Word: navel
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...read the final draft and don’t sense all the brilliant, subtly wrought miracles of language. Ever since that conversation with my blockmate, though, I’ve begun to notice another quality of the writing process that I hadn’t really considered: unabashed navel-gazing...
...little girls made of? Well, you can pretty much forget sugar and spice or anything remotely hinting at nice nowadays. If we are to believe the movie Thirteen (and why shouldn't we, since co-star Nikki Reed, 15, co-wrote the film?), we would have to think navel rings, tongue studs and multiple forms of self-abuse, ranging from girls' cutting themselves with knives to getting their girlfriends to kayo them with roundhouse punches. Even Annabell (Lindsay Lohan), the teen queen of Freaky Friday, an agreeable sitcom masquerading as a movie, sports a pierced tummy button...
...Fewer still if I knew that journey was heading for an existential train wreck. And in the first few pages of Geoff Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It, the warning signs that I am entering an author's exercise in angst-ridden navel gazing are all there. A quote by Nietzsche on the fly page. A preface that starts with a snippet from Auden and ends with a disclaimer: "Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by the same token...
Jordan surely meant well. Most of us would err on the side of protecting a colleague's life. And there's nothing evil about wanting to report from Iraq--especially in the '90s, when America was focusing like a laser beam on its own navel. But precisely because for many of those years there was no Fox News, no MSNBC and no al-Jazeera, CNN's reporting--and omissions--had even greater influence in shaping perceptions of Iraq, particularly in the Middle East. If it couldn't tell viewers how its newsgathering was shaped by implicit death threats...
...some ways, queer critiques of drag can seem like unconstructive navel-gazing: it’s infighting within the queer community about how to best destabilize gender, when it’s a small miracle that any kind of gender destabilization happens at all. The weird truth of it is that even a small-scale drag event like Drag Bingo is pretty damned subversive for Harvard, where bricks are red, blood is blue, and “queer” more often than not means bobo gay boys partying with other bobo gay boys...