Is Bill Clinton gay?

David Letterman v. Ann Coulter

Margaret Cho explains what's wrong with straight porn

Tell it girl - I've been saying the same thing for years.

Although I'm told by the young'uns that this has changed.

the Fish god-concept

Stanley Fish has been deluged by comments, mostly from atheists, about his critique of the trio of books written by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. Including me. As a playwright, I couldn't help but focus on his abuse of Shakespeare.

Fish said:

The criticism made by atheists that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated is no criticism at all; for a God whose existence could be demonstrated wouldn’t be a God; he would just be another object in the field of human vision.

This does not mean that my arguments constitute a proof of the truth of religion; for if I were to claim that I would be making the atheists’ mistake from the other direction. Nor are they arguments in which I have a personal investment. Their purpose and function is simply to show how the atheists’ arguments miss their mark and, indeed, could not possibly hit it.

At various points Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens all testify to their admiration for Shakespeare, who, they seem to think, is more godly than God. They would do well to remember one of the bard’s most famous lines, uttered by Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

My response:

Professor Fish seems to subscribe to the divinity of Shakespeare as much as his opponents do, since he apparently believes that quoting a well-known Shakespearean adage, regardless of context, is some kind of miraculous rhetorical coup de grace.

For what is Hamlet talking about, this thing not-dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy? The ghost of Hamlet's father. Presumably Shakespeare doesn't expect us to actually believe in ghosts. And presumably Fish doesn't believe in ghosts. But if a god can be imperceptible and yet exist, surely ghosts can too. And the third part of the Catholic Holy Trinity was once called the "Holy Ghost."

I would be perfectly happy if Fish's conception of gods was the one preferred by believers - an unknowable entity beyond human comprehension. Then there would be no more religions, since the existence of religions depend on a hierarchy of authorities who interpret god for others. Fish's god-concept would strip them of every last fiber of credibility, especially on topics of such vital interest to the vast majority of believers as whether or not god cares if you have sex outside of marriage, or whether or not you should suffer a witch to live.

Such a lofty, function-less god that Fish describes is the next best thing to atheism!

watch IDIOCRACY!!!!

Do you wonder why Fox decided not to promote this movie?



I just saw this movie via cable on-demand video. It is genius. And not just for slamming Fox.

I have to say the funniest part is the Carl's Jr.'s vending machine scene.

I wasn't familiar with Carl's Jr., since we don't have them on the east coast, but apparently Carl's Jr. is run by total scumbags and deserves to be mocked.

And the section on Brawndo is a virtual documentary of our current government-corporate relations.

But Brawndo's got what plants crave - it's got electrolytes.

The Guardian has some interesting things to say.

NYTimes promotes evolutionary psychology - yet again

Richard Conniff is the Times' latest evolutionary psychologist, along with Tierney, Brooks, Dowd, Merken, and scores of others. Conniff has important news for the masses - humans live in hierarchies. Egalitarianism doesn't exist, and if it did, it would be a recipe for disaster.

Well who on earth is promoting the idea that humans don't live in hierarchies? Who do you think? The rightwing's usual suspects - Academics.

A long line of academic thinking says the opposite: that hierarchy is a modern imposition on free-spirited, brother- and sisterly human nature. The traditional tribes to which we belonged through almost all of human history were fiercely egalitarian, according to anthropologists.
But the academics go wrong, I think, on several counts.

Note that Conniff can't be bothered to cite examples of these crazy academics. But we all know that those crazy academics are always coming up with insane shit that those of us with common sense know is wrong.

One of the commenters says:

The sociobiologists would have a ball with this piece.

Duh - Conniff IS a sociobiologist - or as we call them nowadays, an evolutionary psychologist, a hugely popular fad in pop psychology because it tells people that everything that everybody with common sense knows is true, IS absolutely true, in spite of the dastardly efforts by the Academics to sow confusion.

So humans live in hierarchies. Does that make hierarchies the ideal - the more hierarchical the better? He seems to think so. I guess the Allies beat the Nazis because they were just so much more rigidly hierarchical than those goose-stepping egalitarians.

What bugs me as much as his evolutionary psychology is the fact that Conniff is probably getting paid for his blog posts. I mean, really, how hard is it to write his entries? They are as well-researched and thoughtful as any rant about pointy-headed intellectuals from your crusty old grandpa. The Times really does like to promote mediocrity.

At least Stanley Fish seems to put some effort into his blog posts, although he is pretty massively wrong in his belief that religion and science are more similar than different. I'm definitely ambivalent about Fish, since he penned one of the most sensible responses to the Larry Summers controversy ever. Summers' remarks reflected his beliefs in evolutionary psychology, which he shares with Stephen Pinker, and also Richard Dawkins - who wrote one of the books about religion that Fish argues with in his column.

I am a stone-cold atheist myself, but I have a problem with Dawkins for his evolutionary psychology leanings, and with Christopher Hitchens for being an all-around asshole. Sam Harris I don't know too much about. Based on his web site, his entire career seems to be about debunking religion, which, if limited, is nevertheless dandy with me.

So although I am not a Fish-hater, I certainly do disagree with his statement:

Mine is not a leveling argument; it does not say that everything is the same (that is the atheists’ claim); it says only that whatever differences there are between religious and scientific thinking, one difference that will not mark the boundary setting one off from the other is the difference between faith and reason.

This only works if you make the word "faith" mean whatever you want it to mean. Or as commenter Bevan Davies remarked:

I “believe” that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I do not “believe” that I will go to heaven when I die.

But believers v. atheists is mostly a false dichotomy. Most believers are skeptical of faith - all faiths except their own. Atheists simply think more logically and coherently than religious types.

Cougar in the Times

Wow, I thought I was respectably ahead of the Times as far as using the term "cougar" but I was wrong. The Times is currently using the term, in this article subtitled: Women of a certain age find a home, and plenty of hot guys, on TV.

It almost makes me want to watch TV more - but who has time?

Movies, the home of male fantasies, still primarily treat women like wallpaper in front of which the important beings perform their acts of heroism and car chases and retro-rat-pack schemes. Unless it is a "chick flick" in which case it is taboo - any male who views such a movie will be polluted by girl germs.

Theatre of course, keeps getting into those unsightly tender "feminine" emotions, driving theatre critics into spasms of anxiety that theatre isn't as manly kewl as movies.

the latest killer app from Apple

I got my new MacBook Pro laptop, and in addition to GarageBand 3, it comes with PhotoBooth, so of course I went crazy making faces at my built-in camera with the "Glow" effect on. And also took my new "pensive librarian" headshot on the right.

Why I am not a "cougar"

I only recently learned that the term for a woman my age who pursues guys in their 20s is called a "cougar" - and there are many cougar-related web sites.

I certainly do like 20-something guys, although not exclusively. But more importantly, the term "cougar" belies the intense double-standard that our culture still holds dear. And you know the double-standard is still firmly in place because the term for a guy my age who pursues 20-something women is "a guy."

One of the fascinating aspects of running a playwrights group is that you get to hear what your members really think about things, and it's often quite revolting. I already blogged about the gender attitudes of members betrayed by their plays in my essay A Streetcar Named Biteme", and the retro beat goes on.

The most recent gender atrocity was perpetrated only a few weeks ago, wherein a member, whom I had previously thought was a pretty cool guy, since he's straight, but he wrote a really sensitive play about a gay couple, came up with a short play about a crazy old coot who gets the upper hand on an uppity bitch talent agent and a metrosexual. It was crystal clear to me that the subtext of the play was the author's deep-seated resentment that the rules of gender behavior are changing. The old coot was crazy-like-a-foxy-grampaw, while the metrosexual was thoroughly conceited and obnoxious, and cared about heirloom tomatoes. Crazy grampaw humiliates the bitch at the end, for preferring the metrosexual to him.

As if it wasn't torture enough sitting through this short play that went on for an eon, one of the actors, a friend of the author (and/or his sycophantic director), opined that we could all learn something from the play. I couldn't stop myself - I scoffed bitterly at the idea that anybody could learn anything from these cardboard cutouts.

The play's author stopped signing up for reading time after that and I think he's going to quit the group - which is fine with me, especially if he takes along with him his entourage - his numerology-believing, Mars/Venus gender-dichotomy-obsessed girlfriend and his sycophantic director, whom I discovered through Google is a hard-core rightwing Catholic and who, at least as of a few years ago, worked as a volunteer for an organization that tells homosexuals it's OK to be gay - AS LONG AS YOU DON'T HAVE THE GAY SEX.

But more to the main point of this blog post is the play I sat through a couple of months ago, written by a man fairly close to my age, about a New York lawyer who golfs down South with a bunch of good ole boys. She confesses to the good ole boys that she's such a big loser when it comes to men - why she even dated a man who was - gasp - HALF HER AGE!

Wow, what a big loser. And I don't even think the author for a moment understood why this pissed me off so much. It wasn't that the good ole boys thought she was a loser - she thought she was a loser. But the good ole boys didn't spend any time worrying that the girls at Hooters they loved so much were half their age.

So I will not accept the term "cougar" - it is utter bullshit. It's time the world got used to the fact that women like hot young men - we're called "women." The evolutionary psychologists are trying to hang on to the Mars/Venus myth for all they are worth, but every year that goes by proves them wronger than ever. Sooner or later they will shelve that tenet of their ideology too, along with the myth that men are "naturally" polygamous and women are "naturally" monogamous - a theory that was quietly retired when genetic testing began to reveal the fact that many children were not actually related to their mother's husband - although the ev-psychs covered their tracks by immediately turning it into a "women are looking for better genes" storyline.

More manly men of theatre

I've blogged here for a couple of years now about how the male critics of the theatre world (and the overwhelming majority are male) are anxious that the theatre world is becoming emasculated, and so they promote the work of manly man playwrights (in the mold of John Osborne and David Mamet) every chance they get.

But I couldn't have come up with this opening paragraph in Ben Brantley's review of Neil LaBute's latest play in my wildest parody:

Rehab as a spectator sport has become such a girlie affair, thanks to the pink-tinged public meltdowns of Britney, Lindsay, et al., that it’s kind of gratifying to watch Neil LaBute grease the road to recovery with his patented brand of testosterone.

Oh how Ben Brantley loves that testosterone.

The male critics are just trying to salvage the theatre world - they know if theatre is associated too much with females it will suffer a loss of status in this patriarchy-in-denial culture we live in.

Hot Adam expelled

The hot actor who portrays Adam in the Creation Museum's documentary about the Garden of Eden has a naughty past which is naturally, intolerable to the nutjobs who believe in creationism.

I would have gone to Creation Museum to watch that hot Adam though.

Hurray for the Weather Channel!

I admit it - I love the Weather Channel. It's both calming (except for those weather disaster shows they have at night - *shudder*) and scientific, and useful. I admit it, I am a weather geek.

I also hate and despise Fox "News" as anybody with a brain and a conscience and a fondness for the truth does.

So I am really loving that the Weather Channel is facing down Fox:

“If The Weather Channel isn’t talking about climate change and global warming, who is?” said Kaye Zusmann, the vice president for program strategy and development for the network. “It’s our mandate.”

The network, which had been gearing up for the opening of hurricane season on Friday, sees the engagement with the issues surrounding climate change as important for content and for business.

“We have a point of view, and we think it’s really important to articulate why it’s happening. Secondarily, it’s good business,” said Ms. Wilson, the network president. “Many consumers want to know, ‘What should I do?’ ”

The lightning rod for controversy, so to speak, is Heidi Cullen, the network’s resident climate expert.

In December, she raised the ire of Fox News and others by writing on her weather.com blog that the American Meteorological Society should not give its “seal of approval” to any meteorologist who “can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change.” (There are now more than 1,700 comments on that one post.)

Dr. Cullen, a tiny woman who speaks with conviction, said she believed that people were “finally seeing climate connected to weather,” but that a lot of information still needs to be disseminated. “If you turn on the local forecast, you wouldn’t necessarily know that global warming exists,” she said.

Far from being intimidated by the political backlash, Dr. Cullen and executives at the channel say they have embraced the issue of global warming. Dr. Cullen is host of the weekly show “Forecast Earth,” formerly named “The Climate Code” where she has entertained such guests as former Vice President Al Gore. She also appears on the channel’s other programming with segments on hybrid taxicabs in New York City and the development of more fuel-efficient aircraft.

So THERE all my friends and relatives who think I'm weird for enjoying the Weather Channel - they are RIGHTEOUS! As well as calming and scientific and useful.

And that goes for you too, leather punk Jon Stewart!



Although you are so very hot, young punk Jon Stewart.

1/2 below average

Somebody said this to me a few years ago, and while it does explain many things, from the fact that GWB got "re" -elected to the fact that crappy movies and plays are often very popular, it is really scary if you think about it too much:

"Think of somebody you know whom you consider of average intelligence.

Consider that 1/2 of all the people in the world are less intelligent than that person."

Gender convergence

Reported yesterday in the NYTimes:

Now experts who shared their latest research at a conference this month say that far from reverting to more traditional sex roles, women and men are becoming more alike in their attitudes toward balancing life at home and at work.

The gender revolution is not over, they say, it has just developed into “gender convergence.”

But filmmakers and film critics are still living in the past.

What (the film "Knocked Up") does feel is honest: about love, about sex, and above all about the built-in discrepancies between what men and women expect from each other and what they are likely to get.

Apparently A.O. Scott doesn't read the rest of the NYTimes.

Bush's amazing achievement

By Jonathan Freedland From the New York Review of Books

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

Bush: I am the dictator

Bush is making a power grab that is so incredible, even the right-wingers are upset.

And if you don't think the Bush gang will come up with some excuse to use the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive to their advantage, you obviously haven't been paying attention.

Excerpt/analysis:

The directive assigns sole power to the executive branch of government.

"The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination."

"The National Continuity Coordinator, in consultation with the heads of appropriate executive departments and agencies, will lead the development of a National Continuity Implementation Plan (Plan), which shall include prioritized goals and objectives, a concept of operations, performance metrics by which to measure continuity readiness, procedures for continuity and incident management activities, and clear direction to executive department and agency continuity coordinators, as well as guidance to promote interoperability of Federal Government continuity programs and procedures with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate. The Plan shall be submitted to the President for approval not later than 90 days after the date of this directive."

"The Secretary of Homeland Security shall coordinate the integration of Federal continuity plans and operations with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency."

"Continuity requirements shall be incorporated into daily operations of all executive departments and agencies."

more analysis at SourceWatch.org

Times like these call for a little levity - from Whitehouse.ORG:
Transcript of President's Call Reaffirming His Faith in the Competence of America's Alzheimer's Ravaged Attorney General

Hottest scene on TV ever

Since I'm thinking of BTVS and James Marsters...


The most erotic scene ever shown on TV was in the episode "Smashed" in season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Spike's poem

Just because...

My soul is wracked in harsh repose
Midnight descends in raven colored clothes
But soft, behold! A sunlight beam
Cutting a swath of glimmering gleam
My heart expands, 'tis grown a bulge in't,
Inspired by your beauty effulgent

Watch it read by James Marsters here

The next poem he is going to read "The Wanton Folly of Me Mum" refers to his vamping then staking his mother (in flashback) in the episode "Lies My Parents Told Me" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

John Ashcroft - civil libertarian???

I never thought I'd read a story in which the hero turns out to be John Ashcroft.

The hospital visit by Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., who was then White House chief of staff, has been disclosed before, but never in such dramatic, personal detail. Mr. Comey’s account offered a rare and titillating glimpse of a Washington power struggle, complete with a late-night showdown in the White House after a dramatic encounter in a darkened hospital room — in short, elements of a potboiler paperback novel.

Mr. Comey related his story to the committee, which is investigating various aspects of Mr. Gonzales’s tenure as Attorney General, including the recent dismissals of eight United States attorneys and allegations that applicants for traditionally nonpartisan career prosecutor jobs were screened for political loyalties.

Although Mr. Comey declined to say specifically what the business was that sent Mr. Gonzales to the bedside of Mr. Ashcroft in George Washington University Hospital, where he lay critically ill with pancreatitis, it was clear that the subject was the National Security Agency’s secret domestic surveillance program. The signature of Mr. Ashcroft or his surrogate was needed by the next day, March 11, in order to renew the program, which was still secret at that time.

Since the existence of the program was disclosed by The New York Times in late 2005, it has been reported that it was the subject of a tense debate at the highest levels of the Bush administration, with some officials concerned that the program was not adequately supervised, and others having more fundamental worries.

Around the time of the hospital incident, the White House suspended parts of the program for several months and imposed tougher requirements on the National Security Agency on how the program was to be used.Mr. Comey told the committee today that when Mr. Ashcroft was ill and he was in charge at the Justice Department, he told the White House he would not certify the program again “as to its legality.”

On the night of March 10, as he was being driven home by his security detail, he got a telephone call from Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff, who had just been contacted by Mr. Ashcroft’s wife, Janet.

Although Mrs. Ashcroft had banned visitors and telephone calls to her husband’s hospital room, she had just gotten a call from the White House telling her that Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to see her husband, Mr. Comey testified. “I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don’t know that for sure,” Mr. Comey said.

He said his security detail then sped him to the hospital with sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing, while he telephoned the director of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller 3d, from the car. Mr. Mueller shared his sense of urgency: “He said, ‘I’ll meet you at the hospital right now,’ ” Mr. Comey testified.

When he got to the hospital, Mr. Comey recalled, “I got out of the car and ran up — literally, ran up the stairs with my security detail.”

“What was your concern?” asked Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who was the chairman of today’s committee session.

“I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that,” Mr. Comey replied.

Mr. Comey recalled arriving at the darkened hospital room, where Mr. Ashcroft seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. For a time, only Mr. Comey and the Ashcrofts were in the room. Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller, who had not yet arrived, told Mr. Comey’s security detail by phone “not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances,” Mr. Comey testified.

Minutes later, he said, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card entered the room, with Mr. Gonzales carrying an envelope. “And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there, to seek his approval for a matter,” Mr. Comey related.

“And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me,” Mr. Comey went on: He raised his head from the pillow, reiterated his objections to the program, then lay back down, pointing to Mr. Comey as the attorney general during his illness.

In the NYTimes

Sheplers on my shitlist

For several years I bought my cowgirl boots from Sheplers. But no more - I finally realized that their "western wear" includes "rebel" merchandise which features that emblem of slave-owning pride, the Confederate flag.

I told them to take me off their email mailing list since I'm a patriotic American - so instead they put me on their catalogue list and I received one of the catalogues the other day. So now - it's on!

Time to boycott Sheplers.


What the fashion-conscious asshole is wearing this season.

The re-emergence of Social Darwinism in the 21st century

In the NYTimes

Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.

“I do indeed believe conservatives need Charles Darwin,” said Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, who has spearheaded the cause. “The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the 21st century will depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative thought.”

It's a miracle!

The NYTimes will now have TWO FEMALE OP-ED COLUMNISTS!!!!

Gail Collins may not be a Katha Pollitt, Anna Quindlen, or Barbara Ehrenreich, but at least there's now a Sassy Smurf to join catty Smurfette Maureen Dowd in the Times op-ed hive colony.

And here it is only the 7th year of the 21st century!

Another evil director thwarted

My friend Valerie is producing her own play and engaged a director who gave her a contract - as the producer, she should have given HIM a contract - and the contract included a clause that claimed "property rights." When she told me about it, I immediately told her to have the Dramatists Guild look at the contract. She did and, they took out all that SSDC-trying-for-a-director's-copyright crap and, although the director had tried to play it like it was his way or the highway, he signed it.

NO American playwright should sign ANY director's contract without having it vetted by the DG. The SSDC - Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers - is on a mission to turn the theatre world into a duplicate of the film world, where directors are gods and writers are nothing. And their lawyers were SUCH assholes to us during our trial last year - perhaps they thought they could intimidate us by insulting us in the hall after our court appearances, but they were dead wrong.

The SSDC must be forced to back down every single time they try to steal property rights away from a writer - and the Dramatists Guild is just the organization to do it.

The B Word

An excerpt from my play THE B WORD is online, along with excerpts from 8 other plays from the recent NYCPlaywrights Spring Reading Fundraiser. Check it out.

oh snap - Frank Rich on fellow media types

Frank Rich said:

That state of denial was center stage at the correspondents’ dinner last year, when the invited entertainer, Stephen Colbert, “fell flat,” as The Washington Post summed up the local consensus. To the astonishment of those in attendance, a funny thing happened outside the Beltway the morning after: the video of Mr. Colbert’s performance became a national sensation. (Last week it was still No. 2 among audiobook downloads on iTunes.) Washington wisdom had it that Mr. Colbert bombed because he was rude to the president. His real sin was to be rude to the capital press corps, whom he caricatured as stenographers. Though most of the Washington audience failed to find the joke funny, Americans elsewhere, having paid a heavy price for the press’s failure to challenge White House propaganda about Iraq, laughed until it hurt.

You’d think that l’affaire Colbert would have led to a little circumspection, but last Saturday’s dinner was another humiliation. And not just because this year’s entertainer, an apolitical nightclub has-been (Rich Little), was a ludicrously tone-deaf flop. More appalling — and symptomatic of the larger sycophancy — was the press’s insidious role in President Bush’s star turn at the event.

It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.” Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny guy” at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.

Who could ever forget THAT disgrace?

Excellent essay about OUR TOWN in the NYTimes

Jeremy McCarter says some of the same things I said a while back about OUR TOWN.

McCarter's essay here.

I do have to disagree with this bit though:

Grover's Corners is, in retrospect, an unbearable place: quite content to be homogeneous, conformist, anti-intellectual and lacking ''any culture or love of beauty.'' When staged properly, the play doesn't let us to feel simple nostalgia. We ought to weep at Emily's famous line not because she finds earth wonderful, but because she was unable to find it so during her close-minded life in her close-minded town -- which is, of course, our town.

While I have no doubt that McCarter would find Grover's Corners unbearable, Emily certainly does not. And it's surprising, since drama critics tend to be such irony mongers, that he doesn't get the irony of Wilder's line about lacking any culture or love of beauty, when it's all over the play, from the flowers that the women grow to the church choir to simple appreciation of good weather. I'm certain that Wilder's point is that snobs believe that culture and beauty don't count unless they're on display in a museum or featured in the NYTimes Arts section.

Most people would NOT find Grover's Corners unbearable, and whether drama critics believe it or not, they are people too. Those of us who can't live in Grover's Corners come to live in the city. But then some of us get pretentious and kewl and believe that our understanding of life is superior to that of the Grover's Corners townsfolk, when, what Wilder is saying, is that deep down we are all the same. Which is why theatre hipsters, who want their plays fresh from an angry young man like John Osborne from 50 years ago, heap derision onto OUR TOWN. Cause unlike Emily, THEY are going to live forever and they have no patience for tiresome mortals.

Smurfette Dowd strikes again

In case there was ANY doubt that Smurfette at the NYTimes Op-Ed hive colony is a complete idiot.

Smurfette believes that John Edwards is too attractive to be elected.

I'm sure she said that about JFK too.

I love me some Dahlia Lithwick

It's hard to fathom why Kennedy has so much more sympathy for the women who changed their minds about abortions than for those who did not. His concern for Inconstant Females might be patronizing in any other jurist. Coming from him, it's brilliantly ironic. Kennedy is, after all, America's Hamlet. The man who famously worried that "sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line," will long be remembered as the living incarnation of agony and indecision, And today he seamlessly rewrites his Stenberg dissent as a majority opinion that blasts his earlier Casey vote to its core.

I'm no psychologist but in light of today's Gonzales opinion one has to wonder: Is all of Kennedy's tender concern over those flip-flopping women really just some kind of weird misplaced justification for his flip-flopping self?

In Slate
via Pandagon

Twisty is a genius

I've had a few minor disagreements with Twisty, primarily with her debate style, but it cannot be denied that she is a fucking genius. When is someone going to give her a book contract, op-ed column or TV show?

Do you guys get, I mean actually get, that our society is a patriarchy? Patriarchy isn’t just a gimmick for a blog. It really exists. There are actual implications. Do you get that a patriarchy is predicated on exploitation and victimization? It’s not a joke! It’s not an abstract concept dreamed up by some wannabe ideologue making up catch-phrases while idling away the afternoons with pitchers of margs. Exploitation and victimization is the actual set-up! A person is either an exploiter or a victim, or sometimes both, but never neither.

This means me! This means you!

This means that, until patriarchy is smashed, we ain’t got a chance.

Meanwhile, do you guys see that there is no other possible outcome, in a society based on exploitation and victimization, than for the Don Imuses and the Daily Koses of the world to shit, frequently, on members of the lower castes? Shitting on the lower castes is a privilege built into the system. When exercised with macho aplomb, it attracts advertisers. It creates prestige. It makes money. It entertains the masses.

If, by some Stone Age fantasy-world turn of good fortune, our society had not been permitted by the clumsy aliens of the planet Obsterperon to devolve into a patriarchy, Kathy Sierra wouldn’t have done anything wrong. The Rutgers basketball team wouldn’t have done anything wrong. They would have just been human beings, doing whatever the fuck they felt like doing.

But it is a patriarchy. And in a patriarchy, where women are the lowest caste, a public woman is always wrong. Which is why Sierra and the basketball players and lard knows how many others over the millennia have been victimized by a gazillion patriarchy-enthusiasts. These women attempted publicly, in a society in which they are devalued as dirty jokes, hysterics, babymommas, and receptacles, to behave as sovereign human beings. It is one of the first laws of patriarchy that insubordinate females should be jeered at and harassed, from the moment they dare, as members of the sex caste, to step into the gray subumbra of proto-celebrity, to the moment the last blurb is written by some feminist blogger who criticizes their behavior as victims-who-let-the-terrorist-manbags-win.

I Blame the Patriarchy

The astonishing Bill Clinton

How different was our last president of the 20th century from the first president of the 21st century.

from Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books

In 1998, a friend of mine, Robert Pinsky, who at the time was serving as the poet laureate of the United States, invited me to a poetry evening at the Clinton White House, one of a series of black-tie events organized to mark the coming millennium. On this occasion the President gave an amusing introductory speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poetry came in junior high school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages from Macbeth. This was, Clinton remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President's hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. "Mr. President," I said, sticking out my hand, "don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."

I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth's anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland's legitimate ruler. When I recovered my equilibrium, I asked the President if he still remembered the lines he had memorized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patiently waiting to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Macbeth's great soliloquies:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th'inventor.
(1.7.1–10)

There the most powerful man in the world—as we are fond of calling our leader—broke off with a laugh, leaving me to conjure up the rest of the speech that ends with Macbeth's own bafflement over the fact that his immense ambition has "an ethically inadequate object":

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th'other....
(1.7.25–28)[1]

I left the White House that evening with the thought that Bill Clinton had missed his true vocation, which was, of course, to be an English professor. But the profession he actually chose makes it all the more appropriate to consider whether it is possible to discover in Shakespeare an "ethically adequate object" for human ambition.

I love me some Harvey Fierstein

In the NYTimes

For the past two decades political correctness has been derided as a surrender to thin-skinned, humorless, uptight oversensitive sissies. Well, you anti-politically correct people have won the battle, and we’re all now feasting on the spoils of your victory. During the last few months alone we’ve had a few comedians spout racism, a basketball coach put forth anti-Semitism and several high-profile spoutings of anti-gay epithets.

What surprises me, I guess, is how choosy the anti-P.C. crowd is about which hate speech it will not tolerate. Sure, there were voices of protest when the TV actor Isaiah Washington called a gay colleague a “faggot.” But corporate America didn’t pull its advertising from “Grey’s Anatomy,” as it did with Mr. Imus, did it? And when Ann Coulter likewise tagged a presidential candidate last month, she paid no real price.

In fact, when Bill Maher discussed Ms. Coulter’s remarks on his HBO show, he repeated the slur no fewer than four times himself; each mention, I must note, solicited a laugh from his audience. No one called for any sort of apology from him. (Well, actually, I did, so the following week he only used it once.)

Face it, if a Pentagon general, his salary paid with my tax dollars, can label homosexual acts as “immoral” without a call for his dismissal, who are the moral high and mighty kidding?

So it goes.

''When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes'.''
- Slaughterhouse Five

Last I looked, not even Vonnegut web was on top of the news.

Wikipedia, however, reliably was.

NYTimes: Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Survey Finds Girls Morally Superior to Boys

An article in today's NYTimes states:

The wink-wink methods have filtered down to the students, as this survey of high school athletes found.

¶43 percent of boys and 22 percent of girls said it was proper for a coach to teach basketball players how to illegally hold and push.

¶41 percent of boys and 25 percent of girls saw nothing wrong with using a stolen playbook sent by an anonymous supporter before a big game.

¶37 percent of boys and 20 percent of girls said it was proper for a coach to instruct a player to fake an injury.

¶29 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls said it was acceptable for a coach to urge parents to allow an academically successful athlete to repeat a grade in middle school so that the athlete would be older and bigger for high school sports.

¶6.4 percent of boys and 2 percent of girls admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs.

Imagine if the genders were reversed - I have no doubt that the headline would be screaming something about boys' moral superiority. But here the gender discrepancy is explained as the result of school sports. So it's not the boys' fault. Just as girls beginning to surpass boys in academics is also not supposed to be boys' faults - our school system is just too "feminine" and punishes natural male vigor and curiosity - although the system doesn't seem to have changed since the days when boys surpassed girls.

Isn't It Ironic? Yes, it is, Einstein.

It's common knowledge that Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic" contains no irony, which is itself ironic, hyuk hyuk hyuk.

Unfortunately for the pseudo-certain grammar scolds who think they caught a pretty chick singer being stupid - which is such a satisfying thing for a certain brand of hipster male and his female enablers - the song does in fact contain irony.

The most obvious example is in this stanza:

Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
"Well isn't this nice..."
And isn't it ironic... don't you think

Since we can be fairly certain that Mr. Play It Safe doesn't want to die in a firey plane crash, his thought "Well isn't this nice" is indeed ironic. The rest of the song contains dramatic and situational irony. The people who claim the song doesn't contain irony don't know the meaning of irony.
And so here is the Merriam-Webster definition:

iro·ny
Pronunciation: 'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -nies
Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirOnia, from eirOn dissembler
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning -- called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play -- called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

High school seeks to ban play about Iraq

Play About Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School
But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

This on the heels of the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" controversy.

I got my t-shirt from Cafe Press

Stage Diving

My 10-minute play STAGE DIVING will be part of two different short-play festivals.
Learn more here.
In the meantime, check out these wacky stage diving videos:
A bride stage dives & crowd surfs during her wedding reception
Kurt Cobain stage dives - then gets into a fight with a bouncer.
A really high stage dive everybody cheers I think because the guy doesn't die.
Crowd's-eye view of a very successful musician stage dive/crowd surf combo

Is that really how they select op-ed pieces?

Currently the 11th-most emailed story, Stop the Presses, Boys! Women Claim Space on Op-Ed Pages begins this way:

Whatever other reasons may explain the lack of women’s voices on the nation’s op-ed pages, the lack of women asking to be there is clearly part of the problem. Many opinion page editors at major newspapers across the country say that 65 or 75 percent of unsolicited manuscripts, or more, come from men.

The author, Patrician Cohen, doesn't speculate about to what degree not trying impacts female under-represenation in the op-eds, although she believes it "clearly" is. The reason being:

Many opinion page editors at major newspapers across the country say that 65 or 75 percent of unsolicited manuscripts, or more, come from men.

Is that really how op-ed articles are chosen? Unsolicited manuscripts? The rest of the publishing world does not run on unsolicited manuscripts, so I'd be very surprised if that was the case for newspaper op-eds. But even if that is the case, 65 - 75 % unsolicited from males means that 25 - 35% of unsolicited manuscripts are coming from females. Does the op-ed world have 25-35% female representation? I rather doubt it.

Certainly the NYTimes roster of regular op-ed writers doesn't reflect those numbers, with one Maureen Dowd in a field of seven. That's 14%.

New Yorker annoys others

Looks like feminist bloggers aren't the only ones annoyed with the New Yorker, due to the lopsided gender ratio of its conference on the future.

- there's an essay in the NYTimes complaining about the New Yorker's attitude towards poetry.

The NYTimes has no room to complain about skewed gender ratios of course - the NYTimes op-ed columnist roster has the gender ratio of a Smurf hive colony, with Maureen Dowd playing the role of Smurfette to perfection. (Paul Krugman is Brainy Smurf of course.)

Over at Sivacracy, Liz Losh discovers a gaming conference, Living Game Worlds III that doesn't deny that females are half the human race.

The connection between female infanticide and autism

Surely I'm not the first person to speculate about this connection, but so far failed to discover anything via Google.

The nature-nurture debate rages on, especially now that Simon Baron-Cohen is claiming that Autism is associated with masculinity because autistics are systematizers and males are systematizers, while females are empathizers.

This is mostly based on speculation and big stretches, that are effectively countered by the work of Elizabeth Spelke.

But it is indisputable that more boys than girls are autistic, with estimates ranging from 4:1 to 10:1.

It is also indisputable that infanticide was practiced far and wide througout human history, but especially female infanticide:

Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.

There is ample historical evidence to document the incredible propensity of parents to murder their children under an assortment of stressful situations. In nineteenth century England, for example, infanticide was so rampant throughout the country that a debate over how to correct the problem was carried out in both the lay and medical press. An editorial in the respected medical journal Lancet noted that "to the shame of civilization it must be avowed that not a State has yet advanced to the degree of progress under which child-murder may be said to be a very uncommon crime.

Infanticide has pervaded almost every society of mankind from the Golden Age of Greece to the splendor of the Persian Empire. While there are many diverse reasons for this wanton destruction, two of the most statistically important are poverty and population control. Since prehistoric times, the supply of food has been a constant check on human population growth. One way to control the lethal effects of starvation was to restrict the number of children allowed to survive to adulthood. Darwin believed that infanticide, "especially of female infants," was the most important restraint on the proliferation of early man.

While female infanticide has at times been necessary for survival of the community-at-large, there have also been instances where it has been related to the general societal prejudice against females which characterizes most male-dominated cultures.

Infanticide is not necessarily actively practiced - that is, the parents don't outright murder the baby, but rather cause it to die through selective neglect. This from "Health care allocation and selective neglect in rural Peru."

This study of health care allocation to children in northern Puno, Peru, utilizes quantitative and qualitative data to explore differential resource allocation to children in rural Andean households. As part of a broader ethnographic study of health in two communities, quantitative data on reported health status, symptoms, and treatments (both lay and specialist) were collected for 23 children under the age of 7 over a one year period. Additional data were collected from local health post records. Data were analyzed by gender, and by three age groups (birth to 1 year, 1-3 years, 4-6 years) to determine if differences existed in the allocation of health care. The data suggest a pattern of discrimination against females and younger children, especially infants under age one, despite the fact that these groups were reported to be sicker. Differences were especially significant in the allocation of biomedical treatments, the most costly in terms of parental time, effort, and money. Ethnographic data on child illness, gender, and developmental concepts help to explain why children of different genders and ages may be treated differently in the rural andes. They provide a context in which to interpret health care allocation data, and, in the absence of a population-based study, reinforce findings based on the limited study sample. Female children are valued less because of their future social and economic potential. Females are also regarded to be less vulnerable to illness than male children, meaning that less elaborate measures are necessary to protect their health. Young children are thought to have a loose body-soul connection, making them more vulnerable to illness, and are though to be less human than older individuals. The folk illnesses urana (fright) and larpa explain child deaths in culturally acceptable ways, and the types of funerals given to children of different ages indicate that the death of young children is not considered unusual. Health care allocation and ethnographic data suggest that selective neglect (passive infanticide) may be occurring in rural Peru, possibly as a means of regulating family size and sex ratio. It is important to go beyond placing blame on individual parents or on culture, however, to address the underlying causes of differential health care allocation, such as poor socioeconomic conditions, lack of access to contraceptives, and female subordination.

In spite of the fact that infanticide was widely practiced, it was still a difficult thing to do. Anthropologist Marvin Harris suggested that infanticide was so repugnant that until the invention of more humane forms of birth control, societies responded to times of abundant resources by allowing more children to live - eventually resulting in scarcer resources due to overpopulation.

While it must be difficult to kill any baby, it certainly must have been easier for parents to kill babies that refused to interact with them. Two of the three classic symptoms of autism are stunted social interactions.

According to the National Autism Association:

(Indicators of autism include):
1. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:

marked impairment in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction.

failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level

a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest)

lack of social or emotional reciprocity

2. Qualitative impairments in communication as manifested by at least one of the following:

delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language (not accompanied by an attempt to compensate through alternative modes of communication such as gesture or mime)

in individuals with adequate speech, marked impairment in the ability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others

stereotyped and repetitive use of language or idiosyncratic language

lack of varied, spontaneous make-believe play or social imitative play appropriate to developmental level

3. Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:

encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus

apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals
stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole body movements)

persistent preoccupation with parts of objects

Is it really a stretch to suggest that the reason that the ratio of male:female autism is so extreme is because female infants that displayed symptoms of autism were much more likely to be victims of infanticide?

It isn't just rates of autism though - baby girls are hardier in general than baby boys, and it seems likely to me that a plausible explanation is that baby girls have been selected for hardiness - the weaker ones died from selective parental neglect that was not practiced as much on baby boys.

And there ends the debate on nature vs. nuture - because if my theory is correct, it is cultural selection that resulted in a higher incidence of autism in boys, rather than some testosterone-autism connection that Baron-Cohen suggests.

Obviously this hyposthesis needs to be tested. But it's no more implausible-sounding to me than plate tectonics.

I write letters

So looking at your lineup for this conference about the near future, I'd love to see this question asked during the course of the conference: do the gentlemen (and few ladies) believe that the future, intellectual discourse, and the New Yorker will continue to be totally dominated by males?

But since David Remnick is either in deep denial, or proudly androcentric - perhaps with a dash of bravado in the face of the howling bitches of PC at his dining club door - I can't imagine such a subject being broached. My fellow feminist bloggers may want to address the issue though.

Nancy McClernan
www.mcclernan.com

FOLLOW UP: thanks for the shout out Ann Bartow

the curse of the middle-aged woman

Well who doesn't despise those middle-aged women? They aren't hawt babes any more, so they can't hang out with hipster young dudes. They just putter around, doing chores, hanging out in sububurbia, enjoying unhip girly shit that really sucks, like soap operas and romance novels. I avoid those stupid cows like the fucking plague.

But wait - I'm 46. I guess that makes me a middle-aged woman.

Some middle-aged women like music, theatre, other arts. But the arts don't like middle aged women, not judging by two recent comments in "liberal" media outlets The New Yorker and The New York Times.

First the New Yorker - I got into it a year ago with their music critic Sasha Frere-Jones over this:

During a performance at Madison Square Garden last August, the sixty-four-year-old singer and songwriter Neil Diamond asked everyone in the audience to turn to a neighbor and say, “I love you very much.” Several thousand people, many of them women over the age of forty, did as he requested, but some giggled after saying the words. “Why are you laughing?” Diamond asked. “Love is not funny.”

It was pretty clear to me that he mentioned women over forty to make a point about Neil Diamond - that in spite of his audience he was actually pretty hip. When I wrote to him, he actually admitted that Diamond's publicist or whatever asked him not to mention the over-40 women.

Women over 40 are the antithesis of hip - or good art for that matter.

Then there's the fact that the theatre world is petrified that it's becoming too feminized, hence the eternal search for an angry young (straight) man to be the new Mamet on the part of the middle-aged male theatre critics - and the vast majority fall into that demographic, leaving out John Simon who would skew the average to about 90.

And as I blogged earlier, many people in the theatre world think a woman is old and desperate once she hits 30.

So it was no surprise to read this a recent NYTimes:

But Jon Steingart and Jenny Wiener, who founded Ars Nova in 2002 and now run it with Jason Eagan, say the financial model — which at first seems insane — makes sense if you understand their focus on new works, new artists and new audiences. Many companies aim for one or two; Ars Nova aims for all three at once.

“A lot of not-for-profit theaters are driven by middle-aged women buying $100 tickets,” Mr. Steingart said. “But you can’t build a younger audience that way. And you can’t support younger artists if you charge $50 a ticket, because no one knows who they are. Our goal is to be as competitive as we can to a night at the movies. Even before we converted to not-for-profit status last year, it was never a commercial venture.”

Now if it was just about the $100 tickets, the issue would be not-for-profit theatre being driven by the upper-middle-class. But it isn't merely about the money. It's because middle-aged women are soooo unkewl.

Well what do I expect? We live in a patriarchy and even people who believe themselves to be hipster artistes can't possibly be expected to examine their bullshit assumptions.

So I sent Steingart and Weinter an email. I doubt they'll write back, but it will be fascinating if they do. It's not like I burned any bridges by questioning them on their attitudes - I had no chance to have my plays produced by them anyway - I'm a middle aged woman and therefore a useless old unhip cow. What could I have to say that could possibly be of interest to anybody but maybe other useless old cows?

UPDATE: March 7, 2007

Well I got a response from Steingart, and it was a pretty good response and very polite, but only led me to more questions:

==================================================
Thanks for your response. And while I can accept that you did mean economics, I still have to wonder... do not-for-profits really create programming for middle-aged women?

If theatre organizations are so concerned about women, why is it that the vast majority of playwrights produced are male? Are you telling me that middle-aged women just prefer to have men write their plays for them? The male dominance of theatre is all the fault of middle-aged women? What, exactly, do you consider fare that satisfies this homogenous group, the millions of humans who qualify as middle-aged women?
=================================================

I Like Ives

One of the few good things that came out of the strange case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions was that I got to know David Ives a little. He was editing the Dramatists Guild's newsletter The Dramatist when I contributed my article about the case.

I wasn't actually surprised to find him witty and charming - I had seen him on a panel about playwriting along with the late Wendy Wasserstein and David Lindsay-Abaire a few years ago, and while Ives had the least to say of the three, he was the pithiest. Which makes sense from the master of the short form play.

I was pretty thrilled when Ives agreed to sit in on a recent meeting of my group NYCPlaywrights and participate in the feedback sessions. Having David Ives give you feedback on your play is like having Leonardo DaVinci critique your sfumato technique. He gives great feedback.

I've already enjoyed some of his comments on playwriting, and put two of them in the NYCPlaywrights quotation section:

For me, there's only one rule of playwriting: don't bore the audience.

and my favorite justification for running NYCPlaywrights:

(on learning playwriting at Yale) Mostly you sat around the table and read your stuff, which is as it should be. There was certainly no theory of playwriting.

Especially encouraging for someone who discovered playwriting long after my brief stint in Academia - if you can call art school Academia.

Plays from Ives's collection All in the Timing are performed quite a bit, so check them out next time you get a chance - they're also fun to read.

And you can read this excellent Ives article online Why Write for Theatre?

A bunch of us gave Ives a lift home and chatted a bit enroute. He's going to work on a version of My Fair Lady with Kelsey Grammer - oddly he's never seen Frasier - which is rather a shame I think, because at its best, Frasier is as good as anything you'll see on Broadway. And I love me some David Hyde Pierce!

We also offered him a bullwhip* but he claimed he has his own.








*about the bullwhip - my production of HUCK FINN required a bullwhip prop for the slave trader, so I ordered one on ebay, only to discover I'd accidentally ordered a box of 12. So to the cast's delight they each got a free souvenir bullwhip. With a cast of seven, we had extras, so we could afford to be generous to David Ives.

WORST PRESIDENT EVER - NO CONTEST!

Carol Lam, the former United States attorney for San Diego, is smart and tireless and was very good at her job. Her investigation of Representative Randy Cunningham resulted in a guilty plea for taking more than $2 million in bribes from defense contractors and a sentence of more than eight years. Two weeks ago, she indicted Kyle Dustin Foggo, the former No. 3 official in the C.I.A. The defense-contracting scandal she pursued so vigorously could yet drag in other politicians.

In many Justice Departments, her record would have won her awards, and perhaps a promotion to a top post in Washington. In the Bush Justice Department, it got her fired.

Ms. Lam is one of at least seven United States attorneys fired recently under questionable circumstances. The Justice Department is claiming that Ms. Lam and other well-regarded prosecutors like John McKay of Seattle, David Iglesias of New Mexico, Daniel Bogden of Nevada and Paul Charlton of Arizona — who all received strong job evaluations — performed inadequately.

Oh you fools who voted for Bush - you have brought our democracy to the brink of disaster! Hang your heads in SHAME!

Go Al Gore, go Al Gore!

VIDEO: Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth Wins Best Documentary at Think Progress.

more evidence that Daphne Merkin and I are very different

The dread Merkin squeezes a whole column and a nice payday from the NYTimes out of the fact that she has too much money and time on her hands - she incessantly buys and returns clothing.

I almost never return anything. In the first place, I loathe shopping and do as much of it online as possible. I recently spent several hours in a mall in Paramus and very nearly lost my mind. And the clothes are so ugly anyway, not to mention the standard plain uncomfortable. You cannot buy calf-high leather boots with heels under 3 inches. And all the clothes and shoes seemed to be exactly the same from one store to the next.

Buying clothing is stressful enough, but going back in and returning stuff only reminds me how much time I wasted having my soul crushed by the mall the first time around.

Maybe the situation is better on the Upper East Side, but I expect it's similar if more expensive.

So I'd just as soon donate the clothes to Goodwill. The fact that I never buy fancy couture helps with this - I don't lose all that much money on the deal. And yes, I am willing to pay for the pleasure of not returning to a store.

Ann Bartow I love yah, but I admit I was quite conflicted when you pointed me to this article. On the one hand, I'm flattered that you see me as a sort of antidote to Merkin's foolishness, but I could have done without reading her latest whine and literary name dropping fest. Save the assignments for something more egregious. This time around she was merely gossiping about herself - which does no harm, if you don't count the inevitable gasps of exasperation - she is not trying to devise a grand critique of the Way We Live Now based on Chapstick consumption, or offer evolutionary psychology-tinged explanations on why men disdain women over 45. If she sticks to sharing fashion facts about herself, I can resume the life I knew before I first beheld her jibba-jabba in the New Yorker, in blissful Merkin ignorance.

But if I see her byline in the Theatre section again - it's on!

In case you needed more evidence on the idiocy of fraternities/sororities

Sorority Evictions Raise Issue of Looks and Bias

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

Luckily this priest never got my brothers...

It was probably a lucky thing that we moved away from Our Lady of Fatima parish before they were teenagers.

From the Catalog of Sexually Abusive Priests
Hermley, Robert J. (OSFS)
Ordained: 6-4-55
(Wilmington, Delaware)
6-22-82 6-22-82 - Fourteen year old boy - Thirteen year old boy
Padua Academy, Wilmington, Delaware
(1980-82)

- Arrested watching pornographic film with thirteen-year-old boy and fourteen-year old boy in parked car. 19 pornographic magazines confiscated from car.
- Rev. Hermley was released into the custody of Rev. J. Stuart Dooling, OSFS,
Provincial of the Oblates.
Johns Hopkins University medical doctors determined that Rev. Hermley did not
need help. He received three years probation for the 1982 incident. On 12-7-82, Rev.
Dooling assigned him to a parish in Vienna, Virginia.
=============================

PRIEST MINISTRY RECORDS

The Rev. Robert Hermley

June 4, 1955 Ordained in Wilmington. Member of Oblates of St. Francis de Sales

(Dates unknown) Our Lady of Fatima Church, Bensalem, Pa.

1966-78 Father Judge High School for Boys, Philadelphia

1978-80 Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, Seaside Heights, N.J.

1980-82 Padua Academy, Wilmington

November 1982 Pleaded guilty to indecent assault

Dec. 7, 1982 Assigned to Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, Vienna, Va.

Nov. 12, 1991 Assigned to St. Mary Church, Fredericksburg, Va.

May 1992 Seton Home School (chaplain, curriculum consultant), Arlington Va.

2001 Oblates contact Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, requesting permission for Hermley to return to the Diocese of Wilmington to minister at Little Sisters of the Poor, Newark

2002-2003 Little Sisters of the Poor, chaplain, Newark
====================

Now he's involved in "home schooling." I just emailed them to ask if they hired him knowing about the arrest.

H. Allen Orr, once again, hands an evpsych his ass

In the NY Review of Books.
It's always wonderful to watch this biologist run philosophical circles around yet ANOTHER ev-psych philosopher - in this case, the mystifyingly popular Daniel C. Dennett.

Orr is taking up where Stephen Jay Gould left off.

Speaking of Kung Fu

Go read "My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable" if you want to laugh really hard.
(From the author of the more famous Get Your War On, BTW.)

How to identify an alien

Talk to the alien for a while. If he/she, he-she or it can not use contractions, you know you got an alien on your hands. Either the outerspace type or just the foreigner variety. This occurred to me as I was watching a re-run of Kung-Fu tonight. Neither Kwai Chang Caine nor some Indian kid that he meets can speak English with contractions. Although I guess technically the Indian kid is not an alien, compared to the White Man.

I cannot use contractions but I will not hesitate to kung fu your ass if you do not learn my name is Caine, not "Chinaman."

Sometimes I just like to look at a really hot guy

One of the advantages of not being in a relationship is that you can say stuff like this in public and not worry about your partner's feelings...


Found this hottie through the QR web site on my space and then clicked a commenter's link... I sure love those (over age 18) pretty boys.

Al Franken for Senate

Al explains why. I wish I lived in Minnesota and could vote for him.

why are there no "Men's Studies"???

The ninnies came out in droves to cry a Mississippi's worth over poor "PC" victim Lawrence Summers, when Judith Warner wrote a piece about his replacement, an honest-to-god woman. Who happens to have a background in Women's Studies. Some schmuck writes:

Her background is in Women’s Studies which is a curriculum that disparages males. Taken at face value a Women’s Studies program is itself a violation of Title IX equity when there is no offsetting Men’s Studies category, as is nearly always the case.

There are no Men's Studies, schmucko, for the same reason that there is no White History month. Because ALL history is white history. And all studies are men's studies. Great male politicians did this. Great male artists, writers and musicians did that.

And here comes evolutionary psychology - Lawrence Summers' theory of choice - to tell us why - because females are too cowardly, feeble-minded and hobbled by emotions to do anything worth recording for posterity.

Summers is a bad scientist and a worse politician. But he will never be unemployed because the old boy network - the people who still put up roadblocks for women while citing "scientific" female inferiority - will take care of him.

The loathesome Camille Paglia tries to re-gain her 15 minutes of fame

Those of you too young to remember Paglia in her glory days missed the horror of pseudo-hipster morons who considered Paglia cool and contrarian because of her constant attacks on real feminists. She was basically a dry run for Ann Coulter.

The fact that Molly Ivins penned this smackdown in 1991, but so many ninnies STILL didn't get what a cretin Paglia was and is, shows that the vast majority truly cannot discern shit from Shinola.

Here is the late great Ivin's perfect summation of Paglia, by way of Pandagon (Amanda's back!) and Faux Real

What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in New York intellectual circles is a clear sign of decandence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation’s intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she has “flashes of brilliance.'’ If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill.
One of her latest efforts at playing enfant terrible in intellectual circles was a peppy essay for _Newsday_, claiming that either there is no such thing as date rape or, if there is, it’s women’s fault because we dress so provocatively. Thanks, Camille, I’ve got some Texas fraternity boys I want you to meet.
There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “Poor dear, it’s probably PMS.'’ Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “What an asshole.'’ Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole.

Paul Krugman is on fire

For the past month or so, virtually every Krugman column is incredible, especially in revealing the evils of the Bush administration.

On a more upbeat note, he feels that John Edwards actually has a workable health plan, unlike Obama and Clinton:

People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.

Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting — the process of screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, “Health Markets,” the press release says, "will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare." This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition.

And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. “Over time,” the press release says, "the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan."

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.

Yes, that includes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So far, all we have from Mr. Obama is inspiring rhetoric about universal care — that’s great, but how do we get there? And how do we know whether Mrs. Clinton, who says that she’s “not ready to be specific,” and that she wants to "build the consensus first," will really be willing to take on this issue again?

Paul Krugman is the reason I keep paying for "select" access to the NYTimes.

This messes up my blogroll

What's going on here? There's a shakeup going down on my blog roll.

I delinked from Majikthese because I got tired of the intrepid girl philosopher's kewl contrarian observations, like how awful those doggie steps are, among other things - I still think of it every time I see a commercial for that humane and innocuous product. So up pops Lindsay Beyerstein as a member of the Tom Tomorrow blog team. I like Amanda at Pandagon, so she announces she's leaving to work for John Edward's presidential candidacy and puts that jerk Chris Clark onto her blog team - it was bad enough that I had to read about how great Chris Clark was in every goddam thread at Pandagon. Chris Clark already had a full-time job, apparently, of commenting on other people's blogs, as well as the occasional freelance work of offering psychiatric diagnoses. Did he really need another gig?

NOW I find that Al Franken is leaving Air America, Evil Li-brul Overlord >:D is shutting down, and I'm tired of reading about those adorable precocious children at Adventures in Ethics and Science.

It's time for a major blogroll shakeup. Think I'll add The Comics Curmudgeon. Especially since I didn't read word one about this schadenfreudefest over the disgrace of the creator of Mallard Fillmore anywhere in the liberal blogosphere. And the comments are genius.
Yes of course I'm cranky. Molly Ivins died.

Newsflash from NYTimes: "Bush Is Not Above the Law"

James Bamford: "To allow a president to break the law and commit a felony for more than five years without even a formal independent investigation would be the ultimate subversion of the Constitution and the rule of law. As Judge Taylor warned in her decision, 'There are no hereditary kings in America.'"
more here

About my play HUCK FINN

A Justification for Liberties Taken or,
What About Lil Lizabeth?
Also at the Huck Finn web site

I've been reimagining Twain's Tom/Huck stories since I was a little kid and my friend Laura and I wrote our own version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, inserting two new characters - a sister for Tom, modeled on Laura and a sister for Huck, modeled on me. Both girl characters hated Becky Thatcher with a passion, since she represented everything Laura and I hated about how a good girl was supposed to behave. It’s interesting that Twain created the good girl character we despised in the same book as Tom Sawyer, whom Twain saw as an antidote to the idealized good boy character that he despised.

Tom Sawyer was certainly not a good boy. In fact, he was a big jerk. Here’s standard Tom Sawyer for you – he allows Aunt Polly to grieve for him for days – even spying on her in her grief, before he reveals he is alive.

That’s an incident in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," and that’s bad enough. What’s far worse is that the pernicious Tom invades Huck Finn’s story and very nearly ruins “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Ernest Hemingway’s remarks are often quoted in articles and commentary about the book:

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

The next three sentences are quoted much less frequently:

"If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim (sic) is stolen from the boys (sic.) That is the real end. The rest is just cheating."

I agree with Hemingway - although you have to wonder how well Hemingway remembered the book, since Jim is "stolen" from Huck alone, not boys, plural. The rest of the book which Hemingway refers to is commonly known as the Evasion section, and marks the re-appearance of Tom Sawyer. Tom neglects to tell Huck and Jim that Miss Watson has freed Jim in her will, and uses Jim’s imprisonment (while Uncle Silas tries to contact his owner) as an opportunity to play a weeks-long game of pretending to free Jim, and almost succeeds in getting Jim lynched - he does succeed in getting Jim abused by the local townsfolk. That lovable scamp.

The character of Tom Sawyer is a black hole into which the characters of Huck and especially Jim disappear. Although Huck continues to narrate the book after Tom shows up, he basically does what Tom tells him to, only once in awhile making a wry comment about Tom’s adorable idiotic hijinks. And Jim – Jim forgets who he is and why he ran away in the first place. He forgets entirely about his family.

The last paragraph of Huckleberry Finn is beloved and much-quoted:

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.

But who exactly are "the rest" that Huck is going to light out ahead of? Tom Sawyer and Jim. When Huck talks about lighting out for the Territory, he’s referring to a few paragraphs before:

"And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le's all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two;"

Here’s what Jim was like back on the raft as described by Huck in chapter 16:

"He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them."

So thanks to the influence of Tom Sawyer, Jim is transformed from a man with a life-or- death mission to rescue his family, to the equal of two adolescents planning to spend a fortnight playing cowboys and Indians.

And that’s why it was necessary to remove Tom Sawyer from my version of Huck Finn - so Lil Lizabeth can get her father back.

That’s not entirely true - Tom Sawyer’s name does crop up from time to time in the play, as a symbol of the "good" people, the ones who don’t actively try to lynch black people, but who, through callousness and selfishness are able to live comfortably and conscience-free in a slave-holding society.

Complaints about the sullying of Tom Sawyer and by extension all-American boyhood may be addressed to nancy@mergatroyd.org

HUCK FINN at the Metropolitan Playhouse

At the Metropolitan Playhouse 220 East Fourth Street ~ New York, NY 10009

This Equity Showcase production is the world premiere of a new play by N.G. McClernan based on Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

This version of the story focuses tightly on Huck's dilemma - follow the law and be "respectable" - or risk eternal damnation and help Jim escape to freedom. Jim never forgets his goal is to free himself so that he can free his family.

Tickets at Theatremania.com or call 212-995-5302.
More info here and at the Metropolitan Playhouse web site.

Nutrisystem for men - because a man's time is too valuable for that wimmin shit

One of the more obnoxious commercials currently running on TV is for NutriSystem's program for men. I saw it in the middle of what I assume is the TV premiere of "Supersize Me."

Some "Hall of Famer" speaks this, but they helpfully had the text on the NutriSystem site.:

...That's why NutriSystem is great for guys. It lets you eat your favorite foods, but in an incredibly smart and effective way. No counting, no measuring, no weighing in. What guy has the patience for that?

See, only those fool women have time to do the utterly tedious, time-wasting aspects of weight-loss. Men's time is too important for that.

But now the good news, sort of - men are now feeling serious pressure to do their share of the housework. How do I know? Because there's now an "anti-anti-clutter" movement according to one of the NYTimes most-emailed stories and people are saying "yes to mess."

Cleaning is no longer strictly women's work, and suddenly there's a pro-mess movement. Coincidence? I doubt it.

Peyton Place in the Pleistocene

Excellent spoof of evolutionary psychology from Eye of a Cat - with the obligatory objections of fans of EP.

Excerpt

ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Y'know, I don't think primatology a million years from now is really going to support that simplistic a conclusion about relationships between the sexes. Chimp societies definitely don't work that way, and as for the bonobos -

ANCESTRAL MAN: Again, you're not exactly being constructive.

ANCESTRAL WOMAN: I'm fed up with getting all the shortest lines.

ANCESTRAL MAN: But you can't argue with my conclusions. Human behaviour is governed by programs created for the society we live in now: nuclear families, strongly-marked hierarchies, rich and poor individuals, men who provide and women who nurture. And this explains why, in a million years, men will get paid more and women will be gold-digging whores. It's genetic. And anyone who thinks that people's lives and expectations might be significantly shaped by their societies in the future is just kidding themselves. We should run our societies based on the way they already are, since that's obviously basic human nature, and entirely unchangeable.

ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Is that, um, perhaps getting a bit too close to the is/ought fallacy?

ANCESTRAL MAN: [Sighs] More like taking the is/ought fallacy home and introducing it to your parents.

[Long silence. They stare at the mammoth slowly cooking on the fire in front of them.]

ANCESTRAL WOMAN: You know, I'd like to live in one of those real hunter-gatherer societies. The ones where people live in small communities rather than nuclear families, so nobody has to worry about getting a specific partner to provide them with specific things. The ones where labour's divided up between the sexes, and there's no real hierarchy or concepts of wealth. I don't know why, I just...

ANCESTRAL MAN: Get the impression that they'd cope far better in the Pleistocene savannah than we do?

ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Yes.

[Another long silence.]

ANCESTRAL MAN: It wouldn't work, you know.

ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Because the conclusions drawn by large portions of evolutionary psychology tend to be based on naive, poorly-researched ideas of prehistoric society that rarely specify anything more than 'during evolution', entirely ignore the role played by nurture, pay little attention to the idea of adaptability being one thing that's always going to be useful for human brains, reduce all human behaviour to the level of genetic reproduction even when the connection's clearly tenuous, and come up with some pretty iffy and often misogynistic conclusions that seem to be based far more in justifying contemporary society and the speaker's own place within it than explaining the limitations and capabilities of human behaviour?

ANCESTRAL MAN: Well... you could say that. But, see, you're a woman. You're more emotional. That's why you're letting your idealistic, head-in-the-clouds nonsense about hunter-gatherer societies cloud your perception of the Harsh Truth.

ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Which is?

ANCESTRAL MAN: That that the default setting for humanity is the gender roles and domestic arrangements of the worst stereotypes of 1950s suburbia.

ANCESTRAL WOMAN: White picket fences and all.