Category Archives: Contradiction

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The Defiance of the Shrew

It was refreshing to see an article on the front page of The New York Times on the sexist culture of academia, in this case philosophy departments.  Not that any one area of our culture deserves to be singled-out or assumed immune.  Men assert their superiority everywhere.  Women enable them in taking it.

We try to train our sons to think differently, but they absorb what surrounds them.   We all collude and we’re all equally trapped and implicated, even those of us who can argue eloquently otherwise.  Or maybe I should have stopped myself yesterday from reading all the way through the article about ‘rape culture’ in Steubenville, OH and our Twittering appetites in this week’s New Yorker.

I remember when I was a kid seeing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the film The Taming of the Shrew and wondering what made Liz Taylor shrink and diminish her wild child.  She did not appear to me to be in any way ‘lacking’.  Even (or maybe especially) at 8-years-old I felt the desperation of capitulation and yearned for the freedom of bonny Kate.

 

 

All abundant survivors, please speak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rashomon: La Vache Qui Rit

Where there are conflicting motivations, there are multiple narratives.  The wife in Kurosawa’s Rashomon tells her story as though she is ashamed, projecting that shame into her husband’s eyes (‘Don’t look at me like that!) until she stabs him in a sort of self-defense, defending her belief in her own virtue and victimhood.

But the last perspective on the crime, told by the woodsman who we see find the body of the husband in the beginning of the film, shows us a wife who’s wild and wiley.  This wife laughs an hysterical threat, a castrating cackle.  Beware the mirth of woman, it may be neither truth nor lie.

 

Below is an edited excerpt from that final perspective on the crime from Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in celebration of the wife who laughs.

from Kurosawa’s Rashomon

 

All howls, shreiks and chortles are welcome.

 

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The Cat Who Walks by Herself

When I was a kid I had an LP of Boris Karloff reading Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.  I still have the sound of his voice in my inner ear.  Even though Mr. Karloff had such a distinctive male voice, when he read  The Cat Who Walked by Himself I always thought of the cat as female.

Sometimes I find myself thinking, in his intonation, “for I am the Cat who walks by Herself and all places are alike to me.”  In the story, the cat tricks the woman into letting him live in the cave and drink milk.  The woman admires the cat’s cleverness and forgives him for tricking her.

I like that the Cat is forgiven by the woman, unlike Echo who is punished for tricking Hera and consigned to forever repeat only the words of others.

 

Here I repeat a bit of Kipling in the cadence of Karloff:

 

 

cat-erwauling and purring…aloud…  Who are your cats who walk by themselves?

 

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