Ha! Take that.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on His plays harbor problematic depictions and characterizations.

‘Edward II’ has a very strong relationship to Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’ (one of my favourite plays, one that I have directed and acted in as Richard); it is the forerunner to Shakespeare’s play, and an influence on it, just as Marlowe’s poem ‘Hero & Leander’ (a wonderful poem) was a stimulus to Shakespeare to write ‘Venus & Adonis’. In ‘As You Like It’, Shakespeare makes a specific reference to Marlowe and ‘Hero & Leander’ when Phebe says:

Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might,

‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’

The second line is a a line from ‘Hero & Leander’. The dead shepherd is Marlowe.

I suspect the two young men worked together on some of the early history plays, which were not by Shakespeare alone, and in particular on ‘Edward III’, a play that is now recognised as almost certainly being in part by Shakespeare. They clearly stimulated each other. I put on and directed a production of it at the university I worked at in connexion with the British Council’s British arts festival in 1998, I think. It was the first production ever in Japan, and probably only the third or fourth full production for 400 years. The first half is, I believe, definitely by Shakespeare – it contains probably the first of Shakespeare’s great temptation scenes, when Edward attempts to seduce the Countess of Salisbury. In the second half, which is not so intimate and literary (by which I mean no criticism) but works wonderfully well as theatre (it is about the wars in France), there is one speech by Edward which has all the hallmarks of Marlowe, in its building and cutting away at the end almost to a kind of bathos. It was wonderful to work on a play that hadn’t been done thousands of times before.

The play of Marlowe’s I love best is ‘Dr Faustus’ (the first version), with Faustus’s final soliloquy, in which blank verse is used with a quite astonishing mastery, and an hour’s time is convincingly contracted on stage into a speech lasting about ten minutes.

Mansplaining feminism to feminist women.

This made for a fine laugh this morning.

Why it’s funny is because Timothy Brennan is head of Devereux Chambers, which Foxy Jolyon left as of midnight yesterday.

Burn ALL the bridges down.

Originally a comment by Papito on The influencer wife.

I once had a long conversation with a good friend of mine, who is a Japanese-American, about appropriation. She had been very offended that a group of white and Chinese protesters shut down an event at the museum that allowed visitors to try on, and take a picture of themselves in, a kimono. The protesters insisted that this was cultural appropriation, you know, all the usual, orientalism, the male gaze, whatever. My friend, let’s call her Keiko, insisted that it wasn’t their culture that they were talking about, and in her culture, Japanese culture, trying on kimonos and having your picture taken in them was something that people did. She was very bothered that people from another culture were preventing people from her culture from sharing their own culture with the museum visitors. The kimonos in question had literally been fabricated for the specific purpose of being tried on at a museum exhibit as a cultural event. But they were packed away, the exhibit was canceled, and the museum apologized for their cultural crimes.

In our long conversations about the matter, we decided that, like racism, appropriation can only happen where there is a power differential, or subordination. Japan does not see itself as subordinate to America, America does not see itself as subordinate to Japan, thus there can be no cultural appropriation by Japanese of American culture, nor cultural appropriation by Americans of Japanese culture. The question of whether Japanese can appropriate Black American culture is more complex, but let’s not get into that.

Can an American appropriate Spanish culture? What does that really mean? Can a Spaniard appropriate American culture? I tend to think no (either way), whereas an American can appropriate, say, Mexican culture.

My wife studies Flamenco, both singing and dancing. She adores it. She is of Cuban extraction, visibly Hispanic, but born in America. Is she appropriating Spanish culture? Are the many Japanese who study Flamenco appropriating Spanish culture? (Flamenco is hugely popular in Japan) The Spanish don’t seem to think so.

Hilarious pretended to be really Spanish instead of just loving Spain and Spanish culture. But I don’t think that can count as appropriation as much as flattery. I think the Spanish are much more upset that she stuck her foot in her mouth by saying that she’s a white girl, and there are lots of white people in Europe… as if saying that Spanish people aren’t white.

This happened.

She hasn’t been heard from since.

What if the pardon power conflicts with international law?

Donald Trump’s pardon of four American men convicted of killing Iraqi civilians while working as contractors in 2007 violated US obligations under international law, United Nations human rights experts have said. …

“Pardoning the Blackwater contractors is an affront to justice and to the victims of the Nisour Square massacre and their families,” said Jelena Aparac, the chair of the UN working group on the use of mercenaries.

The group said the Geneva conventions obliged states to hold war criminals accountable for their crimes, even when they are acting as private security contractors. “These pardons violate US obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level,” it said.

Trump would just squawk that he has THE ABSOLUTE RIGHT to do whatever he wants, but to reason-capable adults it’s not so simple.

Kathleen Stock juxtaposes academic freedom and UK universities’ policies on The Trans Question:

The Education Reform Act 1988 describes the need “to ensure that academic staff have freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions”. Most UK university statutes contain a similar clause.

Keeping that in mind, consider those policies.

Leeds for instance:

“Think of people as being the gender that they self-identify as.”

Er – no. A university might as well tell its staff to think of people as being the nationality or species or profession or celestial body that they self-identify as. People’s individual private hidden unverifiable personal thoughts about themselves are just that, and it can’t be anybody’s business to tell us to share those thoughts, because it’s impossible. We’re all locked into our own heads. We can’t verify other people’s thoughts about themselves for them, and that’s all there is to it. The expectation that we can and that we must be told to do so is grotesque.

“A person should be addressed and referred to using the pronouns which make them feel comfortable. This could be he, she, they, per, hir or other pronouns. If you are uncertain, either listen to what pronoun others are using or politely ask what they prefer, for example “Hi, I’m xxx and I use the pronouns he and him. What about you?” Encourage others to use these pronouns too and if the wrong pronoun is used, apologise quickly and move on.”

This is grown-up professionals telling other grown-up professionals to do this nonsensical conversation-clogging absurdity. In a university.

“If a trans person informs a staff member that a word or phrasing is inappropriate or offensive, then that staff member should take their word for it, and adjust their phraseology accordingly”

I can’t see how that could go wrong at all.

Warwick:

“Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of their own gender and what feels right for them. This might be male, female, non-binary, genderless, or some other gender identity. All gender identities are equally valid” [NB: bold is theirs].

This is a university policy, for the staff – not a game for children. It’s baby talk, but it’s official policy.

There’s a lot more. It’s all just bonkers.

He has got to be kidding.

Or rather they have got to be kidding, since they wrote it and simply put his label on it. But still – he and they have got to be kidding.

Trump issued a ProclaMation flattering Thomas Becket and Religious Freedom and the right of religious bosses to tell the monarch to fuck off. Yes because Trump is so keen on being told to fuck off.

Today is the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket on December 29, 1170. Thomas Becket was a statesman, a scholar, a chancellor, a priest, an archbishop, and a lion of religious liberty.

By “religious liberty” Trump means the liberty to agree with him and do what he says to do.

Before the Magna Carta was drafted, before the right to free exercise of religion was enshrined as America’s first freedom in our glorious Constitution, Thomas gave his life so that, as he said, “the Church will attain liberty and peace.”

Right because Trump is so good at paying attention to the Constitution.

When the crown attempted to encroach upon the affairs of the house of God through the Constitutions of Clarendon, Thomas refused to sign the offending document. When the furious King Henry II threatened to hold him in contempt of royal authority and questioned why this “poor and humble” priest would dare defy him, Archbishop Becket responded “God is the supreme ruler, above Kings” and “we ought to obey God rather than men.”

Unless the men are Donald Trump.

As Americans, we were first united by our belief that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” and that defending liberty is more important than life itself. If we are to continue to be the land of the free, no government official, no governor, no bureaucrat, no judge, and no legislator must be allowed to decree what is orthodox in matters of religion or to require religious believers to violate their consciences.

Unless their consciences tell them to criticize Donald Trump or win elections that Donald Trump wants to win.

On this day, we celebrate and revere Thomas Becket’s courageous stand for religious liberty and we reaffirm our call to end religious persecution worldwide. In my historic address to the United Nations last year, I made clear that America stands with believers in every country who ask only for the freedom to live according to the faith that is within their own hearts. I also stated that global bureaucrats have absolutely no business attacking the sovereignty of nations that wish to protect innocent life, reflecting the belief held by the United States and many other countries that every child — born and unborn — is a sacred gift from God.

Unless it’s the child of asylum seekers from Central America.

To honor Thomas Becket’s memory, the crimes against people of faith must stop, prisoners of conscience must be released, laws restricting freedom of religion and belief must be repealed, and the vulnerable, the defenseless, and the oppressed must be protected.

The what? What was that again?

the vulnerable, the defenseless, and the oppressed must be protected.

According to Donald Trump???

Come on.

A society without religion cannot prosper. A nation without faith cannot endure — because justice, goodness, and peace cannot prevail without the grace of God.

So that’s an official insult to all atheists, handed down by the government. So much for religious freedom.

Oh no, people questioning someone’s identity again. People are what they say they are! Unless they’re TERFs who object to being called TERFs of course; that’s completely different.

Last week, a Twitter sleuth sketched out how Hilaria Baldwin, the influencer wife of actor (and sometime SNL star) Alec Baldwin, has perpetrated “a decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.”

Or rather, pretends to be a Spanish person. Impersonating one means a specific one, as opposed to a generic one. She was going for the generic.

The user, who goes by the handle @lenibriscoe, shared a number of damning videos of “Hilaria,” from a Good Morning America appearance where she employed a Spanish accent to a Today show stop in which she supposedly could not remember the English word for “cucumber.”

Further posts showed Hilaria’s mother discussing growing up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and numerous articles pointed to how she had spent virtually her entire career practicing medicine in Massachusetts, where she’d served as “an associate physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School” until she “retired from both positions in 2012,” according to MassLive. (In a video interview she said she moved to Mallorca, Spain, in 2011, the same year Hilaria began dating Alec.)

And yet…

Hilaria Baldwin’s CAA speaker page claims that she was born in Mallorca, Spain, as does her IMDb bio and Wikipedia page. She said on a podcast earlier this year: “I moved here [to America] when I was 19 to go to NYU from… my family lives in Spain, they live in Mallorca,” adding, “I knew no pop culture.” She has graced the cover of Hola! magazine, a Spanish-language publication based out of Madrid, where she was identified as a Spanish person in both the interview and its press release. Alec Baldwin has repeatedly referred to her as “Spanish” online. And she’s made a number of appearances in Latina magazine, which she’s enthusiastically promoted (Spain is not a part of Latin America, by the way), and has referred to Spain as her “home.”

Wellllll maybe she meant it’s her spiritual home.

It appears that Hilaria’s real name is Hillary Hayward-Thomas, according to her old MySpace page and those who claim to be her old classmates. She attended the private Cambridge School of Weston, in Massachusetts, and in her senior yearbook is listed as “Hillary Hayward-Thomas.”

So, is there anything tacky about this at all? Does it qualify as appropriation? Is it comparable to Rachel Dolezal, or is it just someone who is smitten with a foreign country where she has spent a lot of time and likes to pretend to have deep roots in that country when she doesn’t? And if we’re all free to define ourselves in whatever terms we like, then why is this even a story?

Now about this word “influencer”…

Graham Linehan asks the age-old question: Is Eddie Izzard a lesbian?

Alright, everyone, let’s get out there and start asking our favourite celebrities the following question: “Is Eddie Izzard a lesbian?”.

Ask everyone you can think of, from intellectuals like Jameela Jamil and Frankie Boyle all the way across to such LGBT giants as Michael Cashman and Linda Riley. Let’s get people on the record as saying that Eddie Izzard is a lesbian.

Because, by now I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that, yes, this is literally what is being proposed. It is why lesbians have been lying down in front of Pride Marches and such. It’s why Maya Forstater lost her job. It’s why there are branches of the LGB Alliance opening all over the world, despite the fact that it’s not easy being a branch of the LGB Alliance, with the BBC, for example, unable to make up its mind whether they’re a hate group or not, in part because they never seem to find the time to speak to them.

…

It’s currently de rigeur among Twitter’s blue checkmark set to call the LGB Alliance a hate group. Their crime? They don’t believe that Eddie Izzard—and the many other crossdressing men like him currently claiming trans status— are the same sex as they are.

“Is Eddie Izzard a lesbian?” Ask them the question. Let’s see if they can go that far. Let’s see if they dare go on the record saying such a disgraceful, homophobic thing. Let’s see how long they will play along with a sick joke by Eddie that erases the reality of women, and lesbians in particular, in the most careless, reckless, selfish manner.

Eddie, with respect, you’re not a lesbian. That’s homophobic and sexist and I’m sure you don’t want to be homophobic or sexist, no matter how many people are currently telling you that you’re stunning and brave, such as the famously ethical and rigorous Pink News.

If he were an actual lesbian no one would pay the slightest attention to him.

More than 13 years later and it’s still pissing us off.

As it should.

So she got a job writing comedy.

A tedious conversation:

Hahahaha right the law is magic and changes men into women when they say the magic words.

This “movement” has been hell on people’s thinking skills.

The really scary thing is the abject apology Jessica Cluess felt compelled to give.

Well, I tell you what, if she does learn more about “Ms. Germán’s important work with #DisruptTexts” she won’t be impressed. She probably knew that when she said it. She was either appeasing the bullies or mocking them, or perhaps both at once.

Having just read a bit of Ms. Germán’s important work I can report that it has no value. She’s not literate enough to do that kind of work; she’s not sufficiently interested in literature to do it. She’s the wrong person for the job.

The reality is there are already teachers reading against the grain, encouraging students to think critically about what they’re reading, and the like. I have no idea how general that kind of teaching is, but I know it’s not completely absent, because scholars of education have been writing about it for decades.

The Lorena Germán – Jess Cluess contretemps has nudged my curiosity, so I looked for more.

Way back last July:

Oy. You mean, like Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton? For example?

Fast forward to today and she’s being bullied in the usual fashion.

So how about this DisruptTexts crew of educators?

Here’s Lorena Germán on how (and why) to disrupt Shakespeare.

We knew that suggesting educators disrupt Shakespeare would be a challenge for many. We were pleased to see the openness to the idea and the willingness to engage. But then again, it could be because we’re “preaching to the choir” and we acknowledge that educators hesitant to challenging thinking around the use of Shakespeare in our schools chose not to engage. The chat surfaced some valid points and great thoughts around the reasons for replacing and/or critically interrogating Shakespeare. Here are some of our thoughts around Shakespeare and his pedestal:

We believe in offering students a wide variety of literature and access to playwrights other than Shakespeare. That is valuable, restorative, and productive.

No kidding. Do any schools say Shakespeare and only Shakespeare should be on offer? University students who major in English literature will take one or more Shakespeare course(s), but primary and secondary schools mostly don’t specialize that way.

We believe that Shakespeare, like any other playwright, no more and no less, has literary merit. He is not “universal” in a way that other authors are not. He is not more “timeless” than anyone else.

Nope. Wrong. Wrong in the “no more” part. He does have more “literary merit” than most. You’d have to read him and/or see him on stage/film to see how and why though. It’s not a myth; he really is as good as he’s cracked up to be. This is all the more interesting because he came from such an unremarkable background. He wasn’t an earl or even a knight, he wasn’t rich, he didn’t go to Cambridge or Oxford, he started out as a player (an actor), who had to go on the road when plays were banned in London because of the plague (sound familiar?), which was considered very raffish and low-class indeed.

We believe he was a man of his time and that his plays harbor problematic depictions and characterizations.

That “harbor” is sly – as if he were hiding a fugitive Nazi in his basement. Anyway – Othello? Shylock? They’re not as straightforwardly “problematic” as you’d expect from a 16th century country boy. And then there’s the women question, on which he is startlingly original and different from his rivals.

Overall, we continue to affirm that there is an over-saturation of Shakespeare in our schools and that many teachers continue to unnecessarily place him on a pedestal as a paragon of what all language should be. Though we enjoy reading some of the plots in his plays and acknowledge the depth and complexity within many of his plot arcs and characters, we also find that educators are often taught to see Shakespearean plays as near perfection, his characters as “archetypes”, and to persist in oj indoctrinating students into a false notion of the primacy (and superiority) of the English language.

Oh we enjoy some of his plots; how generous. That passage is illiterate and stupid, and this group should not be allowed anywhere near any curriculum decisions.

We do not see these same problematic approaches in other plays where whiteness and the male voice are not centered…So, let us be honest, the conversation really isn’t about universality, nor and this isn’t about being equipped to identify all possible cultural references. This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization.

I’m not persuaded. You know why? Her words are not up to the job. Language is a vital tool for persuasion, in fact it’s pretty much impossible to persuade without it, unless you consider a fist under the nose “persuasion.” Exposure to rich, complicated language just might be a path to important fields of learning and work.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”

Now just a god damn minute. The reason Shakespeare shouldn’t be dumped into the bin labeled “Evil Hate-monger From the Past” and forgotten is nothing to do with “academic excellence.” Fun fact: he wasn’t considered an elite taste in his own day, but rather one of those vulgar players, who wrote some of their vulgar plays himself. Gabriel Harvey pointed out as a matter of surprise that he appealed to both classes, but Ben Jonson considered him much too pop and too little erudite…until he sat down to read the First Folio in preparation for writing an introductory poem. The reason Shakespeare shouldn’t be dumped is because many of his plays are simply brilliant. Ignoring him would be like going to the Grand Canyon and carefully staying in the car the whole time, looking in the opposite direction.

Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”

Mmyes, good point. Everything written before 1950 is evil shit. Definitely.

Jessica Cluess, an author of young-adult fiction, shot back: “If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the judgmental Puritans . . . then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your twitter bio.”

An online horde descended, accused Ms. Cluess of racism and “violence,” and demanded that Penguin Random House cancel her contract. The publisher hasn’t complied, perhaps because Ms. Cluess tweeted a ritual self-denunciation: “I take full responsibility for my unprovoked anger toward Lorena Germán. . . . I am committed to learning more about Ms. Germán’s important work with #DisruptTexts. . . . I will strive to do better.” That didn’t stop Ms. Cluess’s literary agent, Brooks Sherman, from denouncing her “racist and unacceptable” opinions and terminating their professional relationship.

The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.” The English Department chairman of Lawrence Public Schools, Richard Gorham, didn’t respond to emails.

What about keeping the Odyssey in your curriculum and including the “we wouldn’t do that now” stuff in the discussion? It does of course have a lot of such stuff, because it’s about war and warriors and the domestic life of warriors, many centuries before the Geneva Convention and the UDHR and feminism. It features slaves, and war crimes, and mass murder. It’s a harsh world. But it’s worth reading.

Small backwater towns are not all Frank Capra and social capital. They can be all MAGA and fuck wearing masks, instead.

Ten years ago, Dr. Kristina Darnauer and her husband, Jeff, moved to tiny Sterling, Kan., to raise their kids steeped in small-town values.

“The values of hard work, the value of community, taking care of your neighbor, that’s what small towns shout from the rooftops, this is what we’re good at. We are salt of the earth people who care about each other,” Darnauer says. “And here I am saying, then wear a mask because that protects your precious neighbor.”

But Darnauer’s medical advice and moral admonition were met with contempt from some of her friends, neighbors and patients. People who had routinely buttonholed her for quick medical advice at church and kids’ ballgames were suddenly treating her as the enemy and regarding her professional opinion as suspect and offensive.

Because somehow medical science and reliance on evidence and listening to expert advice became a matter of politics instead of a matter of the right tools for the job. It makes about as much sense as deciding that calling a plumber when a pipe breaks is something liberals do, while conservatives prefer to let it fix itself.

That wedge is splitting off health care workers from communities that desperately need them.

More than a quarter of all the public health administrators in Kansas quit, retired or got fired this year, according to Vicki Collie-Akers, an associate professor of population health at the University of Kansas. Some of them got death threats. Some had to hire armed guards.

“These are leaders in their community,” Collie-Akers says. “And they are leaving broken.” Collie-Akers notes these professionals also leaving at a terrible time. The pandemic is still raging. Vaccines still need to get from cities to small towns and into people’s arms; public health officers are as important as ever.

Also it’s going to be hard to replace the people who are leaving, because the situation remains what it is.

The Gender Studies professor strikes again.

Hur hur. So funny. Lesbians are not endangered! Yes, there are a lot fewer of them in the rising generation but that’s because they’re glorious inspiring trans men instead! Which is obviously so much better! So let’s laugh ourselves sick at the very idea that fewer lesbians means fewer lesbians.

This is a Labour MP.

But that’s not true. Everyone isn’t free to define herself in whatever terms she deems fit. I’m not free to define myself as Charlotte Nichols MP, for instance. Many many kinds of defining oneself as something or someone one is not are criminal fraud, while others are reckless endangerment, and others are rape, and we could go on this way. We’re not free to tell lies about ourselves if anything hangs on those lies. If it’s just play or fantasy or a game, sure, but that’s not what Nichols is talking about, nor is it what the LGB Alliance is talking about.

Would Nichols say the same thing if it were a white guy identifying as Keith Vaz? I don’t think so.

Presumably that’s not what she meant, but then what did she mean? What is this supposed truism that we can all identify any way we like? I wonder if they will ever start to notice that they’ve created their own reductio ad absurdum.

The conversation seemed to start well.

But it didn’t go on well.

…”you drawing the lines of who gets to be one” – well if there are no such lines then what are we even talking about? What even is a lesbian?

This is laughably basic but apparently not everyone gets it – the reality is we can’t talk about anything if we don’t have common meanings for the words we use to talk about things. One broad hint at this state of affairs is that we can’t go prancing all over the globe striking up conversations with everyone we encounter, because the world contains many different languages, and it takes time and effort to learn new ones.

The word “lesbian” has a meaning. Lesbians are women attracted to women. That’s it, that’s the meaning. It’s not an issue of who gets to be one, it’s an issue of who is one, who can be one. It’s not a country club that the members can hand out guest passes to, it’s a word with a specific narrow meaning. Some words have broad meanings, like “beautiful” for instance. There’s room for argument there, and people do argue over what is or isn’t beautiful. Are the Sainte Chapelle and the Chrysler building both beautiful or do you have to pick one? That kind of broad meaning. But “lesbian” isn’t like that. It isn’t evaluative, it’s just factual. Men can’t be lesbians, because that’s not what the word means.