The Culture Enthusiast

Surrealist painter René Magritte once wrote in a letter to André Bosmans that: 

“All the abstract paintings reveal only abstract painting, and absolutely nothing else. (…) I cannot share an interest in what abstract painting is able to say, which was summed up once and for all by the first abstract painting.”1

Well, if it isn't the pot calling the kettle black...

I partly agree with his dissatisfaction with abstract paintings because, in general, I don't like them very much. (Exceptions made to Jackson Pollock and maybe Cy Twombly).

But it’s funny how Magritte dismiss abstract paintings, since his paintings are somewhat abstract themselves. Not in the sense that they are not figurative, because they are. 

More in the sense that they are so mysterious and enigmatic. His paintings, though not abstract per se, look more like abstract ideas than figurative paintings.

Personal Values by Rene Magritte, 1952

Do you remember his random explanation for one of his paintings? 

I bet he thought his works are able "to say" many things, but I know for a fact that for many people they are baffling and unintelligible. It might be easier to understand and like Jackson Pollock's paintings than Magritte's. 

How do you fell about Abstract Art?

Source: “Magritte: the true art of painting.” By Harry Torczyner

I have to be honest here: Macbeth scared the hell out of me.

The witches, the ghosts, the brutal murders, the madness, the blood... Visualizing the three witches saying "Fair is foul and foul is fair" gave me goosebumps. I'm not sure which is more horrifying, the witches or the doublespeak.

Now, many of Shakespeare's plays have violence. Othello strangles Desdemona, Cornwall plucks out Gloucester's eyes in King Lear. Why is Macbeth much more shocking?

In King Lear and Othello, for example, we have a distinct separation between villains and heroes. Who's the villain in Macbeth?

In the beginning of the play, Macbeth is a brave soldier, a "worthy gentleman" in the eyes of the king. Along come three witches that say he'll become Thane of Cawdor and later on king. They also say Macbeth's friend, Banquo, will be the father of kings.

Macbeth and his wife then set out to murder the king and more and more they became the villains of the play. Who is the villain that made them fall, the witches?

They have no personal motivation to destroy Macbeth, so there's no way you can stop them - they're evil for evil's sake.

They didn't force Macbeth to do anything, they used much less convincing and manipulation than Iago, for example. Bottom line: he did all those terrible things knowing they were wrong because of his "vaulting ambition".

And ambition is a key word. Macbeth, like most Shakespeare’s plays, is open to misinterpretations solely because of the reversal of values we see in our modern culture. 


Following this train of thought we might conclude that he would also have the power to go back to being a good man. He could repent and stop murdering people, but that would mean abandoning his lust for power and abiding to two judgments: earthly and divine. 

He had the option of going back, but he didn't. Not only because this is very difficult but because he still thought he could succeed. "And you all know security is mortal's chiefest enemy". Eventually he becomes so used to evil that all he has left is despair and the nihilistic notion that "life's but a walking shadow".

Macbeth being both the hero and the villain is something unique. Shakespeare seems to put Macbeth between the pagan world of Greek tragedies and the neo-pagan world of our contemporary culture. 

Take Oedipus for example. Oedipus was also a murderer. But the poor guy had absolutely no choice. He killed his father and married his mother without knowing it. He thought he was defending himself and marrying a queen. 

So why did he fall? Because the gods said so. The end of the play is the fulfillment of the oracle's prophecy. 

And then there’s Macbeth. The witches didn't establish he would be king, they have little power over human events, they could be just as well lying. Macbeth knew murdering the king to get his place is wrong. Doing this doesn't go according to some pre-established divine plan, on the contrary, the murder goes against it.

Maybe this is why this play is so scary. We see just how easy it is for a brave and noble man to become a villain. Most Shakespeare plays show that the corruption of the best is the worst of all. Macbeth shows that the best can bring corruption to themselves.

What do you think of Macbeth? What called your attention the most?

This was the first book I read for the Classic's Club Reading Challenge. In November, I'll talk about Elizabeth Barret Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Certain essential facts in the story are not simply small, unimportant, historical mistakes. For example, children were not taken to concentration camps to work alongside adults. Another movie that deals with the Holocaust, Life is beautiful, has a child in a camp, but he was hiding from the Nazis all the time and not working there. 

It even crossed my mind that Shmuel might not be real, that he was Bruno’s imaginary friend. If this was the case, I think the story would have been much more interesting.

Here's something else that bothered me: Bruno was gone for hours every day and nobody noticed. There was an armed guard with a dog in the front entrance, but there wasn't so much as a lock in the back door that led to the camp. And the most appalling of all: if an 8 year-old managed to crawl under the fence in minutes, how come nobody else in the camp did it?

All this may seem irrelevant and maybe I’m being picky. But some of these mistakes, like saying even children could escape the camp, are actually insulting. These mistakes also create two problems.

For one, they make the story seem too implausible in itself. The way the movie portrays the camps makes it difficult to believe that a prisoner would manage to talk to an outsider for several days or that a child would  manage to enter the camp at will.

Secondly, the movie is about WWII. All these details create confusion about the real events that occurred. The prisoners didn't escape because the fences were electrified in real camps, which isn't shown in the movie.


To make matters worse, the movie and the book in which it was based are aimed at teenagers. Young readers don't have enough historical background to spot these inconsistencies and might take everything in the movie as real.

But don't take it from me, because I'm no expert in WWII. A Rabbi wrote a review of this movie and he says he lent the book to one of his friends who is an Auschwitz survivor. According to the Rabbi, his friend "wept, and begged me tell everyone that this book is not just a lie and not just a fairytale, but a profanation."

Remember the other day we were talking about The Producers? Many people consider this comedy to be insulting, because the Holocaust is not a subject that should be dealt lightly. I understand this but I believe movies like The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas are the ones that deal with the Holocaust lightly.

The initial concept of the movie is indeed very original and promising: to tell the story of the Holocaust as seen through the naive eyes of an 8 year-old boy. But the movie's merits stop there.

Is "The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas" still good, despite its inconsistencies? 

UPDATE: While I was checking some college information for my sister, I found an article in an educational website talking about movies that can help students learn. One of the movies was The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas and the article says that this movie "helps discuss the concept of eugenics and exemplifies Nazi concentration camps." (Source in Portuguese)