Friday Ephemera #15

I've cut off the part of this image that says what it's an illustration of. Any guesses? The drawing is by Margaret Tarrant.

In any case, you'll find out tomorrow.

Greek love

The latest of my reading for my Greek and Roman literature class is Daphnis and Chloe. It is an example of the less well-known genre in Greek literature of the novel, and it is also a member of the pastoral genre. It is a romance. It has a happy ending.

The novel is in four parts, written by a fellow who may or may not have been called Longus, about whom nothing else is known. For some reason it impressed me particularly. It is so very very close to being completely saccharine, as the idea of the pastoral genre might suggest to you. Daphnis and Chloe, our hero and heroine, are very much innocents, essentially children, who fall in love while herding their goats and sheep. Daphnis is found as a baby by a goatherd, being suckled by a goat, and Chloe is found by a shepherd being suckled by a sheep. They are of course of noble birth, and so the story goes. It's really a very unoriginal plot, but it remains appealing. It is also so close to being sappy--yet it isn't, somehow.

One feature of the story is that Daphnis and Chloe fall in love and don't realize what it is because no one has ever spoken of love to them; they don't know what it is. This got me wondering about romantic love as an instinct. It is something that's so written of, such a societal institution to us now, that it seems so odd never to have heard of the concept, and how do all these love stories we've all grown up hearing and reading and seeing affect our ideas and feelings of love? So that's interesting to contemplate.

Perhaps in my reading of this I was just in the perfect mental and emotional state to accept and contemplate this story. I can see how others wouldn't be, but if you read it at the right time I think it's a lovely read.

Lebensraum

I mentioned a few days ago the play, Lebensraum, that I was going to see. Normally I wouldn't review a production I'm involved with, but I'm only peripherally involved in this one--I'm running the lights for the two shows next Saturday, so having not been through the rehearsal process with it I'm not too attached to it to be objective. But I have seen it three times, so you can be sure I know what I'm talking about.

You've missed the first weekend if you live in Seattle and want to see it, but it's showing next Friday and Saturday at 7:00, and Saturday at 2:00, at the Bathhouse (it's on Greenlake, look up Seattle Public Theater if you don't know it). And it is free! (Though of course accepting donations.) You cannot beat free theatre.

The premise of the play, by Israel Horovitz, is that the chancellor of Germany suddenly has a brainwave and invites 6 million Jews to relocate to Germany. This is of course not well thought out, Germany doesn't have enough jobs as it is, where are they all going to live, and so on. This premise of course brings up the Holocaust and the German relationship to the Holocaust. And it manages to do this extremely well. It is very funny, which I always think is the best way to handle everything. George Bernard Shaw said, "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." As one character says, if you don't laugh, you cry. It is not, of course, making fun of any of this awful history, it is simply handling it gently and with humour.

The play was written for three actors, but this production is performed by seventeen. Still, many of the actors play multiple characters. It is a very theatrical play, often with actors narrating the action, and this works very well for it. I was extremely impressed by the acting. This is part of Seattle Public Theater's education program, so all the actors are high school students. Many of them have been acting for years, and are vastly talented. There's also a question and answer/discussion session after the play (which runs about an hour and 40 minutes including intermission), which I think adds to the experience very much.

If you do live in Seattle, go see this. If you don't, look out for someone in your area producing it, and go see it when they do.

Clouds of Witness

I have hereby finished my first non-class required book since school started. Not that I haven't read others somewhat, just that I haven't finished any of them.

It was Dorothy L. Sayers's Clouds of Witness, the second Lord Peter Wimsey book. Where the last book featured a mysterious naked dead fellow in a bathtub and a disappeared businessman, this one hits closer to home for Lord Peter. His sister's fiancé, Denis Cathcart, is found dead of a bullet in the chest, and his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, is accused of the murder. This book seems to me to be leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor, Whose Body?. I'd solved the mystery in that one twenty pages before Lord Peter did, but this time I was quite stumped until the end. Clouds of Witness is an enormous collection of clues and red herrings and loose ends.

It's a very good mystery, but as with many mystery novels it's the detective who makes it great. He has the most wonderful expressions, amusing divergences from the point that make him rather fascinating.

"I say, I don't think the human frame is very thoughtfully constructed for this sleuth-hound business. If one could go on all-fours, or had eyes in one's knees, it would be a lot more practical."

"There are many difficulties inherent in a teleological view of creation," said Parker placidly.

Just picture having eyes in your knees. Parker, Lord Peter's police detective cohort, is quite an excellent companion for him, believable as someone Peter would be fond of, but also sensible and average enough to balance him out.

I think a mystery was exactly what I needed to get me through a book, and I'm very glad to have read it.

Anniversary and some links

Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I know this because by virtue of taking a German class I acquired a luridly pink t-shirt that says so. I had yet to be born in 1989, but the fact that it was twenty years ago is a bit odd nonetheless.

Irrelevant to this anniversary, I have some links for you.

Libraries of C.E.O.s, a 2007 article just alerted to me by Cornflower's book blog.

Apparently, babies start learning language in the womb.

Colonial Williamsburg has started putting their collection of historic artefacts online. This is mainly interesting to me as a resource for costume research, but it'd be fun to browse through all of it.

Cosy reading

The last two nights we've had thunder and lightning, ridiculous amounts of hail, torrents of rain. We have also had brilliant sunshine, mind you, but the stormy weather has put me in quite the reading mood. Fortunately I've already done most of my homework for the weekend, so I will even have time! What do I have on the table?

Clouds of Witness, by Dorothy L. Sayers. This is my second Lord Peter Wimsey novel, and it is definitely upholding the interest sparked by the first one. I would go so far to say that it is better than the first one. Unsurprising, as that one was just introducing the characters; with the second novel it's really got into the swing of things, Lord Peter can be further explored, we meet more of his family, and so on. I'll have more to say on the book when I finish it; at the moment I'm a little less than halfway through. But maybe I can finish it this weekend! Crossing fingers.

I have not started, but am eagerly looking forward to The Children's Book, by A.S. Byatt. It is sitting, a noticeable presence, on a chair in the living room, waiting for me. I gather it is about all sorts of things, children's books, a family, pottery, changing times, and lots else besides. I read A.S. Byatt's Possession a few years ago and loved it entirely (and thus hated most of the movie), and her writing in general is wonderful. I started The Biographer's Tale a while ago and didn't finish it, but it's still on one of my shelves so maybe I'll get back to it eventually. I do hope so.

So that's what's on the table. I may also finish Daphnis and Chloe. I've read three quarters of it, and half to read the last for next Wednesday for class, so maybe I'll get ahead and finish it. I'm definitely going to talk about that one when I do, since I find it fascinating and lovely.

So that's what's on the table for my weekend, besides drinking lots of tea, seeing the same play twice (Lebensraum by Israel Horowitz, and maybe I'll review it), and buying non-holey jeans.

Friday Ephemera #14

So it's another pumpkiny thing this week. I know Halloween's over, but November is still an acceptable month for pumpkins, and this one is special.It's a gourd carved for Day of the Dead. Sorry, haven't got the source, my mother sent it to me. Wouldn't want to meet this fellow in a dark alley, would you?

A look at Shakespeare

I got a package from my father the other day. This does not sound particularly entertaining, until you learn that it came in a University Bookstore box and was no doubt sent from there, since my father works in the shipping department, and that I live five blocks away from the University Bookstore. Oh, my parents. It was fun to get mail, though.

Anyway, in the box I found a Halloween card, a bar of chocolate, and two books. One of them was the play Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel, which does look interesting, but the other book is the one that particularly caught my eye.

This is The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl. Apparently there is a record of the testimony Shakespeare gave in a court case over an unpaid dowry in 1612, the only spoken words of his that are recorded. His testimony relates to his time as a lodger in the house of a French immigrant family called the Mountjoys, and the biography focuses on this period in his life and his circumstances when he lived there. I've never read a biography of Shakespeare, and while I assume the book will go into some discussion of the rest of his life, I think it will be fascinating to read something about him so closely focused. And something which sounds surprisingly original for a book about Shakespeare.

I'm really looking forward to reading this. Let's hope I can find some time for it.

Miss Woodhouse

I've finally got around to watching all of the new BBC production of Emma. I have to say I loved it. I hear some people were less than thrilled, though I don't know their reasons, but I thought it was lovely. It's the only one of the three Emma films I've seen where I liked the actors for both Emma and Mr. Knightley (I absolutely can't stand Gwyneth Paltrow for no particular reason, and the Knightley in the Kate Beckinsale version was boring). I thought they did a good job both in translating the mood of the book and in making it romantic enough to appeal to modern viewers (which of course they can't help doing, so at least they did it reasonably well).

Emma was not a book I expected to like before I started it. This, of course, was back in the day where I still thought my chances of liking a Jane Austen novel weren't assured. With that reaction, it's funny that it's become one of my favourites. I love Pride and Prejudice for being my first Jane Austen, Persuasion for the story, Mansfield Park for Fanny Price and because it was the first one where I really and truly appreciated Jane Austen's writing, and Emma because it's so very very good. I think it's possibly the most rounded out of the six novels.

Emma is also a very sentimental story for me because somehow it's become a book that is part of the definition of my relationship with my best friend. In a lot of ways we use it to help articulate what we mean in conversations, as a reference point for rather a lot of different topics (which I suppose further points out the roundedness of the book).

With all this in mind, it is absolutely lovely to finally see a film version of Emma that I really feel does it justice.

Euripides

Having read Medea for class, I can now say I have read three of Euripides' plays (the other two being Helen and The Bacchae). I think this is really pretty good. I even, this time around, read most of the (quite long) introduction to the book, and all of the introduction to Medea.

Euripides, it turns out, is of particular interest because no one can decide if he was a feminist (or the Greek variant thereof) or the opposite. He featured women as main characters more often than either of the other two 5th century Athenian tragedians (Aristophanes and Sophocles) whose plays remain to us. These were often very powerful women, who in all kinds of ways defy ancient Greek assumptions of what a woman is supposed to be. Medea is this extremely powerful woman, yet she is also terrible woman. We have to ask whether Euripides was saying that only the bad women can have power, or whether the only acceptable way to show that women could be powerful was to make them bad.

Medea is of particular interest in this question. You know the story, right? She helps Jason steal the Golden Fleece and then runs away to Corinth with him, they have two sons, and then he leaves her to marry the daughter of King Kreon. She is (justifiably) angry, and decides (justifiably?) to kill Jason's new wife, Jason's new father-in-law, and both of her sons. Medea is in many ways very masculine, often uses masculine language for things (yes, I even read the forty billion endnotes that told me this), kills her children using a sword, a stereotypically masculine means of death. She is also very feminine, represented as loving her children enormously, and she kills Kreon and his daughter by poison, a stereotypically feminine method. In Greek terms, of course, appearing on stage at all is masculine. Women were supposed to stay inside the house, and the way the Greek theatre was set up there was a house at the back of the stage; to be on stage you had to come out of the house.

Medea is the driving force of the play. By contrast, all the men are rather ineffective. Kreon knows something bad will happen if he doesn't exile Medea immediately, but this doesn't help him. Jason, too, appears a little wishy-washy. So gender in this play is complicated.

I'm sad the experience of real Greek theatre can't be totally recreated. Greek theatre was much more like a baseball game than a modern play, and there's really no way to change the expectations of modern theatregoers enough to achieve that.

So I liked the play a lot, insofar as it raises interesting questions and musings. I'd like to see a production of it, even if it won't be much like Euripides intended.