Month: February 2012

Will Meryl do Julia next?

Awesome photo: Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher in Film4 part-production The Iron Lady. Australia"s Prime Minister Julia Gillard speaks during a news conference at Parliament House in Canberra on 27 February, 2012

I can’t wait for the announcement that Ms Streep, still bouffant from her Maggie efforts, will accept the challenge presented by Australia’s own iron lady, who has seen off her closest rival in short order.  It was understandable that the top 2012 oscar honours went to a silent film, when the alternative was to reward  those famously strident tones echoing along Downing Street. But as voices go, Julia’s deserves to be immortalised too – and who better than Meryl to pull it off? A bit of a red rinse and hey presto!

Orientalism?

Oriental. Orientalist. Orientalism. The terms used to be simple with a meaning commonly agreed upon. From the perspective of the people who were charting new naval passages and drawing the maps, Asia was to the east. Hence, the use of the Latin term for it.
Logically a person who studied the Orient would be called an Orientalist, the study itself could be described as Orientalism. Things being as they were, it made sense. Then came that snivelling pseudo-intellectual twazek, Edward Said, and decided that he knew better and that everything would have to change because he wanted it to.

This leads me to, at long last, ask the central question — is it fair, or even relevant, to subject literature, scholarship, and art that was painted decades, if not centuries, before to a contemporary mindset?

This topic has come into my mind because I have just finished reading the Travels of Marco Polo. It was great fun. Perhaps the accuracy is dubious, but the stories are entertaining and the style quick and easy. The task for next week is to try to see if there was a vein “Orientalism”, using Said’s hijacking of the term, in it. It certainly did involve the East, the Orient. It was also told from the perspective of a Venetian from a different day and age. Was it world-class scholarship? Hardly. But does it deserve negative scrutiny, to be drug through the dirt because some prat writing in the 1970s decided that he wanted to kick up a fuss? Hardly.

It seems facile to accept Said’s perspective, to impose it on a different era. “Orientalist Painting” was simply an outgrowth of Romanticism. The fantastic, the improbable, the exaggerated in the paintings of the East were really not that much different from the depictions of the West at different times in its history — the romanticisation  of the Mediaeval Era, of the countryside. More broadly, was the use of East Asian motifs in 18th and 19th century Europe, UK, and the Americas really any different than the Ch’ing Emperors living in a summer palace that blended traditional Chinese styles with the Baroque? Cultural interchange has always gone both ways, not always evenly.

The Age of Reason

There have been a couple of interesting articles in the DT recently.

The first tells of a 5 year old boy called Zach who has decided, since the age of 3, that he is really a girl. Parents, NHS doctors and psychologists and teachers all seem to have agreed that he suffers from GID, Gender Identity Disorder. He has been officially diagnosed as such.

The second tells of a 42 year old women who engaged in consensual sex with two boys aged 13 and 14 as a reward for vandalising the car of her rival. She is being prosecuted for ‘three counts of sexual activity with a child’.  The prosecutor said, “the boys had been willing participants, but were not legally capable of giving their consent. At the age of 13 a lot of boys have hormones coursing through their veins and are perfectly capable and willing to have sex but they are mentally immature.”

So, a 5 year old boy is able to determine that he was born with a gender disorder, but two boys, 13 and 14, are not able to determine that they want to get laid.

Funny that!