Stranger on Earth

Good god, is nothing sacred anymore? I was browsing on Goodreads when I came across the following comments (most probably from a teenager) about Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937), the mother of all memoirs: I have no idea why my mom recommended this book to me. A white British colonist tells the story of her privileged life on her coffee plantation in Kenya. She writes some great imagery about the Kenyan landscape and tells funny stories about animals, except that her idea of the landscape and animals includes all the Black servants and workers and "squatters" on her plantation. She is really stupid and proudly naive. It's awful. For example, when she jokingly threatens to fire all of her servants if they don't find this cute baby antelope she saw while on an outing, she thinks it's out of love for her that they spend all night searching for it. How darling of them! I think you're supposed to find her some sort of feminist heroine because she...

Link to Vol. 1:   http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.com/2014/01/lars-von-triers-sex-therapy-nymph.html This is just the sort of movie that you wander into fully expecting to find Jamie Bell of Billy Elliot fame as a whip-wielding S&M master. Welcome to Vol. 2 . After the sex-o-rama of Vol. 1 , what other nasty surprises can there be, you ask? You get 40 lashes (or 39, according to Seligman) in perverted Roman fashion for asking such a dumb question. This is Uncle Lars’ house of fun we’re talking about. To start with, there’s the Catholic church parallelism. In the chapter “The Eastern and the Western Church (The Silent Duck)”, we’re asked to examine the (Western) Catholic penchant for sadomasochism (what do you know, Christ’s martyrdom is mentioned), and in the meantime, Joe gets herself strung up like a Christmas turkey when she hooks up with K (Bell), an exclusive S&M expert with a fetish for authentic leather horse whips, rope knots, face-slappi...

  Uncle Lars is up to no good again. I’d caught wind of Von Trier’s latest sex-heavy project as far back as early 2012. Even then, without having read a thing about its plot, I knew it’s to be something explosive. The title of course speaks volumes, but in the hands of the Danish nut-job, you just know you’ll be in for a cracking good trip. And then there’s the cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg (who’s known for having pulled off some sick stuff in Von Trier’s Anti-Christ ), Willem Dafoe, Christian Slater, Stellan Skarsgard, Jamie Bell (oh cripes, there goes Billy Elliot), Uma Thurman, and last but not at all the very least, the infamous head-case that’s Shia I-plagiarise-my-apologies LaBeouf. So there you have it: every single one of them talented individuals, regardless of your opinions of them. What in the world are they doing jumping into bed with Uncle Lars? You just don’t say no to Uncle Lars when he comes a-knocking. This is the devil-in-disguise who brought us scathi...

Q: It’s a sign of double madness when you’re interviewing yourself about a book nobody’s going to read. You do know that, right? A. You may have a point there, but we talk to ourselves all the time, and madness is the flipside of clarity. It’s true I have no intention of getting the book published, but as written texts go, the moment they come into existence they will be read. It’s just not the way you think they’ll be read. I’m planning to pull a Kafka. I’ve chosen my Max Brod. Q: So you’ve finally wrapped up your second novel called Goliath . Care to tell us what it’s about? A: That title… it does sound a tad fake, doesn’t it? I tried out several different ones but came back to it eventually. I see it as a sign. But who would want to read a book with such a self-important title? The author clearly has a Nabokov complex. I’ll leave that up to you Jungians and Freudians out there. The book, broadly speaking, is about seven young university students living in the 1960s at th...

When they say there are no certainties in life, they are being pessimistic (or they are lying). You can always depend on the permanence of the fissures in the plastered wall, or the deep-blue of the impassive ocean, where matter slides into the irredeemable.  2009

Dear Herr Hesse, I know you’ve been dead since 1962, a good ten years before I was born, and my writing to you may come across as a mad gesture the likes of which only the overly obsessed are capable of. I can assure you I’m not mad, even though everyone around me is. I’ve just finished reading your 1919 novel Demian , which you wrote when you’re on the brink of madness (Was the war that bad? Why did all those young men have to die?), and which made you what my generation calls an “overnight sensation” among the disillusioned young. Before I started reading the book, I’d wondered why it’d had such an effect on the young men of the 1910s (and also those of the following decades). It’s just a book, I thought. Aren’t we exaggerating? But I should’ve known. Your Siddhartha has after all been my personal guide since I first read it in 2004, so why should this one be made of lesser stuff? The actor/scholar James Franco, a young(ish) man of my generation, wrote a new introduc...