Sunday, April 1, 2007

Title Page

Why Blind Assassin?

1) The Blind Assassin is a magically chilling Margaret Atwood novel.

2) I am a blind assassin and so are you. Killing people all the time. So maybe assassins would have been more appropriate. Blind because we don’t see their faces, don’t know who— all, indirectly. This makes it easier; as if they passed peacefully in their sleep. And blind because they don’t see our faces, either. All are abstracted. A big, blind, unfair knife fight, trade embargo, slow, seeping away of resources, gutting of vast, beautiful continents and bloodying of peoples, racism and misunderstanding, all without names or faces.

I know Marie Antoinette’s overplayed these days. But, Marie serves as a concrete history of how it can happen: kill them by buying too many pairs of shoes that they made with too little recompense, by worrying naught about this but only for your own fertility, Marie. Significantly, inspiringly, they killed her in return. Though Coppola’s portrayal isn't sympathetic enough to the plight of the French people, nonetheless one cannot blame them. This is what I want to take to heart, where I want to begin with, with changing.

3) I just like the sort of symmetry of the double ass. ass-ass: assassination—very appealing.

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