Merry Christmas, boys and girls! What did Santa get you this year? A lump of coal? 2009′s been a year like that. But I must have been very good because I got a bunch of stuff that’s really awesome. And I have come to share! Looky! I got:
12 Drummers drumming in a feelgood (ish) festive bakers dozen dancealong mix tape!
Er, what on earth is up with Shammi’s face? It must be the subterranean lifestyle.
Damn, that moon place sure is groovy! The aliens need to look into better costume design though. This universal dependence on tinsel and aluminum is getting me down.
I want that hair! I WANT.
So, who among you has a soul so dead that you haven’t grooved to this track at least once? Not even in your childhood?
You think Shammi is the bootifool part of this song. But you’re wrong! The true beauty of this song is Mehmood in blackface and a sailor suit.
Aaaaand that’s what an ode to Laxmi Chhaya’s bosom looks like! Don’t thank me, thank Santa! Mera-wala bestest!
Whoa. So much awesome.
Watch Jeetendra have a fit! Watch! And watch Vinod Khanna disapprove! So hot.
Helen. The only person to ever face the full might of Feroze Khan’s insanity and win. That’s why there’ll only ever be one Helen.
Note to Sanjay Leela Bhansali: this is how you play statue. Bolly-style.
You know what I like about the 70s? They all made do with the same 5 or so steps and yet made it all look so amazingly different.
OMG.
That’s right. AB did it first. He did everything first!
11 or so Kapoor confessions
Oh, yes. I remember this ex-boyfriend very well. You want to stay away from that guy, Santa.
A decade worth of disco pants
Feliz Navidad right back at the Mexican wrestling team! I love their Bollywood work!
Thank you, Santa! I had the best time ever. My stocking is full but my heart’s even more so. Won’t you please let me know who you are? Beth the meanie won’t tell me and apparently all my guesses are wrong.
Wish you all a happier, improved 2010. See you all on the other side of the break. Love you all!
Are there any people out there who haven’t seen James Cameron’s Avatar yet? Well, you five contrarians can skip this post unless you like spoilers. Although really, if you have an internet connection, chances are you’ve already stumbled across tons of people orgasming on their blogs or tweets or columns or what-have-you after watching the movie, so what the hell, you might as well read this one too.
Because Avatar is an event. In fact, it is an Event. It’s as though Cameron watched a Disney movie, one of those old-fashioned hand-drawn pieces of art, and thought to himself, “You know what would make this better? If we upped the violence and the romance and made the animals terrifying and killed and bombed a bunch of people and stuff and were somehow able to drop the audience into the middle of it so that they felt as though they were experiencing it in person. That would kick fucking Bambi’s ass so hard!”
And you know what? It totally does. Avatar is a triumph of the imagination. It throws open a door, illumining a visual corridor that most of us didn’t even know existed or was even possible. As VS Naipaul likes to say:
[A] lot of the novels being written in our own time, how intelligent and amusing, do not have any lasting power. They do not have that tension, that convincingness of what is absolutely new. They are novels written by people who have too many models, and possibly the same thing is true of the cinema, which is a fair comparison. The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
Or to put it more succinctly, the problem facing art forms today is: “None of you can be first. But all of you can be next…”
What Cameron, with the help of Peter Jackson and the folks at Weta Digital, has done is to find a way to be first. Any way you count, that is a remarkable achievement. As Eminem says, “kids nowadays are so used to seeing crazy shit, there’s so much crazy weird shit on the Internet, it’s certainly getting harder to shock people.” Art is not always about shocking people but it is always about prompting a response. And it’s gotten progressively harder to get people to think about cinema.
But no matter how gamed out you are, no matter what you have seen or what you like to watch, Twitter-effect or no, the incredible freshness of the Avatar experience works as a palette cleanser. It’s impossible to walk out of the theater thinking, “Yawn, not this shit again.” And that newness of it is what has gotten people talking. In sharp contrast to the other movies released this year, Avatar and its status as a possible Oscar contender is driving the conversation, even outside of the usual niche awards monitoring sites that spring up around this time every year, with an energy and focus that I haven’t seen since I started paying attention (which admittedly is a mere blip in time compared to most others).
The only glitch in what should have been a moment of surpassing triumph is that Avatar isn’t a very good movie. I suppose you could call it a passable movie, but if you took it out of 3D and put it on celluloid, I can’t help but feel it’d be the kind of thing we’d all be chuckling about for days (not that we aren’t already).
Others have expressed their opinions – where the movie succeeds spectacularly and where it falls flat (that is possibly my favorite Stephanie Zacharek review bar none) with equal intensity – and I really have very little to add to those. But it is the conversations that this movie has provoked among folks at large in the past week or so that have really fascinated me. Or should I say, disturbed me?
Baradwaj Rangan’s mixed review, for instance, prompted this comment that left me with a funny feeling in my tummy:
Give it a rest for once and take in the world you are immersed in….this is NOT a film that requires a solid script with depth…whatever story/script there is is good enough to guide you thorugh the director’s vision…anything more complex will have taken the focus away from it.
(emphasis mine) You’ll find more than one person espousing those views, not just in Rangan’s comment section but across the internet, but it was the last line of that particular comment that really gave me pause. Was that person talking for himself or was he speaking on behalf of a larger majority that is now simply not prepared to handle two things at once?
In a Lincoln Center discussion of Ishtar (the most expensive movie of its day at a princely $30 million – which is less than one-tenth the cost of Avatar in case you’re still calculating numbers that don’t mean squat to you) with Mike Nichols, its director Elaine May said:
[L]ook how quickly we all get used to eating shit… We get used to it very fast. We get used to skim milk very fast. Whole milk tastes like cream. We adapt very quickly to being treated very badly…[Y]ou have to remember most movies are made for 16-year-old boys. Maybe that’s changing, but 16-year-old boys have truly had a poor education. Really the point is that people want to make too much money.
And with Cameron, we’re not even talking about just American 16-year-olds. We’re talking about the 16-year-old’s parents on a date night. Their 15-year-old sisters and their friends. It’s the kind of mega-movie that “better make sense in Kerala as well as Kansas” as Mary HK Choi writes in her love letter to it.
Maybe there really is no intelligent way to do that. Maybe a movie like Avatar is now by definition a movie that you watch for the pretty pictures and awesome sound and leave your brain at home with a babysitter. With the right perspective, even The Lord of the Rings is a just movie about people walking endlessly.
Which is why I find it interesting that the story Cameron chose as universally translatable and instantly relatable is one infused with the white man savior complex. No matter how in tune with their world the Na’avi might be, as Mary Bustillos writes:
It still takes a white man to tame the really BIG dragon, and to outfox the enemy. He will also take the “best” woman, the noblest, the highest born, the smartest, whose token resistance will dwindle its sorry way from faux-contempt to near-drooling adoration in a matter of days. Her former man will die, and her father will, too; her whole civilization will lie in ruins. She will pretty much get down on her knees to thank this white man.
It shocks me that this aspect of Avatar doesn’t trouble more people. Or would it be more correct to say that it shocks me that it doesn’t seem to have occurred at all to a great many people? Is that because this is a trope that has seeped so deep into our subconscious that we don’t even notice it any more or have we gotten so accustomed to our steady diet of tripe that most of us have simply given up on analyzing the meaning of the visuals unspooling in front of us? We’ve been going on a slow march towards the popular view that intelligence is elitist, but has the mere act of thinking at all now become too elitist to indulge in polite company?
Maybe it’s just a simple ignorance of the strong parallels Avatar draws to the genocide of Native Americans. Writing about “the white guilt fantasy“, Annalee Newitz notes:
These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside…Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode…When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.
As the chatter builds for Avatar as a possible Best Picture contender or even outright winner come Oscar time, it strikes me as absurd. Yes, Avatar has opened a door for the human imagination and the technical detail is amazing. But as a movie? Really? Avatar is your best movie of the year, dated slang and outdated wheelchairs and all?
And then I read this comment on the slang post: “The movie was well written. I’d rather have a movie with good writing all around than one with a few memorable catch phrases here and there.” I had half a hope that it was Wonkette-style facetiousness until I remembered that Titanic anointed Cameron king of the world.
James Cameron clearly knows what he’s doing, and much as I’m awed by his technical skills that fact alone makes me hope that he won’t get the grand prize for this story. I’m glad I went to watch Avatar. Like I said, it was an Event. Those are fun. I’m even more glad I took my brain with me. I wouldn’t even know what “fun” is without it.
Oh great, yet another one: when you’re handed a long-ass list of TV shows and you’ve seen more of them than you care to admit. I distinctly remember having a life and living it, but then I look at this list and I have no idea how.
Bold all of the following TV shows which you’ve ever seen 3 or more episodes of in your lifetime.
Italicize a show if you’re positive you’ve seen every episode of it.
Highlight new additions with an Underline.
Now here’s the thing, there are some shows that I’m positive I’ve seen every single episode of – because they had limited runs or were on endless repeats and thus I’m as sure as anybody not actually working on those shows can be that I’ve seen them all – but there are a couple of shows that I’m sort of sure I’ve watched till my retinas bled but am open to the possibility that I might have missed one or two due to reasons of living this thing called life. So I’ve marked those with an asterisk.
As mentioned earlier, I’ve been hoarding the fabulosity my Secret Filmi Santa has been sending my way, but this was simply too good for me pass up. Observe what took place on the 9th day of Christmas!
1…A 1-2-3-4! (Break dance! Break dance! Just fyi.)
2… Fab Musicians! (Yes, that’s two violins at once bishes!)
3… Perplexed Men (My Santa has good taste – Shobhana ftw!)
4… It’s almost the Wiggles (But really it’s “Styley”)
You know what I like? I like it when I find out other people share my strangeness. Here’s the always amazing Mindy Kaling in the New York Times about make-believe families:
[S]ince I was little, I’ve pictured countless different versions of that family. The weirdest things will make me dream up an entirely new version. When I’m watching television and I see an ad for a hotel chain where “kids eat free.” Photo frames that have a fake picture of a family inside them already. Driving by Sizzler.
[...] Alex and I lived in Hancock Park — a hip Los Angeles neighborhood — and I loved him so much that I was in a perpetual state of grinning. The kids were, I don’t know, kids. Really cute, etc. I have less experience with cute kids than I do with cute guys, so I’m not able to describe them as well, but trust me — super cute.
The problem with being a writer of romance and romantic situations is that my capacity for creating and believing in fantasy is huge.
Oh, my God! Mindy totally snuck into my room one night and planted a thought-reading chip in my brain, didn’t she? Where is the bloody tinfoil?! Give me the tinfoil!
Seriously. I’m not a writer of romance per se – although I’d argue most writers have tangled with romance at some point to some degree and as such I definitely qualify – but I am a Bollywood watcher and my disbelief has been suspended so far, it’s now floating somewhere in space, looking for a new home.
So while I remain unconvinced about the possibility of getting married at all or having children some day, this fantasy of the life I will someday lead sounds extremely familiar. Real life people never touch off the impulse in me even though I’ve been lucky enough to meet a number of couples who clearly have something better than good going on between them in spite of their unique challenges (and all of them have experienced significant ones – a thing that makes me admire their coupledom even more).
But I watch a scene from a film or an ad on TV or a billboard or a snatch of prose – and immediately, I’m spinning a tale around it. I’m Martha Stewart running an empire from my kitchen; I’m Oprah Winfrey talking people into building my mega-millions; my eye sight has improved to the point where I regularly knit the most marvelous outfits for the people I love without once throwing up and collapsing for a week; I nonchalantly cook seven course meals on a whim with the leftovers in my fridge without burn marks and bandaids sprouting all over my hand; I’m the parent that every teacher runs from at my kids’ school… show me something and give me two seconds to improvise. I’ll have an entire life laid out.
So of course I’m a committed baby-namer and have names all picked out for my future non-existent children that I’m not sure I want. Multiple ones, even. Sorry if you had plans, future non-existent husband that I’m not sure I want! Maybe we can insert a middle name or something as long as it goes with the totally amazing names I’ve already decided upon. And sorry also to the future non-existent babies I’m not sure I want if they had ideas about gender or the order in which they plan to make an appearance – I’ve already drawn up a plan and all you really need to do is show up as requested.
What’s that you say, Mindy?
When I started remembering that this fake family was fake, I started missing them. By the Centinela exit on I-10, I had depressed myself, and nothing had even really happened. Oldie Christmas music was playing on the radio, which made me feel even sadder, and I started to cry.
Well. Okay, so I’ve never cried over my fantasy family’s fakeness. But I have cried real tears over the imagined terrible things that are going to happen to them. I guess I should mention that my fantasy families are all tragedies. Terrible ones. My future non-existent husband and babies should be glad I’m not sure I want them.
I know, right? Why bother to make up an imaginary family if you’re going to blow them up, murder them, break them apart, perish in airplanes, etc?
Well, if it made sense it wouldn’t be strange, now would it?
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee (C.R.A.Z.Y.), The Young Victoria is a movie with a lot of charm. This is, of course, rather bad news for its makers (producers include Martin Scorsese and Sarah Ferguson) because charm went out of fashion in Hollywood a very long time ago, but it’s good news for those of us who enjoy a well turned out period romance to perk us up.
“Some of us are more fortunate than others,” observes a sober young Victoria (Emily Blunt), Princess of Kent as she dwells upon a childhood that appears to be anything but. Although she lives a life of luxury, it is also one of great restriction: the young princess does not attend school, have playmates, read popular novels, eat without having her food tasted first, sleep alone or even walk down the stairs without having an adult lead her down by the hand. She’s a conservatively dressed Mariah Carey who does not sing (although she is actually pissed about the whole hand holding thing).
Having established her extraordinary upbringing, The Young Victoria immediately makes her relatable through the simple means of an entertainingly (for us) awkward dinner celebrating the birthday of her paternal uncle, King William of England, to whom she is heir. As the subsequent scene takes place, no less a personage than the Duke of Wellington is made to mouth a disparaging groan about the nature of families.
This trick of balancing the public and private, the relatable as well as the unfathomable, is one that writer Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) does marvelously well. Victoria is by turns the budding monarch with an iron will that we’ve all read about and an unsure young woman charting tricky waters, both personal and political, from which she has been shielded all her life.
“You’re a china doll,” Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), the comptroller of her mother’s household and her would-be controller, snarls at her.
“Then I must smash,” she rages back at him for the years she spent locked away from the world.
Smash she does and the man she chooses to put her back together is Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Rupert Friend). A cousin on her maternal side, the impecunious Albert is chosen by their mutual uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, to cement his hold on the British throne via marriage to Victoria. In a neat reversal of traditional roles that subtly underscores Victoria’s inherent difference in status from other young ladies, it is Albert who worries about his conversation, her tastes, and his lack of dancing skills as he is painstakingly tutored on what books she likes to read, her favorite composers and so on, in an effort to present himself as the ideal mate to the woman who would one day rule over an empire that circled the globe.
Determined not to marry to please her family, the quietly rebellious Victoria soon finds in him her only friend in spite of their hilariously inauspicious beginning as Albert tries entirely too hard before relaxing into his real, adorably dorky self.
The young couple’s navigation of life amongst the push and pull of international politics, palace intrigue, Albert’s need to be something more than a gigolo with a fancy title and Victoria’s jealous guarding of her authority even as they forge a relationship that neither was too keen to embark upon in the first place… it’s all very charming.
Perhaps even a little too charming. Although a thoroughly pleasant experience, what struck me at the end was the almost complete absence of dramatic tension. Everybody is just so nice.
Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) is presented early on as a possible rival for Victoria’s affections, a politician willing perhaps to even seduce the naive young princess in a bid to control the throne. He ends up counseling her to recognize the worth of her admirable young husband. Conroy builds the heat a fraction by actually manhandling Victoria and even prompts Melbourne to ask if cutting him loose might not be dangerous in some way – in the end, he quietly packs his bags and leaves. King Leopold (Thomas Kretschmann) is another character that you think might well cause a hitch or two… he shrugs his shoulders and walks away.
The palace intrigues are (dare I say it?) kind of lame, the emotional betrayals are not so shocking and the one great Incident that occurs towards the climax takes about 30 seconds to resolve – with the help of a desk of all things. It’s a Sooraj Barjatya film with a plot and no songs (well, a tiny bit of opera doesn’t count), not a Shekhar Kapur film about a perilous period of English history.
And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I enjoyed it. It was interesting to watch a movie that worked against expectations even at the risk of being branded dull, which it most certainly is not. If you’re looking for something exciting and dramatic – and really, why should you in a movie about the early life of Queen Victoria – then this isn’t the film for you. But if you’re looking for charm and good story telling, anchored by excellent performances, then The Young Victoria is worth a watch.
Say it ain’t so! They put out an ad for a beauty product that raises unrealistic expectations in the bosoms of their customers? Good Golly Miss Molly! How shocking! I never heard of anything like that before. Tut tut.
Please.
So alright, this is a little extreme and it’s clearly not the teensy weensy touch up that Procter & Gamble insist it is, but have you seen an ad for any kind of cosmetic product lately? Leaf through a magazine the next time you’re in a doctor’s office or salon and check if any of the people in those ads look as though they might be human.
When was the last time you bought an Omega watch and turned into George Clooney? Or put on something from L’Oreal and turned into Aishwarya Rai Bachchan? How about shampoo – does your hair look like shiny nylon now that you’re using the one being hawked by your favorite star? I don’t think so.
The only new information I’ve gleaned from this entire affair is that P&G needs to hire a better PR department that won’t betray the utter contempt it has for its customers and its models by putting out heartfelt statements like:
“The advertisement was placed only in magazine titles aimed at mature women, to whom Twiggy is relevant.”
Well, as long as it’s just the old bags…
Nice. Also bullshit. Steaming piles of it, like so:
I guess I’ll start my battle on another field, thanks.
Suhel Seth was Outlook‘s cat of the week in its “Beta Male” issue – you know, the one they like to let loose among the right wing pigeons who like to roost on their publication? It’s an entertaining tradition of which I heartily approve. And Seth seems to have delivered in spades with his Ten Ladies to Tremble By column that introduces us to the “[p]urveyors of hypocrisy, self-preservation and godawful stupidity—[the] women who set my teeth on edge”.
Said femmes terribles are Sushma Swaraj, Renuka Chowdhary, Meira Kumar, Jayalalitha, Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy, Mayawati, Rakhee Swant, Ekta Kapoor and Suneeta Narain – a little sugar for everybody. Of course Outlook‘s commentarati took it up a notch shortly thereafter by taking him to task for A) impugning the honor of the flower of Indian womanhood and B) not impugning the honor of the flowers they wanted (Sonia Gandhi x 10. Because the flower of Italian womanhood is always fair game).
[You know, I've thought it over and I've decided my all-time favorite internet complaint is: "But why didn't you write what I wanted you to write? I hate you! Your mother is a leprechaun and your father is a spore!" Or words to that effect.]
Now I’ve just spent a month following different top-rated Hindi soaps for an article (I’ll link when it’s up) so this one about IQ favorite Ekta Mata really leaped off the page:
Ektaa Kapoor: No matter how well she does, I will always detest what she has done to the psyche of the Indian woman and more importantly to Indian family evenings. Each one of her serials is riddled with social taboos but then how would Ektaa ever know? If you are the daughter of India’s legendary white-shoes, grace and style are but an aberration!
Well, that’s his opinion. But can I just say I’d take a month of watching Jeetendra “dancing” on the beach, twinkling his white toesies in the middle of an epileptic fit, over the trash his daughter and her contemporaries put out on television any day? At the most I’d end up mildly annoyed or bored if forced to watch him in Southern remakes for a solid month. After watching multiple Indian soaps for the same period of time, on the other hand, I was violently angry.
Violently!
For example, have you ever worn something sleeve-less? Do you like to put on make-up? Line your eyes, maybe? Wear high heels? Do you wear something other than a saree?
You SLUT!
A proper Indian woman dresses like Pratibha Patil, with her pallu modestly covering not just her head but her entire body like a bed sheet. If she wants to be especially daring or modern, she can keep the pallu off her head, but a saree is the only appropriate dress for an Indian woman. Fine, if she’s a virginal unmarried child, she can wear a salwar kameez.
Even if you’re an evil trollop, you will wear a saree. However, you can signal your trollop-hood by wearing off- the-shoulder blouses, halter necks, backless cholis, etc. This means you have passions. Terrible ones. You probably have – gasp! – sex. With your clothes – shriek! – off.
A good woman on the other hand is one who gets up at four in the morning to shower and dress so she can sing chapters from the Ramayana on an empty stomach to the patriarch of the household before she does pooja and serves breakfast (which she will prepare and maybe serve, not eat. That comes much, much later). This, according to the top-rated show that I was watching, was in the manner of a treat for the new bride who got unjustly yelled at for the god-awful crime of sleeping in on the morning after her wedding. An event that went on for a solid month, with many a twist in the tale, from what I gather.
All the top rated shows, in fact, seem to be ones in which nothing happens. Or maybe one thing happens in a month and then we discover that there are five hundred rituals associated with it that require the entire cast to get together and sing, dance, and pray. Every. Single. Time. To the same bloody songs, with the same bloody expressions and you simply can’t understand why they go to all the bother because it always ends badly. Haven’t they ever seen a soap on Indian TV?
Even worse are the ones in which something does happen. There is the historical Jhansi ki Rani, for example. Its production values make Ekta Mata’s Mahabharat look good in comparison. After a great many questionable Robin Hood-like adventures, its child protagonist is currently getting married to the much older Raja of Jhansi – presented as an arrogant womanizer with a taste for alcohol, dancing girls and satin capes. I kid you not. He also walks around with a giant cardboard plaque sheathed in red plastic around his neck. I didn’t even know there were levels of set design where it was futile to ask “what the fuck” because your mind has already been blown to smithereens and can no longer process thought.
But that’s not even the scummy part of it. The truly creepy part of it is that the little kid is now being counseled on the virtues of a good bride, which apparently involves her not being a child and losing that independence that first got her noticed.
Who is the audience for this show? From what I first saw of it, I presumed it was a children’s show because it was about this little kid giving it back to the (most hilariously bad) British by dressing up as a revolutionary leader and talking back to those who seek to put her down. And then all of a sudden, towards the end of the month, the focus shifted to how best a tweener could partner a man in his thirties (or twenties, my tummy was too queasy to let me find out).
Yes, the real Rani of Jhansi was a child bride. She married her husband at the age of 14. It was definitely the norm back then. But for a country where child marriage is still a serious problem, what is the message being sent out when a primetime show on a major Indian network is asking its family audience to not just witness but celebrate the upcoming nuptials of a child and a grown man as not just a political event of the distant past but a possible love story?
And even if you do want to show it as a love story (and the uncomfortable truth about child marriages is that at some point the children do consummate the marriage), must you really paint it with the same mix of hocus-pocus and intrigue that color all the other dramas on TV?
Anyway, I just wanted to let all you ladies know that if you’re reading this blog instead of cooking yummy, traditional food for the five hundred people in your joint family or praying and fasting for the well-being of those same people, then you’re a whore. A strapless-bra-wearing immoral make-up assassin. And if you’re reading this blog at work or after coming home from work (argh! “work”! quick! gargle and spit!), then there aren’t words enough to describe you. Just tell me one thing: why do you want to destroy your family? WHY?!
This is not how I expected William Faulkner to sound. [Well, I didn't expect that outfit either.] I thought he’d at least read a little better, you know? I guess I’m used to the modern day writers who hone their performance skills.
But then you read the text of his speech and realize that with words like that, it simply doesn’t matter. He could have croaked it out with a banjo and it’d still have had the same resonance.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
He said those words in December, 1950.
Whether you take it literally or metaphorically – and anyone who has ever written so much a comment on the internet can tell you they do so with one eye open for a flame war – the fear to express yourself remains by far the greatest one.
Whatever the context, be it a personal situation or a political one, the moment you put your thoughts into words is incredibly fraught. The vulnerability that comes with the knowledge that people now have a direct window into your brain is next to indescribable. They might not know that, but you do.
And yet, unless you can move past that moment, and express yourself honestly, all the words in the world mean nothing at all. There is nothing less satisfying than watering down your point of view for the sake of other people’s good opinion, than saying things you don’t really believe in because it’s easier, more convenient, safer, less risky.
You can hide your thoughts from other people, sure. But what are you going to do about yourself? With all those ideas rattling inside you?
[via James Fallows who really wants you to read the thing ]
