At 12:36 AM +0100 4/4/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>the linking of waste and birth comes
>from the view of the war.
Well, it's fair to say it doesn't work for me, and irony doesn't make
it work either. The disgust focuses on the body rather than on
violence; the bombers are subservient to the image of shitting,
rather than the other way around. Sure, sexual violence and war are
very intimately linked - no war has ever taken place without sexual
violence, from the enslaving of women by the Greeks to the fall of
Berlin to Mai Lai, and I know the training of American GIs involves a
huge dose of conditioning in the rhetoric of sexual violence - but
birth is by no means an act of violence. I think if you want an
irony to work in it, you'll have to think it through a little more.
I found Dom's poem less uncomfortable on that front: I read it not so
much as homophobic as expressing the suppressed homoeroticism of
violent conflict. There was a similar passage in one of Genet's
novels - Funeral Rites?
Thanks Rebecca and Jill for your notes on the tone overnight; I might
remind everyone here of the list rule against sexism.
Best
A
A
--
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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