Ice Storm

Rozenkrantz & Guildenstern are dead

I decided to read Stoppard's play. I'm totally baffled. I don't feel that I obtained any insight into Shakespeare's play (or even know if I was supposed to get any such insight). I don't know what the two characters are about. Of course I "get it" -- they are weaving in and out of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It's about illusion and reality in a play. But I don't see why that's a good way to make that point.

Yesterday I watched the Beatles' movie "Hard Day's Night" which dates from the same era as this play and maybe asks some of the same questions. I like the Beatles' questions better. Who are you if you are onstage? Well, you aren't you and you are you. You can start giving silly answers to silly questions from your adoring public at cocktail parties. OK. I'm done.

Shakespeare in History

To continue my Shakespeare project, this week I read A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro. I am delighted by the approach of this book. The author explains how little actual information is available on the person Shakespeare. We have no diaries, personal papers, or memoirs of Shakespeare -- and no such intimate documents for any of his contemporaries. Recording of personal thoughts seems not yet to have happened in that time. Many previous scholars have sought a retrofitted portrait of Shakespeare in his works. The speculative nature and dangers of this approach were already obvious to my Shakespeare teachers years ago.

Shapiro tries something different: to look at the social and political scene, as recorded in the materials of chroniclers, social history, and annalists. He holds up the details of the year 1599 (fascinating in and of themselves) to the plays that Shakespeare wrote. The work of the censors and licensers, and the records of publications and so on make it possible to date 4 of Shakespeare's plays to 1599: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. He connects each one to the fascinating events of that year.

Also in 1599 an unscrupulous publisher obtained several sonnets by Shakespeare. Some were poems that Shakespeare had circulated in confidence and wished to remain unpublished, others lifted from plays. The publisher produced a pirate edition of these and others not by Shakespeare as The Passionate Pilgrim.

Here in brief are some of those events. First, a perceived threat to England by a second Spanish Armada, which caused a somewhat panicky organization of a defense of the country. Next, military action in Ireland led by Essex whose relationship with Queen Elizabeth was in very bad shape. Essex was engaged in a power trip that also led to his attempt to create a number of new Knights whose titles would bind the holders to him. These events led to the fall of Essex, but from the Shakespeare angle -- they generated interest in the questions of how monarchs hold power, which are explored in the plays. In contrast to this last gasp of feudal relations, 1599 was also the date of the founding of the East India Company, with plans to equip ships for long commercial voyages and so to change the orientation of English greatness. Shakespeare also pursued the award of a coat of arms to his family, and a lawsuit to restore property from his mother's family to which his father had formerly lost the title.

These are bare-bones examples. The book makes all the connections fascinating.

Where in the world have I been?

I learned that there was a website where I was able to create the following map of countries where I have been. My trip to Hong Kong (with a day in Gangchow/Canton) means I get to count China, and my trip to a dive resort across the border of Israel in Egypt allows me to count that whole country too. The map also shows a Scandinavian country too many: I really only highlighted Denmark.


Here is the link if you want to make your own map:
create your own visited countries map

It's fun to make this map and also to look at the comments on the site from people discussing what should be meant by a "country." There is an option for a US map of states one has visited as well.

Stratford upon Avon

The photo above shows the church where Shakespeare is buried, reflected in the Avon river.



These photos date from several years ago, when we visited Stratford-upon-Avon, England and toured several of the houses and sites associated with Shakespeare.

The Taming of the Shrew

While I found The Tempest and Twelfth Night much more delightful than I recalled, I found The Taming of the Shrew to be disappointing. From the first long scene that just leads up to the real play, it seemed scattered --a total contrast to the compact and efficent presentations of character, plot, and emotion of the other two plays.

"Such a mad marriage never was before" (III, ii, 184) says Gremio, one of the servants whose prose-expressed antics reflect Shakespeare's view of them. The Bard reserved prose for the lowly, bawdy, disorderly classes, I learned once. And the lowly, bawdy, disorderly servants seemed to me to dominate this play. What sticks in the mind is one scene where Petruchio pretends to protect shrewish Kate from bad food, poorly made clothing, and improper beds: thus depriving her of nourishment, proper dress, and sleep. And so he tames the shrew. But it's only one little scene in a long play.

At least I'm still keeping my resolution.

Tillie Olsen

The best obituary of Tillie Olsen that I have read: Tillie Olsen, 1913-2007 by John Leonard in The Nation online. Here is a sentence about John Leonard's introduction to Olsen and others in the 60s that I view as another rereading list:

There was a lot of this music around in the early '60s, especially at Pacifica radio, where so many of us went instead of graduate school to play with our politics and microphones, such a plenitude we took for granted, so many books so splendid, so savage and so nourishing, that they seemed to fall from some giant banyan--a Tin Drum and a Golden Notebook, a Catch-22 and The Fire Next Time, Flannery O'Connor and Chinua Achebe, Herzog and V--and we'd never again go hungry for meaning.

The New York Times was more informative (and conventional):

A daughter of immigrants and a working mother starved for time to write, Ms. Olsen drew from her personal experiences to create a small but influential body of work. Her first published book, “Tell Me a Riddle” (1961), contained a short story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” in which the narrator painfully recounts her difficult relationship with her daughter and the frustrations of motherhood and poverty.

See: Tillie Olsen, Feminist Writer, Dies at 94 By JULIE BOSMAN -- Published: January 3, 2007

And from the Washington Post, a summary of her fascinating biography:

Tillie Lerner was born Jan. 14, 1912, on a tenant farm near Wahoo, Neb., the second of six children of Russian-Jewish immigrants who had fled their homeland after being involved in the failed 1905 revolution. Ms. Olsen was strongly influenced by her parents' radical leanings and by Midwestern farm life. "I learned a lot being around cows," she recalled in 2002. "It seemed to me they were so damned patient."

She dropped out of high school in Omaha after the 11th grade and began her long succession of dead-end jobs. "Public libraries were my sustenance and my college," she wrote.

An activist and a member of the Young Communist League, she went to jail for organizing packinghouse workers in the Midwest. She began "Yonnondio" while recovering from pleurisy and tuberculosis contracted because of poor ventilation in the tie factory where she worked. -- "Working-Class Fiction Writer Tillie Olsen, 94." By Joe Holley, Washington Post, Thursday, January 4, 2007.

Twelfth Night

I had forgotten some of the plot twists, so I really enjoyed reading Twelfth Night, second in my Shakespeare reading project.

The theme of "I am not what I am" -- Viola's statement of her position (III, ii, 158) -- impressed me the most. While in every scene, the misunderstandings are comic, they always border on someone getting hurt. I felt as if at every turn of the plot, we were close to going over the line, but we were in good hands: Shakespeare's!

Some of the characters even call attention to the exaggeration of others: "Most excellent accomplished lady, the heavens rain odors on you!" says disguised Viola to Olivia, trying to impress her on behalf of Orsino. "That youth's a rare courtier: 'Rain odors,' well," comments Andrew. "My master hath no voice, lady, but to your own most pregnant and vouchsaved ear," she continues, and he: "'Odors,' 'pregnant,' and 'vouchsaved.' I'll get 'em all three ready." (III, i) The fool also does some of this snide commentary.

Olivia and Orsino, the nobles, are immersed in a self-imposed, perhaps indulgent, melancholy. He because she won't love him, she because she is in mourning for her brother. The more she rejects him, the more he tries to reach her. Though her sorrow is real, her self-imposed isolation and emotiveness seems exaggerated. Their language seems to reflect this.

Viola's disguise as a man is the simplest not-as-I-am, and the most understandable. Marooned in a strange city, she fears to be a young and helpless woman alone, and thus makes herself the servant of Orsino. But as she tries to explain the virtures of Orsino, Olivia falls in love with her. Thus occur the famous variety of misunderstandings and absurdities of dialog between them. Further, Viola's brother -- not lost at sea but roaming the same streets -- is mistaken for her in disguise. As a result, the sea captain who saved the brother's life is sent to jail, feeling betrayed, because the wrong twin (Viola in disguise) failed to acknowledge him. And, taken for disguised Viola, he marries Olivia. So several misunderstandings arise from her seemingly harmless deception.

The fool and his friends play all sorts of false roles and conscious tricks. At the same time, the beautiful songs that the fool sings heighten the deep emotions really being felt. There's a tension between the reality of the emotions and the sometimes exaggerated way the characters express themselves and overstate their case.

Toby, Maria, and their pals are all constantly deceiving one or another of their group. They especially mislead gullible Malvolio, and then lock him up for mad. Misled Malvolio puts on yellow stockings and "cross garters" (which cut off his circulation) because he wants to attract Olivia. This skirts on the cruel, but I think it goes over.

And tomorrow IS Twelfth Night. Good time to enjoy this play.

Lit Crit

At our local Barnes and Noble, I looked over the books about Shakespeare. Surprise: many of the titles for sale this afternoon already appear on my shelf from my last major encounter in graduate school 40 years ago. Still classic: Leslie Fiedler, J. Dover Wilson, A. C. Bradley and other familiar names are fresh in my mind from a trip to my own attic! New authorities have written new books as well, but the overlap is much more than I'd expect.

The Tempest

The first Shakespeare play of my New Year's Resolution is The Tempest.

Its few scenes are so efficient, each one showing the nature of one or a few more of the characters who live on the island or come in on the ship. First the shipwreck: both real and illusory, with violent storming waters empowered by Prospero's magic and his magic spirits. Before one can ask why he desired the storm, he tells the story to his innocent Miranda.

The immediate love between Ferdinand and Miranda has its own existence. It is a love that Prospero could hope for, could set the stage for, but then could only wait for. As well, we learn of the inexorable deception, engendered regret, and reconciliation of the various noble passengers. I remembered each part of the plot, but upon this rereading again I loved the condensation, the impact of each expressive scene.

I had also forgotten the interplay of the elements: water-earth-fire-air. Caliban, the earth-bound spirit, begs the rude and drunken servants from the ship to be his new masters, having already wished every evil on Prospero, who must constantly remind him of his obligations.

"I'll show thee every fertile inch o'th'island" (II, ii, 152) says Caliban of the earth. "I with my long nails will dig the pignuts." (II, ii, 172) Most of all, he wants these strangers to kill Prospero, obtain his book, and take over the powers that he hardly comprehends.

Ariel, all air and spirit, so strongly feels the emotion of the end of the play that Prospero says "Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling/Of their afflictions...?" (V, i, 21) Each delicate song that Ariel sings, his longing for freedom, even the sound of his name, all relate to his airiness. Each time Prospero asks a new magic act from Ariel, he must repeat the promise of freedom to follow almost immediately, as Ariel is ready to rejoin the airiness and timelessness of his nature.

The water all around the Island storms and rages at Prospero's command. Finally, it will drown his book: source and symbol of his island power. Like Ariel, at the end Prospero is free from a spell: "But release me from my bands...As you from crimes would pardon'd be,/Let your indulgence set me free."

Shakespeare

My New Year's Resolution: to read Shakespeare plays.

Winter?

Aerobics Potluck

For 51 weeks a year, we do aerobics and other exercise faithfully, and in all the ways that it's good for us. But today was the day for Marie's classes to come together, do 30 minutes of aerobics and 30 minutes of Pilates, and then have a potluck lunch! We all feel that we are friends, and in fact were busy greeting those whose schedule varies so we haven't seen them for a while.

First, the exercise:
Then food and conversations. I was terrible: everyone brought wonderful home-made things like chicken salad, noodle dishes, deviled eggs, artichoke dip, spicy shrimp, cookies, scones... But I went to Trader Joe's and got grapes, a cheese log, and crackers. I feel bad. Next year I promise to bake!



I have a lot more photos -- but I tried to be selective.

Ann Arbor Theaters

Ann Arbor preserves two really retro theaters. The State Theater now shows movies only in what was formerly the balcony of a large campus-area theater, and has lost much of its original size and style to the redo. The sightlines are terrible: every seat has an awkward view.

The Michigan Theater, in contrast, represents years of preservation efforts, including repainting the overwrought ornateness of gold decor and installing all-new plush velvet seats. The Michigan shows not only first-run films, but also is home to concerts, film festivals, and other civic events. Its theater organ still rises from inside the floor at full theater-organ volume.

Thus, as in these photos, from the corner of State and Liberty one can see two theater marquees of the most impressively antique variety.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

We spent Thanksgiving Day with Arny and Tracy in Lancaster, a wonderful historical town. The best-known activities in Lancaster County are touring the Amish farm areas and shopping at the long-established discount malls. Friday morning, we opted instead for a walk in the historic district around town to see the many one to two-hundrend year old houses. These buildings are beautifully maintained and in many cases decorated for the Thanksgiving season.










After the walk we met Miriam, Alice, Evelyn, and Tom and attended a puppet show at the nearby Hole in the Wall Puppet Theatre.

Mae's Food Blog

I have now moved all the posts on food from this blog to a single-purpose food blog:

Mae's Food Blog

Language and Linguists

For the last few months I have been following a blog called Language Log. It's written by several linguists. The content is very interesting, and the writers have a good sense of humor. Now I have become so interested that I'm taking their advice on books to read. Fortunately, the libraries that I use have many of their suggestions.

First I read:
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language by Geoffrey K. Pullum (he's one of the irreverent Language Log writers). In this book I finally learned the objection to the claim that Eskimos have X words for snow. The questionable thing about this is not whether Eskimos do or don't have a lot of words for snow -- after all, the article points out, even we English speakers have snow, sleet, blizzard, avalanche, flurry, etc. In fact, most languages have a lot of words for things their speakers need/want to talk about.

The author points out that there are many Eskimo languages; it's not trivial to "count" how many words there are for whatever; and so most of the statements are made in total ignorance and lack of any real interest in Eskimos. Or as the author says: "The tragedy is not that so many people got the facts wildly wrong; it is that in the mentally lazy and anti-intellectual world we live in today, hardly anyone cares enough to think about trying to determine what the facts are." (p. 171)

Second I read:
Language Myths edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill. This book is a collection of essays by experts on things that many people wrongly or pretty wrongly believe to be true of language. Some of the essays pointed out things I knew; others were quite new to me.

The third book is:
Word Origins...and how we know them by Anatoly Liberman, which describes how word historians work, where they get their ideas, and to some extent, how to tell when someone claims to trace a word's origin but is really only blowing smoke.

Margaret Atwood: The Penelopiad

I have just read The Penelopiad. In it Margaret Atwood amusingly retells the story of Odysseus's faithful wife in her own words. The time is now. The location is Hades, the fields of asphodel. After millenia as a shade, Penelope is still jealous of gorgeous, selfish, vain Helen. She's still angry for a lifetime of mistreatment and increasingly irritated at mythological misinformation about herself. We hear all about the dishonest nature of wily Odysseus, how she often saw through his tricks, and how much less savory he was in "reality" than in Homer's version. As a shade, she knows all about Homer's version and all the subsequent versions.

Penelope doesn't like her life in Hades much; however, she resists rebirth. In contrast, since his death Odysseus has been "a French general, he's been a Mongolian invader, he's been a tycoon in America, he's been a headhunter in Borneo. He's been a film star, an inventor, an advertising man." (p. 189-90)

My favorite quote from poor Penelope: "More recently, some of us have been able to infiltrate the new ethereal-wave system that now encircles the globe, and to travel around that way, looking out at the world through the flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines. Perhaps that's how the gods were able to come and go as quickly as they did back then -- they must have had something like that at their disposal." (p. 19)

It's a good fun read -- far less challenging than many books by Atwood.

As I read I began to think how many authors have loved to retell old stories in new ways and forms: classic stories from mythology, Arthurian legend, Shakespeare, etc. Some retellings are straightforward; others, like West Side Story, reuse the essential plot in modern dress. The best, like Atwood's tale, refocus from the point of view of a minor or underdeveloped character. The goal may be irony, politics, or curiosity.

My mind exploded with examples:

• Virgil wrote the Aeneid to create a Roman founder myth based in the Trojan war.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court provided Mark Twain with ironic distance from the follies of his own era.
  
• Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea to recreate the first Mrs. Rochester. (She's not the only one to write a story based on this unloved madwoman.)
• Anita Diamant's best seller The Red Tent tried a historic-anthropological take on women in early biblical times through the character of Dinah.
• Wicked, first a novel, later a hit musical, devised a new adults-only personality for the Wicked Witch of Oz. (Author Gregory Maguire has subsequently redone several other children's stories in the same vein.)
• An older Broadway success is The Skin of Our Teeth -- Thornton Wilder mines the Bible. Cute and universal. Now material for high school drama clubs.
  
• In a heavier spirit, Par Lagerkvist created an identity for the crucified thief of Golgotha in Barabbas. (I think this blip has left the radar screen.)
  
• Aldous Huxley offered a distopian version of The Tempest in Brave New World.
• And I can't forget Hollywood's homage to Emma, the movie Clueless.
  

After winning a lawsuit about copyright, Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone -- same story, slave's point of view, Gone With the Wind -- dropped out of sight like a stone. I've never read either book. But I've read/seen all the others on this list. And I know there are lots more, such as at least two more recent retells borrowing characters from Jane Austen novels.

The lawsuit proved that this kind of book isn't a crime. Is it a genre? I don't know.

Armchair travel to Arabian Sands

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger is widely recognized as a classic of travel literature. Thesiger, born in 1910, spent the late 1940s traveling in the "Empty Quarter" of Arabia with Bedu tribesmen. (He objects to the more common name Bedouin for grammatical reasons.) He spoke Arabic, wore native clothing, rode a camel for days and days across wide stretches of desert, suffered hunger and thirst, hid from authorities who hated infidels, hunted Oryx and other desert animals, and generally enjoyed every minute of his escape from civilization.

"All my life I had hated machines," he wrote. "I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. ... I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples." He committed himself to travel the hard way, without any modern conveniences or conveyances: "Perhaps this was one reason why I resented modern inventions; they made the road too easy." (p. 278)

I enjoyed the details the author presents about the Bedu's powers of observation that allowed them to cross empty desert and find the rare watering places for the camels while avoiding hostile tribes. He describes the uncomfortable posture that one assumes to ride a camel, the way that the meager food is prepared, the occasional rain that created discomfort but which they had no way to capture for drink, the varieties of discomfort from cold, sand, wind, scorpion stings, and more. He told how his companions' view that any guest must be given food repeatedly made him fear as his scanty supplies of flour and coffee were offered to strangers. The variety of each chapter is always a surprise.

I suspect that I am wise to know nothing else about Thesiger than the facts presented in this book. I suspect that an Englishman who loved Arabs so much would be on the opposite side of many political situations from me. Evidence: a map of the Middle East (p. 40) where every country is named except Israel, whose boundaries are recognizable but whose existence is unrecognized. I can make a guess what this means. Thesiger stayed away from global politics. He mentioned the Israel independence war only once, in a rather neutral way, stating that his Bedu had never heard of the Jews at all. So I prefer to seek no further than this supposed neutrality.

The author's overall impression in the final pages of the book: "I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate hersmen who possessed, in so much grater measure than I, genrosity and courage, endurance, patience, and lighthearted gallantry." (p. 329)

In other words, we have the work of a romantic Orientalist of a type that can no longer sustain reasonable people's credulity. The development of the clash of civilizations, Christian and Islamic, reflected already in the widespread hatred of infidels Thesiger encountered, has changed ones ability to buy this approach. As he wrote, oil drilling and exploration were already certain to change everything for his Bedu companions. It's interesting to see the last gasp of this romantic voyaging.

Arabian Sands: Revised Edition

Another Hike with International Neighbors

This week we hiked at County Farm Park, near the recreation building where I do my exercise class. About a dozen women participated. The weather and the fall leaves were very beautiful.

I talked to several of the other hikers, and I learned something really interesting from Katie. We were talking about making blogs, and she explained how one enters Japanese characters into a computer -- or a blog. She says one types the phonetic word into the computer (in the Hiragana alphabet). The computer returns the equivalent character (or a choice of possible equivalent character) in the pictorial system. The typist selects the desired character, thus creating a correct version of his or her text. I find this really fascinating.





Note and update: A friend asked about Japanese writing that I mentioned above. Here's a website with a description: Origin of writing in Japan

Early Snow

Update. As often happens, we came up lucky compared to Buffalo. The snow in the picture was essentially 100% of our snow. After that: rain and a few snow showers, but no accumulation. This morning's NYT (October 13) reported:

"BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- A rare early October snowstorm left parts of western New York blanketed with 2 feet of snow Friday morning, prompting widespread blackouts, closing schools and halting traffic."

A Week in Fairfax

When I wasn't watching Miriam and Alice, I also spent an afternoon at the National Gallery of Art, especially enjoying the special exhibit “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris." High point of the exhibit: a stuffed lion attacking an antelope, posed as seen by a taxidermist in Paris years before Rousseau studied jungle creatures in the Natural History museum at the Jardin des Plantes.
On the wall: the magnificent Rousseau painting of the same scene, with the two animals set in a huge jungle of greenhouse plants. For more on this see Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris - The Hungry Lion...

Images from the press (like L'Illustration and Le Petit Journal), postcards, and other source material for Rousseau's eccentric visions also accompanied an amazing assembly of paintings from museums throughout the world as well as in private collections.

Food in Fairfax