Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay

might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

I first saw The Wooster Group perform The Emperor Jones-- Kate Valk and Willem Dafoe at the Performance Garage. I was about to say around 1998, but just looked it up and it was 1993. That means I was just a couple years into my academic career, and can only be relieved that I didn't take the occasion to write something about blackface about which I would now be embarrassed. I could digress further in a few directions but suffice to say that I retained the memory and wanted to make it back to other things (I have to one or two but which?) including the revival at St Ann's last year which I'm really sorry to have missed. Is it possible that it's been 14 years? Hamlet was electric, and I don't agree with Ben Brantley that it was all about the mimesis. Every element of the performance from staging to acting to design was obliged to report on every element of the text and performance (via Gielgud via Shakespeare and via however many other interventions) from staging to acting to design, and the result was why we huddled masses stick it out in New York. That said, I have to confess that he's on to something with 'hypnotic to narcotic', but I attended last Friday at the end of a long week and long day and my sympathy extends of capacity not of judgment.

One Plane, One Vote

I heard today from some one who knows that (topping the news reports) the Dubai Air Show saw $130 billion in sales--in 2 days. This included $35 billion in sales to Qatar alone, which, as this person observed, would provide sufficient aircraft to put the entire Qatari population in flight a la fois. There is so much that is so grotesque about that but I will limit myself to the observation that it does tend to bring one back to reality with respect to the limitations on the possible impact of individual decisions on the overall future of the planet, or of anything that takes place upon it. I liked the little garbage game I wrote about in the previous entry ('Gotham Garbage'), and I don't intend to withdraw it as I make no claims about what I'm doing with this blog, but I do feel the need to acknowledge, with some distaste, the relative whimsy of this and so much else that I think and do and write.

I started out so much more aware of the futility of liberal politics, and somehow have backslided as I have aged. I didn't bother voting in the first election for which I was eligible. Not because of apathy, mind; but out of a conviction that party politics in the US was essentially an alibi--and not a benign one-- for not engaging in the more demanding work required to build a more just society. While I don't think I ever stopped believing that, I did get to a point where my activism had declined to the point where my (well grounded!) theoretical radicalism had become my excuse for failing to behave as a political actor at all.

Today I vote. On the whole I guess I think it is better to have the right and exercise it than otherwise, even if it is still largely coke vs pepsi. I don't despise the marginal comfort I take from the idea that, while I may ever be haunted by the Mondale presidency that might have been, I am blameless (in an electoral sense) for the depredations of Mr. Bush.

This is a ways from Dubai. Whimsy.

Gotham Garbage

Living in New York, I can only shop for as much food and other supplies as my two hands can carry in, yes, plastic bags (loaded down, paper tears sooner). If I'm not travelling, I usually make it to two farmers' markets per week, where I buy most of my food. But sometimes this doesn't happen or it does but I don't plan well enough and get home late or just tired, usually lazy, and decide to order in. Like other New Yorkers, I consider the luxury of a wide variety of delivery options at all hours to be an entitlement. I can't buy much in advance (how will I transport it? where will I put it?) but if it's 10 pm and I want a whole roasted branzino or salt and pepper lotus root or pastrami on rye with a pickle, I can have any one or all of these on my plate within the hour, with no more effort than it takes to pick up the phone or click on a web site.

Each time I take the easy way out, I'm left with mountains of garbage--or recycling, as I prefer to think of it. Not that that should make me feel much better. The sheer volume of plastic containers--often containers within containers-- is pretty staggering. I'm trying to cut back.

I guess I'm still going to have to do better. Check it out:

I played The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game and sent 2,014,352 tons of refuse across 793,937 miles.

Smile

I wouldn't have paid so much attention to this if I hadn't received an evaluation the week before in which my actual performance was acknowledged as benefiting the organization and but I was threatened with imminent termination on account of anonymous and unspecified complaints of my 'condescending' and 'contemptuous' attitude toward various employees. I'm not ready to lay out a brief here. But in my follow up interview my supervisor, a semi-closeted gay white man who is preparing for retirement within the year, actually volunteered that he 'suspected that gender was at issue' in the reaction I have incurred--and which he credited in his assessment (left in writing on my chair as he left the office for the weekend). Mind, my (women) colleagues with whom I shared the evaluation have called it 'insane'.

I was a feminist before I got out of braces. No flabby Friedan for me, nor Robin Morgan; I toted and quoted Shulamith Firestone throughout my early teens. I was deeply impressed by her unsentimental take on motherhood: 'giving birth is like shitting a pumpkin'. I've never been pregnant. I don't have a family. Could this be a reason? Just now I returned to look up the reference. The pages are yellow and the binding cracks as I open The Womens' Press paperback (with the iron logo). I'm too old even to wince any more at the marginalia; I'm almost ready for compassion--even admiration-- for me, nearly 30 years ago.

What did I know at 14, to underline: 'The smile is the child/woman equivalent of the shuffle; it indicates acquiescence of the victim to her own oppression'? or to find a boyfriend whom I could persuade to read the book, whose own comments (for example, in response to a passage in a section entitled 'The Racial Family: Oedipus/Electra, the Eternal Triangle, the Brothel-behind-the scenes', reading 'What the white woman doesn't know is that the black woman, not under the thumb of one man, can now be squashed by all. There is no alternative for either of them than the choice between being public or private property [my original underscore!], but because each still believes that the other is getting away with something, both can be fooled into mischanneling their frustration on to each other, rather than on to the real enemy, "The Man"' --) would read, in still pink ink: 'NOT GOOD'?

(To be fair: this same boyfriend was even then amassing an arrest record and FBI file that will ever put me to shame).

I'd thought this was all part of the detritus of my adolescence. That first world feminism belonged in classrooms, as a useful set of historical references that might help tomorrow's Goldman analysts better appreciate their opportunities, and maybe think twice about the life-work issues they, their colleagues, hires or (more theoretically) supervisors might face as women (who are still weirdly defined primarily by virtue of their reproductive function).

'Feminism is the inevitable female response to the development of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles--both the fundamental biological condition itself, and the sexual class system build upon, and reinforcing, this biological condition'.

Thus sprach Shulamith in The Dialectic of Sex, back in 1970. I picked it up nearly 15 years later, and after an initial conversion, left it on the shelf for a long time. There's a lot to leave behind (specifically, its repudiation of class in favor of gender as the fundamental basis of social order and struggle) but there's a lot more with which I find a renewed sympathy and inspiration as I brush the crumbs of dried binding glue from my lap.

Mother Earth

I attended an update on the millennium development goals at the UN today and learned that 80 per cent of sub Saharan Africa's small farmers are women. They walk an average of 4 miles a day to get their water, and they produce 90 per cent of the continent's food (elsewhere I've seen reports at 75- 80 per cent. Regardless: a preponderance). But for a variety of reasons, including the fact that (and this may be garbled; at the very least an overgeneralization; but I couldn't stay long enough to clarify during the q&a) they are not considered farmers socially (qua gender, as I understood it), they have the least access to technical and other information to help them improve their methods and lives. Only 17 per cent of the arable land in the region is under cultivation. Almost half of the population of the region lives on less than $1 per day.

(None of this is really surprising, of course. But I am reminded of how much is really at stake in an internationalist feminism: something I've always believed in and at times fought for--but if you live in a wealthy nation and don't commonly find yourself in the academic or activist situations that would tend to remind you--well, it does tend to become an abstraction. Even modest activities such as today's are salutary under such circumstances).

These statistics were offered as part of a presentation on progress toward millennium development goal #1: 'Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger'. The chart that accompanies this update in The Millennium Development Goals Report shows that since 1999, progress (even if slight) has been made toward this goal in every region except for Western Asia, where poverty rates have more than doubled since 1990. The narrative report doesn't comment on this. I can think of a few possible reasons. Check this out, too.