Too long since my last entry when the world looked so different as to be almost unrecognizable. 

Feminist Criticism and Hamlet

I am a woman writer attempting non-gendered acrobatics with concrete language that ignores genre boundaries. I did not know this early in my writing practice although Feminist Criticism texts lined library bookshelves. My first undergrad experience was at FIT. I was a fashion designer for nearly twenty years before coming to writing. My first mentors introduced me early on in my writing practice to experimental, metafiction texts and theory, which I embraced. I feasted and continue to feast on theory to inform my writing. Knowledge expands my perception and delimits my experience. My writing was corseted until I went back to school to complete my BFA in Goddard’s low residency program and began my MFA at City. Liberation from fiction’s conventional constraints particularly plot, and literary genre boundaries came from my feminist professors and feminist critical texts. My writing has been heavily influenced by the French focus on language, and the American focus on representation.

I write this after reading “Feminist Criticism and Hamlet” in our course reading guide. Ross C. Murfin brilliant concision of the various and sometimes competing forms of American, French, and British Feminist Critical theory puts all the dangling rhetoric into a comprehensive perspective. I suggest it is a must read. 

I hope Mira doesn’t mind my adding her comment to Vincent’s post that explains the next stage, I think, crucial phase in Feminist Criticism in equally concise terms. 

Mira said…

 I think you raise an interesting an important question here, Vincent. Feminism, by nature of it’s nomenclature, seems to be an exclusively “feminine” endeavor run by females. But I think the word “feminist” might be a misnomer.

I took a class in undergrad once that was called “Philosophy of Feminism.” I think when we examine feminism through a philosophical, rather than socio-cultural lens, the entire concept of gender and sexuality is called into question. I read Judith Butler for the first time in that class, and even though she identifies herself as a “feminist,” she argues that gender and sex are not just constructions, but performances. Anyone who adheres to a specific sexual identity is essentially “in drag.” A provocative statement! Anyway, my point is that it is the responsibility of feminists to call into question not just causes that affect women; the subjugation of women is only the tip of the ice burg. Rather it is conceptions and constructions of sex and gender that are really the at the heart of the problem.

October 15, 2010 2:51 PM

 

Posted by Deborah at 9:35 AM 0 comments

 

 

 

Restless with not enough occupation I peck around for kernels to engage my focus. Headless. After a weekend of Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (the horrible substitute class) and reading James Shapiro’s “Shakespeare and the Jews,” I try to return to my novel. 

Always haunted by language’s layers as I try to explain to my friend after reading his brilliant analysis of sex in Titus Andronicus coupled with my own search for a word to link two thoughts in a sentence sends me in search of Lyn Hejinian’s essay “Strangeness.” Needless to say I get distracted while looking for the page in contents by another essay “Who is Speaking,” that relates in my mind to my comment on friend’s presentation paper:

A brilliant paper marred by contemporary culturally sexual perspectives proposed by the use of “bawdy” and “tawdry” that impose claustrophobic sexual values onto Shakespeare and by association Woolf’s androgynous openness. Will anyone else notice? I am just very picky about language. I refer to the dictionary constantly in my own writing. Lydia Davis does the same. Besides bawdy and tawdry are not worthy of you.

 Hejinian writes:

“To improve the world, one must be situated in it, attentive and active; one must be worldly. Indeed, worldiness  is an essential feature of ethics. And, since the term poetics names not just a theory of techniques but also attentiveness to the political and ethical dimensions of language, worldiness is essential to poetics” (The Language of Inquiry 31).

Attentiveness to language is crucial to my writing. Writing has the luxury of revision, returning to the page over and over to contemplate meaning, speech is reactive, no matter the level of awareness things culturally rooted in the mind slip off the tongue. If the page allows more thought what is the responsibility of the writer?  

 

I went to Brooklyn today to my dear friend’s new home he and his partner moved into a few months ago. Brooklyn is not a place I know well—although I have counted up my visits past ten fingers the borough remains “Other,” not Manhattan but neither is Manhattan, Manhattan anymore. In fact my Manhattan has moved to Brooklyn. Apartment buildings just three, maybe four stories tall, stairs to climb up, small dingy hallways holding decades of cooking, breathing, sleeping, eating, flushes, sighs, moans, all supported by the smell of aging timber. 

From their second floor windows, a corner building, essential to the apartment’s charm, two bay windows in the living room and bedroom set at right angles, the view onto sidewalk thoroughfares of strollers feels so communal.

The home’s perfection relies on agreed images—distinct but not individual of conventions—however I find those conventions soothing to look upon. The lamp set just right on an African tapestry—a congregation of Buddhas—spoils of tourism—trappings of privilege—signs of empathy?

I don’t know. I do know today has caused me to reevaluate embraced in the arms of nostalgia.

I am pushed off center—can I rely on my perceptive tainted by Shakespeare’s literary sewage. You have no idea what I am talking about—every volume—page—word—critique—study—film—costume that represents Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy must be buried and guarded like nuclear material.

Convention for convention I prefer the neutrals of styled photo shots to pies baked with Goth perverts fed to their mother. You still have no idea what I am talking about. I registered, this semester, for Modernisms and Its Margins—I am taking Shakespeare and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy. I could be taking Magical Realism but I got sucked up again.

The screen contains our public mourning. The names of the dead are read (again). The screen projects images of the dead. Nine years later how have the United States and the world been changed since that morning when planes used as weapons of mass destruction plowed into our collective psych and brought down along with The Towers ALL American’s “inalienable rights and liberty and pursuit of happiness.”

The political manipulation and exploitation of uncertainty has legitimatized hateful speak and division along racial and religious lines in speeches where “God” is code for White Christian (male). 

When will the vocal minority and White Anglo Saxon Protestants give up the delusion of proprietary divine right to this country and the interpretation of the Constitution as if it it was written as a mandate for their dreams and desires?

When will the vocal minority break free of Imperialist mindset carried over on the May Flower to become Twenty-First Century citizens of a democratic United States? True followers of Christian philosophy to love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (separation of church and state)?

When will the vocal minority realize their hate speak is UN-American? The fairytale they are fed about the “Founding Fathers” intents is 234 years old? That to survive peoples and countries must adapt, and those incapable of adapting to change become extinct?

When will the vocal minority that there is NO difference between their misappropriation of the Bible and the Islamic extremist misappropriation of the Koran? That Christian fundamentalism is as hateful of truth as is Islamic fundamentalism.

When will the vocal minority realize that bearers of guns kill ideas and progress in the exact same way the tyrants they fear do? Guns are not a democratic tool.

When will the vocal minority realize that it is better to love than to hate—better to mediate than to threaten—better to look for the positive than the negative—better to celebrate similarities than disparage differences, best to embrace diversity?

When will the vocal minority, the politicians, corporations, and financial backers (billionaires Murdock & Koch brothers) come out from behind hate to participate in rebuilding this country for the future generations that will carry the burden of their parent’s political and commercial exploitation that will leave a morally and intellectually bankrupt country as inheritance?

When will  the vocal minority realize they cannot not take back what has not been—a democratic government that cares deeply for the welfare of its citizens but is hampered by greed and false prophets who have come out of the wilderness for their own glory and power lust?

September 11, 2010 we as a nation can best commemorate that day by remembering the national unity and overwhelming global solidarity that overflowed between the attacks on the World Trade Center and  the Pentagon and the war in Iraq. By tapping into the potential that existed in period of solidarity, not only to bring to justice the perpetrators, but to heal open wounds.

The names of the 3000 victims are called out. Their families and friends are nurtured. Maybe it is over the top to make a ritual of commemoration but if we must then shouldn’t we also include the names of Iraq & Afghanistan war dead, all the war dead including the hundred or more thousand Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani civilians?

 

 

 

 

I am preparing for Roshanna dinner I feel totally sideswiped into, although I would have loved to give my partner a real celebration for the Jewish New Year, the timing is off. I have a ton of reading I’d rather be doing—a paper and a novel I yearn to write—so much to explore and deadlines—school is in session.

I am tidying the house, cleaning off the counter tops to make a place for the spread of holiday food to be served buffet (except for the soup and gefilte fish). My beloved paternal grandmother’s cut glass perfume and powder set have been sitting on the granite breakfast bar for months, ignored by the housekeeper grimy with years of basement dust. One stopper edge has a corner broken off as does the powder top and base. I wipe the six pieces clean with Windex and paper towels, images waft off the slick and broken parts. Grandma’s iconic darken bedroom—a faceted plane gleams with votive candlelight lighting infamous saints with flickering light reflected in the large mirror attached to the dresser. I am too young to understand the complexity of the juxtaposed objects and space. I am not even aware of our family’s dysfunction. We are a pack of open ganglions, noisy and combative but always there, protecting and assisting, for each other.  I have not been a good caretaker of my inheritance, my older brother worst. The perfume stoppers and powder jar were damaged by my carelessness. I regret this since I dearly cherish my grandmother memories. I have realized in the last months, after decades of struggling to keep my beloved older brother I must stop clinging to my sentimental version of the past. The brother I grieve for (although he is alive and living well with his family) is closed off in an unreachable corner he has closed the door on.

A last summer breeze mummers through maple and oak leaves on this idyllic morning. A blend of bird song, distant and near, the blur of tires on Scrub Oak and sunlight. It would probably be better if I let well enough alone, tried to block the insidious hate mongering from my consciousness at least out here, just while I drink my morning coffee. Instead I read, first Charles M. Blow’s “I Had a Nightmare” and then Bob Herbert’s “American Is Better Than This” op-ed articles in yesterday’s NY Times writing against Glenn Beck’s hate rally on the Mall in DC. Beck is quoted as saying, “I think we reclaim the civil rights movement.”

Blow and Herbert’s op-eds bring to mind the horrible televised persecution of Civil Right’s protests—the horrors I and those my age, witnessed as we ate our TV dinners not so many years after the end of WWII and months before the string of assignations that would take President Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King’s lives. 

The breeze rustles the edge of op-ed page. It is Sunday morning, the day after thousands have crowded the Mall to hear Sarah Palin rally to “restore honor.” It would be hilarious to watch these two ego-centric light minds try to replicate history if they were not stoking the flame that singes the tattered hem of what remains and passes for democracy in the U.S.

Herbert quotes Lincoln, King, and Beck in his op-ed:

“Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

Something is rotten in the United States (paraphrase Shakespeare). In context to the 1960’s Civil War (remember Kent State) the Tea Party, Fox News, the dysfunctional Congress hobbled fear of the ballot, is more reminiscent to Marie Antoinette’s reply before the French Revolution, “Let them eat cake.” The cake American’s have been fattened has had its desired effect—we are fatter, and less educated, primed for exploitation by Beck, Limbaugh, and Palin’s corporate backers named in Frank Rich’s op-ed “The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party.”

Our consumer society dances to our master’s tune that since Palin entered the 2008 Presidential campaign has been an ever increasing message of hate. Hate rallies against the exotic other (immigrants, and Muslims) are not new. It has happened in this country before but somehow, something pulled us back from going over the edge. But that was before. What will happen this time around is what worries me. What breaks my heart is the distortion of truth that is subverting individual potential. Am I still nostalgic for the misty, Hippie indoctrination of peace, love and equality? Cynical as I am I cannot bring myself to believe the spectacle of a puffed up Beck on the steps of the Lincoln memorial is credible to the majority of Americans.   

 

 

An egg is not a life. An egg has the potential TO BE a life as does the chicken egg you fried-scrambled—poached—boiled and drop on the floor most mornings (before the salmonella recall) could have been a chicken, the veal chop you had could have been a lamb, the hamburger you had was a living breathing—methane polluting cow with calves. 

Had God been created in the image of a chicken, lamb, cow would humans be feed?

An embryo may contain the POTENTIAL for life but cannot live—even with great medical intervention outside a woman’s womb. Do deceased humans deserve to live at the expense of a potential life? It may be all about karma or it may be all about life. No matter, however an egg is a potential for life and once we accepted freezing and storing embryos we slid down the slippery slope. Now all these dozen eggs are spending existence in a freezer waiting for a womb—seems like rather than trash the potential it is better to save a living—breathing—human. The rest is politics.