Writer's Block: Found Objects
I have never looked through other people's bins but I do shop at Charity Shops. The most near shop to me is my local RSPCA one and from there I find so many excellent things! I managed to get a brand new designer tracksuit for £1.50 which made my day, let me tell you. And a really nice deep purple jumper for £1.25.
But the main point of my entry is a television programme I have been watching this whole week. BBC have comissioned a new adaptation of Anne Frank's diary and every evening at 7.00pm I find myself crying. When the actress playing Anne (brilliantly I might add) talks about her dreams for the future it breaks my heart.
Ellie Kendrick as Anne Frank
I have never mentioned it here but for my History A-Level I had the chance to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp with one other classmate (a good friend of mine) and a teacher. It had to have been one of the worst days of my life (it was only a day trip and for that I was so glad. It was truly horrible).
I don't have an overly optimistic view of the world. I never have and I don't think I ever will. I don't think that all humans are little rays of sunshine deep inside. What I like to do instead is pretend that the bad things aren't happening. I push everything away and pretend it is really all OK. I know it isn't healthy and I know it isn't the way I should behave but it is the way I do behave and I think if I didn't do that I wouldn't be able to survive.
I know the Holocaust happened. I have studied it so many times. But precisely because of that I seem to have distanced myself from it. It is facts and numbers and things that happened to people I don't know and can't relate to. But I have been lucky enough to meet Holocaust survivors and even more blessed to have been able to hear their individual stories, see thier brands and read thier memoirs. And watching this TV programme just makes the whole horrendous situation real. This girl had dreams and hopes and desires, just like everyone else. And she wasn't able to live any of them. Anne wanted to grow up and she wanted to travel and work and see the world. And she couldn't do any of it.
Watching this has made me want to read her diary. I really have never read it and while other people read it (or were forced to in school) I am glad I wasn't. It probably would have spoilt it for me. So I decided to look on Amazon to check out prices and then I started reading the reviews. There were quite a few 1 star reviews and I wondered what they were so against. This is one that I found, titled
ACH, DU LIEEEEEEEBEEEEEERRRRR!!!! Why, oh, why ist das Diary des Anne Frank oh-sooooo FRIGGIN' Laaaaaaaaaaangweeeeeeeeil ig?!?!?
That alone made me want to read the review.
I understand that this fool of a Took is entitled to his opinion. (Throughout the whole thing I was sure it was a freaky girl until I read his other reviews. Trust me, the condom reviews makes it glaringly obvious that he has a penis). But I don't agree with it. Well most of it anyway. Some I do because whether I like it or not (and I don't) he has hit the stupid nail on the stupid head.
But I am still going to read it. Because I have no problem at all about reading about her 'sexual awakening' (since I don't find it 'inexcusably AWKWARD' or 'gross'. Maybe because I am not an idiot) or the fact that she doesn't concentrate on the War (I get the fact that she was a thirteen year old girl when it all began. I don't expect her to become a literary war correspondent from her shared bedroom).
ACH, DU LIEBER!!!!
That's the biting phrase that can best epitomize my personal feelings at the disconnect between the expectation of Anne Frank's diary and the actual reality of reading it. The Diary of Anne Frank is very, very, very disappointing and a humongous letdown!!!! To wit, I must implacably question and hold in contempt the judgment processes of the many, previous, sycophant reviewers who've been exaggerating the "beauty" or "grace" or whatever politically correct term of flattery they can invent for this diary. The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most caustic examples of herd mentality-syndrome and mass hysteria among the many positive-rating, Amazon reviewers. In truth, this diary of Anne's is just plain, bloody awful and doesn't deserve its classic status to say the least!!!! I suppose the hordes of five-star reviewers simply turned off their brains, refused to analyze Anne's diary critically, and just subserviently jumped on the bandwagon of conventional wisdom, where her diary is hailed a "classic." BS!!!!
After having thoroughly read this, I can assure you that it's no classic and D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y not worth your time or money...unless, of course, you get your kicks and jollies from plumbing the trivial and superficial mind of a fourteen-year-old. This stellar, brutally-but-intellectually-honest review of mine will analytically break down precisely what the hell's wrong with Anne's diary (plenty!) and warn you against reading it. If you're not narrow-minded and can take an analysis which intrepidly contravenes the discreditable conventional wisdom of the masses, then you'll be grateful for this review. If you're a hypersensitive sheeple, then I expect you to be appalled and shocked at the alleged "audacity" of this review, but that's YOUR problem, not mine. All I concern myself with is an intellectually honest review of this diary.
I went into The Diary of Anne Frank because it came to my attention that I hadn't read it in high school, whereas many of my peers had indeed had it mandated for reading in school. I attended a Catholic high school, and it's not like Catholics have something even remotely to be shameful about concerning their treatment of Jews in WWII. Why, in fact, educated people know that even N*zi Adolf Eichmann confessed in his diaries that the Catholic Church in occupied Italy was the only organization that loudly protested and opposed the mass deportation of Jews from their "ghetto" in Rome. So, I wanted to catch up on this apparent "classic" because it was missed reading at my old, Catholic high school.
However, I absolutely regret and curse this misjudgment of mine due to the appalling quality and shortcoming of the content of the diary. See, as a new reader, I perceptively went into the Diary of Anne Frank with the reasonable expectation that it would, you know, perhaps talk about her feelings relating to--I don't know!--the genocidal, N*zi occupation, which had forced her family and some acquaintances into an attic, where they lived like imprisoned animals under extreme duress. That would make for an interesting read obviously because one would delve into the psychology of a person in such duress and try to relate. Conventional wisdom has it that that's what her diary mainly relates to, but in actuality...her diary's actually filled to the nauseating brim with her infatuation (nah, kids these days would call it her "crushing) on her attic-mate Peter; endlessly boring stories about preparing and storing vegetables in their attic; girl talk about her prior crush before she went into hiding; lurid tales about her discovering her budding sexuality; typical teen-girl angst about how she's never really had close girlfriends; grumbling about the adults in the attic always rebuking her due to her forthrightness; and how she hates her mother like a typical EMO teenager, just to name a few!!!!
Anne disappointingly spends precious few entries (the vast minority) on the more interesting and valuable ruminations, such as those on human nature, persecution of Jews, and the terror felt inside the attic that came primarily from being discovered, or from the sounds and sights of war breaking loose outside her attic (on a couple of entries, she even recounts stories of downed fighter planes and their pilots' fate). That's the unpardonable fault of her diary because only these kinds of idiosyncratic entries actually material to WW2 are what would elevate her diary above that of any other, mundane, teen girl's. That so much of her diary is precisely so ordinary according to what one stereotypically expects from ANY teen girl's entries is the real pity in this exaggeratedly hyped work.
I found the purpose of Anne's diary much more useful in detailing how more wonderfully conservative society was in the 40s--rather than getting the reader to empathize with WW2-era, persecuted Jews--compared to today's liberal nightmare. In example, Anne's many entries where she's "crushing" on her attic-mate, Peter, involve feelings of sincere, simplistic affection and puppy love, maybe quaint but still adorable in hindsight. For instance, in many entries, Anne swoons over attic-mate Peter's confiding in her or the way he merely looks at her; to her as a girl in the 40s back then, that already qualified as a "fantasy." Contrast this to the inarguable fact that in today's world, many 14-year-olds in Anne's shoes would probably have infectious thoughts of desiring to sexually please their crushes (and then do so!) just so they could feel like "true women!" Another unmistakable motif in Anne's experiences that comes through as a confirmation of how more wonderfully conservative things were back then is the constant reference to schoolwork, and, by golly, actually doing well at it! In some entries, Anne actually *gulp* takes pride in getting good grades in school and measuring herself as a person based on her work ethic in class, again, wonderfully "old-fashioned." Again, contrast this with many 14-year-olds today who--especially if they're in the NEA's public schools--can't read, write or do any `rithmetic, yet can tell you all kinds of things about the b*tches and h*es in rap music!!!!
This latest edition of her diary, The so-called Definitive Edition, includes inexcusably AWKWARD entries involving Anne's sexual awakening, which is also a discomforting sign of the incrementing liberalism that's occurring societally, whereas her dad, Otto, wisely omitted these lewd entries from the original publication. For instance, on page 162, she writes, "Once when I was spending the night at Jacque's, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she'd always hidden from me and which I'd never seen. I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other's br*asts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude...I go into ecstasy." Gross!!!! This egregiously has nothing to do with WW2, or a person's feelings of being imprisoned in an attic while hoping the N*zis don't discover her. The inclusion of this lewdness was utterly ill-advised.
Surprisingly, though, some of Anne's entries include reflections which prove she possessed moral clarity and, unlike today's liberals (the arbiters of moral relativism), had the ability to judge between good and evil with regards to WW2. For instance, on page 334 (from July 21, 1944), she writes, "Now, at last, things are going well!...An *ss*ssination attempt has been made on H*tler's life, and for once not by Jewish Communists or English capitalists, but by a German general...This is the best proof we've had so far that many officers and generals are fed up with the war and would like to see H*tler sink into a bottomless pit..." Here, Anne clearly demonstrates that she confidently feels it's perfectly all right to be happy at the prospect of your enemy being killed in a war. Further, she also interprets the *ss*ssination attempt in a pro-Allies, anti-German way, suspecting that H*tler's generals are turning on him. Contrast that to today's dreadful, modern liberals who would have a hell of a hard time rejoicing about the prospect of Bin Laden's death or any terrorist's, for that matter, because they're too obsessed with getting them "legal rights" through habeas corpus and moving them onto the US mainland for detention purposes!!!!
Still, Anne's diary is soooo disappointingly off-the-mark that I want anyone even flirting with the idea of reading a fourteen-year-old's musings to just boycott it. It's so dreadful because it mostly evades reflecting on WW2 and the hardships of attic life. Mainly, it reads like every other fourteen-year-old girl's diary from the beginning of time to infinity, and, so, is an absolutely superficial read!!!! To get an idea of how WW2 affected people, you can get a better read almost ANYWHERE ELSE. If you want to get inside a fourteen-year-old girl's trivial head--which Anne's diary is really mostly about: crushes, boys, resentment of parents, etc.--you should just steal your kid sister's. What's that? Don't have a kid sister?! Well, then steal the diary of your friend's or neighbor's kid sister because you'll get the same trivialities there as in Anne Frank's diary.
When I read his other reviews I kinda stopped paying attention to anything he said. The condom review I mentioned before was just very sexually graphic in a way I really didn't want to EVER read about. His main argument (I think after all the mental pictures of his sex life stopped ravaging my brain) was that as a Christian he argued that sex is for procreation, not pleasure, which even though I don't agree with I can respect because that is his faith and opinion (and it isn't a stupid one). But when he started hating all the people out there who use condoms for safe sex I had a little internal steam. If they want to have sex before marriage isn't it a good thing that they aren't being stupid by not using a condom?
And then he reviewd 'The Notebook' and the first 2 HSM movies. Why, I don't know. Since he keeps going on and ON about how not gay he is and insisting A LOT that reviewing those movies doesn't make him gay. But his review of HSM 2 was hilarious. One of his main objection to it was that at the swimming pool the main female characters wore swimming costumes. He really didn't like that. He also didn't like the fact that the movies 'advocated dancing'. And he wasn't even joking. Here is what else he thinks.
'HSM 2...is... a clandestine, feminist plan to emasculate what little "maleness" our modern society still has left!!!!...HSM 2 takes that feminist ideology and targets it to impressionable, male teens. Where male teens ought to have their masculinity encouraged by developing their leadership, athleticism and self-reliance, HSM 2 schemes to take this away from them, especially with all the Zac Efron singing and dancing.'
Yes, because that's the only way feminists can 'whip' their men into shape. By forcing them to sing and dance. I thought we all had to beleive that if a boy sings and dances it doesn't make him feminine? Surely it only makes him someone who likes to sing and dance. Personally i like to punch people in the face and learn Martial Arts. Am I a masculinated girl because of a masculine ideology which had targeted me at an impressionable age? Surely it just makes me a violent human. But whatever. I rather beleive that at an impressionable age the male sex turned me into a not-girl girl.
I know I am going over board with the crap he has written but seriously? What is he talking about? No one asked him to watch the movies. And if children really believes that High School is a Musical, well eventually they'll figure out that it's not. And they will survive. Heart will not be broken.
But the main point of my entry is a television programme I have been watching this whole week. BBC have comissioned a new adaptation of Anne Frank's diary and every evening at 7.00pm I find myself crying. When the actress playing Anne (brilliantly I might add) talks about her dreams for the future it breaks my heart.
Ellie Kendrick as Anne Frank
I have never mentioned it here but for my History A-Level I had the chance to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp with one other classmate (a good friend of mine) and a teacher. It had to have been one of the worst days of my life (it was only a day trip and for that I was so glad. It was truly horrible).
I don't have an overly optimistic view of the world. I never have and I don't think I ever will. I don't think that all humans are little rays of sunshine deep inside. What I like to do instead is pretend that the bad things aren't happening. I push everything away and pretend it is really all OK. I know it isn't healthy and I know it isn't the way I should behave but it is the way I do behave and I think if I didn't do that I wouldn't be able to survive.
I know the Holocaust happened. I have studied it so many times. But precisely because of that I seem to have distanced myself from it. It is facts and numbers and things that happened to people I don't know and can't relate to. But I have been lucky enough to meet Holocaust survivors and even more blessed to have been able to hear their individual stories, see thier brands and read thier memoirs. And watching this TV programme just makes the whole horrendous situation real. This girl had dreams and hopes and desires, just like everyone else. And she wasn't able to live any of them. Anne wanted to grow up and she wanted to travel and work and see the world. And she couldn't do any of it.
Watching this has made me want to read her diary. I really have never read it and while other people read it (or were forced to in school) I am glad I wasn't. It probably would have spoilt it for me. So I decided to look on Amazon to check out prices and then I started reading the reviews. There were quite a few 1 star reviews and I wondered what they were so against. This is one that I found, titled
ACH, DU LIEEEEEEEBEEEEEERRRRR!!!! Why, oh, why ist das Diary des Anne Frank oh-sooooo FRIGGIN' Laaaaaaaaaaangweeeeeeeeil ig?!?!?
That alone made me want to read the review.
I understand that this fool of a Took is entitled to his opinion. (Throughout the whole thing I was sure it was a freaky girl until I read his other reviews. Trust me, the condom reviews makes it glaringly obvious that he has a penis). But I don't agree with it. Well most of it anyway. Some I do because whether I like it or not (and I don't) he has hit the stupid nail on the stupid head.
But I am still going to read it. Because I have no problem at all about reading about her 'sexual awakening' (since I don't find it 'inexcusably AWKWARD' or 'gross'. Maybe because I am not an idiot) or the fact that she doesn't concentrate on the War (I get the fact that she was a thirteen year old girl when it all began. I don't expect her to become a literary war correspondent from her shared bedroom).
ACH, DU LIEBER!!!!
That's the biting phrase that can best epitomize my personal feelings at the disconnect between the expectation of Anne Frank's diary and the actual reality of reading it. The Diary of Anne Frank is very, very, very disappointing and a humongous letdown!!!! To wit, I must implacably question and hold in contempt the judgment processes of the many, previous, sycophant reviewers who've been exaggerating the "beauty" or "grace" or whatever politically correct term of flattery they can invent for this diary. The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most caustic examples of herd mentality-syndrome and mass hysteria among the many positive-rating, Amazon reviewers. In truth, this diary of Anne's is just plain, bloody awful and doesn't deserve its classic status to say the least!!!! I suppose the hordes of five-star reviewers simply turned off their brains, refused to analyze Anne's diary critically, and just subserviently jumped on the bandwagon of conventional wisdom, where her diary is hailed a "classic." BS!!!!
After having thoroughly read this, I can assure you that it's no classic and D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y not worth your time or money...unless, of course, you get your kicks and jollies from plumbing the trivial and superficial mind of a fourteen-year-old. This stellar, brutally-but-intellectually-honest review of mine will analytically break down precisely what the hell's wrong with Anne's diary (plenty!) and warn you against reading it. If you're not narrow-minded and can take an analysis which intrepidly contravenes the discreditable conventional wisdom of the masses, then you'll be grateful for this review. If you're a hypersensitive sheeple, then I expect you to be appalled and shocked at the alleged "audacity" of this review, but that's YOUR problem, not mine. All I concern myself with is an intellectually honest review of this diary.
I went into The Diary of Anne Frank because it came to my attention that I hadn't read it in high school, whereas many of my peers had indeed had it mandated for reading in school. I attended a Catholic high school, and it's not like Catholics have something even remotely to be shameful about concerning their treatment of Jews in WWII. Why, in fact, educated people know that even N*zi Adolf Eichmann confessed in his diaries that the Catholic Church in occupied Italy was the only organization that loudly protested and opposed the mass deportation of Jews from their "ghetto" in Rome. So, I wanted to catch up on this apparent "classic" because it was missed reading at my old, Catholic high school.
However, I absolutely regret and curse this misjudgment of mine due to the appalling quality and shortcoming of the content of the diary. See, as a new reader, I perceptively went into the Diary of Anne Frank with the reasonable expectation that it would, you know, perhaps talk about her feelings relating to--I don't know!--the genocidal, N*zi occupation, which had forced her family and some acquaintances into an attic, where they lived like imprisoned animals under extreme duress. That would make for an interesting read obviously because one would delve into the psychology of a person in such duress and try to relate. Conventional wisdom has it that that's what her diary mainly relates to, but in actuality...her diary's actually filled to the nauseating brim with her infatuation (nah, kids these days would call it her "crushing) on her attic-mate Peter; endlessly boring stories about preparing and storing vegetables in their attic; girl talk about her prior crush before she went into hiding; lurid tales about her discovering her budding sexuality; typical teen-girl angst about how she's never really had close girlfriends; grumbling about the adults in the attic always rebuking her due to her forthrightness; and how she hates her mother like a typical EMO teenager, just to name a few!!!!
Anne disappointingly spends precious few entries (the vast minority) on the more interesting and valuable ruminations, such as those on human nature, persecution of Jews, and the terror felt inside the attic that came primarily from being discovered, or from the sounds and sights of war breaking loose outside her attic (on a couple of entries, she even recounts stories of downed fighter planes and their pilots' fate). That's the unpardonable fault of her diary because only these kinds of idiosyncratic entries actually material to WW2 are what would elevate her diary above that of any other, mundane, teen girl's. That so much of her diary is precisely so ordinary according to what one stereotypically expects from ANY teen girl's entries is the real pity in this exaggeratedly hyped work.
I found the purpose of Anne's diary much more useful in detailing how more wonderfully conservative society was in the 40s--rather than getting the reader to empathize with WW2-era, persecuted Jews--compared to today's liberal nightmare. In example, Anne's many entries where she's "crushing" on her attic-mate, Peter, involve feelings of sincere, simplistic affection and puppy love, maybe quaint but still adorable in hindsight. For instance, in many entries, Anne swoons over attic-mate Peter's confiding in her or the way he merely looks at her; to her as a girl in the 40s back then, that already qualified as a "fantasy." Contrast this to the inarguable fact that in today's world, many 14-year-olds in Anne's shoes would probably have infectious thoughts of desiring to sexually please their crushes (and then do so!) just so they could feel like "true women!" Another unmistakable motif in Anne's experiences that comes through as a confirmation of how more wonderfully conservative things were back then is the constant reference to schoolwork, and, by golly, actually doing well at it! In some entries, Anne actually *gulp* takes pride in getting good grades in school and measuring herself as a person based on her work ethic in class, again, wonderfully "old-fashioned." Again, contrast this with many 14-year-olds today who--especially if they're in the NEA's public schools--can't read, write or do any `rithmetic, yet can tell you all kinds of things about the b*tches and h*es in rap music!!!!
This latest edition of her diary, The so-called Definitive Edition, includes inexcusably AWKWARD entries involving Anne's sexual awakening, which is also a discomforting sign of the incrementing liberalism that's occurring societally, whereas her dad, Otto, wisely omitted these lewd entries from the original publication. For instance, on page 162, she writes, "Once when I was spending the night at Jacque's, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she'd always hidden from me and which I'd never seen. I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other's br*asts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude...I go into ecstasy." Gross!!!! This egregiously has nothing to do with WW2, or a person's feelings of being imprisoned in an attic while hoping the N*zis don't discover her. The inclusion of this lewdness was utterly ill-advised.
Surprisingly, though, some of Anne's entries include reflections which prove she possessed moral clarity and, unlike today's liberals (the arbiters of moral relativism), had the ability to judge between good and evil with regards to WW2. For instance, on page 334 (from July 21, 1944), she writes, "Now, at last, things are going well!...An *ss*ssination attempt has been made on H*tler's life, and for once not by Jewish Communists or English capitalists, but by a German general...This is the best proof we've had so far that many officers and generals are fed up with the war and would like to see H*tler sink into a bottomless pit..." Here, Anne clearly demonstrates that she confidently feels it's perfectly all right to be happy at the prospect of your enemy being killed in a war. Further, she also interprets the *ss*ssination attempt in a pro-Allies, anti-German way, suspecting that H*tler's generals are turning on him. Contrast that to today's dreadful, modern liberals who would have a hell of a hard time rejoicing about the prospect of Bin Laden's death or any terrorist's, for that matter, because they're too obsessed with getting them "legal rights" through habeas corpus and moving them onto the US mainland for detention purposes!!!!
Still, Anne's diary is soooo disappointingly off-the-mark that I want anyone even flirting with the idea of reading a fourteen-year-old's musings to just boycott it. It's so dreadful because it mostly evades reflecting on WW2 and the hardships of attic life. Mainly, it reads like every other fourteen-year-old girl's diary from the beginning of time to infinity, and, so, is an absolutely superficial read!!!! To get an idea of how WW2 affected people, you can get a better read almost ANYWHERE ELSE. If you want to get inside a fourteen-year-old girl's trivial head--which Anne's diary is really mostly about: crushes, boys, resentment of parents, etc.--you should just steal your kid sister's. What's that? Don't have a kid sister?! Well, then steal the diary of your friend's or neighbor's kid sister because you'll get the same trivialities there as in Anne Frank's diary.
When I read his other reviews I kinda stopped paying attention to anything he said. The condom review I mentioned before was just very sexually graphic in a way I really didn't want to EVER read about. His main argument (I think after all the mental pictures of his sex life stopped ravaging my brain) was that as a Christian he argued that sex is for procreation, not pleasure, which even though I don't agree with I can respect because that is his faith and opinion (and it isn't a stupid one). But when he started hating all the people out there who use condoms for safe sex I had a little internal steam. If they want to have sex before marriage isn't it a good thing that they aren't being stupid by not using a condom?
And then he reviewd 'The Notebook' and the first 2 HSM movies. Why, I don't know. Since he keeps going on and ON about how not gay he is and insisting A LOT that reviewing those movies doesn't make him gay. But his review of HSM 2 was hilarious. One of his main objection to it was that at the swimming pool the main female characters wore swimming costumes. He really didn't like that. He also didn't like the fact that the movies 'advocated dancing'. And he wasn't even joking. Here is what else he thinks.
'HSM 2...is... a clandestine, feminist plan to emasculate what little "maleness" our modern society still has left!!!!...HSM 2 takes that feminist ideology and targets it to impressionable, male teens. Where male teens ought to have their masculinity encouraged by developing their leadership, athleticism and self-reliance, HSM 2 schemes to take this away from them, especially with all the Zac Efron singing and dancing.'
Yes, because that's the only way feminists can 'whip' their men into shape. By forcing them to sing and dance. I thought we all had to beleive that if a boy sings and dances it doesn't make him feminine? Surely it only makes him someone who likes to sing and dance. Personally i like to punch people in the face and learn Martial Arts. Am I a masculinated girl because of a masculine ideology which had targeted me at an impressionable age? Surely it just makes me a violent human. But whatever. I rather beleive that at an impressionable age the male sex turned me into a not-girl girl.
I know I am going over board with the crap he has written but seriously? What is he talking about? No one asked him to watch the movies. And if children really believes that High School is a Musical, well eventually they'll figure out that it's not. And they will survive. Heart will not be broken.