A Meme

1. How tall are you barefoot? 5'2" and a little bit.
2. Have you ever been unfaithful in a relationship? I believe not.
3. Do you own a gun? No.
4. If you had a mental disorder, what would it be? Something resembling Lucy Snowe's.
5. How many letters are in your crush's name? What crush?
6. What do you think of hot dogs? They are edible, and occasionally delicious.
7. What's your favorite Christmas song? No particular favorite.
8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? Coffee.
9. Do you do push-ups? Have done in the past.
10. Have you ever done ecstasy? No.
11. Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend? Of course I have friends ;)
12. Do you like the rain? Yes, mostly.
13. Are you in love? With what?
14. Do you like creamy or crunchy peanut butter? I am not fond of peanut butter.
15. Do you have A.D.D? No idea.
16. Full initials? :P
17. Name 4 thoughts at this exact moment.
- I am very nervous about prospective interviews/future
- I want to get a dose of Jane Eyre tonight to calm my nerves.
- It is frightfully HOT in my room.
- I must do more reading and plan for what is ahead.
18. Name the last 3 things you have bought in the past week.
- Another pair of flip-flops.
- Groceries.
- Interview necessities.
19. Favorite movie? Changes often..anything that makes me think a lot.
20. What time did you wake up today? 8 ish.
21. Can you spell? I would hope so.
22. Current worry? Being indecisive about an interivew.
23. Current hate? The fact that I haven't done anything substantially creative in days..or weeks, rather.
24. Favorite place to be? In my Imagination.
25. Least favorite place to be? Current state of joblessness/uncertainty.
26. Where would you like to go? Ireland.
27. Do you own slippers? Yes.
28. Where do you think you'll be in 10 yrs? I hope to be doing something I love. (No doubt my parents expect me to be married by then..sigh).
29. Do you burn or tan? A bit of both.
30. Yellow or blue? Depends.
31. Would you be a pirate? Perhaps.
32. Last time your phone rang? This evening.
33. What songs do you sing in the shower? None.
34. As a child, what did you fear was going to get you at night? Everything ghastly imaginable.
35. What's in your pockets right now? Which pockets?
36. Last thing that made you laugh? Can't remember.
37. Best bed sheets you had as a child? I can't remember..I don't think there was a favorite.
38. Worst injury you've ever had? Scar obtained as a result of trying to jump over barbed wire when I was about 8 yrs old.
39. What is/was your GPA? Confidential :P
40. How many TVs do you have in your house? 1
41. Who is your loudest friend? None of them are loud.
42. Who is your most silent friend? Me or maybe my friend A.
43. Does someone have a crush on you? Not likely.
44. Do you wish on stars? Yes.
45. What is your favorite book? Villette, Jane Eyre.
46. What song did you last hear? Probably something mellow on the radio.
47. Who is the last person you kissed? In what sense?
48. What's your all-time favorite memory with your significant other? No grounds for that.
49. What were you doing at midnight last night? Blogging probably.
50. What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up? Ah, another day!

To Tame a Shrew?

Along with being portrayed as demons, witches, and temptresses, women have also been portrayed as fiesty creatures, in need of being 'tamed'. This fact was blatantly obvious when I had a chance to observe a production of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" this weekend.

I was excited to see this play. Firstly, because I had enjoyed it very much when I read it as a twelve year old, and secondly, becuase I had heard that this version would have a 'modern' twist and I hoped for an interesting adaptation.

I was disappointed on both counts.

I found that I have changed so much and come a long way since I was 12. Whereas Petruchio's treatment of Katherine and his method of changing her used to amuse me, now I could hardly endure more than a few minutes of his cruelly misogynistic behavior. For he was a misanthrope! Being almost half her height taller than her, and of a larger build, he over powered Katherine from the start. She had no say in the marriage, and no support from her father, who only wished to get rid of her because he feared she had little prospects for marriage. So here she was literally sold off to a man, who desired her dowry more than herself. And then her husband turns out to be a worse terror in that he deals harshly instead of gently with her. I agree that Katherine is the type of woman who needed something harsh to set her right. I agree that she misbehaved badly before her marriage. She was too cross and could hardly ever have a decent conversation without wrecking the house. However, her husband's tactic involved making her meek and submissive. At the end of the play, Katherine shows all the women and men around her that she is the most obedient wife, for she listens to all her husband's commands without question. She tells the women in the room that a woman must always obey her husband because he works so hard and loves her so much while she languishes in her home, being pampered by the fruit of his hard work. She warns women to not be angry, but be pliant and accepting. She tells them that ire would get them no where. I understand that a woman, or anyone, should not go around destroying everything and wrecking havoc verywhere in the manner that Katherine did. However, what kind of punishment is it when all her fire is quenched at the end? When all we are left with is a little puppet, who listens to all that he husband tells her, because he has so much control over her? What kind of woman is she who has no opinons of her own? Is she then not a toy to be used for the sole purpose of giving pleasure to a man?

I felt like Katherine had died at the end, even though everyone applauded her conduct and esteemed her as fine example of virtous womanhood. When the play ended, the audience clapped wildly. I didn't know what to do.

After the play ended, my friend (who was just as furious with the whole episode as I was) and I happened to spot the director mingling with other guests. We walked up to him and inquired as to what his thoughs were about the message in the play, and how he hoped it would address a modern audience. He replied saying that Katherine wasn't wholly submissive, that she still maintained a sly way of dealing with Petruchio's commands, that she was not innocent as she seemed by the end. We told him that the play didn't show enough of what he claimed. When he insisted that Katherine could only marry Petruchio and that they were equals, I mentioned that Petruchio always had the upper hand, for he always knew how to deal with Katherine. Whereas Katherine had to obey him by the end if she is to live peaceably with him. Petruchio could be cunning or not if he wished but Katherine could not because she had no way out.

As for the 'modern twist', the setting was America in the 50s. I suppose one could say that this was an age before the feminist revival of the 60s. Does it still mean that we can accept the social mores that were being implied in the play? Katherine speaks to the audience at the end about submission and obedience toward her husband. Are we meant to take this as invaluable advice for all time? Or are we meant to think of it as the speech of a repressed 50s housewife, and be glad that we are living in a different time?

More importantly, how far have we changed? It is contemporary actors who played those roles. I wonder what thoughts run through their minds when they perform this play.

Mistress of Magic

Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock isn't an easily forgettable book. If one has the pleasure to read it, it won't fail to mesmerize! The first book, called Griffin and Sabine is followed by two sequels called Sabine's Notebook and The Golden Mean and they can be enjoyed together as a trilogy. However, each book is very unconventional and it is this unconventionality that makes it stand out. The story is told through a series of fantastical pictures on post cards, and letters that the protagonists exchange between one another (which incidentally we, the readers, will find enclosed in beautifully decorated envelopes glued between the pages). In such a way, we are drawn into a most intimate correspondence that provokes our voyeuristic desires, for we are caught in the trap of the forbidden act of reading someone else's letter, and enjoying it in the process.

The premise of the story is that Griffin Moss, an artist living in modern day London receives a post card in the mail from a woman called Sabine Strohem who lives in an island in the South Pacific. What is puzzling is that she seems to know all about Griffin and his work while he does not at all know of her existence, and moroever, has never met her. As their correspondence takes flight, and each wishes to learn more of, and visit each other, they find obstacles on their paths to unite with each other, leaving them unable to be with each other in the same place and point in time, until the end, which I will not give away.

What struck me about this book is the depiction of the female protagonist. The author, a male, has sought to portray her as a Creature of Magic instead of an earthly human being. It is Sabine who contacts Griffin first, and not the other way round. While Griffin had normal parents and was brought up as any other human being, Sabine is a mystery from the very beginning. She lives in an island, whereby we are introduced to her exotic nature. Moreover, she does not know of her parents or how she even came to exist, for her adoptive island parents had found her one day as an abandoned baby. It is Sabine who can see Griffin and his work, while Griffin cannot see hers, although she too is a talented artist, if not prolific as he is. As the story progresses, we learn that Griffin is enchanted with Sabine, and eventually, cannot go on without corresponding with her. He claims that she becomes his only source of joy in his otherwise lonely existence.

Griffin is seduced by Sabine, by whatever she represents, whether Magic, Art, Reality, or Desire. By the end of the third book, we feel a sense of eeriness and unease about Sabine. We are more confused about her identity and her purpose. My question is, why did the author make Sabine, a woman, as the creature who seduces a man? Why couldn't it have been the other way round whereby a Man of Magic seduces a human woman? Though she is given supernatural gifts, she is filled with mystery and elicits fear so that we are not sure if she is the ideal lover or the ideal nightmare.

In this sense, Grffin and Sabine resembles the demon lovers of the Romatic poems, such as Coleridge's Christabel and Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci. It seems that men were (and are still) obsessed with the different extreme shades of women. According to them, a woman can be just as beautiful as she can be vicious. But I wonder why they view women as creatures composed of these extremes. Can a woman not be a little of both? Can a woman not be allowed to have a moderation of feelings? Can the woman not be beautiful without having evil tendencies? Can the woman not be viewed as good without being evil?

If men were scared of magic, then why were they (primarily such poets) fascinated with ethereally beautiful women? If they wanted to stay away from magic, thinking it is wrong, why not marry a woman who is less beautiful? It seems to me that these men chased after what they believed to be Beauty, which according to Keats, is truth. However, absolute Beauty does not exist, for Beauty is mixed with its opposite; It is impossible to "unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain". And so, when poets imagine an ideal woman, they intially desire her to be beautiful, but this overwhelmes them in some manner and so she is imagined as a demon.

But what is the casue of this uncertainty in men? Why should men create a demon of a woman? Are they afraid of women? What about women frightens them? Are they afraid of women or of their own natures? Perhaps they cannot get what they desire for themselves (for example, ambition) and so blame the woman as the source of their failure. This story is not unfamiliar, beginning with the Biblical tale of the Original Sin.

Ironically Griffin needs Sabine just as much as she needs him. The books will not exist without Sabine, without her Magic. We would not know of Griffin's art if it wasn't for Sabine. Sabine is the source of a man's Art. Men need women to fuel their imaginations, to fuel their Art, to live. In the same vein, the poems about demon lovers by the Romantics would not exist without the mystery women, for these women weild such power, the power to transcend men's impulse to vilify them, as well as the power to transcend time.