Fundamental Oppression.

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This article really hit home for me, especially the first and last sections.

Artistic expression poses an inherent challenge to fundamentalists because it offers the ultimate manifestation of the temporal and the heterodox. It embodies freedom of thought. Art suggests that mere human beings may also be Creators. As a result, in Muslim majority contexts many artists have faced profound risks for the content of their work, or simply for producing art whatever its content, but they have continued nonetheless.

Summer Television: The Glades

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Wouldn’t you stop being that arrogant the 59th time you accused the wrong person of murder?

I try to like the Glades; Matt Saracen*’s [so to speak] wife plays the main female character, after all. But every week it is insufferably the same (and also: insufferable).

The lead detective, otherwise known as most arrogant portrayal of a cop ever in the universe, seems to accuse each and every single person he meets as he investigates the crime. He is 100% positive they are the killer, tells them that repeatedly, then gets a phone call while interrogating them, leaves the room and goes straight to accusing someone else of being the killer (now 100% positive it’s them). Somehow I fail to see that as an effective method of policework.

Every week, with every person, after he tells them “I KNOW you’re the killer,” he then tells them not to leave town in what sounds like the same exact wording every.single.time. Even Law & Order doesn’t make the audience listen to the Miranda rights with every single arrest.

It’s as formulaic as episodes of House, and quite reminiscent of them in fact. House decides it’s X insane disease no one’s ever heard of, gives the patient some horribly intense medicine, then figures out it’s actually X completely ordinary disease that the previous medicine actually makes much, much worse and he’s basically either killed or almost killed them by his overthinking of their possible illness.

In the Glades, he thinks A is the killer, nope it’s B, nope it’s A again, nope it’s C, nope it’s A again, nope B…ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Sure, it’s fictional, and I need to work on suspending my disbelief. But seriously: Wouldn’t you be less cocky after being wrong so many times in so many episodes?

*Zach Gilford, the actor who played Matt Saracen on Friday Night Lights, is married to the female lead on The Glades. See some incredibly lovely photos of their wedding over here.

Deep thoughts, with books and blogs.

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I have an ongoing fascination with the way things intersect in our lives — how you do a new thing you’ve never done but Oh! completely unexpectedly it overlaps or intersects or has some deep resonance with something else you just did. I am particularly obsessed with this when it comes to reading (see “Good Things Come in Pairs” on this page) — it always feels like you somehow came to exactly the right thing at the right moment when those resonances happen.

Right now I am reading The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit and yesterday I read this quote that just dug deep down into the heart of me:

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe everyday.

Today I was reading Lizzy House‘s blog and saw this:

Also, I just want to say, that maybe I would have met these people another way, that somehow we all would have come together in whatever way, because we were supposed to. Or that my hard work and merit would have positioned me for all of this good, but I do not believe that that’s how the world works, otherwise we’d all live on islands that were having parades in our own honor everyday.

Dang, world.

À la Nick Hornby, books in/books out for June.

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Bought:

  • Hmmm, I’m sure I bought something… But I don’t seem to have written it down. Possibly all I bought were the gajillion Allen Say books I bought as goodbye presents for my students!

Read:

  • Saving Zasha, by Randi Barrow (borrowed from a student)
  • Across the Universe, by Beth Revis (reread)
  • A Million Suns, by Beth Revis
  • Shades of Earth, by Beth Revis

I do feel like this is something people have a hard time understanding.

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I feel alone.
I don’t mean i feel lonely; I mean i feel alone, the same way i feel the blanket resting on my body, or the feathers of my pillow under my head, or the tight string of my sleep pants twisted up around my waist. I feel alone as if it were an actual thing, seeping throughout this whole level like mist blanketing a field, reaching into all the hidden corners of my room and finding nothing living but me. It’s a cold sort of feeling, this.
― Beth Revis, A Million Suns

Big Screen: What Maisie Knew

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I actually had Kramer vs Kramer flashbacks during this movie — I have very vivid memories of that being the first movie that really upset me about parental treatment of children. (I was pretty young to see it then but my parents are not censors of much.)

Julianne Moore’s performance here is pretty amazing and just spot-on for what it’s supposed to be. The two young blondes who become Maisie’s caretakers (Skarsgard being one of them–yeah I’m pretty much over my obsession with him, except where Pinterest is concerned) are both fine although both come across as idiots as the movie begins and it takes a while for them to be tolerable on screen (they become moreso as they wake up to the realities of the film, I guess, which is fine, but did they really have to be quite so dumb to begin with?).

It was a well-done movie but pretty hard to watch if you are daily interacting with children who, while not necessarily mentally or physically ABUSED, are most certainly treated with varying degrees of neglect.

I mean I have often before, and certainly during this movie, pondered whether some sort of readiness test for parenting should be instituted by the state before unprotected sex is allowed. But of course in order to bring that about, the policing of sex would have to be instituted which is such a wild violation of one’s civil rights that it’s plain horrifying. But then you see a child being treated this way…

There certainly are people too self involved to parent, just as there are people too stupid to parent, and frankly the former is more horrible than the latter. The latter might learn, the former don’t care to.