[lit-ideas] Re: The Swan and my gendered writing...
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- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:09:04 +0200
On 16-Apr-09, at 7:17 AM, David Ritchie wrote:
re. villages see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk&feature=related
I'm waffling between the responses of Robert Canfield:
... Someone described her as fumpy. She wore her best dress, something
worn earlier to a nephew’s wedding. She had fixed her hair herself.
And she came on stage to sing. ... This was an aggressive audience,
expressive; they were ready to drive a performer off the stage. The
hosts, the talent judges, were clearly dubious. One of the judges
asked ... what her ambition was. She wanted to be singer. ... Like
Elaine Paige. It was easy to regard this woman as tragically unaware
of her own limitations, with aspirations that surpassed her ability. ...
Here is an event that so embodied something profoundly, even
personally, gripping for thousands of people that the seven minute
clip on UTube is being watched over and over again, by the same
people. Susan Boyle’s moment on stage objectifies something buried in
the psyche, something in the human moral imagination. ...
Buried within the human psyche are feelings, yearnings, anxieties too
deep for words, usually. Only sometimes do we see it in ourselves.
Always it is something outside ourselves that touches us, somehow,
where we feel most deeply. At such moments we remember that we are
humans -- not mere living creatures, but human beings, profoundly and
deeply shaped by a moral sensibility so powerful that it breaks
through our inhibitions; it can burst out, explode into public view,
to our own astonishment. And sometimes that objective form -- a
person, an event, an object, a song -- embodies deeply felt
sensibilities for a lot of us at once, so that we discover how much we
share in our private worlds, worlds otherwise inaccessible to anyone
one else. It becomes a social event, so we can all rejoice, and weep,
together.
(excerpted from http://rcanfield.blogspot.com/2009/04/susan-boyle-and-human-moral-imagination.html
)
and Tanya Gold:
... Do you ever stare at the TV and wonder where the next generation
of Judi Denchs and Juliet Stevensons have gone? ... They're not there,
because they aren't pretty enough to get airtime. This lust for
homogeneity in female beauty means that when someone who doesn't
resemble a diagram in a plastic surgeon's office steps up to the
microphone, people fall about and treat us to despicable sub-John
Gielgud gestures of amazement.
Susan will probably win Britain's Got Talent. She will be the little
munter that could sing, served up for the British public every
Saturday night. Look! It's "ugly"! It sings! And I know that we think
that this will make us better people. But Susan Boyle will be the
freakish exception that makes the rule. By raising this Susan up, we
will forgive ourselves for grinding every other Susan into the dust.
It will be a very partial and poisoned redemption. Because Britain's
Got Malice. Sing, Susan, sing - to an ugly crowd that doesn't deserve
you.
(excerpted from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/16/britains-got-talent-susan-boyle
)
Chris Bruce,
seeking synthesis, in
Kiel, Germany
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