by
Zadie Smith
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[...] I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.
cute (especially the use of the word "roughage" and its significance for DFW)
[...] The girls sing without facial affect; dead-eyed, unsmiling. Around us the bored schoolboys skulk. Nobody speaks to them or takes their picture. The teacher does not worry that boredom and disaffection may turn to resentment and violence: "Oh, no, they are very happy for the girls."
chilling and really worrisome portrayal of the boys as being neglected in favour of "the girls" in developing countries
It is a frustration for activists that Liberians have tended not to trace their trouble back to extractive foreign companies or their government lobbies. Liberians don't think that way. Most Liberians know how much a rubber tapper gets paid: thirty-five American dollars a month. [...]
reminds you of Trump voters doesn't it?
"[...] 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)