Stand by, no way, stop

[sovay]

So my family made the decision not to hold a seder tomorrow night because my mother is still coughing (I will break matzah, pour wine, and open the door to the stranger, because that is the most important thing) and I think it was just as well because I appear to have come down sick. I was invited out to a movie tonight, but instead I fell over sideways and have alternated the last few hours between staring vaguely into the middle distance while feeling nauseated and sort of sleeping, minus rest and plus whiting out when I tried to stand up. I am not thrilled.

1. Erin Horáková seriously analyzes the popular reception of Captain James T. Kirk in context of the simplifying and not apolitical rewriting of the past: "Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift." (I feel some of this same process may explain my feelings toward neo-noir vs. noir, especially where the supposed ubiquity of the femme fatale is concerned. Somebody please remind me to write about the Wachowskis' Bound (1996); I loved that movie and it's been more than half a year.) The statement below flashed out at me:

Heterosexuality has been through the fucking ringer in cultural productions in the last decades due to backlashes against feminism and queer visibility that have transformed portrayals and interpretations alike into dumbshows—crude pantomimes, as before the play. These frantic defenses have done more to render the proposition of men and women loving one another a piece of one-note unsustainable ridiculousness than women's lib and LGBTQ rights ever could.

Boyd McDonald was making much the same frustrated point in the 1980's. I am not pleased that the problem has worsened again since. Also I had not actually realized that not everyone thinks of William Shatner as Jewish.

2. These poems were not published back-to-back, but I read them that way and they resonate interestingly: Robert Peake's "Homesickness" and Dante Di Stefano's "National Poetry Month."

3. I was just trying to run down a reference using Google Books. I ran into a biography of Wilfred Owen. Oh, hey, I thought to myself, I should read one of those sometime. Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991) doesn't count. I began flicking through the randomly available pages and then—

Robert Graves: "Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were homosexuals; though Sassoon tried to think he wasn't. To them, seeing men killed was as horrible as if you or I had to see fields of corpses of women."

JESUS H. MAGDALENE GRAVES.

Seriously, every time I try to parse that, it just gets worse. I feel sufficiently lousy that I would be going to bed right now no matter what, but really, Robert Graves, you're not helping! [edit] The former Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with me! Goodnight.

Comments

[thawrecka]

JFC Robert Graves, what a total tool.

I'm totally going to have to read that link about the popular reception of James Kirk later but I had to comment now about how awful Graves is in that quote. Just, what a dirtbag.

[sovay]

I'm totally going to have to read that link about the popular reception of James Kirk later but I had to comment now about how awful Graves is in that quote. Just, what a dirtbag.

I think it's worse than that time Kipling was racist about Einstein because relativity scared him.

[thawrecka]

I didn't know that about Kipling but I am unsurprised; what little I know of his work has a reputation for racism, after all.

[sovay]

I didn't know that about Kipling but I am unsurprised; what little I know of his work has a reputation for racism, after all.

It came up in a panel I moderated at Readercon about six years ago. Writing in November 1919:

Do you notice how their insane psychology attempts to infect the Universe? There is one Einstein, nominally a Swiss, certainly a Hebrew, who (the thing is so inevitable that it makes one laugh) comes forward, scientifically to show that, under certain conditions Space itself is warped and the instruments that measure it are warped also . . . When you come to reflect on a race that made the world Hell, you see how just and right it is that they should decide that space is warped, and should make their own souls the measure of all Infinity. The more I see of the Boche's mental workings the more sure I am that he is Evil Incarnate, and, like all evil, a pathetic Beast. Einstein's pronouncement is only another little contribution to assisting the world towards flux and disintegration.

It's a case of someone saying a terrible thing which I find intellectually fascinating (Kipling's automatic conflation of German and Jewish identity—go tell that to Germany, dude—and the fact that I can't tell if the theory of relativity would have bothered him as much if it hadn't been proposed by German-born Jewish Einstein, although since he associates it with "flux and disintegration" I think so) which is still completely terrible. I enjoy a lot of Kipling's poetry and prose and I liked finding out that some of the ways he thought about England were more complicated than straight-ahead imperialism and he wrote gorgeously about the sea, but I am not going to try to defend his anti-Semitism (or any of his other racism) with a ten-foot pole. It's of a piece with other remarks he made, chiefly in his travel writing. He wrote sympathetic Jewish characters in "The House Surgeon" and there is a curious attempt to write a benevolent Jewish conspiracy (I guess it makes a change) in "The Treasure and the Law," but seriously, you can object to the idea of the universe working in non-intuitive ways without dragging evil incarnate into it.

[thawrecka]

Wow, that is stunningly racist. And a way of thinking about the world that I find so bizarre I can't fully get my head around it.

Edited to add and I've now also read that Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift article which is interesting, especially because I've been rewatching Star Trek lately. I do agree with a lot of it.

I think also a lot of the reason people want to think of Kirk as a womaniser is because the show tries to position him as a shirt-ripping sex symbol, sweating and golden-skinned - but totally not shagging around nearly as much as pop cultural reputation would suggest, and frequently rebuffing women when he thinks it's inappropriate to go there. There is some pretty awful sexist creepy stuff with Yeoman Janice Rand in the first season of the show, though, especially with the 'evil Kirk' episode where he tries to assault her, so I wouldn't say he's always written as respectful towards women. But I do think this is the same as people thinking of Spock as the logical rule-bound character, when Spock was breaking rules left, right and centre, even committing mutiny once.

The pop-cultural view of these characters has drifted so far from who they were, because people are attached to certain ideas of 60s masculinity - and this idea that Kirk fits in the 'womaniser' role and Spock in the 'uptight nerd' role - and this idea that we've advanced beyond that sexism. When really, we've just moved to different sexist ideas of what men and women should be, & etc.

[poliphilo]

Please don't forget The Village That Voted The Earth was Flat- in which the narrator and his pals concoct a very elaborate revenge on a local magistrate who has fined them for speeding through his village in their motor car and in his speech from the bench makes a casual antisemitic remark about one of them. If I'm remembering rightly they don't so much mind the fine; it's the racial slur they find unforgivable.

[sovay]

Please don't forget The Village That Voted The Earth was Flat- in which the narrator and his pals concoct a very elaborate revenge on a local magistrate who has fined them for speeding through his village in their motor car and in his speech from the bench makes a casual antisemitic remark about one of them.

Thank you! I had forgotten that one and you're right.

"And he said my home address was Jerusalem."