Jamaica without concessions

I was really there to hear Jamaica Kincaid.  Her prose awes me.  So powerful and fluid.  While there are few dialogues, her texts have a cliffhanger quality to them. Yet not a trace of sentimentality.  How does she do it?  From the moment she made her way up the stairs on the side of the stage, her whole person exuded pain.  That grand old dame, bent over by pain.  That interior pain that flows in her texts, is it the price paid to escape sentimentality? To produce such powerful prose?  She takes the microphone and tells of being up a lot of mischief when she was in school and always getting punished.  At the age of 7, she had to copy down books 1 and 2 of Milton's Paridise Lost.  "It ended up not being a punishment at all, I fell in love with its character, Lucy.  And later named a novel after her.  I'm going to read from book 2."

In the exchange of love between the reading performer and the audience, that's all she was prepared to give.  She came fully prepared to disappoint her lover's expectations.  If she had given us a reading of her work, we would have loved her all the more for it.  But she didn't come for our love. Her reading had a deep, beautiful stance to it.  It's a hard text to listen to, and the audience was fretting.  She left, standing straighter in her raw loneliness.

The age gap in Hollywood movies: not happy ever after

41 year difference between De Niro and his life partner Chen

The average age gap between the male and female leads in Hollywood is 15 years. I don't need to tell you which gender is the older one. And that's average, meaning that in some movies, the male lead is 20 years older or more.

At the end of the movie, it is usually expected that the male and female leads will live for ever happy together. Well, that "forever" is not going to last long. 

Women in the US live on average 5 years longer than men. That means our female protagonist is likely to spend 20 years crying over her love interest's grave. Women's roles peak around age 30, whereas men's roles peak at 46, often with men in their 40s or 50s paired with women in their 20s or early 30s.

It would make much more sense for the woman to be older than the man. By about 5 years. Then they could leave our planet at about the same time!

The gender gap in movies ends up creating a model of normality. People go to the movies and identify with the protagonists. Men will think: oh, I can have a partner that is 10 or 15 or 20 years younger than me. Women will think: oh, I won't get a partner that's my age, I'll have to be in a couple with an older man. 

Marriage fits right in the capitalist market model. De Niro is a celebrity hence his value is top, and he can "afford" a woman 41 year younger. If he were retired in Bayridge, he would be no match for her. Women are supposed to look young and fresh whereas it's ok for a man to look seasoned: he's wise and has made money. Hence at 40 or 50, their market value differs markedly in our society. There are couples were the woman is older, but they tend to be discreet or they get ridiculed or worse, see French President Macron and his older wife who were targeted by US media.>