Brian De Palma

Film director Brian De Palma took a lot of critical grief for his rough treatment of women characters, often being called a misogynist. I have a couple of quotations from him addressing the charge.

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~ "I'm saying what I've said a thousand times before. Women are more vulnerable than men. And I like photographing women."

-- from "The Devil's Candy" by Julie Salamon

~ "I'm always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach - chopping up women, putting women in peril. I'm making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?"

-- from Wikipedia

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Aldous Huxley

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INTERVIEWER

Then, even though you have been writing fewer novels in recent years, you don’t think less highly of the art of fiction than you used to?

HUXLEY

Oh, no, no, no. I think fiction, and biography and history, are the forms. I think one can say much more about general abstract ideas in terms of concrete characters and situations, whether fictional or real, than one can in abstract terms. Several of the books I like best of what I’ve written are historical and biographical things: Grey Eminence, and The Devils of Loudun, and the biography of Maine de Biran, the “Variations on a Philosopher.” These are all discussions of what are to me important general ideas in terms of specific lives and incidents. And I must say I think that probably all philosophy ought to be written in this form; it would be much more profound and much more edifying. It’s awfully easy to write abstractly, without attaching much meaning to the big words. But the moment you have to express ideas in the light of a particular context, in a particular set of circumstances, although it’s a limitation in some ways, it’s also an invitation to go much further and much deeper. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas. My goodness, Dostoyevsky is six times as profound as Kierkegaard, because he writes fiction. In Kierkegaard you have this Abstract Man going on and on—like Coleridge—why, it’s nothing compared with the really profound Fictional Man, who has always to keep these tremendous ideas alive in a concrete form. In fiction you have the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative, so to speak, the expression of the general in the particular. And this, it seems to me, is the exciting thing — both in life and in art.

-- Aldous Huxley at The Paris Review (1960)

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Rectify

Ah, I caught the new season of Showtime's "Rectify" after all. It is one of those shows that I discovered on Netflix. It is an odd show in that it moves glacially slow but keeps you utterly absorbed in its happenings. True, the story rests on the mysterious events surrounding the rape and death of a teen beauty, but other than providing this hook, the show is quite dry and free of titillation. It is a marvel to me that I stick with it, but after being hooked myself, I hungrily watch to see how the story of these people's lives unfold, and to see whether Daniel ultimately gets exonerated. I wonder how many seasons the show can maintain the tension and keep us interested. This is the third season already, and you would think that they really need to start wrapping things up, but I have a feeling that they might actually go to a fourth season.

I almost missed this season, because Amazon and Netflix have gotten me addicted to binge-watching. I love having one or two places where I can access a menu of all television serieses and all of their episodes, running through them at will. I hate having to look for a favorite show on the general TV schedule and waiting for an entire week between new episodes. It feels like having to go to a well to draw our water, or to have to go to an outhouse to shit. It is very inconvenient, so 20th century.