the type of answer expected. Lack of understanding of the type question will mislead to an unfavorable answer dooming to a low bandwidth. However lucid or complicated the language of the question seems one should easily make out the difference between informal and formal ones

How to get hands-on with it???

Well, this is the simplest of all just by mere practice of a few times a test taker can successfully get clear hold of which kinds of words are used to put up a formal or informal question. Apart from the choice of words the clear indication to start the answer with an affixed title is also one of the keys. And while answering the question few handy expressions are boosters to take off the write up. Knowledge of the dos and don’ts while writing any of the text is a must and we train the students through the top IELTS Training Center in Dubai.

#language training

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lefilmdujour · 7 years

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500th movie celebration

Last month I have quietly passed the 500th movie landmark on my Tumblr, so I decided to make a post with text instead of pictures for a change.

Five and a half years ago, I have decided to create a Tumblr, my own personal space where I would upload film frames, mostly so I could remember all the many movies I watch. By associating an image to a title, it helps to maintain my mind fresh and pinpoint exactly why I loved or despised a certain movie, linking them to the people I have watched them with and the surrounding circumstances.

The criteria is simple but methodical: no more than one post per day, all films I watch are represented even if I am ashamed of having spent time with them, all films are represented only once regardless of the amount of times I’ve re-watched them throughout the existence of the Tumblr.

I like to watch Artsy Avant Garde movies. Trash movies. 80′s “classics”. 70′s sleaze. Documentaries, a whole lot of them. Surrealism. Nouvelle Vague. The occasional Hollywood blockbuster. Skin. I usually get complaints from people about the amount of nudity represented in the Tumblr.

Movies, regardless of how bad they are to the viewer, always mean something special to someone, so I respect them all.

To celebrate the 500th movie landmark, I decided to pick 50 of the ones that evoke the most vivid memories in me. Quality and circumstance were the deciding factors. Random order. I recommend them all.

The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman) - An inspirational exercise on mythology, symbolism, and pacing.

Philanthropy (Nae Caranfil) - Romanian New Wave is my latest passion. This one is a highlight. A very entertaining tutorial on how to scam and be scammed.

Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders) - Poetry in motion. Falling in love every day.

The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (Stefan Komandarev) - A road movie, on a bicycle. Friendship, memory gaps, backgammon.

The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit) - If a movie makes me cry, it goes to the favorites bucket. The story is simple, the animation is fluid, the outcome is expected. Yet, its message is always powerful.

The Imposter (Bart Layton) - More than a very compelling story of deception and manipulation, this documentary shines due to its brilliant editing. Made me feel pity, anger, compassion and repulse, often at the same time.

American Movie (Chris Smith) - If you love movies, then you cannot skip this documentary about a film director who makes his life mission to finish his crap movie, despite lack of funds, means, and talent. Funny and heartfelt. Highly quotable.

Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven) - Growing up as a woman in traditional Turkey. A feminist look on a closed society. Beautifully shot.

Mad Max Fury Road (George Miller) - A throwback to a time when action movies were being made with a sense of movement and a requirement for suspension of disbelief. Amazing cinematography, highlighted in the recent “Black & Chrome” edition.

Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini) - The fruitless search for true love. Finding it, losing it, finding it again, losing it again, getting up, trying again. “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks in it”.

Bicycle Thieves (Vitorio de Sicca) - A masterpiece. The importance of a bicycle as an instrument of survival in 40′s Italy. Puts things into perspective. Nothing can be taken for granted.

Underground (Emir Kusturica) - In my opinion, the greatest Kusturica movie. The sad story of a country that no longer exists.

The Hourglass Sanatorium (Wojciech Jerzy Has) - A very surreal experience where time and space are meaningless. Living in a lucid dream.

Despair (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) - The only Fassbinder movie I ever watched to date. I always want to watch more of him, but somehow keep forgetting. This movie makes justice to it’s title, despair creeps in slowly, but overwhelmingly by its end.

Mary and Max (Adam Elliot) - A claynimation film about friendship and mental health. Funny and melancholic. People should write letters to their friends more.

Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche) - A beautiful love story.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson) - Twee as fuck, like all Anderson’s movies. This man can do no wrong.

Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen) - I have a special interest in movies related with mental health. The last great Woody Allen movie to date.

Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata) - I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I claim that this is the saddest movie ever made. It took me days to recover from the emotional impact it left in me. War makes victims of us all.

Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini) - What would you do if you have been touched and subsequently abandoned by Divinity? The final scene is one of my all time favorites.

Forbidden Fruit (Dome Karukoski) - Two girls escape from a oppressive religious cult and experience life for the first time. The scene when one of the girls watches a movie for the first time, in a theater, left a good memory in me.

Forbidden Zone (Richard Elfman) - I like musicals too! This one in particular was scored by Danny Elfman, who also plays the devil in its most memorable scene. A weird freakout of a movie. Specially recommend the colorized version that adds up to the surreal atmosphere.

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé) - To be seen on a big screen with the best speakers money can buy. Intense psychedelic experience. Stay on the safe side, remain sober while watching this one.

My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog) - I find most of Herzog’s documentaries to be very relaxing. Not this one. Klaus Kinski was a fabled asshole. Werner Herzog is an eccentric lunatic. How these two geniuses managed to work together without killing each other (although both came very close to it) is definitely documentary material. An intense story about friendship, respect, and guttural hate.

The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) - My favorite Coen brothers film. The week from hell on an otherwise quiet and unremarkable life. Improves with repeated viewings.

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch) - Spent years analyzing and trying to make sense out of this movie. I only understood it upon giving up on my quest. My favorite Lynch movie.

Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Shunya Itō) - 70′s Meiko Kaji is a Goddess. A talent wasted in exploitation movies. Her eyes talk louder than all of the movies’s dialogue. This film is a Pink Women-in-Prison Japanese cheap thrill on surface, but the amount of symbolism and surrealism adds weight to a paper-thin plot. And the title song was borrowed to Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Truly one of my favorite movies ever.

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) - Soviet Propaganda? Yes. Compelling gut-wrenching story? Yes. Cinematic masterpiece? Yes. Regardless on how you feel about the topic, there is no question that the Odessa steps sequence is a work of art.

The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky) - Watch in on psychedelics, or don’t bother.

Heima (Dean deBlois) - A documentary about Sigur Rós’ return to Iceland. Even for people who are not fans of the band, the landscape is undeniably beautiful.

Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) - I am finding the latest Tarantino efforts to be a tad boring on repeated viewings. I usually love them when I see them on cinema, but then abandon them half-way when I try to watch them at home. But this one passed the home test, so it gets my thumbs up!

Disquiet (João Botelho) - Squeezing in a Portuguese movie due for national pride reasons. Not that I care much about those things. But I believe more people should watch this movie. The dialogue is lifted from my favorite poetry book, written by Fernando Pessoa. Heavy, dark, contemplative narrative.

Baraka (Ron Fricke) - There is a particular documentary style associated with both Ron Fricke and Godfrey Reggio that I find very appealing. Visual snapshots of people in their homelands. The silent contrast between traditional and modern. And the omnipresent feeling that all life is meaningless and mankind is a just a random occasion on a ball floating in space. Baraka is the best of all.

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa) - There is nothing in the World like Kurosawa’s samurai movies, and no better samurai than Toshiro Mifune. Rashomon rises above the other excellent Kurosawa movies by its symbolism and usage of light. A murder story told by four different characters. The truth is somewhere in between the lies.

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos) - A perverse tale of innocence and isolation.

Gomorra (Matteo Garrone) - Disturbing stories from Napoli’s crime underworld. Realistically shot, no sugar coating, no happy endings, no poetic criminals.

Kids (Larry Clark) - I had this one on VHS, a double feature that also included Trainspotting. Found memories attached to this movie, I saw the actors as a parallel to the kids in my street. Several of the participants in the movie are dead or living miserable lives nowadays. Just like the street kids from my youth.

A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes) - It is not easy to get into this director. And this is a psychological scarring movie. The audience is led to descend into madness like its main character.

Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch) - “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.”

Daisies (Vera Chytilová) - My most popular post for some reason. An excellent, imaginative, innovative, playful, senseless fun movie to watch.

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami) - A man’s quest to end his life. The ultimate taboo.

Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus) - Greek Mythology meets Brazilian Slum. A wonderful, poetic ending makes up for some dull parts in between. Excellent soundtrack!

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene) - Insane expressionist film with lovely painted backdrops that add a sense of depth and misdirection to its scenes. Timeless movie experience!

Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet) - Modern Fairy tale. Inspirational. Makes me want to enjoy life more.

Oldboy (Park Chan-Wook) - Part of the Vengeance trilogy, I picked Oldboy because I now realize that I haven’t seen Sympathy for Lady Vengeance again ever since I started this Tumblr. Both films are excellent tales of twisted revenge. Oldboy’s fight scene has inspired a generation of copycats.

Spring Summer Fall Winter... And Spring (Kim Ki-duk) - Episodes of the life of a Buddhist monk, from childhood to old age. The wheel of life and rebirth. As Buddhist as it gets.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam) - This got me into Hunter Thompson. There’s no such thing as too much drugs.

Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku) - A high school class is taken to a remote island and instructed to kill each other until only one survives. Classic 80′s video game plot, tickles the nostalgia bone just right without resolving to remakes and rehashes. Incredibly fun!

House (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi) - A horror movie, a comedy, a fever dream, an art-house lysergic extravaganza. Don’t know what to make of this movie, just that watching it is an amusing experience.

Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard) - I love all Anna Karina’s movies with Godard, so it’s hard to pick one. I went with Band of Outsiders because of its dance sequence. Godard had fun while experimenting with filming techniques, and this feeling is contagious to the audience.

Thanks for reading and sticking around.

#50 movies #yay me #movie recommendation

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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MARI RUTI IS a Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto. Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life is the first of two books she will publish in 2018. It’s her 11th overall, and the fifth since 2015 — which means that in the past three years alone, she has written about queer theory (in the Lambda Literary Award–nominated The Ethics of Opting Out), evolutionary psychology (The Age of Scientific Sexism), the Hollywood rom-com (Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman), all of which engage the Lacanian psychoanalysis at the core of her entire oeuvre.

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings is both consistent with that canon and stands apart. It shares with Ruti’s other work the disarming lucidity that characterizes her writing and teaching, and her insistence that critical theory ought to directly address the contours of lived experience. But whereas her previous work has often centered on mapping out the intellectual connections between heavyweight theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Žižek, Penis Envy combines philosophical and autobiographical explorations. It’s not so much theory being applied to the real world, but rather — in a similar vein to “autotheoretical” texts like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts — holding ideas and life alongside each other, searching out what she refers to as “the art of living.”

Penis Envy opens with Ruti’s memorable first encounter with the Freudian concept. Reading Freud when she was in college, Ruti found herself in such visceral disagreement with the idea of penis envy that she flung the book across the room and declared the foundational psychoanalyst “a fucking idiot.” Revisiting the concept now, she concedes that it’s worth rethinking penis envy in ways that reinterpret it as a precursor to feminist politics and culturally produced “bad feelings.” Ruti’s intellectually generous approach is one of “thinking out loud,” drawing candidly on her autobiography — her difficult childhood in Finland; the strain of being a woman in academia; her urgent relationship to writing — and weaving these episodes together with her theoretical reflections. Ruti invites the reader into a conversation about our common vulnerabilities, with the idea that naming them might go some way toward making them easier to bear.

Penis Envy, then, represents something of a turning point in Ruti’s career. Speaking with Ruti over email, our conversation centered on how this intellectual shift informed her writing process: the questions she feels compelled to revisit, the psychic risks and rewards of creativity, what it’s like to write “autotheory,” and the question of how best to actually sit down and write.

TAJJA ISEN AND PHILIP SAYERS: In the introduction, you frame Penis Envy as a way of revisiting the questions — self-fashioning, singularity, creativity, desire — that have been central to your earlier work. At this point, how would you distill the question of what preoccupies you? How has the approach you’ve taken in this book changed the way you think about these questions?

MARI RUTI: It seems to me that life, generally speaking, is a matter of repeatedly returning to what doesn’t quite feel “done.” That’s why the repetition compulsion — repeating hurtful patterns of behavior that aren’t conducive to our flourishing — was an important concept for Freud. He understood that what most fascinates humans, at least on the unconscious level, are their failures. Buried in this compulsion to return to the site of failure is the wish to make things right, to ensure that this time, we won’t make the same stupid mistake. But of course we usually do.

For me, writing has been a generative way of coping with this tendency to repeat. I discuss bad feelings, traumatization, and other painful experiences on the written page in the hope that this keeps me from repeating them in life. I’m not saying I’m always successful. But understanding that writing is always an unresolved process — that I’ll never be able to exhaust a topic — has helped me come to terms with the fact that the same is true of life, that there are no definitive solutions or easy fixes.

What has always most interested me is what one might loosely call “the art of living”: living the kind of life that feels meaningful. The themes you mention — self-fashioning, singularity, creativity, and desire — are all subsets of this theme. It continues to be my main preoccupation. In Penis Envy, I describe a scene where, in 2016, I was standing in front of a mirror in a Harvard bathroom and realized that nothing about the bathroom had changed since I finished graduate school in 2000. It was I who had changed. It was a moment of recognizing that more than half of my life is over. So now what? How am I going to live the rest of it in ways that feel alive? The personal approach that I took in writing this book has made this question all the more urgent.

Your writing in the past has sometimes used examples from your personal experience to illustrate the real-life relevance of theoretical concepts, but in this book, it’s not just that there’s more of the autobiographical element — it often feels like the “bits of memoir,” as you put it, are themselves generating the book’s argument. One way to think about this approach — and you talk about this — would be to call it “autotheory,” after writers like Paul Preciado and Maggie Nelson. But there’s also a longer history of writers doing similar things: for example, you’ve taught Maggie Nelson and Chris Kraus alongside Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin. Thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and even Freud could also be on that list. How would you locate your own work in relation to that tradition?

With this text, I explicitly set out to write an autotheoretical treatise. All the authors you mention have been foundational to my intellectual formation, and what I’ve always admired about them is their dexterity in weaving the personal into their theoretical or philosophical reflections. Without Freud and Nietzsche, I wouldn’t be who I am. But the author with whom I feel a special kinship is Roland Barthes, the Barthes of the 1970s who wrote beautifully personal books, such as A Lover’s Discourse and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. I was also drawn to Maggie Nelson’s style in The Argonauts. Yet somehow I wasn’t entirely ready to produce something like that. The lucidity of my writing style — all my years of striving to stay pedagogical — got in the way; I wasn’t able to replicate her more elusive style. Moreover, it felt important to develop a distinctive voice of my own: what came out was a hybrid text that contains bits of memoir, along with a great deal of theoretical reflection and cultural critique.

As a kind of flip side to that question: you’re often especially critical of thinkers for whom there’s a real split between their radical theoretical positions and their privileged way of life. You give the example of a prestigious academic complaining that his hotel isn’t nice enough right before delivering a lecture critiquing neoliberal capitalism. Priyamvada Gopal has used the term “critique-washing” to describe this kind of thing: being vitriolic in your critique of hegemonic systems as a way to mask the fact that you benefit from those same systems. In contrast, you’re extremely upfront about this uneasy sense of complicity. How do you negotiate that dilemma in your writing?

I admit that, in recent years, my pet peeve with my field — progressive critical theory, defined here loosely as a mixture of continental philosophy, French poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory — has been its tendency to produce theoretical positions that sound radical and cool but are in fact completely unlivable. It’s like there’s this race to be on the cutting edge of the most extreme position conceivable. Yet most of the critics writing these treatises lead relatively normative, and often extremely privileged, lives.

But, frankly, intellectual generosity is a more comfortable style for me. Somehow I lost track of this around 2015, when I staged vicious critiques of some of the very colleagues from whom I’ve learned the most. I regret having done this: it’s not my place to tell anyone how to theorize. Still, in my own writing, I try to stick to ideas that I can live by. I like critical models that have real-life relevance.

One way in which this book seems especially current has to do with your critique of the crushing expectations that heteropatriarchy puts on women (to be adept in “the masquerade of femininity,” to be emotionally intelligent and sensitive to men’s supposed deficiencies), and the way that it lets men off the hook. A lot of feminist responses to talk of “the redistribution of sex” and “enforced monogamy” have made a similar point. Do you have a sense of why this disparity seems to be especially prevalent today?

This disparity has existed for a long time. And feminists have always complained about it. But now the problem has hit the collective consciousness of our society in ways that are making waves. If we stick to the North American context, one of the root causes of the problem is what I call “the gender obsession disorder”: the stubborn insistence on a clear-cut distinction between men and women. At the core of this disorder is the assumption that men are “naturally” more sexual than women and that women are “naturally” more emotional than men. Consequently, women end up doing more emotional labor because they’re expected to automatically know how to handle it — even though they have in reality had to go through a coercive process of social conditioning to gain the emotional intelligence that they may possess. Men, on the other hand, aren’t expected to pull their weight because they’re assumed to be incapable of emotional labor, like they’re expected to be incapable of doing the dishes without breaking your favorite plate. Sex, on the other hand, is supposedly “their” domain and the male sex drive is portrayed as a force of nature that’s in constant need of satisfaction. And depriving men of this satisfaction is presented as a betrayal of their inalienable rights.

Perhaps the most controversial chapter of my book has to do with the ways in which straight women are pressured to put up with their partners’ online porn consumption. I’m not making an argument about the morality of pornography or suggesting that it should be censored. I’ve always been a “pro-sex” feminist. But I think that we have reached a point where we have to admit that not all forms of sexuality are emancipatory. Most heteroporn, which is produced by multinational corporations, is a tool of what Foucault calls biopolitical conditioning: it teaches men that sex is — and should be — available to them at the click of the mouse. And if their girlfriend complains, too bad for her. She’s immediately labeled prudish, uptight, or anti-sex. So this is a situation where heteropatriarchy has reinvented itself to guarantee that men get what they want whereas what women want — in this case, porn-free sex lives — is deemed irrelevant.

Online heteroporn has changed the sex lives of millions of people, and while there are obviously women who happily participate in the phenomenon, my sense is that the change has been mostly at their expense. Not only does it make many women feel terrible about themselves when their partner prefers online porn to sex with them; women are also deprived of sex. The idea that women don’t need sex as much as men is a heteropatriarchal myth. And now that so many men are getting their sexual needs met online, women are left in the painful position of not knowing what to do with their sexuality. One option would be to join the porn consumers. But much of what’s available on the internet isn’t exactly female friendly. This is a topic that needs to explode on the social level, and soon, because it’s becoming too big a problem to hide. Too many women who are upset about it are afraid to complain. I think it’s high time to start complaining, and loudly.

One argument that emerges a few times in the book is the idea that, whereas consumerism is capitalism’s way of harnessing our desire for its own gain, writing (or creativity more broadly) can be a healthier or more authentic way for us to deal with our innate sense that we’re lacking creatures. Sheila Heti recently wrote a great piece in which she pointed out that shopping and writing are similar ways of articulating yourself by choosing things — products or words — but the way they make her feel is different in the end. Shopping makes her feel anxiety, and it’s never satisfying: as soon as what she’s ordered arrives, it loses its allure. But writing is more satisfying — maybe partly because it doesn’t promise once-and-for-all gratification of our desire. Our sense is that you’d agree with this. Why is writing a better way of responding to our lack and desire?

I agree with Sheila Heti. The most succinct way to explain the matter is through Jacques Lacan, who gives us two relevant concepts, namely that we’re all beings of lack and that we’re all filled with what he calls jouissance, an excess of drive energy. Lack causes desire and jouissance demands an outlet. Consumerism seems to offer a solution to both problems: you buy stuff to fill the void within your being and you exhaust yourself in the process. But usually the satisfaction that this brings doesn’t last. Writing, in contrast, gives you an endless resource for coping with both lack and jouissance. It doesn’t fill your lack in any definitive way, but words have a way of easing that sense of emptiness. And writing is an effective means of burning off excess energy: it both augments jouissance and consumes it so that it becomes more manageable. I don’t know about Sheila, but I feel the least anxious — the most “at home” with myself — when I’m writing. Both lack and excess jouissance recede so that there is space to just “be.”

Penis Envy is very critical of contemporary versions of love and romance. We were surprised by what felt like a dialing-back on the descriptions of love from The Singularity of Being. We’ve already touched on how writing and other acts of creativity provide a more reliable source of fulfillment. But do we always have to think of the two as separate? What if we think of love as a form of creativity — could it become something that might “enrich our existence” as sustainably as those artistic activities?

What may seem like a shift in my thinking about love is due to the fact that in Penis Envy I use a Foucauldian (biopolitical) lens to analyze love as a commercial enterprise whereas in my earlier books — such as The Singularity of Being — my lens was primarily Lacanian, with the result that my emphasis was on the transformative power of love, on what Alain Badiou calls the amorous event. I still believe in the amorous event. And I appreciate your idea that love can be a form of creativity, a form of artistic activity — an important part of “the art of living” that interests me. Your way of articulating the matter is one way to comprehend what Badiou means when he talks about staying faithful to the amorous event.

It’s true that one reason I thought that you might not like all aspects of the book is that I know that you’re in an exceptionally fulfilling and sustaining relationship. But my goal isn’t to disenchant love. It’s just that in Penis Envy, I examine how capitalism manages to turn love into a commodity, into the kind of “romance” that’s supposed to be safe and controllable. This, for me, is the very antithesis of the amorous event.

You’re very forthcoming in the book — generously, helpfully so — about your attachment to your “personal creation myth” and the fact that, as much as you might criticize the performance principle and the “good life,” you’ve also chosen productivity as a way of being. How do you balance the necessity of writing to live, and writing that brings with it ever more pressures to perform? Do you ever just want to withdraw from your professional obligations and merely write for writing’s sake?

My “personal creation myth” — the story of rising from the ashes that forms the backbone of the personal narrative that drives the text — is the thorniest part of the book. On the one hand, I’m critical of the American dream as an ideological ruse that places responsibility on individuals to succeed and brutally blames those who fall behind for not trying hard enough or performing well enough. This dream ignores the social inequalities that prevent many people from carving out livable lives for themselves. On the other hand, I can’t deny that the trajectory of my life has fallen within the parameters of the American dream: I grew up poor, in a house without running water, with parents who worked in low-paying and soul-slaying jobs, yet somehow I made my way to my current blessed life. There’s a lot of guilt I carry about this because I know that I was given the kinds of opportunities — such as a scholarship to Brown University — that my parents never had. So when I think of it, I cry, and I’m not sure if I’m crying because I made it, or because they couldn’t. And when I look at the ways in which many Americans are damaged by racism and other social impediments, I don’t know what to do. The one place where I feel I can perhaps make a difference is in the classroom, where I discuss structural social problems.

I’m extremely lucky that usually I get to write for writing’s sake. After my first book — which started as my dissertation — most of my writing hasn’t been out of professional obligation. So my “productivity” in the context of writing is more a matter of a personal compulsion: books sort of just leap out of me. They press on me. And they come out at different frequencies. I’ve written some strictly academic books, but I’ve also written “crossover” books — books that are aimed at both academic and mainstream readers. Penis Envy falls into this category.

The hard part is to ensure that the other obligations that are part of my job as a professor don’t close up the space of writing. There are long stretches when I can’t write because I have to attend to countless other demands. But when I hit a period when I’m free to write, I withdraw from the rest of life almost completely because the time for writing feels so precious.

Throughout the book, you offer a complex portrait of your relationship to the act of writing — as productivity, as pathology, and as living itself. You also suggest various conditions that make writing possible: cutting ties that feel “opaque,” decluttering one’s living space, forgetting the weight of the past. It was a surprising but illuminating moment when you admitted that only when you wrote those words — “lucidity, uncluttering, paring down” — did you see the connection between your life philosophy and your writing style. Now that you’ve found that connection, could you say more about this link between writing and paring down?

It was a surprising moment for me as well to realize that there’s a connection between my minimalist lifestyle and my lucid writing style. This realization made me even more determined to get rid of murkiness: no more ambiguous relationships; no more excess consumption of anything; no more clutter; and no more pining for a better life than the one I have because my life is better than I could ever have imagined. Giving up these other pursuits — and sequestering myself in an apartment with no internet access — creates space for writing, which, for me, for some enigmatic reason, feels like the key to my singular art of living.

Tajja Isen is a writer and voice actor. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications such as BuzzFeed, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, The Globe and Mail, and Catapult, where she is also a contributing editor.

Philip Sayers is a PhD candidate in English and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

The post Ideas to Live by: A Conversation with Mari Ruti appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2tVnw7i

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

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peculiarvernacular · 6 years

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8 Fictions (and 4 Non)

12 more of my favourite reads in no particular order.

1. Steppenwolf - by Hermann Hesse

Harry Haller is Der Steppenwolf, a depressed and suicidal outsider in his own bourgeois society, until a beautiful dancer and her handsome friend “re-introduces” Harry to himself and teaches him a thing or two about how to embrace life, warts and all. Hesse is known for his writings on spirituality (Siddharta, Glass Bead Game) and this meta-physical work is essentially about self-realisation, and suggests the need to fully inhabit yourself as a prerequisite of contentment and peace.

2. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

“Here I am, Here I am, Here I am!

So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are!”

In this sprawling intergalactic caper involving a Saturnian moon, space (and time) travel, and a Martian invasion, Vonnegut casts his satirical eye over organised religion, free will, and the illusion of choice; concluding that man’s only logical response to the insanity of existence is, of course, love.

3. Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

I was so smitten by 1984 that I was hungry for more George, and having already read Animal Farm this one seemed the next best choice. I was not to be disappointed. A story about a young man racked by feelings of failure and inadequacy is also, as is the norm for George, an astute observation about politics and society, in this case capitalism and middle-class anxiety. Despite the slight odiousness of main character Gordon Comstock, Orwell treats his characters with sympathy and humour, inviting empathy over criticism, in the process nudging readers towards recognizing, and accepting, their own flaws and insecurities.

4. Women by Charles Bukowski

A visceral read, as I found myself gasping at the bawdy descriptions of Henry Chinaski’s sexual escapades, who at the age of 50 suddenly finds himself a famous poet and a lothario whose goal is to “fuck a 18 year old when I’m 80″. It sounds paradoxical to say, but despite the misogyny, abuse, and violence, I did get an inkling of real vulnerability and feeling in Chinaski for his women (and his women for him), absent in say, Celeste Price (of Tampa by Alissa Nutting) or even Humbert Humbert of Lolita.

5. This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

A collection of short stories about love, lust, and sacrifice is also about immigration, displacement, and being Dominican in America, a running theme in Diaz’s work. Like Oscar Wao the Spanish/English prose is taut, realistic, and brutally effective, an absolutely essential read for anyone who has yet to discover the delights of Diaz. Or just anyone, really.

6. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Solaris is a planet. Or is it? This cult 1961 sci-fi classic has since been adapted into a film twice, first by Andrei Tarkovsky in the 70′s and then in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. The setting is dark and claustrophobic, main protagonist Kris Kelvin paranoid and sinking into delusion just like Snow and Sartorius (the only other occupants of the space station orbiting Solaris), as he deals with ultra-realistic, persistent apparitions of his dead ex-wife Rheya. More Kubrick-esque psychological festering than white-knuckle Ridley Scott thrill, Solaris may not be your typical sci-fi adventure, but it was hugely visionary for its’ time and no small influence on the space sci-fi genre in general [see also Arrival (film)].

7. The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

A writer whose sardonic, side-splitting prose reminds me of Junot Diaz, not just because their work is mostly grounded in humanist issues of race, identity, and culture, but also because they are such astute chroniclers of contemporary America. An especially crucial read in the political and cultural landscape of today, The White Boy Shuffle is a satirical reminder, often LOL funny, of what we already knew: that regardless of what we look like, where we come from, or what we identify as, we all just want the same things. Namely to be a genius poet, basketball superstar, and to enjoy mail-order marital bliss. Well, that and not getting shot, basically.

8. Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Some say it is the greatest love story ever told, because it is a tale of true unconditional love. As a young man, Florentino Ariza falls madly in love with Fermina Daza, but is thwarted as Fermina instead marries the affable and well-respected Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Even after having a lifetime of obstacles thrown in his way, Ariza’s love for Fermina not only persists, but becomes his defining life purpose. Pure fantasy of course, but so endearing, believable, and quintessentially Marquez.

9. Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

My first Sagan book but most certainly not my last. Like most people I am fascinated by humanity’s second oldest question: Are we alone? Carl certainly doesn’t think so and I agree with him. What’s most important about Carl’s work however, isn’t his postulations on space-faring civilizations, the viability of space travel, or a colonization of Mars; rather it is his lamentations on the state of humanity in the wider context of our place in the Universe, our “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam”, and how we treat it and each other, that is the real lesson.

10. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

Loneliness. The bane of human existence. A modern malaise. In this semi-diaristic book Laing seeks to address the universal and persistent problem of loneliness and isolation through the lives and work of some of contemporary art’s most enigmatic names such as Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz, and how they sought to exorcise the debilitation through their art. A most enlightening and comforting read, whether or not you think of yourself as a lonely person.

11. The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton

A book I didn’t know I needed, as a fun holiday purchase turns out to be my veritable bible. Alain is the founder of The School of Life, an online “school” of philosophy, and this book is a neat introduction to the work of some of Western civilization’s most eminent philosophers such as Socrates, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. De Botton cuts through their often inscrutable writing and proposes a simpler way of looking at their philosophies, that is, by first identifying what kinds of problems they were trying to address, whether it be not having enough money, feeling hopelessly inadequate, or being heart-broken in love. The result is a lucid, concise, and often funny book that is infinitely re-readable, and makes an excellent gift.

12. The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Trekking through the Himalayas in the 70′s with his biologist friend George Schaller and a ragtag band of sherpas, Matthiessen’s search is as much for blue sheep and snow leopards as it is for personal redemption, as he experiences epiphany upon epiphany in this brutal yet wondrous landscape. So beautifully written is this book that many times I only had to close my eyes to “feel” the icy cold on my face; or to “see” the wisps of wind blowing crystal snows off the peaks of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, and it became easy to imagine the deep spirituality and transcendence that Matthiessen so vividly describes. I will leave you with three of my favourite passages from the book, which given the context, is quite possibly the most memorable collection of words I have ever read:

“The wind blows snow from pristine points that glisten in the light, and there are magic colours in the clouds that sail across the peaks on high blue journeys”

“The sun is roaring. It fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond comprehension, and once again the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air - the Earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”

“I long to let go, to drift free of things, to accumulate less, depend on less, to move more simply.”

Until next time, happy reading!

#fictions #mind selfies #books #novels #literature

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che-ck-your-self · 7 years

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Like the brain, a book of secret connections This is not the standard walk through the facts of brain science that transits the hierarchy from molecules to brain in logical order. Rather, this book strikes me as an elaborate exercise based on the idea that talking about neuroscience is discussing a system that is trying to understand itself. The brain is the central entity that gives structure to reality, so this is the branch of science that is closest to a first-person perspective. Probably because of that, the topics presented are always punctuated by the author’s own peculiar intellectual itinerary and a disregard for traditional discipline boundaries, to the point that it is hard for moments to disentangle scientific knowledge from the collaborations and circumstances that generate it. Go to Amazon

Five Stars Wonderfull essay! Go to Amazon

Beautifully written, does not water down the deep issues and dilemmas. In matters of psychology and how the brain works, everybody has opinions based on nothing but anecdotes. Sigman is one of the grand practitioners of understanding how the mind actually works from careful and masterfully thought-out experiments. With this tiny book, Sigman demonstrates that he is not just one of the great scientists of the field, but also a lucid expositor who makes the intricacies and pitfalls of the subject. Highly recommended reading for anyone who wants to get past the "psych for the masses" into understanding the real problems and dilemmas. Go to Amazon

Conversational Writing The first thing I did when I chose this book was obtain a copy of the author's TED Talk. It set up the book beautifully. Mariano Sigman offers insights on the brain and it's mysteries in a conversational, easy to read style. I never felt lectured, and at times I felt quite entertained. I think that what I most appreciated was the many anecdotes used to illustrate and prove the points made by the author. I could tell The Secret Life of the Mind was well researched, and in my opinion very well written. I could definitely see it as a book discussion selection, as I find myself referncing it quite frequently in conversation and recommending it to others. Go to Amazon

This is a great beautifully written book that illuminates the latest discoveries of ... This is a great beautifully written book that illuminates the latest discoveries of Neuroscience in a very personal and anecdotical way. This thanks to the fact that the author is a well known researcher telling the story of his own discoveries and collaborations. One amazing example explaining the relationship between brain and mind is how very often the brain detects events before the minds is conscious of them. Only modern neuroscience and its technological improvements makes this possible. The book furthermore has a long discussion about learning in infants and bilingualism, which I was particularly fond of given that my toddler is learning 4 languages! Go to Amazon

This is how to be taught and learn about the "Why's" and the "Hows" we choose to do something. One of the most informative books on what goes on inside our mind. Go to Amazon

but pretty clear and precise in its will to make the ... Not the first book I read on this topic, but pretty clear and precise in its will to make the brain as clear as possible. Some things I knew some other I didn't so it was a pleasure to read it. Go to Amazon

#and Decides: Mariano Sigman: 9780316549622: Amazon.com: Books

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high-lady-of-dreams · 7 years

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(I read the Swedish version of the drama, the other cover is the English version with Caryl Churchills interpretation)

I haven´t read anything by August Strindberg before, but growing up in Sweden it´s completely impossible not being raised into knowing and believing he is one of the greatest authors coming from this long, northern country of ours. In the context and on the topic of his words, it feels impossible not starting to formulate your sentences with more metaphors, with more angst and drama and with just more than you normally would. You almost unconsciously know you should respect him and that his work is something which we should appreciate and bow before.

Now, I have some mixed opinions on this after finally getting a taste of my own, but I´m choosing to leave it for my future review on Miss Julie, where I´m already suspicioning I will have a long debate ahead of me to try to type out.

But for now, the Dream.

I haven´t started reading Miss Julie yet, but I´ve watched the recording of it played by Bibi Andersson and Thommy Berggren from 1969 in class the other week. While, once again, that tragedy certainly caused some knots to inflict themselves in my otherwise quite clear view of Strindberg, just hearing the language, the old and dramatic that some consider pretentious and ostentatious, put a kind of spell on me and I found it was exactly the type of words that I like. The type of words that don´t just make me love the story, but it makes me love the story and the dialog and each and every little word and this passage and that. It makes me appreciate words and it makes me want to make my own.

So when the copy of Miss Julie given to me from school also included A Dream Play, I got a whim this Sunday to maybe just try reading it. I didn´t really want to take a break from reading Strange the Dreamer (apparently April weather is making me want nothing but dreams) but something in me just wanted to see more. I wanted to hear more, see if that thing bothering me in Miss Julie would continue and more importantly, I wanted more of his beautifully put words that (even if this sounds like a drama in itself) reminded me how beautiful my mother tongue can be.

So, down I sat, book and coffee in hand. I thought that maybe it was going to be too hard, the language too old and complicated to be available for someone like me. I also thought that even if it is, what is the worst thing that can happen? So in I went – and let me tell you, the dream swallowed me whole and kept me for one long sitting until it was finished.

A Dream Play, is written in a form that revolutionized the idea of how dramas can be created and played and it certainly surprised – not to mention confused – me when reading. There is structure, but it´s constantly moving and it flows in and out of different scenes. At one point I found myself flicking back and forth a few pages, realizing the scene and the characters had morphed into something else and left me without any clue as to when this actually happened. It made me a little annoyed the first couple times it occurred, I felt like I just wasn´t getting it, but then I realized that is the exact point. It´s all a dream, and just like our dreams it flowed in and out and it made things turn into new things without making any sense or being logical at all. At one point you´re following the officer and then the lawyer takes over and at one point the oak tree is just a tree, then in the next, it has conveniently turned into a coat hanger and I almost want to laugh because while reading, this all made perfect sense. When explaining it afterward, it sounds like complete nonsense, but in the moment, it was logical and clear and it really is like trying to explain a dream.

Not only has Strindberg managed to replicate the lucid nature of dreaming, he is also using plenty of symbols and there´s many dialogues and lines where I was smiling at how brilliantly – how cleverly – you can formulate words and sentences.

There is one quite known one where I actually had to just pause and appreciate it, and it goes something like this:

A blind man asks a boy why the sea is salt, the boy replies saying it´s because sailors cry so much. The man goes on to ask why the sailors cry so much and the boy replies and says it´s because they have to go away from home for very long, which is why they dry their handkerchiefs on the masthead. Finally, the blind man asks why people cry when they are sad. The boy replies, “That’s because they have to wash the glasses of their eyes so they can see better.”

*swoons*

Finally, we are led to realize the whole thing has been a dream of the character “the Daugther” also known as Agnes. We also find out that she is actually the Daughter of Indra, who according to Indian folktale is the god who sent his daughter to earth so she could see how the humans are living.

It all wraps up and as you get closer and closer towards the end of the drama things get clearer and clearer. You realize it´s all a dream and it all ends in fire, as well as the constantly growing fairytale castle stopping to bloom its giant chrysanthemum crown.

It kept me locked down, completely submerged in this state of dreaming, and waking I find I want to see more.

5/5 stars.

Review: A Dream Play by August Strindberg (I read the Swedish version of the drama, the other cover is the English version with Caryl Churchills interpretation)

#a dream play #august strindberg #book review #Classics #drama #ett drömspel #review #theatre

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