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...

“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” says one of the outlaws to our protagonist Guy Montag before the novel ends, “live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world” (201). Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1958) is traditionally considered a novel about a dystopian society à la 1984 that has made books and the act of reading illegal. But upon closer examination it reveals a message that is even more sweeping than the one above: one of living one’s life to its full capacity. Guy Montag, a fireman who has spent his whole life burning books and the houses of transgressors, has a sudden awakening when he is on the job. Seemingly out of the fiery red (not blue) he develops a sense of guilt, and books, objects he has never particularly cared for, begin to prey on his mind: Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms … A book alighted, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, ...