I will play one happy one, and I won't read the note
for that, because it's also a long one,
but then I'll play the translation for you.
This is one of my favorite ones if I can find it.
OK.
Heroic.
Helen Holmes, "The Hazards of Helen."
[MUSIC PLAYING]
"Victim?
Tie me up to trestle or bridge.
I bristle, buck, saw through blunt bindings swing and shimmy
to ease myself down burnished poles.
Bold, cold, heroic.
Lock me inside your clerk's closet,
I'll pick its double lock, duck the hucksters ill-timed shot,
tackle robbers in the box car.
Intrepid, I ride astride slender waist-rails uncouple cars,
and mount runaways.
I turn all tails to heads, begin each film fired,
despised til I solve all crises I alone saw coming.
I get my men.
My fans are manifests now of different destinies.
The West is a dead end for those with frailty inbuilt
to their machinery.
Men here hit the skids, lost it all and stocks, cows,
card, slots, topped out and constrained by history.
But I'm still speculative, exciting,
my amplitude the endless futurity
to which my sex has always been traveling.
That's why strangers eat me up in the dark,
laugh when I grab the robber's mitt, the one snatching
at your heartstrings, my leather valise.
Now I bring my mouth down to his wrist
to take a bite that only looks like a kiss."
[LAUGHTER]
I should just say one thing.
The note, I go into it in more detail,
but Helen Holmes did all her own stunts,
which I think is quite--
quite amazing.
And the other thing too to take note of, the myth of the woman,
the image of the woman tied to the train tracks
was actually-- it's sort of a cultural myth.
There were only like two such images and Helen Holmes
paid sort of ironic homage to them
by tying up her boyfriend Tom and leaving
him roped on the tracks in one of her films.
So yeah.
So we have this idea of the hapless, helpless woman, but in fact,
that's--
that's a fabrication.