I had heard it was bad. I rented it on DVD. Hoping for it to be good-bad, as it were. Not to be. The film Eat Pray Love is a reason to launch war on America. The smug, laughing, crying, meditating, utterly self-engrossed Julia Roberts, playing self-engrossed travel journalist Liz Gilbert, is insufferable. To understand the vast gulf between Hollywood-American sensibility and that of, say, the developing and European worlds, watch this film. Ms. Gilbert has a great job, handsome, charming husband, great friends, and a house in New York. What she doesn't have is a sense of "herself". Instead of reading books, or going to a therapist, or even expanding her horizons locally, she dumps her husband, and takes up with a stud of an actor, before dumping him to travel to Italy to gain weight eating (which she sees as liberating), then off to Asia to try and get some mystic insights. Roberts never actually puts on weight, and her life lessons are vapid. I threw shoes at my TV set. Hemingway once observed that there was no way to escape one's self through travel. Ms. Gilbert should have stayed at home and looked inward. The depths afforded by wealth and opportunity are only off-set by the surfaces they project.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
Comments
Thanks for tipping us off. I shan't bother renting it now. I've never cared much for Julia Roberts anyway.
Best wishes from Simon