ARTSCAPE: GERMAINE GREER (below) delivered a typically sensational lecture at the National Library of Ireland's excellent Summer Wreath celebration of WB Yeats's birthday this week, writes SARA KEATING.
According to Greer, Yeats was “not a great man and not a great lover” but he was a great masturbator (she also mentioned that he was a great poet). In her hour-long lecture, Greer, who refuses to take her first questions from men, spoke about Yeats’s “onanistic proclivities” and how he deliberately sacrificed satisfying sexual intercourse for sterile fantasies about unavailable women.
Greer seemed to draw most of her argument from the infamous limerick by Oliver St John Gogarty about Yeats’s relationship with the Abbey Theatre’s patron, Annie Horniman: “What a pity it is that Miss Horniman / When she wants to secure or suborn a man / Should choose Willie Yeats / Who still masturbates / And at any rate isn’t a horny man.”
She supplemented her argument with a few poems ( Leda and the Swan, No Second Troy) and with biographical details of Yeats's relationships with Olivia Shakespeare and Maud Gonne, the latter of whom she politely called an "entre-nous", a euphemism for a word that remains unutterable here but which is commonly used to describe women who lead men on.
Greer also vividly evoked imagined versions of Yeats’s preferred seduction techniques. Maud Gonne’s blank face, she said, was the blank face of utter boredom: “Come on, Willie! Don’t you get it! She just doesn’t fancy you!”
It was an entertaining if glibly provocative talk, which ended with Greer encouraging a (male) interlocutor to go and buy some specialist pornography. Sixty-year-olds, amputees, obese women, “all kinds of weirdness available on the top shelf” will soon give men, serial idealists when it comes to women and sexual desire, a reality check. If that doesn’t work, she said, go witness the “abattoir” of childbirth. “Muses don’t bear your children for a reason,” she concluded.
Irish not-quite-Oscars
It’s common enough for press releases to announce that someone or other has won an award that is “often known as the double-glazing Oscars” or some variant thereof. A couple of these arrived this week, both proclaiming Irish success.
Neil Jordan's Ondinelast weekend won a Golden Goblet for Best Cinematography at Shanghai International Film Festival. The awards, you might guess, are "Asia's equivalent of the Academy Awards". No one, of course, would describe it as Asia's equivalent of the Iftas.
Elsewhere, there was a win for Druid's company stage manager, Sarah Lynch, who was awarded a UK National Award for Stage Management (Individual Award). These awards are "sometimes described as the backstage Oscars", according to the announcement (although surely the backstage Tonys would be more apt). But the win was well merited, as Lynch, who has been with Druid for 12 years, kept six productions on tour across the globe this year. She is currently working on Enda Walsh's upcoming play, Penelope, which will run during Galway Arts Festival, and Walsh described her as "a wonderful collaborator" and "utterly irreplaceable".
The impactof Ulster Bank's sponsorship of Dublin Theatre Festival and Belfast Festival at Queen's was the subject of a Business to Arts and PricewaterhouseCoopers report published this week. According to the survey, the equivalent of 67 jobs were supported by the sponsorship, with an economic impact of €8.4 million across the island's economy. Unsurprisingly, the report concluded that the bank's sponsorship was key to the festival's continued health, but at a time when the monetary value of the arts has been a popular topic for debate, such figures offer some interesting perspective.
