TUESDAY March 17, 2009

First Blog Post by Joyce Marcel

If you are a woman and you can't find yourself -- or at least some part of yourself, your deepest self -- reflected on one of the screens of the Women's Film Festival, then I don't really know what to say to you. I find myself in all of them.

And if you're a man, why wouldn't it be the same? Women's stories are above all human stories -- it's almost embarrassing to have to write those words, you'd think everyone would know that by now -- and these stories of extraordinary and quite ordinary women are lessons in being human.

A little housekeeping first. I was out of town this weekend, but I was told that the first showing of "Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm," was well attended Saturday evening, and that many men came (heh, heh) as well as women. The film tells a fascinating story, which I covered in my Brattleboro Reformer column "Getting a Buzz," which is posted on this site.

I'm introducing a new feature this year. It's called "Think and Discuss." The first topic is from "Passion and Power."

Discuss: Are there really two different female orgasms, a clitoral one and a vaginal one? Is there really a G spot, or was that idea invented to return heterosexual women to the penis, after they'd discovered vibrators and were spending a lot of money on batteries? Does the movie confuse the masturbatory with the intercoursal, if that's a word? After all, vibrators are great, but they aren't everything. Or are they?

20 SECONDS OF JOY


I still don't know what to make of the film "20 Seconds of Joy" by Jens Hoffman.

The film tells the story of Karina Hollekim, a stunning blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, superbly fit Norwegian blonde who enjoys throwing herself off (very) high cliffs and free-falling -- or flying, really -- until the very last minute before she has to open her parachute.

Every time she throws herself off another cliff I scream.

The sport is called BASE jumping (Building, Antenna, Span or Earth - the four categories of jumping).

Needless to say, the sport is extremely dangerous. And sponsored. Karina's clothing was covered with -- no great surprise here -- Red Bull logos.

Karina knows how dangerous it is.

"It's insane watching your your best buddies die," she says. "You have to ask yourself, is it worth it?"

And her father agrees. "There's a lot of statistics against her."

Yet when you watch her in her flight suit, soaring against the cliffs like a butterfly, it's breaktakingly beautiful. It lifts your spirits and elevates your comprehension of human capability. Isn't it all of our dreams -- and our nightmares -- to fly?

We can' even imagine the rush of adrenaline that shoots through her, the vistas she sees, the emotions she feels.

BASE jumping is Karina's joy, her passion and her obsession. Like jockeys and other thrill-seeking athletes, she's hooked on it. "If I don't do it, I'm not a complete person," she says. "I'm not a happy person."

Of course her friends are terrified for her safety. But Karina isn't concerned. She frankly says that the only thing that would stop her would be becoming a paraplegic or a mother. Odd choices, come to think of it.

But when she crashes into rock at 100 miles an hour and shatters both her legs, you're along for the ride because she's filming the jump.

The result? Twenty-one fractures in one leg. The doctor says she won't ever walk again. After myriad operations, she speaks from a wheelchair, and her biggest concern? "I can do everything right and it still can go wrong."

Then, subdued, she asks, "Is it really important to jump off a cliff for 20 seconds of joy?"

Think and discuss: Is Karina crazy, or does her obsession make sense to you? Or both?


THE POET'S VIEW: KAY RYAN: CHICKENS AND THE FUNNIES

This was just an absolute smashing film. By Mel Stuart, it's part of a wonderful series on the lives and work of both male and female poets. Kay Ryan was absolutely unknown to me -- she's the U.S. Poet Laureate for 2008-2009, which shows you how little I know about poetry -- so it was a special pleasure hearing her read, seeing her home and watching her work.

She write short poems with internal rhymes and wise thoughts that strike you in the heart as truths. In "Theft," for example, she compares the loss of the mind through diseases like Alzheimer's to a fox sucking out the insides of stolen eggs. The poem went by so fast -- my thanks to Stuart for showing us the words as Ryan reads, which makes it infinitely easier to comprehend -- that I can't quote it.

And oddly, since I'm writing this in the library, I can't find any of Ryan's poems on the shelves.

As a writer, though, Ryan's thoughts about work were especially interesting to me. And again, they struck as truths that I would have told myself, had I thought of them. For example, she said that she writes "from my desire to stop doing nothing." Exactly.

And, "A writer needs not seek suffering. Enough suffering will come to her."

And, she said, she writes in longhand on yellow legal pads because "you can't save mistakes in the computer." You never know whether, in an hour or so, something that you erased will be exactly what you need, while what you saved should be erased.

Think and Discuss: This comes from Ryan herself: "Is it worth it to be a poet?"