Reading The Bluestocking this morning I am taken back to the Hotel Earl just off Washington Square in Greenwich Village circa 1982, where I am alone, watching Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time on the TV – a play about the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz. The experience is infuriating because, as the film draws closer to its conclusion the ad breaks get longer and more frequent. The effect is bleakly comic, with cheery ads for restaurants and car dealers elbowing their way into the horror. Straight out of Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Vanessa Redgrave’s pro-Palestine stance meant the film was banned in Israel and some of the dramatic portrayals were contested by members of the real-life orchestra. Miller himself didn’t mention the play in his autobiography, allegedly because of the antagonism that it kicked up. I have never seen it again, but there was a theme in it that has always stuck with me – not just that we are all responsible to some extent for tolerating appalling behaviour rather than speaking and acting against it, but that, as humans, we are also all capable of the greatest cruelty. This is perhaps our greatest weakness.
“And obviously Americans are the heroes in the story, unlike *other* historical events you might teach in American schools.”
What a bizarre sentence. The “obviously” introduces the ill conceived snide tone. The “might” and italicized “other” maintain it.
I went to public (state) schools in the US. We learned about slavery, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, and many other things that reflected poorly on our history. I’m not sure what we “might” have been taught had we not been distracted by WW 2 and the holocaust.
Sadly, the closest the Profanisaurus gets is ‘Batman’s Cave’, which I’ll leave other readers to work out for themselves. Truly his poetry is his own.
Reading The Bluestocking this morning I am taken back to the Hotel Earl just off Washington Square in Greenwich Village circa 1982, where I am alone, watching Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time on the TV – a play about the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz. The experience is infuriating because, as the film draws closer to its conclusion the ad breaks get longer and more frequent. The effect is bleakly comic, with cheery ads for restaurants and car dealers elbowing their way into the horror. Straight out of Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Vanessa Redgrave’s pro-Palestine stance meant the film was banned in Israel and some of the dramatic portrayals were contested by members of the real-life orchestra. Miller himself didn’t mention the play in his autobiography, allegedly because of the antagonism that it kicked up. I have never seen it again, but there was a theme in it that has always stuck with me – not just that we are all responsible to some extent for tolerating appalling behaviour rather than speaking and acting against it, but that, as humans, we are also all capable of the greatest cruelty. This is perhaps our greatest weakness.
“And obviously Americans are the heroes in the story, unlike *other* historical events you might teach in American schools.”
What a bizarre sentence. The “obviously” introduces the ill conceived snide tone. The “might” and italicized “other” maintain it.
I went to public (state) schools in the US. We learned about slavery, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, and many other things that reflected poorly on our history. I’m not sure what we “might” have been taught had we not been distracted by WW 2 and the holocaust.
Oh god that poem is a car crash 😂🫣 thank you for a great read, as ever