The Republic of Dissent

Reviewing Sex (and the City) part deux

I saw Sex an the City last night and I have to admit that I don't know what to say about it because I couldn't hate it and yet, I couldn't bring myself to love it or even to like it. It was like eating American cheese when you are looking for cheese and when you are a good palate; you know that French cheese is always better and yet, because you long for cheese, you eat what you are being served without complaining. My only problem with the movie is that it tries to have both ways: one of its message is that clothes, accessories, brands, stuff matter and the other one is that once you have all of these stuff you can afford to be simple, to be yourself, and to celebrate your wedding at a family restaurant instead of a five star one. I'm not buying it, but I don't think it matters here because it isn't a substantive issue because for all of its glitz, Sex an the City has no point of view and no substance. It is content on being superficial and commercially successful and the distressing thing is that it had an embarrassment of riches to make the movie something more than an acceptable summer blockbuster.

Reviewing Sex (and the City)

I haven’t yet watched Sex and the City.  I was planning on seeing early late last night, but I didn’t because I was too tired and after reading the reviews I’m glad I didn’t make the effort. Rick Groen says the following in the Globe and Mail:

For sure, I liked the TV series, along with the fact that success turned the show into its own label, a designer brand unto itself, which may explain why, after the last episode aired four years ago, the series felt instantly dated, so yesterday's Valentino. But that dated quality doesn't begin to explain why I hate, loathe and despise – sorry to mince my words – the movie based on the TV show. Or perhaps that reaction (okay, overreaction) is intriguing too. After all, bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

[..] Spoiler alert, the secret is out: There is no script, at least nothing recognizable as such to any sentient being with a room-temperature IQ. Instead, writer-director Michael Patrick King takes the designer brand that is the TV series, which he helped create, and simply mounts it on the screen, just sticks it up there along with the other brand names, the ones attached to dresses and shoes and handbags.

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Tribune writes:

I am not the person to review this movie. Perhaps you will enjoy a review from someone who disqualifies himself at the outset, doesn’t much like most of the characters and is bored by their bubble-brained conversations. Here is a 145-minute movie containing one (1) line of truly witty dialogue: “Her 40s is the last age at which a bride can be photographed without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext.”

[…] The movie of “Sex and the City” continues the saga of the four heroines of the popular HBO series, which would occasionally cause me to pause in my channel surfing. They are older but no wiser, and all facing some kind of a romantic crossroads. New Line has begged critics not to reveal plot secrets, which is all right with me, because I would rather have fun with plot details. […] “Sex and the City” was famous for its frankness, and we expect similar frankness in the movie. We get it, but each “frank” moment comes wrapped in its own package and seems to stand alone from the story. That includes (1) a side shot of a penis, (2) sex in positions other than the missionary, and (3) Samantha’s dog, which is a compulsive masturbator. I would be reminded of the immortal canine punch line (“because he can”), but Samantha’s dog is a female. “She’s been fixed,” says the pet lady, “but she has not lost the urge.”

Ouch! I can’t say that I’m surprised by the bad reviews because from knowing the Hollywood machine it was clear that the producers weren’t going to be willing to take some risks and to mess with the Sex an the City brand by giving any freedom to writers to mess with a popular product, the lives of characters, who have become too robotic to be interesting longer than the length of a television series (25 minutes) that's the reason why the focus is no longer on them but on what they buy, wear, and on the people they flirt or sleep with. Nevertheless, I’m going to go see the movie because there is no other movies for me to see and because I don’t want to have to see Iron Man three times. Sex athe City doesn’t have any excuse for its supposed bad quality because the Devil Wears Prada shows that a movie about Fashion and Pop and still be of good quality.

The impossibility to say Goodbye to all that

Interesting review on the Prospect of Marek Kohn’s book, Trust: Self-interest and the Common Good and Kenan Malik, Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate :

Trust, the topic of Marek Kohn's book of the same name, is what arises from this discrimination—and Kohn rightly recognises that trust promotes both self-interest and the common good. As individuals, we toil to build reputations as a way of advertising our trustworthiness and of attracting like-valued people. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the importance of co-operative social systems to our psychology and social behaviour. If trust is the fuel of our co-operation, reputation is the currency with which we buy it. Apes, dolphins and ants don't feel shame or engage in honour killings.
This view of what makes humans tick also helps us to understand the awkwardness of the public debate about multiculturalism. Malik asserts that there is a tendency for what he calls the liberal left to "resurrect racial concepts" in framing their views on multiculturalism. Thus we grant authenticity, and equal but separate status, to the different desires and practices of some groups on the basis of their deep cultural heritage: consider the recent uproar over sharia law. Malik doesn't suggest these liberals are racist, just that the language they use—of ethnicity, authenticity and identity—is laden with racial baggage and reminiscent of that used by the old racists when justifying their exclusionary views.
So how is it that race and ethnicity find their way so easily, even if inadvertently, into discussions of multiculturalism? The answer has nothing to do with racism and a lot to do with statistics. Humans, as I have described, evolved to live in small isolated groups and are finely tuned to seek people of common values. Like it or not, common culture (common practices, expectations, and beliefs) correlates, even if imperfectly, with common biological ancestry. This means that markers of race and ethnicity come to be taken as markers of common values.
So does this mean that, deep down, we are all racists? No: we are too clever and self-interested for that. The very social feature that makes us unique—our ability to co-operate with unrelated others—makes us, uniquely among animals, capable of moving beyond the politics of race and ethnicity. Were we as mindless as apes and ants, this would be impossible. Their behaviour is based almost exclusively on common genetic ancestry. Ours is not.
We humans will get along with anyone who wishes to play the co-operative game with us—and that part of our nature will always trump guesswork based on markers of ethnicity or other features. The key is to provide or create stronger signs of trust and common values than are provided by the statistically useful but imprecise markers of ethnicity.

I’ve learned in the last few months that it is impossible to discuss race and ethnicity, in the United States anyway, without marketing the discussion, without making it seem that the end it will lead to a prepackaged political goal. The goal is to avoid stepping on any toes and to ignore the complexities of the subject by making it seem as if the world is divided between racists and the good people who should pat themselves on the back for being free of any racial prejudices. I don’t like the way people talk about race in America. I don’t like the fact that it can be used as a bargaining tool. I don’t like the fact that America has trouble engaging into a constructive discussion about race because it views itself as a moral country, which has therefore dealing with social issues any other way than making wrong sins for which it must atone for, and regret repentance and penitence. Race in America cannot be separated from the fact that America is a religious nation, which cannot accept its own frailty.

Parodying a train wreck

The trouble nowadays is that everything is about entertainment and that train wrecks become watchable instead of being sad and awakening within us the desire to help. In this video, French humorist Florence Foresti, or as I like to call her the French Tina Fey, parodies Amy Winehouse. I'm not sure if it is funny, but it is on point. By the way, can somebody tell me what's the difference between  Winehouse and a young Mick Jagger?   

Neverending battles

Rebecca Walker on her mother, Alice Walker, and feminism:

My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.

I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son  -  her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.

[…] The ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn't take into account the toll on children. That's all part of the unfinished business of feminism.

Then there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: 'I'd like a child. If it happens, it happens.' I tell them: 'Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.' As I know only too well.

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women's movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them  -  as I have learned to my cost. I don't want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.

Oh man!  I have to admit that I don’t get the incessant bickering among women about the superfluous because in my opinion it stops meaningful conversations. What I’ve learned in the last few years is that the era of all-encompassing femininity is over precisely because women can forgive each other for their imperfections and failures. Togetherness and solidarity have become manly words. If I wanted to be cute, mean, and unnecessarily provocative, but shortsighted I would say that unfortunately for too many women, man is the future of the woman and manliness is the aspiration of womanness

Patience

My task on this Memorial day and for the rest of the year is to learn to be patient and to be honest with myself about my strengths and weaknesses. One of the most important thing that I have realized so far is that timidity isn't cute when you are trying to lead or to succeed. People appreciate humility when it isn't the product of self-doubt or confusion.

Plainness kills creativity

During the last week, I saw two movies, which are supposed to be summer blockbusters and which not only disappointed me, but irritated me because I sensed they could have been good had the writers and the directors decided to take more risks and not to be bet on plainness, which nowadays is safely lucrative when it is well packaged. The two movies were the latest Indiana Jones and the sequel of the Chronicles of Narnia. I have to admit that I kept wondering while I was watching those movies whether there was something I was missing or whether the purpose of the summer movies when they are condemned to become blockbusters is to provide viewers with a sensory experience that will keep them from leaving the theater because they are watching things and people that are in perpetual actions without letting them think, take a breath and to think about what they are watching. When I was watching Cate Blanchett trying desperately to make her unoriginal and stereotypical character, I kept wondering what the purpose of the movie was and why George Lucas and Spielberg made it when they obviously don't need the money. I realized that I wasn't seeing the big picture and that nowadays, in Hollywood as anywhere else on our planet, it people are attracted to big moving things even if it means watching a train wreck, even if it means being part of a movement that is doomed. People want action because it gives them the illusion that they have controlled over something or rather that they are moving towards something. I would have loved Indiana Jones if Spielberg had taken the risk to make a picture like Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, that is to make a movie, which doesn’t try to get around its hero's age, but uses it to make power points about aging and about the fact that it changes you without necessarily giving you the chance to feel young again by marrying the love of your life and a son whom you never knew you had.

Moving West

I'm seriously thinking about moving to the West of the United States instead of moving back to New York.  I feel that moving West would give me the opportunity not only to be a part of a growing and dynamic region, but also the one to make my mark and to finally get my business off the ground. I have fallen out of love with DC. I love New York but it is too crowded (with a lot of the right people though) and everything there has basically been done already and those doing new things have advantages, means and connections that I don't have. I' m excited about the possibility of going somewhere where there is no winter and where there are a lot  of things left to be done for the city to become exceptional. I haven't made up my mind yet. I don't want to rush into a decision. I need to have a plan. I 've learned that excitement, courage, and hard work are essential, but not enough when trying to do something big and new.

The willingness to be controversial

I’m realizing that in our times, being controversial isn’t about saying outrageous things.  Nowadays, controversy comes when one dares to be different, to disagree with the mainstream without backing down, and to take the heat that comes with it without apologizing or being apologetic about rocking the boat and causing strife.  It is for this reason that I find that I like Roseanne Bar more and more even though she says things that I don’t agree with it and that she can be rough and unfair.  What I like about her is that she doesn’t mind not being disliked and expressing her strong opposition to some things and some people. Her blog is a great read, but you get things that you may get somewhere else, but with more soul and more spice. In our times when everything is bland and where people are so scared of offending the “right” people, it is great to read somebody who doesn’t give a damn and who isn’t afraid of being bold and abrasive. I wonder why Roseanne Bar isn’t a more powerful voice in Hollywood and I believe that the fact that she isn’t explain why Hollywood is becoming a candy shop that sells things, which can rot not only teeth, but also the human soul and individuality.

Falling back (softly) to Earth

I’m back from New York.  It was a lovely, but short (it had to be short to be lovely and sweet) vacation.  It was great to go back to Manhattan even though it was expensive, but hey you only live once. So what can I tell you about New York? Well two simple and prosaic things. The first one is that New Yorkers are worried about the possibility of an American recession and are forgetting that New York has to battle fiercely to remain one of the beautiful cities of the world (it is my way of asserting that London has a better atmosphere than New York at the moment). The second thing is that Manhattan, at least its hotels, are filled with Europeans who are enjoying the advantage of a strong Euro. In my hotel, most of the people were German, Spanish, and French. It made me regret the days when I could use the mighty dollar to have a great vacation in Paris, Nice, or Barcelona. To be brief, my trip was excellent and my head is filled with bold ideas. I know that my summer is going to be exciting and fruitful. I am rested and ready for battle and I will blog more intensely now that I’ve been able to get some rest and some much-needed perspective.

Blissful exile to New York

I’m going to New York to spend a few days and to look and find hopefully an apartment (I’m leaving DC this summer for Manhattan). I will be gone for at least 4 days, but for at most 10 days. I don’t know if I will be able to blog, but if I spent more than 4 days away from this blog then I will more than likely find a way to blog. I know that this is my second exodus from this blog so far this year, but the truth is that my life is in flux and I’m trying desperately to get my life together. Anyway, my hope is that I will have a good trip and that I will come back with a new perspective on life or at least on blogging.

Psychoanalyzing Bitchiness

I find the following point by India Knight about bitchiness disturbing:

I always think that nasty adult women were terribly unpopular at school and have yet to meet one who disproves my theory - put it this way, I doubt Celerier found herself overburdened with invitations during her teenage years. However, while I can understand that being shunned as a pariah by your contemporaries would leave its mark and perhaps, rather poignantly, cause you to devote your adult life to getting one over on them, there has got to be more to it than that. Surely not every ambitious young woman in the country was a loathsome teenager? Does The Apprentice have a secret pool of them to pick its candidates from? Or do young women still think that bitching and backstabbing constitute their best chance of achieving success in their chosen field? Because something has gone a bit wrong if they do.

Women have a strange love-hate relationship with bitchiness. We hate being at the receiving end of it but aren’t entirely averse to doling it out: it makes us feel (oh dear) important and capable. We periodically reassure ourselves that bitchiness - being foul to other people and making them feel crap - is a marvellous and uniquely female virtue, one we must embrace and master, one that shows we are brave and fearless and mistresses of our own destinies. We may even hold the vague notion that there’s something rather laudably feminist about it.

However, there is nothing brave about being vile or grinding down your fellow woman just because you can. Au contraire - without wanting to get too Desmond Morris about it, attack is a basic animal response to fear: it’s fight or flight, and therefore says nothing whatsoever about confidence and a great deal about the lack of it.

Perhaps people confuse bitchiness with wit or with verbal dexterity to the point where entire generations of otherwise apparently intelligent women believe, stupidly, that Nasty Girls Finish First, despite the embarrassment of evidence to the contrary, both in the real world, where nasty girls seldom have enviable lives, and in The Apprentice’s version of it, where nasty girls get fired.

The only people who are in any position to do anything about this are the bitchy women themselves: surely it’s time the scales fell from their eyes? Bitchiness gets you nowhere - plus, everyone still hates you. Not big, not clever and not what anyone would call a result, within the boardroom or out of it.

Wow!  I think that by just reading that paragraph it is possible to understand why neither Ségolène Royal nor Hillary Clinton made it. They had too much baggage.  They were bitchy and women are always the first ones to psychoanalyze bitchiness, to make it about them and to make it about a character flaw while having cojones and being macho are considered masculine virtues. To this argument, people always argue what about Margaret Thatcher, what about Golda Meir, or even Angela Merkel, the answer is very simple none of them were president and would have been elected without a group of males around them to drown their perceived bitchiness and make their disturbing feminity less visible.

Musical nostalgia

Soixante-huitards and the search for eternal youth

Christopher Hitchens on May 68 and on why he still considers himself a soixante-huitard:

As someone born in 1949, I prefer to consider myself not a mere sixties person but a soixante-huitard. If there didn’t happen to be French argot for this, I would still want to answer to the name “sixty-eighter.”

For me, this date-stamped association of memories and ideas and bygone struggles has almost nothing to do with the checklist recently evoked onscreen by Tom Brokaw, which ran the gamut from the Tet Offensive and the murder of Martin Luther King to the images of Haight-Ashbury and the mystic lyrics of Buffalo Springfield. That year was for me a rite of passage, a sort of ordeal, as well as a kind of joy and liberation.

[...]  If you were a real political soixante-huitard, which meant that you were in one way or another related to the New Left, what you looked for and hoped for was a resistance to both the Eastern and Western “blocs.” Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were strong options, but they were just that—optional. In my cohort, we kept our hair short and our demeanor non-psychedelic, the better to appeal to the workers at the factory gate, who, we thought, were about to see through the realm of illusion foisted upon them by a combination of consumerism and the Cold War.

[…] At the time, I thought 1968 was the beginning of something. Later, I understood that I had instead been part of the end of something: the last gasp of red-flag socialism (which actually persisted until the murder of Salvador Allende in 1973 and the overthrow of Portuguese fascism in 1974). But the antitotalitarian ethos embraced by the best soixante-huitards remains an option, and I believe that it will have further opportunities to declare itself—in Cuba, to take one vivid and imminent example—long after the pseudo-revolutionary silliness has been forgotten.

The fact that Christopher Hitchens still considers himself a soixante-huitard is very revealing because it explains his evolutions and his contradictions. Hitchens reminds of Bernard Kouchner in his unwillingness to give up the idealism of his past’s struggles and his willingness to reinterpret them and to fight his present struggles by switching camps and putting the emphasis of winning since for him he was never wrong, but simply fought the good fight with the wrong people.  What fascinates me with the soixante-huitards is their refusal to grow up because they can’t give up what they view as the purity of their youthful ideologies, which in fact was its self-righteousness. The saddest things about the soixante-huitards is that because they can’t bring themselves to even consider the fact that they may have been wrong about le droit d’ingérence, interventionism and the belief that injustice, whereever it happened, annihilated everybody's right to freedom, they have today to say the problem isn't that they were wrong, but that they were right, but unwilling to assert their own rightness by kicking the ant-hill by fear of upsetting the balance of the world. This refusal to grow up and the ferocious battle to keep themselves young lead the glorification of action for action’s sake, which in turn accentuate the fact the soixante-huitards no longer believe in anything, but themselves and their duty, in the name of their own greatness, to remake the world in their image. It isn't surprising that Hitchens doesn't believe in God.

A writer's mother

The Guardian has a fascinating interview with Lucie Ceccaldi, the mother of Michel Houellebecq who is certainly France’s most successful writer of the last decade, who has written her memoirs. Ceccaldi has some scandalous (but not always outrageous) things to say not only about her son and his writing but also about motherhood in general. It is a great read. Sugary excerpt:

Then, in 1998, when Houellebecq was at the height of his fame, she says she stumbled upon an article about him winning a literary prize for Atomised. (In the photo he was wearing "the same anorak he had been wearing for years".) She went to a bookshop, picked up Atomised and was furious. "I said, 'Fuck, it's not true.' He described me as a kind of whore, kept by I don't know what American. That's slander. All my life I've toiled to earn money for other people. I want him to apologise. If I was law-suit minded, I would have sued him and won."

She writes in her memoir's postscript that she will only talk to him again "the day he goes to a public square with Atomised in his hand and says: 'I am a liar, I am an imposter, I've done nothing in my life except do bad to the people around me, and I ask for forgiveness.'" Does she think he will apologise? "Of course not, he's too proud. And also, he's famous because he's a terrible victim. If he apologised to me, his sales would disappear."

She doesn't rate her son's literary talents. "What's all this stuff about an old chemist who wonders if his secretary is having a wank?" she asks. "If it hadn't been my son, I wouldn't read that kind of crap, I would put it down straight away, because if there's one thing I detest in the world it's pornography. That book is pure pornography, it's repugnant, it's crap. I don't understand its success at all, that just shows the decadance of France." In her own book, she speculates that he writes about sex because he doesn't get enough. "What's this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who's never done anything, who's never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior ... Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq's a stupid little bastard, whether he's my son or not."

Does she believe in mother love? "Western women get on my nerves with their mother love." She says she can't stand the western mothers who crow about how amazing their kid is, preferring the "mother love of African women who carry a child behind their back" and raise it among the wider tribe.

Do you love your son? "Yes, of course I love my son. If he dropped dead, I'd be profoundly hurt, definitively, but I wouldn't complain in newspapers and write a book about it."

When one reads this interview, one can understand why Michel Houellebecq never seems to be at ease with his own greatness and takes as a curse by then taking upon himself the obligation not just to be controversial, but also to make people uncomfortable. Many articles and books has been written on the influence that having an absent father or rather not having a father at all played in the lives of writer such as Baudelaire, Camus, and Sartre. Paul Vitz wrote a couple of years ago a  book, Faith of the Fatherless, in which he asserts that the atheism of Camus and Sartre, which is essential to their writing and philosophy can be explained by the fact that they both grew up without a father. It is impossible to read Lucie Ceccaldi’s mother and not to be persuaded that she had a great influence in not the personality of her son, but more importantly on who he is as a writer.

Falling out of love with liberalism and becoming an independent

After the end of the Democratic primaries tonight (we all know that the race is over), I've realized that if these primaries have taught me anything is that I don't like the Democratic party and I can no longer call myself a liberal. I think that the whole circus that were the Democratic primaries taught me that I don't want to be a part of party that has to turn everything into a struggle between good. I don't want be to one of those liberals who stop thinking, growing, and rebelling against the unacceptable because they have found hope and the truth. I'm not following Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and David Mamet by crossing the Rubicon to join the Dark Side but I'm definitely leaving the pink island. Anyway, it is sad to say, but liberalism and the Democratic party are about romance and the creepiest form of youth obsession. I was a teenager once and I don't want to go back to that time because I don't believe in the absoluteness of innocence.

It's already so complicated

I find the following sugary excerpt from Jessa Crispin on Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s latest book interesting:

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is worried that this surge in misogyny — the violent porn, Girls Gone Wild, and I’m sure he would include The Average American Male — is one of the signs that something is wrong with our men. He previously blamed women for this trend in Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex. His argument was something along the lines of, “Put some clothes on, tart.” Now he looks into the male half of the species in The Broken American Male: And How to Fix Him. He theorizes that the stunted adolescence, the frat-boy mentalities that are never outgrown, the high divorce rate, and the growing number of women who would rather live alone than with men demonstrate that there is something seriously wrong with the state of masculinity. It is our toxic culture that is destroying men.

[…]He does not blame feminism for the state of masculinity, or so he says. But having read his thoughts on femininity before, I read The Broken American Male wondering how long it would take before women became the problem. That would be 47 pages. “[M]en are with women who have in turn been with so many other men that the modern American male feels that his very anatomy is being measured against some standard that he cannot attain.” Sluts! I noticed that in his book about femininity he did not have a corresponding chapter about women’s bodies being compared to men’s former sexual partners, not to mention every woman on television, in movies, on billboards, in pornography; or that chick he saw on the elevator and used as a masturbatory fantasy earlier that day.

If anything, The Broken American Male is a 291-page argument for why women should not get married to men.

America more than any country has gender problem in the sense that it is unable to deal with gender in a nontraditional and unthreatening fashion, which explains why all discussions about gender in America especially tends to be circular and to lead nowhere. Sometime, I feel that America has too much in common with that transsexual woman who becomes a man and yet finds himself pregnant. I don’t think that differences are anomalies or are creepy, or freaky, but I think that when they are sacralized they tend to espouse the qualities that the people who fear them what them to have. I for one, find tiresome the endless conversations about women, men, manliness, femininity, traditional values, nature, and sacredness because it asserts violently the fact that one is her/his gender and that a man is a man is a man and that a women is a women is a women and that she better be a rose. I would like to be able to show my derriere without being an affront to women’s everywhere and to be virile without threatening a man’s ego. It may not be possible in my lifetime, but again the fact that it isn’t doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do it.

Politics and the novel

Orhan Pamuk on novels and politics :

My experience going back to my early 20s when everyone was politicized in Turkey is that serving a cause destroys the beauty of literature. Most of the time I saw that well-meaning authors had destroyed their talent through politics.

If you look at the whole corpus of novels, politics is not the most interesting subject. These subjects are love, happiness, bourgeois life, the meaning of life, goals in life that end in disillusionment.

There is so much cheap morality in writing political fiction. I wrote a political novel, Snow, but I did my best not to pass a moral judgment on any of my characters. The problem with the political novel is that there is a high expectation from the reader that you will pass judgment on a character.

But the very strength of the art of the novel is that the writer identifies with the character he creates with such great intensity that no moral judgment should be passed on a character.

The art of the novel is based on the unique capacity of human beings to identify with the Other with whom we have no common interests. In my mind's eye I try to understand what this person -- who is not like me but is of a different race, gender, culture or class, who may be perverse or strange -- is thinking and feeling. But at the same time he or she is a human being like me. It's called compassion.

Of course, I'm not saying human beings are like this all the time. We are capable of killing 200,000 Iraqis and don't care about it anymore, and just pay attention to what George Bush says. We are capable of doing this as well as being compassionate. But the art of the novel is based on this human capacity for compassion.

A novel works if the writer manages to identify with the characters. That means putting oneself in the shoes of others, not judging them.

The worst thing that a writer can do is not to take politics seriously, but rather to confuse it with literature by placing it above everything including her/his own art. Writers stop to be able to write novels when they to look at the world and their art through the eyes of a politician because doing it implies setting limits that can only cheapen a literary work by making it a cheap piece of political propaganda.