Miss Ultimate Sexy Baby

As part of our work on column writing we looked at issues to do with the sexualisation of young girls through such things as child beauty pageants and inappropriate clothing. Many of you were horrified by the antics of beauty pageant mothers on shows such as “Toddlers & Tiaras”.

Australian and New Zealand psychiatrists have backed calls for child beauty pageants to be banned, saying they encourage the sexualisation of children and can cause developmental harm.  The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists says American-style pageants, promote an adult’s perception of “beauty”.

Jaimee wrote her column on the issue. Here’s her opening:

Makeup, high heels and spray tans; these have become necessities in many women’s lives. But they’re adults, not children. Why would a parent let their pre-school daughter be primped, crimped and styled until they look like the toddler equivalent of a glamour model? Why should children be subjected to bright lights and camera flashes before they’ve even been to school? Five-year-old Jayleigh has already entered 100 pageants in the last four years alone.  It’s becoming more frequent for parents to enter their children into beauty contests and show them off and parade them to a panel of judges, but why?

Jaimee wrote really well on the subject and I think she will enjoy Tom Hanks’s parody of Toddlers & Tiaras. Enjoy the“Miss Ultimate Sexy Baby” contest.

Johnny Cash – Hurt

First look at Tintin

The first images from the Peter Jackson produced Tintin film are out and they have what has been dubbed an animated noir look to them.

The New Zealand Herald Reviews ‘Never Let Me Go’

Peter Calder has written a very interesting review of the film version of ‘Never Let Me Go’.

The 2005 novel by Japanese-English master-writer Kazuo Ishiguro, which this film adapts, yields the horrifying truth at its heart only slowly.

There are clues carefully left lying about, but the mind rebels at the idea of picking them up. And all the while, a muted, almost affectless,tone engages our slightly horrified curiosity: we are uneasy about finding out what’s going on but we can’t tear our eyes away.

The film version does well to capture the timbre of the original. It’s certainly not as nuanced – an opening title-card gives too much away, and the story is told in a more linear, less elliptical fashion – but it remains faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of the book.

A parable with elements of sci-fi (though, perversely, it’s set in the recent past), it’s the story of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), played for a third of the movie by child counterparts.

They are students at, and later suspiciously sheltered alumni of, Hailsham, a faintly Dickensian boarding school in the country. Here a stern headmistress (Charlotte Rampling) urges them to watch their health and reminds them that “the students of Hailsham are special”, while doing her best to protect them from the truth of what lies ahead.

If their lack of back story were not already a clue – they never mention a life outside Hailsham – a renegade teacher, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins), blurts out the salient facts after 20 minutes or so then is not seen again.

But much of the film’s effect derives from the fact that even if we know what’s going on, the main characters don’t. The novel let us in on things at the same rate as the characters; the film keeps us one step ahead, and the effect is, if anything, more heartbreaking.

In using its dystopian context as the setting for what would otherwise have been a conventional romantic triangle, the film becomes a haunting meditation on loss and the evaporation of the dreams of youth.

Read the rest here.

Kazuo Ishiguro discusses ‘Never Let Me Go’

Go here to find a podcast of an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro. The author, born to Japanese parents in Great Britain, talks with Karen Grigsby Bates about his latest work, praised by critics as a deceptively simple tale set in a private school in the English countryside, where nothing is as it seems and the horrible truth is slowly revealed.

Go here to hear Kazuo Ishiguro read the first chapter of ‘Never Let Me Go’.

Never Let Me Go – 100 Best English Novels

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel ‘Never Let Me Go’ was chosen as one of Time Magazine’s 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present. Here’s what they said about it:

Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are students at Hailsham, a very exclusive, very strange English private school. They are treated well in every respect, but as they grow older they come to realize that there is a secret that haunts their lives: Their teachers regard them with fear and pity, and they don’t know why. Once they learn the secret it is already far, far too late for them to save themselves. Set in a darkling alternate-universe version of England, and told with dry-eyed, white-knuckled restraint, Never Let Me Go is an improbable masterpiece, a science fiction horror story written as high tragedy by a master literary stylist. It’s postmodern in its conception, but Ishiguro isn’t playing games or chasing trends: The human drama of Never Let Me Go, its themes of atrocity and acceptance, are timeless and, sadly, permanent.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1951793_1951943_1952574,00.html #ixzz1MOvpLwVn

I so agree with their last line, it is very well put. What do you think?

Redemption

Redemption

All living creatures’ pain,

The suffering of the lowliest thing that creeps

Or flies a moment ere it sinks and sleeps,

Are too Redemption’s tears and not in vain—

For nothing idly weeps.

Earth is through these fulfilling that it must

As in Christ’s own eternal Passion chain,

And flowering from the dust.

The driven and drudging ass

Crushed by the bondage of its bitter round,

Repeats the Gospel in that narrow bound;

God is reflected in the blade of grass,

And there is Calvary’s ground.

O not an insect or on leaf or sod

But in its measure is a looking-glass,

And shows Salvation’s God.

All thus are carrying on,

And do work out, the one Redemption’s tale;

Each is a little Christ on hill or dale,

The hell where Mercy’s light has never shone

Is with that Mercy pale,

And though flesh turns from agony they dread,

Even as they groan and travail it is gone—

Love riseth from the dead.

Frederick William Ward (5 April 1847 – 1 July 1934) was an Australian journalist, newspaper editor and Methodist minister. Ward was born in New Zealand the fourth son of the Rev. Robert Ward, a Primitive Methodist clergyman and was sent to Brisbane, Australia around 1867 as a Methodist minister. His poem ‘Redemption’ promises that however much pain is suffered in life, the power of redemption will heal it.

What do you understand by the term redemption? Redemption is a major theme in the novel. The idea that, “There is a way to be good again” drives the novel. Amir is desperate to make up for his past sins and although he fears the cost of his redemption this desire to redeem himself fuels his actions and forms the basis of his character.

Amir and Redemption

‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini was written in 2003 and it is an extremely popular novel. The book is an epic tale of friendship and betrayal, and of the need for love and redemption. As our course theme is redemption, ‘The Kite Runner’ is a great book to help us explore it. To start we are going to look at Amir.

Amir is the protagonist of ‘The Kite Runner’. He was born into a privileged Pashtun family, and grows up in Kabul, Afghanistan. Amir was raised by his father Baba as his mother died in childbirth. This loss shapes him in a negative way as Baba and Amir have a conflicted relationship. He feels that Baba is angry at him and perhaps blames him for the death of his mother, “Did he ache for her, the way I ached for the mother I had never met?” As a parallel, Amir aches for his father who is emotionally and metaphorically missing in his life. Amir is also conflicted about his identity, he is interested in books, he is thoughtful but not very athletic. He is quite introverted and he prefers to write stories in his notebook rather than play soccer, much to his father’s dismay. Amir wants to be the sports-orientated, brave man that he believes Baba wants him to be. Amir wants a better relationship with his father and is strongly motivated by the wish to make this fantasy a reality—ultimately with tragic results. Amir is constantly trying to earn his father’s approval but he struggles to get his father’s attention. He becomes jealous when his father pays more attention to Hassan, the son of the family servant Ali. Amir finds that the only way to gain his father’s limited approval is to win the traditional kite-flying contest. Hassan always knows exactly where a kite will drop once its string has been cut. He becomes Amir’s kite runner chasing down fallen kites as Amir works his way to winning the competition. Amir then commits the shocking act that requires redemption. He encounters his best friend being bullied, and then raped by Assef, but does nothing to stop or even acknowledge this act.

Amir is haunted by his childhood betrayal of Hassan, and he eventually travels back to Kabul to put things right . Throughout the novel Amir wants to be a good person and he is constantly upset by his own shortcomings, particularly in his relationship with Hassan. He needs to find redemption.We see how Amir is released from guilt as he negotiates the memories of his betrayal of his childhood friend. We understand what it takes to to be good again.

Who else in the novel is seeking redemption?

Rereading: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the finest and most accomplished contemporary writers of his generation. The short story author, television writer and novelist, included twice in Granta’s list of Best Young British Writers, has over the past twenty-five years produced a body of work which is just as critically-acclaimed as it is popular with the general public. Like the writings of Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro’s work is concerned with creating discursive platforms for issues of class, ethics, ethnicity, nationhood, place, gender and the uses and problems surrounding artistic representation.As a Japanese immigrant who came to Great Britain in 1960, Ishiguro has used his unique position and fine intellectual abilities to contemplate what it means to be British in the contemporary era. As ‘Never Let Me Go’, Kazuo Ishiguro’s unsettling story of a community of clones, comes to cinema screens, Rachel Cusk finds herself both intrigued and repelled by the novel.

Never Let Me Go is Ishiguro’s sixth novel and has proved to be his most popular book since his Booker prize-winning heyday. As with The Remains of the Day, there is a film, replete with English celebrities. Ishiguro’s ventriloquism announces itself in the novel’s first lines: “My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year.” The “now'” and the “actually”, the absorbed ordinariness, the vagueness of “they” and the precision of “eight months, until the end of this year”: Ishiguro’s ear is acute, and these are the verbal mannerisms of the public services sector in the humdrum modern world. Kathy is a “carer”, and indeed the notion of the “caring professions” represents precisely that elision of the institutional and the personal that generates the undertone of disturbance in so much of his work. There are undertones of Kafka, too, in these words, and in the immediate sense they convey of the reader’s imprisonment in the narrator, and thus of the narrator’s actual powerlessness. Another elision is the humdrum and the sinister: triviality is the harbinger of evil, and Ishiguro’s prose from the outset is conspicuously dull with trivia. Kathy calls the people she cares for “donors”, and on the third page she says of one of them: “He’d just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and he must have known he wasn’t going to make it.” And so the association, the elision, is swiftly clarified. This is a book about evil, the evil of death, the evil of banality: “he must have known he wasn’t going to make it.”

Never Let Me Go takes place in the late 20th century, in an England where human beings are cloned and bred for the purposes of harvesting their organs once they reach adulthood. These “clones” are reared in boarding school-type institutions: much is made, in the clone community, of the differences between one institution and another. Hailsham, where Kathy grew up as inmate before her “promotion”, is mythologised for its special ethos: a Hailsham childhood is idealised, with somewhat grotesque and faintly Dickensian sentimentality, by those who were “born” into less fortunate circumstances. Hailsham is a grand place whose ample grounds encompass a pond, a pavilion and, towards its perimeter fence, a sinister area known as “the woods”. It is staffed by “guardians” who have the quasi-parental function of the boarding school housemaster or mistress: these worthies bear the knowledge of their charges’ fate as best they can. Once the children have reached maturity they leave their school-type community and embark on a twilit adult life, in which they are given limited access to the normal world while they await the summons to make their first “donation”. This is where Kathy, as carer, comes in: she is the attending angel, seeing her portfolio of donors through the series of operations and consequent deteriorations that will lead to their certain death, or “completion”. This role has extended her own lease on life, and so she must endure the survivor’s moral and emotional suffering. And indeed, it is her capacity for emotion that provides the narrative occasion, that makes her the writer of this account.

It would seem from this description that Never Let Me Go is a work of unremitting bleakness and gratuitous sordidity. At the very least the question might be asked what style of literary enterprise this is. It isn’t science fiction – indeed its procedures are the very reverse of generic, for there is no analogy at work in the text, which instead labours to produce its iterative naturalism as a kind of sub-set or derivation of our own. In this sense it has more in common with a novel such as Camus’s The Plague, in which a dystopian but familiar reality dramatises the dilemmas of the age. But the dilemmas of our age are not really those of Ishiguro’s dystopia: vainglorious science, meddling with the moral structure of life, is a kind of B-list spook whose antics have yet to offer any substantial intellectual or practical challenge to the populace.

Read the rest here.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Creepy Clones

It’s no secret that I love Margaret Atwood and I have found her take on Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’. Her review is entitled ‘Brave New World’ and she explains why she found the novel really chilling. It is a very interesting read.

Never Let Me Go is the sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his chilling rendition of a bootlickingly devoted but morally blank English butler, The Remains of the Day. It’s a thoughtful, crafty, and finally very disquieting look at the effects of dehumanization on any group that’s subject to it. In Ishiguro’s subtle hands, these effects are far from obvious. There’s no Them-Bad, Us-Good preaching; rather there’s the feeling that as the expectations of such a group are diminished, so is its ability to think outside the box it has been shut up in. The reader reaches the end of the book wondering exactly where the walls of his or her own invisible box begin and end.

Ishiguro likes to experiment with literary hybrids, to hijack popular forms for his own ends, and to set his novels against tenebrous historical backdrops; thus When We Were Orphans mixes the Boys’ Own Adventure with the ’30s detective story while taking a whole new slice out of World War II. An Ishiguro novel is never about what it pretends to pretend to be about, and Never Let Me Go is true to form. You might think of it as the Enid Blyton schoolgirl story crossed with Blade Runner, and perhaps also with John Wyndham’s shunned-children classic, The Chrysalids: The children in it, like those in Never Let Me Go, give other people the creeps.

The narrator, Kathy H., is looking back on her school days at a superficially idyllic establishment called Hailsham. (As in “sham”; as in Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham, exploiter of uncomprehending children.) At first you think the “H” in “Kathy H.” is the initial of a surname, but none of the students at Hailsham has a real surname. Soon you understand that there’s something very peculiar about this school. Tommy, for instance, who is the best boy at football, is picked on because he’s no good at art: In a conventional school it would be the other way around.

In fact, Hailsham exists to raise cloned children who have been brought into the world for the sole purpose of providing organs to other, “normal” people. They don’t have parents. They can’t have children. Once they graduate, they will go through a period of being “carers” to others of their kind who are already being deprived of their organs; then they will undergo up to four “donations” themselves, until they “complete.” (None of these terms has originated with Ishiguro; he just gives them an extra twist.) The whole enterprise, like most human enterprises of dubious morality, is wrapped in euphemism and shadow: The outer world wants these children to exist because it’s greedy for the benefits they can confer, but it doesn’t wish to look head-on at what is happening. We assume—though it’s never stated—that whatever objections might have been raised to such a scheme have already been overcome: By now the rules are in place and the situation is taken for granted—as slavery was once—by beneficiaries and victims alike.

All this is background. Ishiguro isn’t much interested in the practicalities of cloning and organ donation. (Which four organs, you may wonder? A liver, two kidneys, then the heart? But wouldn’t you be dead after the second kidney, anyway? Or are we throwing in the pancreas?) Nor is this a novel about future horrors: It’s set, not in a Britain-yet-to-come, but in a Britain-off-to-the-side, in which cloning has been introduced before the 1970s. Kathy H. is 31 in the late 1990s, which places her childhood and adolescence in the ’70s and early ’80s—close to those of Ishiguro, who was born in 1955 in Nagasaki and moved to England when he was 5. (Surely there’s a connection: As a child, Ishiguro must have seen many young people dying far too soon, through no fault of their own.) And so the observed detail is realistic—the landscapes, the kind of sports pavilion at Hailsham, the assortment of teachers and “guardians,” even the fact that Kathy listens to her music via tape, not CD.

Kathy H. has nothing to say about the unfairness of her fate. Indeed, she considers herself lucky to have grown up in a superior establishment like Hailsham rather than on the standard organ farm. Like most people, she’s interested in personal relationships: in her case, the connection between her “best friend,” the bossy and manipulative Ruth, and the boy she loves—Tommy, the amiable football-playing bad artist. Ishiguro’s tone is perfect: Kathy is intelligent but nothing extraordinary, and she prattles on in the obsessive manner touchy girls have, going back over past conversations and registering every comment and twitch and crush and put-down and cold shoulder and gang-up and spat. It’s all hideously familiar and gruesomely compelling to anyone who ever kept a teenage diary.

In the course of her story, Kathy H. solves a few of the mysteries that have been bothering her. Why is it so important that these children make art, and why is their art collected and taken away? Why does it matter to anyone that they be educated, if they’re only going to die young anyway? Are they human or not? There’s a chilling echo of the art-making children in Theresienstadt* and of the Japanese children dying of radiation who nevertheless made paper cranes.

What is art for? the characters ask. They connect the question to their own circumstances, but surely they speak for anyone with a connection with the arts: What is art for? The notion that it ought to be for something, that it must serve some clear social purpose—extolling the gods, cheering people up, illustrating moral lessons—has been around at least since Plato and was tyrannical in the 19th century. It lingers with us still, especially when parents and teachers start squabbling over the school curricula. Art does turn out to have a purpose in Never Let Me Go, but it isn’t quite the purpose the characters have been hoping for.

One motif at the very core of Never Let Me Go is the treatment of out-groups, and the way out-groups form in-groups, even among themselves. The marginalized are not exempt from doing their own marginalization: Even as they die, Ruth and Tommy and the other donors form a proud, cruel little clique, excluding Kathy H. because, not being a donor yet, she can’t really understand.

Read the rest here.