#start the week

[dabiconcordia]

“This has been such a Monday! I wish I stayed in bed, and I wish that yesterday had never happened.” ― Lisa Mantchev

[amyylinchen]

Good morning beauties 😘💚

Mondays should be banned. I'm for a 3-days weekend 😅😬

Have a nice day!

[105nt]

Start the Week - Emma Donoghue

There’s a great interview with Emma Donoghue by Adam Rutherford in Start the Week this week. I liked it so much I started making a transcript of the main bits relating to The Wonder. I’ll post it in stages - this is the last of four. All typos and errors are mine.

About eating and Florence Pugh:

AR: Eating is obviously a key theme in this, as Anna, the fasting girl is not eating, but many of the scenes feature Florence Pugh's character, Lib Wright, just jamming food into her face with big wooden spoons - big brothy Irish dishes. There's an enormous tension in there and that presumably is very deliberate?

ED: Oh, everything in a film is deliberate because you’ve worked it over so many times before the money is spent. Yes,  it was crucial to me to begin and to carry on the nurse eating, because of course, when you choose to write a story about what many people would understand as eating disorders, the last thing you should do is contribute to that cult by making it seem glamorous. 

And of course if you cast Florence Pugh, who is known to have a huge following especially of teenage girls - I  mean while we were filming the production there'd be .. the village was full of girls standing there hoping for a glimpse of her. The last thing you want to do is add Hollywood glamour to the idea of a child not eating. So it was crucial to us to show - not just to have Florence's character say, "you should eat" but to literally show her choosing life, eating this stew, stomping over the hills and saying "yes" to her body, rather than almost renouncing and turning away.

So yes, I think I counted eight eating scenes and the food was all very delicious. She took it home afterwards! She's got a wonderfully pro-food approach, Florence Pugh has, and she's known for her cooking videos as well.

AR: It is an astonishing performance, by her and all of the actors as well.

[naturelvr-69]

Good Morning ♋ https://www.tumblr.com/blog/naturelvr-69

[105nt]

Start the Week - Emma Donoghue

There’s a great interview with Emma Donoghue by Adam Rutherford in Start the Week this week. I liked it so much I started making a transcript of the main bits relating to The Wonder. I’ll post it in stages - this is the third of four. All typos and errors are mine.

About the setting and the competing narratives:

AR: The timing of the piece is very important as well, it's set just a few years after the Great Famine in Ireland and so there's a very clear sense of a memory, a collective trauma that is a big part of the narrative of the young girl and the family that are sustaining her miracle, if that's the interpretation of it. Is that timing important for you?

ED: Very much. As I say, there was no real fasting girl case set in Ireland just then, but I thought it was an irresistible context to put my fictional story in because of the awful irony that her relatives have died of hunger and here she is saying no to the food that is available.

I also thought it was a very interesting way of writing about the famine without it being too head on. I think Irish writers often feel quite oppressed by our big subject of the famine and sometimes suggesting the sort of lingering shadows it could cast on a culture is a more subtle way of reflecting on what it did to us, than showing the bodies rotting in the fields.

AR: Of the competing narratives, do you have a sense as the author that one of them becomes dominant, that one wins?

ED: I suppose what I find interesting is that you think at first it's a very simple clash. The sensible person against the ignorant people, but in fact the sensible person - the nurse - is forced to change her story too, she's forced to use different techniques. She can't solve this problem in an entirely practical and sensible and stereotypically English way. She has to sort of go rogue, go native in some ways - she has to be shaped by the child's language of emotion and miracle and almost fairytale, just as much as she the nurse is importing her scientific and sensible language. So, I suppose like many novelists I love setting up binary opposites and then confounding them and confusing them, showing it's all a lot more complicated than that.

So, what I found really moving is the mutual change - that by the end no one of them has won and it's more like they've improbably found their way through to a new way of managing to live.

[nonesuchrecords]

Natalie Merchant was live on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week this morning to talk with presenter Kirsty Wark and fellow guests Jeffrey Boakye and Michel Faber about her new album, Keep Your Courage, and more. You can hear their conversation here. Merchant begins her European tour in Berlin tomorrow, followed by two nights at London Palladium.

[105nt]

Start the Week - Emma Donoghue

There’s a great interview with Emma Donoghue by Adam Rutherford in Start the Week this week. I liked it so much I started making a transcript of the main bits relating to The Wonder. I’ll post it in stages - this is the second of four. All typos and errors are mine. 

 About the meta framing of the film:

AR: One of the things that is really striking about the film is that there are multiple competing narratives. That there is the one being told by the community that this is a religious - this is a miracle, but then there's the scientific one from Florence Pugh - the nurse, and then there's the media one and then there's this weird one from the doctor.

Let me ask you about story because, at the very beginning ... it's not set in 19th century Ireland, it's set on the sound stage where this is being filmed, and there a very clear instruction that we are being told a story, and I know you mentioned this is the director's work, but what is the intention of taking us out of the immersive media that is cinema?

ED: I think it's very interesting - the book itself has no modern frame but the book is full of these meta moments, in that, the nurse is having to take notes and everything, and at one point she fakes her notes in order to help the girl, the journalist is having to come up with palatable versions of it, everyone's spinning different yarns and interpreting the girl's behaviour differently and they're very aware of the effect of the version they write on their audience.

So I think Sebastián Lelio, our director, was really responding to that in the book and was really trying to flag it up, because a film has much less time to communicate than a book. A book has so much room for conversation and narration and moments, in the film I think he really wanted to press pause before having audiences just jump into the sheer pleasurable immersion of ... oh! here we are with Florence Pugh and the beautiful Irish countryside.

He really wanted to stop and make them think and make them aware that, yes, they might be quick to judge the people they would see as ignorant and superstitious, but aren't we all choosing to suspend disbelief every time we embrace the pleasure and comfort of a story? Every time we read a book or watch a film. So I think it's a very interesting example of where he's come up with a cinematic device to try and capture some of what's going on in the novel.

[unoriginalimages]

Some woman was on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week this morning claiming that all research into racial groups was racist and that every difference between races was caused by the environment. The host and the other guests failed to challenge her and seemed to agree.

She had writted a buk, and had a go at The Bell Curve, an actual, useful book.

Abolish the TV licence.