Ignorance and Playing Dumb

I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity become proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.

Jane Takagi Little in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, 1998.

Photo from the Seattle Edible Book Festival.

Sucking at Life

I was always rummaging at the Riverbanks DVD tiangge almost every week when I saw this movie which attracted me because of its Sideways-like poster. True enough, it fell in my little mind drawer that includes The Squid and the Whale, I ♥ Huckabees, and Igby Goes Down. I didn’t know then that this was based on a book nor did I really read books outside of class. But when I saw the paperback on a Powerbooks warehouse sale, I knew it wasn’t a bad bargain. Fast forward to this recent Lent, I picked it up from the shelf for ROYB during the break, and regretted why I didn’t open it earlier; it was still wrapped in shop plastic!

To ignore the adaptation dilemma, I wanna be unjust and say the books is way better. While the movie already helped me to imagine the entire scenario, the book is full of details and episodes that really won’t fit in the movie. Or did I just forget? I think his relationship with his dentist Perry Lyman (Keanu Reeves) was much more profound. I don’t remember the Mormon conversion escapades. Nor can I visualise the alcoholic Willy Lindt’s boat cabin. There was definitely more sex and doping, and Justin’s oral obsessiveness was more justified with what’s constantly going on in his mind.

Once, Justin “saved” a baby from a weed-dealing couple, but the moment it was breathing fresh air in Willy’s cabin, it just froze. It wouldn’t budge until it sensed MJ smoke again. “The thing to remember,” the old man said “was that we didn’t start this mess, now did we?…We got here in the middle. It’s not our fault.” I think that was crucial against all the intervention to Justin’s oral fixation. All the problem-solving fucked him up more. With that, I’m solved. All I need now is the accompanying photo book to establish my fandom. *looks for the DVD*

Atonement and Some Sexy Time

It is not that bad that I finished Atonement just now since I opened it almost two years ago. I got lost when the war started. But towards these last pages, as I inched to the ending bind, I realised how more intense the writer’s effect worked because I also had the same distance from the beginning. An old Briony (Keira Knightley in the movie) is back in her childhood home, and the clan’s grandchildren perform the same play that she wrote back then. And there I was at the train, secretly awed at this:

The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

And can I just say, Ian McEwan can write The Sex:

The sighing noise she made was greedy and made him greedy too. He pushed her hard into the corner, between the books. As they kissed she was pulling at his clothes, plucking ineffectually at his shirt, his waistband. Their heads rolled and turned against one another as their kissing became a gnawing. She bit him on the cheek, not quite playfully. He pulled away, then moved back and she bit him hard on his lower lip. He kissed her throat, forcing back her head against the shelves, she pulled  his hair and pushed his face down against her breasts. There was some inexpert fumbling until he found her nipple, tiny and hard, and put his mouth around it. Her spine went rigid , then juddered along its length. For a moment he thought she had passed out. Her arms were looped around his head and when she tightened her grip he rose through it, desperate to breathe, up to his full height and enfolded her, crushing her head against his chest. She bit him again and pulled at his shirt. When they heard a button ping against the floorboards, they had to suppress their grins and look away. Comedy would have destroyed them. She trapped his nipple between her teeth. The sensation was unbearable. He tilted her face up, and trapping her against his ribs, kissed her eyes and parted her lips with his tongue. Her helplessness drew from her again the sound like the sigh of disappointment.

I forgot to recommend parental guidance. But heck, kids watch Gossip Girl anyway. OMFG.