The belly -- Coriolanus

I was reading Coriolanus last night, one of Shakespeare's lesser known plays. I was having a hard time getting enthusiastic about the material. 400 years worth of people have decided the play is no good, who am I to debate them? I am just some stupid, average English major, full of aspirations and topped off with a ginormous head! But Shakespeare opens up his play with a few amazing lines. The citizens of Rome are getting prepared to riot, but Menenius tries to dissuade them with the story of the rest of body rebelling against the stomach. Their thought is that it's just a holder of food which sits as they do all the work of bringing the food in. So they get rid of it and slowly starve to death. Here's what the belly has to say:

'True is it, my incorporate friends,' quoth he,
'That I receive the general food at first,
Which you do live upon; and fit it is,
Because I am the store-house and the shop
Of the whole body: but, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live: and though that all at once,
You, my good friends,'--this says the belly, mark me,--
'Though all at once cannot
See what I do deliver out to each,
Yet I can make my audit up, that all
From me do back receive the flour of all,
And leave me but the bran.' (Coriolanus, Act I:I)

Shakespeare makes a wonderful case for the state. How it complete a sort of symbiotic relationship like your tum-tum does. I have heard this story before; however, like so many things, I didn't realize it had part of origins at least in Shakespeare. Apparently the fable has its true beginnings with William Camden's Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine. Usually I have heard it describe the wholeness of existence, in which you cannot have the good without the bad. And apparently, it "has the distinction of being among the few Shakespeare plays banned in a democracy in modern times. It was briefly suppressed in France in the late 1930s because of its use by the fascists element" (Wikipedia). Pretty much true, if you look at it as enforcement for the government to do anything it wants. But I highly doubt that's what Shakespeare was getting at. He had spent his entire career derailing against man's constructed world (Theseus, Augustus, even King Lear), why would he start endorsing the power of the state to anything it wants at the end? Coincidentally, I just finished "Never Let Me Go", a movie based on novel by Kazuo Ishiguro with the same title. It depicts a dystopian Britain where clones' organs are harvested so the rest of the population can live longer. In other words, the belly is literally being ripped out of the countrymen. The movie is heart-breaking, and Andrew Garfield continues to prove his versatility with this and "The Social Network".

Identity

So far my break has been rather drab. I have seen several movies, some of which weren't really worth seeing ("The Virginity Hit", what an awful movie). I have read (romance novels and horror), but I have lately really been into graphic novels, chiefly The Sandman and Fables series. I am attracted to the eternal idea--the myth which survives throughout ages and across space. And that is what gods, fables, and The Endless represent: constants. y=mx+b, they are the m's and b's--the stable trends or truths which will continue until the end of life. On Monday, I saw Rango at the Shiloh movie theater in Billings. I was one of the few people there. It was pleasant and quiet, and I was quite alone, just me and the 20 foot movie screen... (not really, but it felt that way). To my surprise, Rango began with a lizard questioning who he was, locked away in away in an aquarium. He was putting on a fake show for himself. He acted all the roles and gave the inanimate objects around him personalities. This theme runs throughout the movie. He pretends to be a sheriff and gains the respect of the town. He cross dresses and puts on a play for the villains. One of the most telling sections is when he confronts "The Spirit of the West"--a proverbial god of the denizens of the desert. Golden globe awards are in a golf cart, and we see Clint Eastwood dressed in cowboy garb about to tee off. "The Man with No Name" tells Rango we are all in a play, acting our roles and playing our parts, and no one can leave his story before it is through. This is classic Shakespeare, "As You Like It", "Midsummer Night's Dream", affair. The main problem Shakespeare deals with, I THINK, is the problem of identity--who we are. who am i. who are you. And I have noticed a recurring motif throughout tales that deal with identity crisis: the cross dresser. It appears in Rango, in The Sandman "The Game of You", and "As You Like It". In The Sandman, it is Wanda, who is a man who wishes to be a woman, and Hal, another man who likes to me made-up as a gal, who achieve these motifs.

A few semesters back in Literary Criticism, I read Judith Butler. She suggested that gender is merely a cultural play we perform for others. There is no "true" woman role, only the role we choose to perform. Hence, cross dressing reveals the illusion of gender types. When a man dresses as a woman, or a woman as a man, they clearly perform something which is often hidden to us by our own culture, bringing light to the illusion we live every day. Butler states, in her "Gender Trouble", "Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or a cultural performance, or is 'naturalness' constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within the gay and lesbian cultures often thematize 'the natural' in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex. What other foundational categories of identity--the binary of sex, gender, and the body--can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?" Often, when authors use cross-dressing as a thematic point, it is to point out the unfixed identity. Shakespeare uses it in "Midsummer's Night Dream" when Francis Flute dresses as Thisbe and in "As You Like It" when Rosalind puts on the mask of Ganymede. But even before any line is spoken, there is still the fact that all the female roles are performed by men. There is much confusion and it is very pertinent that often this gender anarchy takes place in the forest or Northrop Frye's "Green World"--a realm without designators, walls, or borders, of Dionysus, the god of masks, chaos, and the theater, of the Mother Goddess, Titania, Demeter, Venus, and Isis. The Green World's wholeness reveals the made-up games we play in the masculine world. It is the obelisk versus the dome. Emotion versus rationality. Rome versus Egypt. The Federation versus the Borg. The Doctor versus the Dalek. Meg Murry versus IT.

Near the end of the "Game of You" arch in The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Barbie says, "... Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world--no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Isn't that a weird thought?" These mundane lives we lead are manifestations of the culture around us. We are filled with epics and universes, waiting to spill over into "the real world", if there is such a thing.

Assignment

I just realized that I really am a sick and twisted person, so I am not going to give an example of Kent and Oswald's argument. However, speaking of Kent and his alter ego Caius, I began to wonder if there was not some connection between Clark Kent aka Superman. So curious that I utilized wikipedia and discovered a possible connection: link! Meet Kent Shakespeare, the Superman of the 31st century! I have had my fill of silly allusions now (of course I haven't) and will continue to the second part of this assignment, flyghting (how do you spell this?). Wait, I already did that. For some reason I am thinking of a Spongebob episode where Sponge and Patrick exchange insults, but I can't think of the episode. Here's a minor scene from the show though, youtube quality of course:


Alright, now for the real second part of this. What do I need? I need my friends and family. I probably need them more than anything. Without them, well, I would be, nothing. I could survive as long as I had them.



Ian KcKellen is pretty awesome. He plays Magneto in this clip.

Senile, Mad, Old People

Senile, mad, old people. That's what I thought after leaving Tom Brokaw's speech last night. No, I am not talking about Brokaw, though I don't agree with many of his left-leaning views and my girlfriend is pretty convinced he farted on stage at one point. No, I am talking about the 97 year-old Crow Indian chief who blessed the anchorman at the hour 23 mark. He went up on to the podium and talked about Crow Country for awhile (not Montana, I might add) and its bountiful buffalo, deer, antelope, potatoes, berries, women picking berries, buffalo, and deer. Then he either mispronounced Tom's name deliberately or was senile (at this point, your guess is good as mine). Poor Brokaw then tried to tell the old chief his very PC story about riding a horse on his Park County ranch and thinking about Chief Plenty Coup, and how he tells his friends how Indians were here long before us and were still important to this country. The old man interrupted Tom at the beginning of this blaaag, saying he was going to sing now (stop talking!). So he did. He sang for a long time, stopping periodically to say, "Why is no one looking at me! I am Tom Brokaw!" Yes, the Crow Chief said that, and I don't understand why. At any rate, he ended and the anchorman could finally stop looking so damn awkward up there. I thought this was an appropriate story, since we are starting with King Lear, where an old man goes mad and senile. Maybe the geezer last night wasn't, maybe I am just really bad at judging, but his handler sure looked perturbed.