Sherry Chandler

Well, it broke yesterday anyway. That’s good enough for this blog. Always up to the minute.

A correspondent has sent me this item from WLEX-TV news in Lexington:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - A Kentucky grand jury has indicted an Ohio historian who led efforts to pull an 8-ton boulder from the Ohio River.

Greenup County Commonwealth’s Attorney Cliff Duvall says a local grand jury indicted Steve Shaffer of Ironton, Ohio, on Thursday for allegedly breaking Kentucky law by removing a protected archaeological object from the river. The charge is a Class D felony, punishable by one to five years in prison.

If you’ve been reading here, you know that we’ve been following the story of Indian Head Rock for over a year now.

Things is getting serious.

but that’s no reason not to try to change it.

From Vietnamese poet Linh Dinh at Harriet, a post called Man = Animal = Vegetable = Mineral = Everything = Nothing:

Anima Female souls, from the roots an, “heavenly,” and ma, “mother,” recalling a time when all souls were supposed to emanate from the Heavenly Mother. In the 16th century A.D. Guillaume Postel said every soul had male and female halves, the animus and anima. The male half had been redeemed by Christ, but the female half was still unredeemed and awaited a female savior. This was a new development of the old Christian view that only males had any souls at all. The third canon of the Council of Nantes in 660 A.D. had decided that all women are “soulless brutes.”

Alchemist applied the word anima to all “spirits” considered female: Anima Mercury, Anima Mundi, etc. The Spirit of the World was connected with the elements of earth and water, like Eleusinian Demeter, “Mistress of Earth and Sea.” One reason alchemists were suspected of heresy was their notion that the World-Soul was a female anima.

Certainly no heresy amongst the media pundits this election season, though as with racism and homophobia, I often suspect that the reason white men are so frightened is that they fear the power of those they have repressed.

But them’s heavy words for a nicely whimsical post that wanders around in animism and/or superstition and/or Magic Realism ( “Better safe than sorry.” ) from Betty Boop to odd churches built of flint in East Anglia and on to Viet Nam.

A border town is exciting. The beginning and the end, impure and illicit, it promises surprises and adventures. Marking the bloody, not forgotten advance of one army, the retreat of another, it yearns to spread across that arbitrary, colorfully mapped line, be it a mined field or a thin river, to resume conquest or merely to reunite kin.

Châu Đốc is set amid a beautiful landscape of mountains and sugar palm trees. Even with a lucrative traffic of contraband goods smuggled in from nearby Cambodia, it is still an unusually poor town. Seven out of ten houses are thatch huts. (And we’re talking leaning, decrepit thatch huts, with their one item of luxury a constantly glowing black and white TV.) Châu Đốc has only been Vietnamese for about 300 years. Its earliest recorded settlers were the Funanese, who thrived from the 1st to the 5th century AD, their empire spreading across all of present day Cambodia, southern Thailand, southern Laos and into Malaysia and Burma. I doubt if even 1% of the current inhabitants of Châu Đốc have heard of the word “Funan.”

…

The most famous temple in Châu Đốc is the Lady Chúa Xứ Temple, dedicated to a stone statue. Rebuilt many times since its founding in the 1820’s, its modern, tasteless buildings are now the destination for busloads of Vietnamese pilgrims year-round. They come to pray for, among other things, a winning lottery ticket or a good turn in romance.

According to legends, during the early 19th century, a young girl in Vĩnh Tế village started speaking in tongues and instructed the villagers to retrieve a statue from the mountain. They did as told, but the forty men assigned to carry the statue could not budge it. The girl linda blaired once again and told the villagers that this task was to be accomplished by nine virgins. Nine maidens were quickly recruited and, sure enough, they lugged the statue down the mountain with ease. They walked and walked until, suddenly, they could walk no longer. The statue had become unbearably heavy again. Where they set the statue down became the site of the temple.

Scholars have determined that this statue is actually of Indian origin, a Shiva Linga, and dates back to at least the 3rd century BC. In its present reincarnation, it has a painted face, an elaborate red crown, and a red and yellow Chinese robe, with two swirling dragons on its chest. Worshippers believe that the statue is getting larger each year, with measurements to prove it. “It is a kind of living rock,” one woman told me

The fabulous post finds a moral in Kafka and Krazy Kat, one that we would all do well to heed, to wit, that we are all apes and mutts with delusions of grandeur. And it culminates with the translation of 13 “anthropomorphic” Vietnamese folk poems.

Go read.

Linh Dinh blogs at Detainees.

Via Melissa McEwan, Julia Keller brings the whole demonization of Hillary Clinton back where it belongs. Into literature and the history of western (so-called) culture:

This is not simply sexism or racism. Those prejudices are familiar, if still repugnant, and leaders as strong as Clinton and her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, have faced them many times. This, though, is something different and more sinister, because it is not just a commentator’s opinion about a person’s fitness or unfitness for public office. It is not about using colorful, vivid language in order to wish that a person might or might not continue a campaign. It is an unprecedented public call—albeit metaphorically, but still violently and persistently—for a person’s death.

In their landmark book of literary criticism “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination” (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar were among the first to spotlight this noxious theme, this isolation and ridicule of powerful women by labeling them crazy, hysterical, perverse, monstrous. To challenge male domination—of the world, or just of oneself—was to be risk being marginalized, ostracized, locked away like Rochester’s wife in “Jane Eyre” (1847), the fate that gave the book its title. In real life, behavior that strayed from the polite, demure norm expected of women in the 19th Century was rewarded with psychiatric evaluations and often, imprisonment and death.

…

The notion of a powerful, driven, influential woman as a hideous threat—a threat that can be curtailed only with her death—ripples through literature, from the D.H. Lawrence novel “Sons and Lovers” (1913), with its protagonist’s conviction that he must escape the clutches of his looming, clingy mother if he is ever to realize his destiny, to the 1962 novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey, with its way-scary female character: the loathsome, larger-than-life Nurse Ratched. The joyless, hulking harridan who wants to keep her patients drugged and miserable so she can control them. From the Furies in Greek literature onward, the women-as-mythical-monsters theme has shrieked, flapped and lurched its way through the arts.

…

It’s natural to wonder whether Obama approves of the death-haunted images that surround his opponent like a phalanx of vultures. Surely he doesn’t. He is an intelligent, sensitive, enlightened man whose life has been enriched, as he frequently acknowledges, by the presence of strong women, most notably his late mother and his wife. I wish, therefore, that he would publicly condemn the trend of evoking death and destruction when it comes to Clinton. Perhaps, someday, he will.

Meanwhile, the pile of death images continues to rise, like corpses outside Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory door. After Clinton’s victories in recent primaries, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert called it a “back-from-the-dead” moment. Walter Shapiro, Washington editor for salon.com, opined last week that Clinton had entered the “death with dignity” phase of her campaign.

Death, death, death. The steady, depressing drumbeat continues. What these commentators seem to seek is not just a proud female’s withdrawal from a political contest—but her outright annihilation. They evoke the nightmarish vision of a commanding woman intent on destruction—thus she must be destroyed before she can launch her evil scheme.

In a thriller by Irish novelist Tana French, “In the Woods” (2007), a detective muses about a psychopath who has outwitted him, “I wanted her not just dead but obliterated from the face of the earth—crushed to unidentifiable pulp, pulverized in a shredder, burned to a handful of toxic ash.” With that attitude, he won’t have to worry if the gumshoe gig ever fails him: He can always apply for a job with MSNBC.

I strongly suggest that you read the whole of this excellent article, because, as Melissa says:

It’s a distinction that is lost on every person who’s accused me of being in the bag for Clinton. Feminism/womanism is a cultural critique first and foremost, and, although Chris Matthews calling Clinton a she-devil piques my political ire in the same way pernicious media misrepresentations of Al Gore did, the way the MSM’s disfavor toward Democratic candidates always does, but that Matthews specifically goes for misogynist attacks against Clinton is not a political concern for me nearly as much as it’s a cultural concern, akin to Jay Leno’s homophobia and sexism and racism, David Letterman’s transphobia, Adam Carolla’s sexism and homophobia and fat hatred and transphobia, Bill Maher’s sexism and rape jokes, and on and on and on. Our media is a giant tool of the kyriarchy, and, while there are certainly exceptions (we’ve spoken before in a great QotD thread about films that opened our minds about something), the MSM is largely little more than a jack-booted thug enforcing the biases that protect existent privilege, and politics is only a tiny part of that.

The Sexism Watch has way more to do with the larger culture than it does to do with the subculture of political discourse. Keller’s piece clarifies beautifully how a critique of the rhetorical cudgels being wielded against Clinton is a cultural issue, not a specifically political one. And thusly, it underlines once again how a failure to address what’s being done to Clinton is not justifiable because she’s not your candidate, or because she voted for the AUMF, or because because because…

Not if you care about women and the means of their subjugation. Not if you’re a progressive.

Meanwhile, Anglachel gives a really nice portrait of the Hillary Clinton her supporters see:

I don’t see the Hillary campaign saying a bad word about the voters, even those who vote for her opponents. I don’t see the campaign explaining away their losses because of some flaw or failing in the voters. Even the group of Obama voters most vociferous and adamant in their objections to her do not get criticized or condemned. To the contrary, she defended MoveOn from politically motivated attacks. She went to Yearly Kos and spoke without rancor or defensiveness to a deeply hostile group.

When she says she is impervious to attacks from the right-wing noise machine, the MSM and political opponents, it shows up in the way she will not be badgered and baited. She can look Richard Scaife in the eye and tell him exactly what she intends to do as President without belligerance and without apology. Their cruelty and crudeness cannot disrupt her calm civility, though she may poke some sly fun at them.

This is not someone who has burned bridges on the Democratic side. In a hard-fought campaign, she has been firm that there will be nothing from her side to prevent resolution and reconciliation within the party. She pulls no punches on issues, but has not stooped to personal attacks of the kind leveled at her by her opponents and even by some party leaders. When somone on her campaign has behaved dishonorably, they are told to leave at once.

Unity is not obedience or falling into line. It is being able to strongly and persuasively present yourself and your objectives and be victorious, but do so in a way that does not demand the humiliation, denegration or destruction of your opponents. It is to treat others as valued colleagues to be won over, not as enemies to be obliterated.

May Day, Beltane, time to wind the colored ribbons around the Maypole or, in George W. Bush’s case perhaps, to wind the Mission Accomplished banner around the tower of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Five years ago today, Mr. Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq. Today, I suspect he’d like to do a little witchy nose-twitching and make that banner disappear. Said Dana Perino, “President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission.” Load of text for one banner.

I think this is probably Geronimo, certainly not Tecumseh.

Tecumseh (Jay Silverheels) vies with Stephen Ruddle (Jon Hall) for the love of Laura (Christine Larson) in the 1952 film Brave Warrior. The triangle is resolved at the Battle of Tippecanoe. I think we may safely conclude that this movie, which nets 4.3 stars on the IMDb, has little connection to reality but it might be of interest to watch, just to hear Jay Silverheels say more than “unh.” The NYTimes says the role is “well-played.” It might be fun, too, to see Michael Ansara as Tecumseh’s villainous brother, The Prophet. I loved Jon Hall as Ramar of the Jungle.

A bargain with the devil, from Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream:

Once upon a time, down South, Mr. Rich White made a bargain with Mr. Poor White. He studied about it a long time before he made it, for it had to be a bargain Mr. Poor White would want to keep forever. It’s not easy to make a bargain another man will want to keep forever, and Mr. Rich White knew this. So he looked around for something to put in it that Mr. Poor White would never want to take out.

He looked around . . . and his eyes fell on the Negro. I’ve got it, he whispered.

He called in Mr. Poor White and said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you and me lately—how hard it is for us to make a living down here with no money and the rest of the country against us. To keep my farm and mill going the way I want them to go, making big profit off of little capital, I have to keep wages low, you can see that. It’s the only way I can make as much as I want to make as quickly as I want to make it. And folks coming in from the North have to keep wages low too, for that’s our southern tradition.

“It’s a good way for us rich folks and it’s not bad you either, for you’re smart enough to see that any job’s better than no job at all. And you know too that whatever’s wrong with the South isn’t my fault or your fault but is bound to be the Yankee’s fault or the fault of those freight rates. . . .

“For instance, the nigger. You don’t need me to tell you that ever since the damyankee freed him the nigger’s been scrouging you, pushing you off your land, out your job, jostling you on the sidewalks, all time biggity. If he hadn’t been freed, he’d never bothered you, I could have kept him on the farm and bossed him like I bossed him for 200 years. But the damyankees always know better, don’t they! Here I am busy at my mill with no time to boss him, and here he is pushing, causing lot of trouble. Thing I can’t forget is your skin’s the color of my skin and we’re both made in God’s image; we’re white men and white men can’t let a nigger push ‘em.

“There’re two jobs down here that need doing: Somebody’s got to tend to the living, and somebody’s go tend to the nigger. Now, I’ve learned a few things at making a living you’re too no-count to learn (else you’d be making money same way I make it): things about jobs and credit, prices, hours, wages, votes, and so on. But one thing you can learn easy, any white man can, is how to handle the black man. Suppose now you over the thing you can do and let me take over the thing I can do. You boss the nigger, and I’ll boss the money. How about it?”

See also Joshua Zeitz, What Did Martin Luther King Really Believe?

Critically, he envisioned these broad-based, public-sector compensatory programs as targeting both African-Americans and poor whites, whom he labeled the “derivative victims” of slavery and Jim Crow. In this regard he leaned on the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, who famously observed that poor and working-class whites gained nothing from Jim Crow but the psychological “wages of whiteness.” In return for the psychological boost that “whiteness” gave them, poor whites—millions of them, from slavery times through the modern age—surrendered political and economic power to their elite counterparts. King might well have been thinking of the radical white writer Lillian Smith’s 1943 parable, “Two Men and a Bargain,” in which “Once a time, down South, Mr.

Rich White made a bargain with Mr. Poor White. . . . You boss the nigger, and I’ll boss the money.” According to Smith, they “segregated southern money from Mr. Poor White and they . . . segregated the Negro from everything.”

Smith’s reasoning—and King’s—was well-founded. Jim Crow divided white and black labor against each other, stunting the growth of unions, labor parties, and liberal political coalitions. Jim Crow thus drove down wages across the board and secured a political system (chiefly in the American South) where taxes were regressive, public services were minimal, and political participation was sharply limited. Remember that on the eve of World War II, poll taxes in eight Southern states disenfranchised as many as 64 percent of white citizens and virtually all eligible black voters. It’s hard to say what most working-class whites got from Jim Crow other than the satisfaction that they weren’t black.

As the 1960s wore on, King came to view social problems more through the lens of class and less through the lens of race.

And also Paul Krugman, Bubba Isn’t Who You Think:

In fact, if you look at voting behavior, low-income whites in the South are not very different from low-income whites in the rest of the country. You can see this both in Larry Bartels’s “What’s the matter with What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (pdf), Figure 3, and in a comprehensive study of red state-blue state differences by Gelman et al (pdf). It’s relatively high-income Southern whites who are very, very Republican. Can I get away with saying that rich white trash are the problem? Probably not.

If I had to hazard a guess, strictly my own opinion, about why we’re seeing what looks like a racial split in the current Democratic primary, I would say that it isn’t so much about racism on the part of the “lunch-bucket” whites but about economics issues. When African Americans look at Barack Obama, they see the first black President of the United States of America and they are rightly very excited about that prospect. When working-class white people look at Hillary Clinton, they see some one who will help them with pocketbook issues, issues that are very important right now.

Lynching was once called the national crime of the United States, for the practice of seizing those accused or convicted of crimes and executing them without legal authority or due process of law has been peculiar to this country.

So begins Henry E. Barber’s article “The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942,” Phylon 1973;4:378-389.

Barber tells us that, according to the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Institute, 4,761 lynchings were recorded between 1882 (when recording began) and 1930, 71% of them were lynchings of African Americans, and 3,810 of them took place in the eleven Confederate States, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.

The most commonly used excuse to justify this extra-legal punishment in the South was “in defense of southern white women.” Lynchings were believed to be a “sort of natural outburst, in some vague way a strong man’s gesture, splashed liberally with knight errantry and designed to protect the blushing flower of Southern womanhood.” [Quoting John R. Clowes in the Courier-Journal for March 10, 1940.]

This “natural outburst of knight errantry” malarky reminds me very strongly of the backlash Susan Falludi describes in The Terror Dream. Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, when it was easier to fantasize the return of John Wayne than to deal with reality.

The nation’s men, from the inhabitants of the White House on down, were reportedly assuming a hard-boiled comportment last seen in post-World War II cinema. They were anointed “the new hawks” of the new consensus, “fighting a new Cold War,” as tough on terrorists as the old hawks had been on Communists. They were men prepared to mete out “torture” and “focused brutality,” take “nasty and brutish means,” and chuck the “niceties” of avoiding civilian casualties, as muscle-flexing columnists in Newsweek, Time, Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and other publications intoned. “We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting,” columnist David Brooks [!] wrote in the Weekly Standard, approvingly. A new John Wayne masculinity was ascendant …[and] women figured largely as vulnerable maidens. (pages 4 & 5)

William Bennet wanted to Kill! and David Brooks wanted veins in his teeth. Everybody wanted to rescue Afghan women from their burkas and supply them with the latest cosmetics. But all this posturing had as little reality in 2001 as it did in 1901. To return to Barber:

Tuskegee Institute, however, reported that only 16.7 percent of the victims between 1889 and 1929 were lynched for rape and 6.7 percent for attempted rape. [Quoting Arthur Franklin Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching, Chapel Hill, 1933.] Quite clearly, crimes against women were not the real cause of lynching. However, regardless of the crime, the accused Negro had to be lynched in defense of white women.

And in the twentieth century as in the twenty-first, some women weren’t buying it. A select group, lead by Jessie Daniel Ames, decided to take action. From the Handbook of Texas Online:

The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was founded in November 1930 in Atlanta, Georgia, by Jessie Daniel Ames, a Texas-born southern woman active in suffrage and interracial reform movements. She and twelve founding members established the ASWPL as an arm of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an organization working for racial harmony. The ASWPL’s founders, all active in Protestant churches and interracial organizations (they were later joined by members of Jewish women’s groups), wanted to prevent lynching by educating southern whites about its causes and prevention. They were convinced that lynchings were sanctioned murder and the result of “false chivalry,” the use by white men of white women’s virtue as an excuse for racially motivated violence against blacks. The ASWPL sought to convince white women of their responsibility to refuse to play a helpless role in that process.

By the early 1940s, Barber reports the ASWPL had pledges of support from more than 43,000 individuals and 109 churches and civic organizations. By 1934, all thirteen Southern governors had signed on. By 1939, they had recruited 1,229 local law enforcement officers. These women not only spoke in churches and meetings, they were also known to confront lynch mobs. Barber quotes one witness as saying

When white women appeared on the scene in a situation like that, these white men were afraid of them.

By the late thirties, early forties, the ASWPL had helped turn public opinion against lynching. In 1939, there were only three recorded lynchings. In 1942, the association, which had always been very loosely organized, dissolved as women’s concern about lynchings waned and the country’s involvement in WWII took their attention.

As women like Susan Sontag and Katha Pollitt (or perhaps more appropriately, Barbara Kingsolver and the Dixie Chicks) who spoke out against the post-9/11 excesses were called traitors and bitches and threatened with death, so the women of the ASWPL were called “nigger lovers” and sob sisters and were threatened with violence by groups like the KKK.

I had never heard of the ASWPL until I came to read Lillian Smith’s 1949 memoir Killers of the Dream. Smith buys heavily into Freud and her thinking, while admirably frank about miscegenation and violence, often manages to leave all clichés comfortably intact: neurotic white women in the front parlor, earth-mother mammies in the kitchen. Her treatment of the ASWPL is more remarkable for its emotion than for its hard facts. Nevertheless she is capable of eye-opening insights, as in her writing about the psychic cost for both white and black women when they decided that they would break one of the South’s central taboos and sit down to eat together:

It is difficult for those not reared as white southerners to remember how this eating taboo in childhood was woven into the mesh of things that are “wrong,” how it pulled anxieties from stronger prohibitions and attached them to itself. But we who live here cannot forget. One of these church women told me of her first eating experience with colored friends. Though her conscience was serene, and her enjoyment of this association was real, yet she was seized by an acute nausea which disappeared only when the meal was finished. She was too honest to attribute it to anything other than anxiety welling up from the “bottom of her personality,” as she expressed it, creeping back from her childhood training. Others have told me similar experiences: of feeling “pangs of conscience,” as one put it, “though my conscience was clearly approving”; or suddenly in the night awaking, overwhelmed by “serious doubts of the wisdom of what we are doing.”

The white women were not alone in these irrational reactions. Colored women also found it hard, but for different reasons. Sometimes their pride was deeply hurt that white women felt so virtuous when eating with them. They were too sensitive not to be aware of the psychic price the white women paid for this forbidden act, and yet too ignorant of the training given white children to understand why there had to be a price. And sometimes the colored women were themselves almost overcome by a break-through not of guilt but of their old repressed hatred of white people. One of the most charming, sensitive, intelligent Negro women I know, tells me that even now when she is long with white people she grows physically ill and has immense difficulty coming to terms with the resentments of her childhood.

Given taboos and resentments that ran so deep, these women of both races should be remembered with pride. Maybe the remarkable thing isn’t that, sixty years later, we still have our Jeremiah Wrights and Pat Buchanans but that we have so few of them.

From Ange Mlinko, “Conversion Comedy” in Poetry, March 2008:

Once you suggest the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims, I start listening for them — the cries — under my own singing.

From Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (Norton, 1994, originally published 1949)

Church was our town—come together not to kneel in worship but to see each other. God was our Host, we were guests in His House, the altar flowers were fresh and fragrant, and if it was Communion Day the cloth was starched and white and the silver cup out of which every one drank was shining. And though we willingly listened to the sermon if it was not too long, and felt a deep flowing sense of togetherness when we sang the Doxology, we were there also to mend the little broken places in our knowledge of each other.

********

Must winds that cut like blades of steel

And sunsets swimming in Volnay,

The holiest, cruelest pains I feel,

Die stillborn, because old men squeal

For something new. “Write something new….”

*******

No, no! My chicken, I shall scrawl

Just what I fancy as I strike it

Fairies and Fusiliers, and all

Old broken knock-kneed thought will crawl

Across my verse in the classic way

And sir, be careful what you say

There are old-fashioned folk still like it.

__Robert Graves, 1918

*********

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to staging a Shakespeare comedy is the awe in which we have come to hold his work. Max Reinhardt felt obliged to stage a huge spectacle for his stage productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in the 1935 film even though he cast a batch of American Movie Stars in that. While many of the choices he made were inspired–Mickey Rooney as a manic Puck with an obstreperous cackle, Jimmy Cagney as Bottom–he miscast Dick Powell as Lysander. The massive production tended to overwhelm the comedy.

* * * * * * *

Comic book and graphic novel adaptations have fared no better–the Classics Illustrated version ignored the verse of the play–and Shakespeare employed far more rhymed couplets in MSD than in any other play. Charles Vess tried to adapt it to graphic novel form but felt overwhelmed–probably because he was so influenced by Arthur Rackham and other Victorian illustrators–and ended up doing an MSD metafiction with Neil Gaiman in his Sandman series.

*******

In his webcomic Pibgorn Brooke McEldowney adapted the play using characters from his mainstream comic 9 Chickweed Place to supplement his comic fantasy saga cast. He adapted many of his female characters to traditionally male roles; one major conceit is that the play is set in a 1930s “Athens City” theatre district which is a thinly veiled New York. Art Deco skyscrapers abound so that they nearly become supporting cast members. Allusions to the Ashcan School of American Art culminate in a direct copy of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. McEldowney manages to evoke nearly every trope of 20th C. Broadway comedies/musicals and Hollywood adaptations of same along with film noir and pre-code movies and cartoons.

*******

Much of this adaptation ponders the role of women in 20th C. America–the power they had gained before WWII, before the Depression, before the repression of the ethics code. This fits very well with the concerns of the play with the tension between male power and female resistance–is Pyramus a tyrant or a lover–or both? Hermia and Helena gain power in the Wood they never could have in Athens, and when Chickweed’s Gran is cast as Egea, with the power of life or death over her recalcitrant daughter, it points up just how much power 20th C. American women gained.

But the most dynamic bit of casting is the fairy Pibgorn as the pwca Robin Goodfellow. This allows for a love triangle between Puck, Titania (the succubus Drusilla with short black spitcurls–Betty Boop as Mae West?) and Oberon (Geoff, the mortal pianist as underworld boss–his acetylene-blue eyes burning under the shadow of his fedora). McEldowney also matures the changeling Indian prince into a haughty handsome youth, the perfect boytoy for Titania and fitting rival for Oberon, so there is a second interlocking love triangle in the fairy realm.

There are sly allusions throughout the adaptation to numerous 20th Century comedies, romantic, screwball, fantastic. Solange the Chickweed Siamese colorpoint accompanies Puck so often that Bell, Book and Candle’s Pyewacket rises in the magic circle. The girls who work in Titania’s nightclub The Wood form a Busby Berkely chorus line–clothed only in pink thistledown– to help the Prince sing their mistress asleep. The Prince himself, who could be a cross between the pop star Prince and Cab Calloway, with a dash of Valentino, finishes the number with a bit of slide dancing and a slow striptease. For me, this evoked all three of the Cab Calloway/Betty Boop cartoons. Then he enjoys a Code-flaunting love scene with Titania. They apparently do everything short of kicking that gong around.

* * * * * * *

But Puck has already seduced Oberon after she delivered Cupid’s herb–a passion-flower? — and they wind up in bed for a post-coital tete-a-tete as he outlines his plans to get the changeling away from Titania. Puck’s frustration and jealousy complete the movie-oriented genre which Shakespeare’s plays helped inspire. She is a working class girl to Oberon’s criminal overlord and is fated to win his love, according to the conventions of the best screwball comedies of the 20th Century. All of the dancers, Titania’s fairies, the rude mechanicals/chorus girls and Puck are solidly working class in contrast to the aristocracy–the theater and nightclub owners.
Bottom is also female–probably the only time the ingenue plays that role–and she is another fairy, Oognat,–the musical reference is typical of McEldowney, who is also a professional musician; she may also evoke a certain G. Herriman character. McEldowney even manages to make her transformed ears exude a certain je ne sais quois so that one can understand why Titania could be so taken with her charms. The scene where the succubus’ serpent tongue twines about the delicate tip of a gracefully tapering ear is inspired.

* * * * * * *

Pibgorn archives are available through subscription to mycomicspage.com.

Charlie Whitt, our diligent Flatwoods South Shore reporter, has drawn my attention to this story, filed by Frank Lewis in The Portsmouth [Ohio] Daily Times:

The feud over the Indian Head Rock has been taken to the next level.

Greenup County (Ky.) prosecuting attorney Cliff Duvall has subpoenaed Portsmouth Mayor Jim Kalb to appear in Greenup County Court to testify before a Greenup County grand jury on March 28, at the Greenup County Court Annex.

“We have the Antiquities Act here in Kentucky, that involves things that are registered under that act through the University of Kentucky,” Duvall said. “It’s a Class D felony, and in Kentucky, that carries one to five years. That charge will probably be the most applicable. There isn’t any monetary value that anybody could put on it.”

Kalb said receiving the subpoena was not a surprise to him.

“I got a call from my office a couple of days ago, saying that a member of the Scioto County Sheriff’s Office was there to serve me with a subpoena. I kind of suspected that it would be over the rock,” Kalb said.

…

Does Duvall intend to call Steve Shaffer, the man who spearheaded the retrieval of the rock last year?

“If he chooses to. Let’s put it that way,” he said.

Shaffer, of Ironton, the main authority on the history of the rock, told a recent gathering of Scioto County school administrators there were five main theories as to the real history of how the now-famous carved face got on the rock.

“One is that in 1851, messages were placed on the rock, likely by early pioneers to mark the low-water mark. The second is that a quarry man carved it with a metal tool. Theory No. 3 is that a band of robbers used it as a marker when they buried their loot nearby. The fourth theory is that it was carved by Native Americans, and that theory began in an account in the 1891 edition of the Portsmouth newspaper. And the fifth theory is about a 100 -years-old. It says a boy named John Book, a prominent member of Scioto County society who was killed in the Civil War, carved it,” he said.

…

Kalb isn’t backing down on the issue, and is standing firm on his belief the rock belongs right where it is.

“The rock belongs in Portsmouth. It’s a logical place for it. This is not a case of Kentucky wanting to display it, it’s a case of them not wanting Portsmouth or Ohio to have it,” he said. “This is an important part of Portsmouth history, and if the rock is on display, it will be for both sides of the river to enjoy. If it’s Kentucky’s intent to put the rock back in the river, that should be a crime in itself.”

On an unrelated note but just because I saw it in the headlines, Scioto County where Portsmouth is located, went for Clinton in yesterday’s primary.

The Clinton campaign toured Ohio over the last month with former President Bill Clinton coming to Shawnee State University on Feb. 25, accompanied by Ohio first lady Frances Strickland.

Scioto County Democrat Party Chairman Randy Basham credited Strickland and the Clinton campaign sending Bill Clinton to Scioto County with pulling off the election for Clinton.

“It was good when Ted Strickland got Bill Clinton down here to speak on behalf of Hillary. Hillary did come to Lawrence County, and a lot of people from here went there to see her,” Barnett said.

Maybe they could get Bill to come down and arbitrate this rock dispute.