by
Zadie Smith
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"[...] The whole reason Firestone came to Liberia in the first place was as a means of creating a permanent supply of rubber for the American military. The British had increased the taxes on Malaysian rubber--the Americans didn't want to pay that. They needed a permanent solution. So they planted the rubber--it's not native to Liberia. Really, they created a whole industry. It sounds strange, but these are some of the best jobs in Liberia."
quoting someone named Kamal
Englishman: [...] Maybe we could just give them a few things ... a nice bed, bedsheets, something so they won't be bitten to death at night. [...]
Liberian: My friend, someone's going to get malaria. It's inevitable. [...] I ask you please not to worry about malaria--we get it all the time in Liberia. I promise you we are used to it!
The history of Liberia consists of elegant variations on this conversation.
I really like the "elegant variations on this conversation"
[...] I cannot honestly say I feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud to be black and ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience either pride of shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I understand how those words got into the racial discourse, but I can't sign up to them. I'm not proud to be female either. I am not even proud to be human---I only love to be so. As I love to be female and I love to be black, and I love that I had a white father.
[...] A hesitation in the face of difference, which leads to caution before difference and ends in fear of it. Before long, the only voice you recognize, the only life you can empathize with, is your own. [...] I believe that flexibility of voice leads to a flexibility in all things. My audacious hope in Obama is based, I'm afraid, on precisely such flimsy premises.
on being invited to a "crazy reggae bar" in Harlem on the night that Obama was elected
her hope in Obama is based on the fact that in Dreams From My Father, he's able to write other people's voices so well
They meet in the Borghese gardens, dappled in leafy light, the scene of a Shakespearean comedy.
just a pretty phrase
This is no fault of the actress herself, whose comeliness is as self-evident and insistent as the wafting cherry blossom and the orange lanterns floating on pellucid water, the sumptuous silk of the kimono and the trimmed perfection of the formal gardens--all of which we are repeatedly encouraged to appreciate until you begin to feel that if something ugly does not appear on-screen soon you might go quite out of your mind.
in a review of Memoirs of a Geisha. thought it was pretty writing and also funny
[...] "I did it for my family" is the most repeated line in this film. Its echo is silent, yet you can't help hearing it: what would you do for yours?
"Its echo is silent" is a nice way of putting it (inspiration for my Man in the High Castle review)
Lean's sad, buttoned-up account of unconsummated love is about all of us and our cautious natures. It's not that the English don't want true love or self-knowledge. Rather unlike our European cousins, we will not easily give up the real for the dream. We remain skeptical about throwing away a concrete asset like Fred in favor of "the faery power of unreflecting love," no matter how much Keats may recommend it. Laura, a Midlands mother of two, is certainly not a fairy by temperament, despite her pixie face. She will not give up the reality of Fred for her love of Alec. Alec, gentleman that he is, quite agrees. An Italian (or indeed, the modern English viewer of the film) will diagnose Laura and Alec as morbidly repressed. The film offers a different hypothesis: that the possibility of two people's pleasure cannot override the certainty of other people's pain. Primum non nocere is the principle upon which the film operates. As a national motto we could do a lot worse.
reviewing the film Brief Encounter
[...] a story that in book form was an act of fury and lit a fire under the Thatcher-era kids who read it. Its message was not "Blow up the Houses of Parliament" or "Wear a white mask and knife people," for kids are not morons and understand what an allegory is. The message of V for Vendetta is "Change is possible." In its film form this is a truly radical notion to be filed in the adolescent brain right next to the message of the first Matrix movie: the world is other than it seems. If this film makes kids think that way again, that'll be, like, totally awesome.
[...] What if the "problem" is neither genetic nor psychological, but social? For what did "women trapped in a male body" do three hundred years ago? Maybe they expanded the social category of what it is to be male so that it was expansive enough to include the "female" traits they longed for.
I kind of agree with this POV but I also want to see rebuttals (probably along the lines of: what would be great systemically doesn't exactly work for the individual within the system)