jeudi 15 mai 2003

Women's words, Wagner ... and who are you? Clare Short's real resignation this week and her statement (published in Tuesday's Independent) restored some of my regard for the woman, almost lost when she proved me wrong just before the war. She deserves the praise from aid agencies. I'm scarcely sorry for President Blair and the upset Labour Party lickers of his backside. What I heard of the parliamentary speech I heard wasn't bad, if not as er ... exciting as Robin Cook's, reportedly drawing sharp intakes of breath from even Tory benches while there was a "stunned silence" in the ranks of the pink. However, as friend Tony once remarked, "Most people make a pretty decent resignation speech, even if the rest was always total rubbish." By contrast, cabinet minister John Reid spouted such drivel on 'Today' this morning that given the energy, I'd have fired off an e-mail. But then the braying of male asses in the Commons had me switch off altogether. Still, Clare's shilly-shallying richly merited a story at 'scrappleface' which made me laugh aloud. One of those Americans who writes dates the odd way round (05/12, and you know, that awful multiple plane attack on November 9), Scott Ott began: "(2003-05-12) -- British Secretary of International Development Clare Short has submitted her quarterly resignation letter..." (read on here) When I saw that Scott toyed with monkeys and Shakespeare three days before I cobbled my own potty tribute, I almost sent him a donation, but managed somehow to fight off the temptation. zzz Now that Shakespeare bloke was one misogynist pig. A few feminists going strong while I began to enjoy him in the late 60s and early 70s were convinced of this and the notion persists, to look at some US campus sites. I never believed it, finding that the fellow distributed his finest lines and discourses to both sexes, measure for measure. It's like an old contention about Wagner, quite a misogynist - was he scared (painting by A. Rackham)? He gets portrayed as a proto-Nazi since Hitler adopted him, which had more to do with the actions of some of the composer's family and circle than Wagner's own increasingly mad essays. The anti-Semitism manifest in a monstrous ego's treatment of Mendelssohn (who mainly bores me stiff too) and in his turgid 'Jewry in Music', stems from the fact that the young Richard Geyer, as he was known until he was around 14, spent his life fighting a belief that he was himself of half-Jewish parentage in company where this just "wasn't on"*. Wagner is still high in my pantheon of artists possessed of a multi-layered universality of insight into the human condition, increasingly taken up with themes of fall and redemption as his work progressed. His final opera, to be called 'The Victors', was to have drawn on the life of the Buddha! However, his women are mainly archetypical characters who redeem flawed men through instinct, love ... and self-immolation. Indeed the man died after a seizure one afternoon while scribbling his 'Über das Weibliche in Menschlischen' ('On the Female Element in Humankind'). I shudder to consider where it was going. By then a long way from Shakespeare, Wagner had been drawn a much younger man to the bard 'Das Lieberverbot' ('The Love Ban'). I fail to see how, as Donna Freitas notes in a look at the feminist matter (with good links), a certain Boom - who or what? - can assert that "Shakespeare invented personality, i.e., what it means to be human." Sweeping stuff! Granted the dubious benefit of my own monkeying around with a string of quotes (and maybe there should be a prize for whoever can track every one of them down to source!), a lovely lady remarked that he was also the "first psychologist". Or just about... And so to women and some sweeping generalisations of my own. Apart from Ursula K. for a few short story re-re-reads (I meant that) as part of a staple diet, and Rebecca B., whose recent concerns include the truth or otherwise about that 'iLoo' (which she's dubbed the "WWW.C" - along with "open cesspools": there's simply no immediate escape from faecal material), I've read not a book by a woman this year. Though not on purpose. The nearest to a convincingly hot romance I've embarked on is part of a current almost indescribable bedtime read. My own review of Karl Schroeder's 'Ventus' (no spoilers here) will be attempted once I'm done. "There's Marguerite Duras," observed the wildcat of women and letters last night, tiger pacing, which was good news since it meant her claws were still on the floor. "Just don't even mention Virginia Woolf!" Cheery site that... Should I also avoid Sylvia Plath while about it? And forget that as a distinct possible for my lone desert island poet, Ted Hughes was inconveniently a man? No, my sharp-edged but passingly marsh-mallowed sweetheart, it wasn't all your books I had in mind. When it comes to blogs, though! My listlink-cum-blogroll is in for an overhaul. Yet I can't help but notice that (with not the least offence intended), my regular reads include far more gals than guys. Why should this be? Well ... one of them led me straight to Natacha Merritt, the main illustrator of this ramble. Is it art, porn or glossy self-indulgence? Amazon readers can't make up their minds. Oh, and sorry I got distracted by that penis picture as we talked, darling, but it was rather strong. Anyone who cares to decide for themselves could run to Digital Diaries (beware, extremely Flash, and be "welcome, voyeurs, to the very private sexual journey of a 21st-century girl." Just 21 to boot. But then, I'd not realised till last week that the highly readable Holly was 23. Donner hit me with your lightning-stick if I've taken a fancy to striplings, but age is immaterial! When I began in the press, somebody told me to check out sports writing. Far from my field, but "some of the best on the planet", he advised. Fair enough, but without belittling the work of my male colleagues - or my own - I've noticed that many women journalists reach parts most of we men don't. There can be this eye for telling details that we'd miss or think irrelevant but can "make" a story, character stuff, even perhaps a different way of asking the right questions and relating the answers. I've read fashion stories whose subjects and vocabulary almost totally evade me, but which grip me from start to finish through sheer style. A handful of "women's magazines" occasionally grab my attention for articles that few men would think to write, but leave me glad I read them. It's not just a matter of enjoyable gossip or the small-talk I'm lousy at. Nor is it some easy, false dichotomy between synthetic and analytical ways of seeing. There's no particular reason why Rebecca, again, should reconsider the 'High Price of Materialism' the way she chooses to because she's a woman. Vagary seems to have taken apathy to extremes since May 1, unless she's vanished from the radar for any number of other reasons, but I'll leave her there in the hope she finds her way back. Over at odessa street, Lee, who does often write as only women will, is today as focussed on 'The Matrix' as everybody else, but with extra reason: her road will go insane this weekend, and perhaps it's not such a good idea after all (even at the Max Linder, safely clear of Lee's). And there are others I've yet to blogroll, along with all the fine fellows in there. Surprises to come. Kim, who's younger than most I occasionally drop in to read, makes no pretence in subtitling 'Fresh Hell' "All pop. No culture," reveals more about American television shows than ever I needed to know or will remember ... and also sets out "Friday fives". The last before tomorrow asks questions about planning and organisation. How do you do? Now, DON'T complain you weren't warned. I rarely shout, but making that clear is vital before sending anybody into 'Violet Blue' and "oral fixations" at 'Tiny Nibbles', with another disclaimer along the lines of "to each their own and here's more than most"! I can see some folk getting lost there and never coming back. But when it comes to that straight women's talk on sex I mentioned today, it's among some places I meant. 'Geek Goddess' claims to be the "original" place for all those women on the leading edge of the feminisation of cyberspace and currently lists a handful. One of those is called 'stopthief', and features some well-armed ladies along with good writing, so I'd better stress here that I've only borrowed a logo for illustrative purposes. Should you disapprove, please leave the knives behind. zzz I suspect that what all this boils down to is one simple thing: Without any pretence at really understanding the whies of it and the differences in thinking, I often find women more interesting than most, I stress "most", men I know. It's not just what they say, but how they say it! There are evidently exceptions among my best friends and most fascinating acquaintances. But being bored is not my strong point, and cars and ball games are only the first off-switches. Blow those personality tests as a separate thread, since everything's long today after brewing all week and more. So it was a man, Rainer, who set my mind down off this long path way back on April 21 with this, the admirable chap. 'The Guardian' query he mentions is still Do you have a male or female brain?, in an article saying "there really are big differences". Should you be too impatient to find out before reading it, here are the tests themselves (more Flash). You think that's it? You gotta be kidding ... if you've got days with nothing better to do. Try shapes. And that's still only part of the start. This is where you can have a holiday; a good thing about all the tests hosted here is that they have the sense to tell you how long they should take. Rainer, like his trigger at codepoetry, was upfront enough to say how he scored. Me too: my IQ is only slightly below average; I'm as aggressive, outgoing and macho to the best degree they come, which is consequently prematurely (but never mind her feelings); my empathy level was so far off the scale that I might as well be living on Pluto; I've got every prejudice in the book, on the Net and some that have yet to be mentioned; and my very essence is like the life of Thomas Hobbes's perfect "natural man": "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." _____ *Part of this I learned in Robert W. Gutman's magistral 'Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and His Music', the only weighty biography I've read twice. With admirable flair and humour, the genial professor combines an occasionally perfectly damning portrait of a multiple and complex character with acute insight into the layers on layers of substance and meaning in the music. 10:46:24 PM  link   your views? [] Perfectly lunar, like a ring Now I know why Francis slept badly, bleary-eyed behind his counter. I also know there'll be no argument about movies this weekend. Never mind the state of the guts... (which I shouldn't have mentioned: the effect was instantaneous. I was about to say that) now 'Matrix Reloaded' is here, we might even go to town's biggest and best, the Max Linder Panorama, dare I venture that far. Marianne also wants to see 'Fanfan la Tulipe', a notion to which the top half of me is not averse. While I was fuming that Ciné Live dares to cash in on the trend by asking an outrageous ?5.50 for its Matrix special, Francis was busy blaming the moon for tough times in general. It's not actually full until tomorrow, but should he get a siesta or another rough night, he'll be up, says he, for big eclipse. I shan't. Elsewhere in the unreal world outside the Matrix, I'm not sure which colour pill my wildcat chose. She was smouldering where she is and said she wants a helium balloon to rise out of it. Not a bad place whence to watch a lunar eclipse, I'd have thought... She has no money, to speak of, and neither do I. This is simply frustrating. Now I almost feel guilty about buying 'Premiere' for a more acceptable three euros and ordering Robert Donington's 'Wagner's Ring and its symbols' when at last I spotted an available copy again. Will I ever learn to stop lending books to people who disappear? In his own perspective on 'Possessing the Ring' (half the street used to shake during my rare 18-hour weekends with the tetralogy, but nobody complained), Dr Donivan Bessinger, now retired, but deep into "articles which center around the theme of sythesizing modern knowledge to affirm the meaning and healing of human life", also brings Jung into the Wagnerian cosmos. Tonight, the moon becomes a ring all her own. But that doesn't solve the wildcat's problem nor mine. However, I know what my three numbers are and she rattled off her own favourite three like a shot. All we need now is for that full moon to bring blessings rather than a curse. Plus just one more number. It'll have to be Marianne's. I haven't played the loto in years. This time, we'll win. zzz On that other business, today's been a real drag for the resumption of constant visits, but I've enough spark left to complete the promised piece. And some test results are in hand. They mean little to me, but will to Dr Yang tomorrow afternoon. 7:34:58 PM  link   your views? [] When Sandy's 'ghost' was laid, the quest was on! There's a trailer in cinemas this month for some French film soon to be released. In it is one of the oldest jokes around, but still I laughed to see it again. Out on some lonely walk with appropriate waves pounding hard on the rocks, the man says: "Just once, I'd really love to know what it's like to feel a female orgasm as a woman does. Even just the once." His lady companion breaks any spell with her reply: "Just once, I'd really love to know what it's like to feel a female orgasm as a woman does. Even just the once!" I'd better remember what it's called, because it was one of those where young Marianne nudged me and said, "Yes." It's part of our trailer code: as the five or six roll by, there's a nudge and a "yes", "no" or whispered "maybe" and we haggle afterwards. If there's discord, it's "This one of mine for that one of yours" or "Certainly not, you can go with your friends." Melvyn Bragg and his guests began talking this morning about the myth of the Grail. His weekly 'In Our Time' doesn't always grab me, but that did. I switched off long wave as they started on the Fisher King, will catch it later on the Net, given that privilege, and probably record it too for brother Jon and my Dad. "What does it symbolise and why are its stories so resolutely set in these Isles and so often written by the French?" is one of several questions Bragg and co. probe, one of a number which have caused hours of family debate down the years, along with the location of Camelot. The Parsifal, or Perceval, painting is by Jean Delville and used to illustrate a poem by Verlaine on a bilingual site on thevirgin knight ("for all current browsers"). Warning: music! Wagner too. Odd these things should crop up as I'm finishing notes for a promised entry on the writings of women. Wagner has somehow stormed into those as well. I've yet to hear if Bragg delves into it, but that Grail legend is shot through and through with sex. At Voices of Women, one Carolyne Pion slots the tale into an article about 'Rechoreographing the Father-Daughter Dance' (which is something in hand under this leaking roof before she gets too old and it's too late. Considerable caution, once puberty has struck, is really rather important. At least we can hope to avoid what we see as the mistakes in our own upbringing... There's no doubt which bit of the wounded Fisher King's anatomy got lanced, though some writers are ridiculously coy about it even now. Like many teenage lads, I endured the shame the morning my Mum found naughty pictures under the bed. That was in days when my school Oxford dictionary, with no further explanation, defined masturbation as "physical self-abuse"! Life in the late, swinging '60s wasn't always what it's made out to be, which is why students tore up paving stones outside the Sorbonne 35 years ago in Mai Soixante-Huit (French society was even more hidebound then than my own). Back in March at "the canteen", Baudier, no tight-laced bourgeois he, snitched a glance at the mag I was reading - one of the usuals on Macs or graphic design - and recoiled. "Mais, c'est presque du porno, ça!" he exclaimed. "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" "It's just some bloke scratching his back," I answered, before giving the ad for internet service provider Free a first proper look. Yeah, well. Not exactly my thing and not exactly brilliant as an advertisement either. But porn? Come on, André, I've seen some really degrading things for both sexes and, worse, involving kids. You don't browse as much as I do without finding them, whether intentionally or not, and once you've let your e-mail on to people's selling lists... The ad on the right also slightly bothered the man, whose own "thing" about generally whopping boobs I largely spared readers of that piece on his productions; for me, it's just that the girl's corset doesn't come as a turn-on (the ad is for Corbis). That garment reminds me of Playboy models and tracts of a lingerie selection where I think that, were I a woman, I'd probably find both uncomfortable and a nuisance when it came to shedding it all. But to each their own. Many men are obviously bestirred by that sort of thing, or - Playboy thinks they are -along with the flowing manes too well groomed to withstand any breeze, alarmingly long nails and the absurdly high heels almost all of those models seem to insist on wearing to bed. Otherwise this and the harder stuff wouldn't sell so well. My second deeply embarrassed moment came some years back, when Jon and his wife were helping me do up my flat. Or rather, they were doing and I was supposedly helping, but all I got really right was the measurements and the furnishings I wanted. I won't lie and pretend I'd forgotten the horrible months soon after the divorce when I must have spent hours having a go at writing illustrated porn myself. It was no substitute for anything real, but divorce can lead to feelings of emasculation and inadequacy it takes a while to grow beyond. It wasn't even "good porn" if such exists; mostly banal, boring and, in retrospect, disturbingly pubescent. But I couldn't afterwards bring myself to chuck it all out while still grappling with an emotional adolescence. When those two found it, I felt like the world's most red-faced kid all over again. If this tale rings an echo in any reader's mind, well, the shrinks did come to play their part, but true friends I found I had were more valuable in the end. I no longer resent an upbringing which left me all screwed up about sex, despite the "wasted" years. It was not even particularly what I suppose, today, must have been almost routine parental attitudes when I was kid; it was very much me too, what I was. So I'm lucky that I ever genuinely enjoyed any sex at all while still in the full flush of youth - but no thanks at all to the loathsome sexologist somebody once dragged me to see in despair! That was costly, painful and unfruitful. And the "expert" was a feller! Now I've decided that not only do women probably make far better sexologists; in general, they also write about sex in much more interesting (and erotic) ways than your average man. But just as Playboy has its stereotypes, few of them remotely my dreamgirl kind, I long nursed a private one as well. Why one "type" among infinite variations in particular, I've really no idea any more. Maybe because my first head-over-heels teenage infatuation revolved around Susannah York, especially with her hair cropped short and even before I savoured the magnificent sexy food scene with Albert Finney in 'Tom Jones'. Compared to that, today's tendency to have young actresses rip everything off as a matter of course may occasionally be arousing and certainly stirs no prudish nerve in my nature (though Marianne will still sometimes briefly bury her head in my chest), but it's rarely required. Except that Francis the newsvendor told me that a recent edition of Elle was sold out within a day and not just to the usual readers. It seems that Emmanuelle Béart was in it, a fine ode to women in their late 30s, but her clothes weren't. Susannah was such an idol - a kind of archetype even? but let's not get too silly - that I was upset much later when I heard her talk of a bad marriage. "How anybody so lucky could go and treat her wrong!" I snarled at the radio. Not that I ever fell in love with Susannah or anyone like her. No. Indeed, like droves of callow lads, I rushed blindfold into partially "marrying my mother", though it's unfair on either the real one or Marianne's to press any comparison too far. The kind of point made by Carolyn Pion, above but also in reverse, would have been lost on me then. I can hope that Marianne doesn't walk into that particular trap, but know well enough that should she do so, she'll have to find out and deal with it for herself. So who, then, is this other lass who should know better than to be hoisting the fur quite so high at her age, unless she wants to get scratched or it's an unusually compliant pussy? If you don't want to know, you shouldn't be this far down, but Sondra Greenberg (aka Sandy), was in Playboy in 1987, a couple of years before Marianne graced this world. I knew nothing of her then, and little more now, but she decidedly struck a deep chord of fancy before I got bored with types, or simply grew out of it. When first I spotted her, I'd happily have invited her to my desert island, if two people were allowed by the rules. But though she took charge of my fantasies for a while, she'd never have come. She said, on becoming one of the very few women I ever saw in that magazine allowed to look remotely natural, that she hated "loud noise in the morning" and loved "back rubs", two things on which we see eye to eye. However, the island would have driven her mad, since she also sought "a life of energy, motion, excitement, change" ... and very fast bikes. And all this, by the way, answers a question I refused to some years ago. The doggedly persistent asker of the time is likely too far away to read it (or to care), but should she do so, there she has it. Not that it matters. What I fancy nowadays includes a few things both in and out of bed which I used to be too timid to mention, even though none of these are what some might call perverse; it's alarming, with extra years, there seems to come a broader imagination... Oh, about men knowing a female orgasm from inside out; well, we don't yet have that "affinity gene" Hamilton envisages to startling effect. Again, no matter. Other options are intriguing enough. As for Sandy, I hope she found her grail knight, the financial independence she craved, as many kids as she might have wanted, and feels as natural being 40-something as it looks like she did at 28. 6:29:14 PM  link   your views? [] X innovators' contest open to danged furriners "The first contest got off to a smooth start except for one issue: only U.S. residents could compete. As you know from our recent Mac DevCenter survey, a significant number of our readers reside outside the U.S.--roughly one third. So based on reader feedback, I published an article in March stating that we weren't crazy about the restriction either, and that I would see what I could do... (...) "The deadline for entries is Monday, June 16, 2003 at 5 pm PST" (more from Derrick at the MacDev Center). When it comes to good ideas (now I've digested it all), better a late lead than never for people living outside the States. 12:02:57 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.