Ian Mcewan

Ouch. I enjoyed a profile of him in the New Yorker and recalled enjoying his work as I read it in Granta years ago...Yeeeeaaars ago it seems.

I mentioned watching "Atonement".

This passage from the New Yorker piece smacked of Vonnegut and Dangerfield (Greg is Mr. Mcewan's son):

'Galen Strawson, a philosopher who lives in Oxford, said that the breakup freed McEwan to “become radically more scientific than any one of us.” McEwan’s next novel was “Enduring Love.” Whereas in “Black Dogs” the intellectual war is between equals, Joe Rose’s logical mind clearly shows up that of his girlfriend, Clarissa. A Romantic scholar, she doubts his evidence that he is being stalked, and nearly ends up dead. McEwan remembers that not every reader accepted the point: “Poor Greg had to study ‘Enduring Love’ in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, ‘Well, I think Clarissa’s got everything wrong.’ He got a D. The teacher didn’t care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too ‘male’ in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing.”'

In the DVD Player

Umpteenth update: Lucilla Andrews' time faded before she could publicly mention Ian McEwan...add water imagery and stir...The movie was all so terribly sad, and, upon further reflection sadder still...could I be dys-sad-isfied? Lovely film, they should have taken more time with it all I think.

Atonement with Keira Knightley.

Is there a pithy law ala Murphy's law (not just a bar in Bport) regarding everyone's view in life being 88% in error?

The movie has just begun, do I have popcorn? If I lived a suitable life I might have a guess, but as it is if I really had to answer this before looking I'd say I have an 88% chance of being wrong, far worse than a coin flip. Bad luck and worse guesses. Add lazy and stir. Often Darwin doesn't work fast enough.

Does this have anything to do with the movie? I suppose I will see shortly. I'm assuming a disproportionate level of uncomfortable moments are in store.

Update: minutes in. Ouch.

Update update: they call "Indian Wrist Burns" "Chinese Bands". I prefer "Chinese Bangles" as the torture is noted by Alexandra Fuller, I think the term "Indian Rug Burns" is silly.

Why are the rich assortment of childhood tortures so poorly catalogued?

Martin Amis

I noticed Arma Virumque mention an interview which looks worth reading. They pull a quote which reminds me of the reaction of some to "Gran Torino":

I think people are too fragile now. Humour is . . . you don’t see much of it. You see it a lot on the sort of V C sub-surface, stand-up and TV and that. But the comic novel has more or less disappeared . . . Think of the range of what you can’t joke about now. It’s almost everything. I’m writing [in the new novel, The Pregnant Widow] about 1970, and I thought, well, I’ve got to be honest and put in the sort of jokes that people told. And I realised that it would just make everyone hate these characters so much—their jokes about Jews, about black people. It was actually a satire on prejudice and it was funny. But now the only political constituency of people you can sneer at are white South Africans, or white southerners in America, and up to a point, Israel. And Israel’s the unusual one, because they have slightly darker skin. But our whole kind of paralysis about Islam is to do with that.

His friend Ian Mcewan has been noted before. Also his friend Christopher Hitchens.

There may be other posts related, but I never labeled them. Thus the term "Mess" in the banner.