From the rarely-so-thoughtful-but-often-fun Overheard in New York:
So Yada Yada Yada, We Spent the Night in the E.R.
Twin sister #1, indignantly: I tried to get him the least sexual plant I could find. I mean, a cactus, how much less sexual could you get?
Twin sister #2, thoughtfully: You really can't get any less sexual than a cactus.--Uptown 1 Train
Though to be fair, even cacti do have sex...
On Double X, Slate's relentlessly smart site for women's issues, Margaret Wheeler Johnson alleges that feminism has screwed with Blanche DuBois.
Forget about the irony of the alleged perpetrator for a second, and think of the victim.
Is there a greater crime possible against a character in American theater?
The greatest of all American tragedies -- the rape of beauty by force -- has been sullied, if such an allegation is true, and if such a double negative is possible.
Wheeler complains:
Stanley’s attack is the second rape attempted on Blanche in a single evening, following the unwanted advance of her recently disillusioned suitor, Mitch. [Tennessee] Williams’s stage directions specify that she “sinks to her knees,” allowing Stanley to carry her “inert figure” to the bed. Her reaction inevitably raises the question of why she doesn’t fight back. Has she just come to believe that she deserves it, or does she actually deserve it?
The BAM production elides this feminist’s dilemma by calling into question whether this is rape at all. In [Liv] Ullmann’s version, both Blanche and Stanley are drunk off their rockers by the time Stanley pushes Blanche onto the bed, giving the scene, at worst, the ambiguity of date rape. “It is clear this is something [Blanche] may want,” Ullmann said at a recent Q&A at BAM. The director’s main goal seems to be to rescue Blanche from total passivity. Of course, this creates the problem that if she wasn’t raped, she later lied to her sister and said she was. But in Ullmann’s version, at least Blanche remains in control.
Fundamentally, and interestingly in this context, the complaint about feminism as a movement seems to be that it doesn't know when to stop.
It's true that men far too often use force in sex, for instance, but then feminist Andrea Dworkin famously complained about the nature of sex itself, arguing that (according to Wikipedia):
"Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women."
In 2009, has feminism -- or a dramatic attempt at an expression of such -- gone too far again?
Regardless of the answer to that question, the good news, everyone fortunate enough to have seen the production agrees, is Cate Blanchett.
In the words of the great John Lahr, in a recent New Yorker:
Blanche is the Everest of modern American drama, a peak of psychological complexity and emotional range, which many stars have attempted and few have conquered. Of the performances I’ve seen in recent years, Jessica Lange’s lacked theatrical amperage, Natasha Richardson’s was too buff, and Rachel Weisz’s, in this year’s overpraised Donmar Warehouse production in London, was too callow. The challenge for the actress taking on Blanche lies in fathoming her spiritual exhaustion, her paradoxical combination of backbone and collapse. Blanche has worn herself out, bearing her burden of guilt and grief, and facing down the world with a masquerade of Southern gaiety and grace. She is looking—as Williams himself was when he wrote the play—for “a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in.”Blanchett, with her alert mind, her informed heart, and her lithe, patrician silhouette, gets it right from the first beat.
According to the National Weather Service, this huge storm that hit California last night was the biggest precip to reach the state at this time of year in forty years (sorry, I can't reference that, because I can't find/remember where I read it). Hit central CA harder than us in SoCal, but boy was it welcome.
In celebration, here's a lovely poem by the late Robert Creeley on the subject, published in l991, and below, a picture of our little stream...running for the first time in October in a decade!
THE RAIN
From an essay by Jay Griffiths in Drunken Boat:
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshameable, elemental as earth and water and fire. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth. In wildness, life. And, for the human spirit as for any other wild creature, wildness smoulders in the groin, thighs slippery with juice. Proud, anarchic, the raw core of our human spirit is still untamed, eloquent, complex, kinetic and fleetly wild.
Wallace Shawn, as Wikipedia notes, is considered by the world to be a comic actor. But read the essays of Wallace Shawn (son of the famous New Yorker editor), or see his plays, and you will quickly realize that this man, ordinary looking though he may be is, is as he was described in Manhattan -- a sexual animal. Unashamedly so.
(Woody Allen fans will recall that the Diane Keaton described her ex-husband that way in the movie to the Woody Allen character, and may recall as well how stunned Allen was when he found out that this "sexual animal" was a balding, nerdy looking character -- aka Wallace Shawn.)
But sex happens to nearly everyone, and takes us all by surprise. Which is one of the things that makes it so fascinating...and so enviro. As Shawn writes (in an essay from the Guardian, and Harpers):
...when I form a picture of myself, I see myself doing the sorts of things that humans do and only humans do - things like hailing a taxi, going to a restaurant, voting for a candidate in an election, or placing receipts in various piles and adding them up. If I'm unexpectedly reminded that my soul and body are capable of being totally swept up in a pursuit and an activity that pigs, flies, wolves, lions and tigers also engage in, my normal picture of myself is violently disrupted. In other words, consciously, I'm aware that I'm a product of evolution, and I'm part of nature. But my unconscious mind is still partially wandering in the early 19th century and doesn't know these things yet.
Writing about sex is really a variant of what Wordsworth did, that is, it's a variant of writing about nature, or as we call it now, "the environment". Sex is "the environment" coming inside, coming into our home or apartment and taking root inside our own minds.
Shawn goes on to argue that falling in love with beauty is akin to falling in love, period:
So it might not be absurd to say that if you love the body of another person, if you love another person, if you love a meadow, if you love a horse, if you love a painting or a piece of music or the sky at night, then the power of sex is flowing through you.
Yes, some people go through life astounded every day by the beauty of forests and animals; some are astounded more frequently by the beauty of art; and others by the beauty of other human beings. But science could one day discover that the ability to be astounded by the beauty of other human beings came first, and to me it seems implausible to imagine that these different types of astonishment or appreciation are psychologically unrelated.
Could Shawn be right? Without sex, we would not be able to love at all? Even this world, our home?
