Vagina: A New Biography

Photograph of Naomi Wolf by David Shankbone

Katha Pollitt is adding her name to the list of “conscientious objectors” to Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography. In a review in The Nation (“No Carnations Please, We’re Goddesses," October 1, 2012), she writes, “The vagina may be built to withstand multiple childbirths, but apparently even a joke at its expense can shut women down: Wolf says she couldn’t write for six months after a male friend celebrated her book deal with a festive dinner featuring vagina-shaped pasta (‘cuntini’) followed by salmon. It was the salmon that really did her in. Well, at least it wasn’t fish tacos. Or clams.” Pollitt also goes after Wolf on the facile equating of “female confidence”(deriving from a well orgasmed vagina) and “creativity.” “I dunno,” Pollitt says,”—the virgins- and-celebates team has some pretty heavy hitters: Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, the Brontes, Forence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf…There’s something to be said for sublimation, as Freud observed.” Pollitt has her fingers, as it were, on the role of hyperbole in dehumanizing sexuality. It’s as if Woolf had picked up the virus hosted by macho male intellectuals that equates the encounters of famous philanderers like Pushkin, Hugo and Updike with their productivity. In her critique of Wolf, Pollitt is inadvertently championing the solitary males counterparts of the woman writers she cites, Proust and Kafka. And then there is the question of the vagina itself. Is Wolf a dualist? By writing a book entitled Vagina: A New Biography, she undermines neuroscience’s hard won mind/body connection.

Lives of Our Leaders: Obama vs. Romney #1

It wasn’t the Thrilla in Manila or the The Rumble in the Jungle. The first debate was primarily defensive like one of those 12 round fights in which cautious styles create a kind of depersonalization. The problem with the debate was homogenization. The hurtle  for Obamacare as a political fact is that it was introduced and worked in the state where Romney was governor, though it was plain that health care is an issue about which the president is impassioned and one which he can outpoint the challenger. If health care is Obama’s forte, then the 700,000 jobs that would be lost due to tax increases became Romney’s mantra. Why was the president spending two years working on heath care, when the country was dogged by unemployment? Still, if Romney was strong on the economy he was still haunted by his non-existent loopholes and the fact that his criticisms of Dodd-Frank were not backed up with specific proposals about the open wound of banking deregulation. In a prize fight, the challenger has to be more than the equal of the title holder. He has to take the belt away and that comes from not merely ducking and slipping, not merely avoiding the champion’s power. He has to take control of the ring. He has to stop his opponent at his own game. You box a fighter and fight a boxer. In the first bout Romney might be given some extra points for style, but Obama and Romney both kept their distance and boxed the first debate. Hopefully in Obama/Romney #2, they’ll come out fighting.

Autumn Sonata

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

Autumn Sonata was a film by Ingmar Bergman. It starred Ingrid Berman and Liv Ullmann and it was literally Ingrid Bergman’s autumn sonata to the extent that it was the last film she ever made. Autumn is usually associated with death and endings; naturally it’s the time of the year when vegetation dies and yet there is a form of autumn that is like a premature baby, an autumn that arrives extravagantly and sometimes too soon and there are unfortunate souls who reach the autumn of their lives before it’s their time, people whose lives are curtailed just as they are beginning to come into their own. In Vermont, Autumn is almost miraculous to the extent that it comes like a robber almost over night.  But its coming is like one of those supernovas, whose death is heralded by a great explosion of energy. No death is as demonstrative as autumn in Vermont. The burst of colors is almost like a blossoming. Even though he was effectively talking about spring, Ezra Pound’s words in his great poem “Exiles Letter,” express the mixture of sadness and ebullience, of death and life, that characterizes Vermont in Autumn. “And if you ask how I regret that parting? It’s like the flowers falling at spring’s end, confused, whirled in a tangle." 

Dial M for Murder

The Hitchcock cameo appears early in Dial M for Murder, now being revived at Film Forum. The director appears in the photo of a smug Cambridge reunion table surrounded by his two villains. He looks dumbfounded and bemused at the same time. It’s a classic Hitchcock self-portrait and it deserves comment to the extent of how profoundly poker-faced he is, a male version of blind Lady Justice. Dial M was shot for 3-D which acts as metaphor for the post-war era in which the movie was shot. 3-D captured a world of profound reality, not the post-modernism of today where reality in fact feels like a stage play made into movie (which is what Dial M  actually was). One of the wonderful things about British whodunits going back to The Mousetrap is the presupposition of a rational universe. Rationalism is the father figure restoring the Great Chain of Being, that has been intermittently shaken up as in the strange doings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You couldn’t write a play like Dial M today or a movie adaptation of it with actors like Robert Cummings playing a writer of mysteries who falls in love with a British heiress (Grace Kelly), married to a cad (Ray Milland). The nature of the evil, so unambiguous and parsable, eludes the imagination in the sinkhole of bankrupt post-modernity. Hitchcock’s camera luxuriates in his wonderful upper crust settings and there are memorable cinematic sleights of hand that take place effortlessly in his confidence narrative world. For instance, as Milland and his counterpart plan out their crime, the camera hovers overhead. You don’t take note of the break from full frontal naturalism until the scene has passed. In this setting the props--a stocking, a key, a dial-up phone-- are free to become icons. Today’s inhabitant of London or New York is suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder and the gnarled characters that contemporary film directors and mystery writers create reflect an unfathomable evil that’s far removed from the crime that Hitchcock portrays in this delicious piece of nostalgia.

Radio Unnameable

There are only two days left to see Radio Unnameable, Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson’s documentary about Bob Fass— the Ur albeit soft spoken radio shock jock, the precursor to Howard Stern, the postscript to Lenny Bruce and the inspiration for the last vestiges of free thinking that may be found on rogue public radio stations. NPR and PRI have a template in which First Amendment dirty laundry is washed and bleached in a strong detergent of political correctness. Fass pioneered what he called “free form” radio, which occurred in the wee hours of the morning. In fact, the film clips of the era in which Fass had his heyday look like outtakes from Taxi Driver and some of the call-ins could easily have been part of Scorsese’s script. But  "Alice’s Restaurant" and "Mr. Bojangles,” debuted  on the program and Joni Mitchell, Jose Felciano and Bob Dylan all found their way to the WBAI studios where Fass also interviewed the likes of Ed Sanders, Judith Malina, Julius Lester, Abby Hoffman and Paul Krassner. One of the most joyous of the events that Fass created on the air was a party at the international terminal of JFK called "the fly-in,” (in which in a use of words he admits is injudicious Fass describes his listeners as “crashing” at Kennedy). His commentary would also accompany the    “Yip-in" (in which the hands were removed from the clock above the information booth in Grand Central Station), the "be-in" and ultimately the l968 march on the Democratic Convention (culminating in the trial of the Chicago 7). The intellectual horsepower that he was able to summon makes one painfully aware of what Occupy Wall Street lacks. If Fass didn’t change the world, he certainly saved one life. One night someone named Kenny, who’d intentionally overdosed, called in and Fass kept him on the air until the call could be traced. Curiously Radio Unnameable is playing at Film Forum which is right across the street from one of the homes of Grove Press, whose Evergreen Review published some of Fass’s guests. Right down the street from the Grove Press site, is an AA clubhouse, that in Fass’s heyday was an afterhours club catering to pre-op transsexuals. How times do change.