A friend who is also a blogger mentioned her difficulty using the Google Blogger layout options to display her recommended blogs list. I decided to experiment with my dummy blog to see how difficult it was for me. I added the blog list gadget to the blog and picked some of the blogs I don't usually list on my main page. One was Sarah Blakewell's cleverly named "Sarah Blogwell's Bake" where she posts "half-baked ideas". Blakewell lives in England, has three books to her credit and has a web site and a blog. She was a university librarian before becoming a full-time writer. Her most recent book "How to Live" walks through the life and times of one of the world's first essayists and philosophers of everyday life, Michel de Montaigne.
While adding a link to her blog on my experimental site "ABC123", I saw her title "The beast must be free, too". I thought that was intriguing and took a look. It turned out to concern a theme that has interested me for years. Probably in my early college years, I saw a book entitled "Seven Years Solitary". It was about a Hungarian woman arrested for spying and held in solitary confinement for 7 years. Considerable research has been published over the last few years about the dangers to mental health of solitary confinement. Dr. Edith Bone explained in her 1957 book how she worked to give herself structure and duties and tasks to complete, even playing chess against herself with a makeshift chess set to keep her bearings and her mind occupied.
Blakewell's focus was on two different people experiencing a less severe problem but serious still, being held under house arrest. . Ai Weiwei is a well-known Chinese artist and activist and Jafar Panahi is a leading Iranian filmmaker. Both of these men have made the governments of their country nervous. Ai Weiwei is kept under surveillance by the Chinese government and Panahi is forbidden by the Iranian government from making films, writing them or directing them. Weiwei decided to go the government one better by installing web cams around his house so that the whole world could see what he was doing all the time. Panahi and a friend with a camera made "This is Not a Film", explaining throughout that what was produced was not a film because of its limitations, stiltedness, lack of flow, etc.
Blakewell explains the writings of a 1790 young man held under house arrest for 42 days as well as describing the experiences of the Chinese artist and the Iranian filmmaker. Her title refers to the insight of Edith Bone and the others that their minds are free but the physical "beast" of their bodies needs freedom, too.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
