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

[sovay]

I am tolerably sure that William Shatner thinks of William Shatner as Jewish, which is probably the only measure that matters

I don't argue. I may have worded things confusingly. Horáková just mentions that more people remember Nimoy's Jewishness than Shatner's and that surprised me.

[we saw his one-man show last year; I went expecting to be disappointed, and was delightfully impressed].

Nice! What kind of show was it?

Also, Robert Graves may have ended up the only person who didn't see Robert Graves as a jerk.

I imprinted very hard on the novel of I, Claudius in high school and that is never going away, but, yeah.

That was a very well-balanced comment, by the way.

[tree_and_leaf]

I think Horáková is right, fwiw. I certainly know Nimoy was Jewish long before I knew Shatner was - though that might be partly because I was more interested in Nimoy than Shatner....

[sovay]

I think Horáková is right, fwiw.

If comments on this post are representative, I think so, too. It just wouldn't have occurred to me. Shatner was not as important to me as an actor because Kirk was not as important a character to me as Spock, but for whatever reason I knew they were both Jewish from such an early age that I can't remember learning it.

[kore]

I wonder if that's possibly also because Spock is Othered, is very visibly alien, and Kirk is from that cliche shorthand most whitebread of places, Iowa.

[sovay]

I wonder if that's possibly also because Spock is Othered, is very visibly alien, and Kirk is from that cliche shorthand most whitebread of places, Iowa.

I mean, I agree absolutely with half of that hypothesis: not only is Spock visibly, significantly alien, Nimoy's Jewishness was built into/became part of his alienness, Vulcan salute and extended casting and all. (I don't know if it was universal and I don't know if it was conscious, but I did the research once and a number of prominent Vulcan characters in TOS—Mark Lenard's Sarek, Celia Lovsky's T'Pau, Arlene Martel's T'Pring, and Lawrence Montaigne's Stonn—were played by Jewish actors. This would be part of the reason I was unimpressed when the reboot blew up Vulcan and doomed the survivors to permanent galactic diaspora. Never mind fridging Amanda.) And I agree that Kirk isn't Jewish, although I was really interested by Horáková's observation that he is the survivor of mass murder carried out according to one man's theories of eugenics, twenty years prior to a present day airing in 1966. But actors are not as a general rule their characters, no matter what traits they may share. The character so completely overwriting the actor is interesting to me.

[edit] If it's true that Shatner—despite his Canadian origins—read as American white bread to most viewers, then he put it to viciously brilliant use in Roger Corman's The Intruder (1962), an absolutely amazing film about a white supremacist in a small Southern town and his efforts to disrupt the newly court-ordered process of desegregation.

[kore]

This would be part of the reason I was unimpressed when the reboot blew up Vulcan and doomed the survivors to permanent galactic diaspora

OH WTF

//did not see those movies because T was horrified at "those people are NOT Spock and Kirk," heh

[sovay]

//did not see those movies because T was horrified at "those people are NOT Spock and Kirk," heh

I have not seen either Into Darkness (2013) or Beyond (2016), but I saw Star Trek (2009) and enjoyed quite a lot of it at the time, although not the demolition of Vulcan and not the way the writing and direction of Zachary Quinto's Spock put more weight on his humanity than his alienness. (Quinto is really talented; he's just not Leonard Nimoy. That is an unrecastable role from my perspective.) So you dodged several bullets and an exploding planet there.

[kore]

'So you dodged several bullets and an exploding planet there.'

\o/

T isn't horribly picky like me -- his hobby is basically watching sf shows and movies, no matter how bad they are, so he watches nearly anything he can find, and he tends to watch stuff to the end. I've seen him walk out on maybe three or four movies, if that, in 25 years. So this being ABSOLUTE NOPE was sort of a Thing.