Dutton was at times considered a contrarian; in our [ie LA Times] opinion pages in 2004, he wroteI was less generous, hoping that Gollum would channel Hannibal Lector and go munchies on Frodo, Sam ("oh master Frodo. Oh, Sam. Oh, Master Frodo. Oh, Sam. Oh, Master Frodo"), the longhaired wizard and all those elves.
[Peter] Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' represents the victory of special effects over dramatic art. ... I have never looked at my watch as often during a movie as I did in The Return of the King. Toward the end, I found myself desperately cheering on the giant spider in hope of getting home early. Eat Frodo! Eat him!
I've meanwhile been reading 'Pee(k)ing into Derrida's Underpants: Circumcision, Textual Multiplexity, and the Cannibalistic Mother' by The Rev. Dr. Philip Culbertson, The College of Saint John the Evangelist (Auckland, New Zealand) in (2010) 10 Journal of the Society for Textual Reasoning
In Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Four - the date was Columbus Day, October 12 - I was sailed like a frisbee quite involuntarily into the ocean of patriarchal heterosexism, of male hegemony, and of maternal betrayal, as the mark of circumcision was inscribed forever on my flesh. As I was hurled through the fog-obscured skies of gender expectation, my foreskin was ripped away in a gust/o of parental violence.For me it is more impressive, or simply more fun (in the spirit of Derrida), than Culbertson's 'Designing Men: Reading the Male Body as Text' in (1998) 7 Journal of the Society for Textual Reasoning .
Four hundred and fifty-two years separate these two events, and yet Columbus and I hold a wound in common, like Freud, like Derrida. Columbus was, by most accounts, a Marrano, a Jew who adopted the external trappings of Catholicism in order to survive the successive waves of persecution and expulsion. I am not a Jew, but I, like Columbus - like Freud, like Derrida - am circumcised, involuntarily determined a child of patriarchy long before I could think for myself.
Who wounded me, and why was I wounded? As I struggle through the unveiling of my scars, so I unveil the wounds that all men carry. Some of us carry them visibly on our .... Even more troubling are the invisible wounds of the uncircumcised, the unreadable marks written on the bodies of men who are wounded and do not know by whom, or why, or even that they bear/bare wounds.
How do we make meaning out of the practice of male circumcision in the world, in the South Pacific, in Aotearoa-New Zealand, in the contemporary men's movements, and above all in the thought of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida?
That response is presumably a reflection of the truth of the Schopenhauer aphorism, quoted elsewhere by Culbertson for the New Zealand Association of Counsellors in 2007, that "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world".
