I’m taking a course on Shakespeare and we discussed Romeo and Juliet through the lens of the sonnet format. This led me to recall a favorite sonnet, found in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers:
Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.
Lay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
To my great relief, my attempt at a year in photos has only one week left. I admit, I’ve fudged dates a bit here and there, but it has always been at least seven photos a week, even if I sometimes missed a few days. And it’s nearly over. Huzzah!
But then, of course, I’m going to need a new project. If I don’t have something focusing my thoughts, I forget to post.
I’ve done the Best Picture Project. I’ve done week-in-photos (the final week will feature photographs from the ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas, for which I leave tomorrow morning). What to do next?
In the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of time to listen to audiobooks while working or while chasing squirrels away from the apricot tree – the latter is a WHOLE other tangent I’m not going to follow right now – and I found a lecture series at the library that was quite interesting.
Created by The Teaching Company, the 84 lectures of “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition” start with the epic of Gilgamesh and end with “Waiting for Godot,” by Samuel Beckett. The professors delivering the lectures place the authors and the literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, examining elements of a master-work by the author, and showing how it fits into the Western literary tradition. They’re half-hour lectures, so it’s not like these are definitive, and it’s only about 80 authors over a few thousand years, so many are left out.
But it was interesting to me and it got me thinking – why not make a concerted effort to write about reading over the next year?
As soon as I learned to read, I was one of those kids who would devour books. I read the Harry Potter books the first day they came out, often within the first 24 hours. I couldn’t get enough. In college and grad school, so much of my schoolwork involved reading, hours upon hours of reading, that in my down time I couldn’t face the prospect of more printed text. I started watching more videos, listening to more audiobooks, and so on.
While I have no intention of ceasing to watch videos or listen to audiobooks, I am a year out of
Loki says READ!
grad school and I am working on trying to reincorporate leisure reading into my daily life.
So this year, I’m setting myself a blog project of writing about reading. There will be at least one book per month that I’ve been meaning to read, but haven’t read yet. There may be a few that I’m re-reading for the first time in a while. And I’ll write about it. I doubt I’ll go deep into literary or historical analysis (though there may be a little – after eight years of college-level education, I can’t give up ALL my academic leanings). I expect I’ll write more about my reactions to the books, and my thoughts on the experience.
Before I start each new book, I’ll make sure to announce it, in case you’d like to read along with it. Indeed, I hope you do, and post your thoughts in the comments here. It could be like a bloggy book club. Wouldn’t that be fun?
The first book will be Elspeth Huxley’s memoir The Flame Trees of Thika. It was a BBC adaptation of this book, back in the 1980s, that provided my parents with my name.
450 years after the birth of one of the world’s most influential and often-quoted writers, it’s still astonishing to realize just how much of our perception of the major figures of that time is influenced by Shakespeare’s writings. Until the discovery of the skeleton of deposed usurper Richard III, there was no solid evidence that he had any kind of physical deformity, yet we all think of him as the hideous hunchbacked demon of the play RICHARD III. Representations of Henry VIII’s “Great Matter” are still colored by Shakespeare’s depiction of events, especially the infamous moment in the Blackfriars court when Katherine, called by the bailiff, instead kneeled at her husband’s feet and made an impassioned plea, then got up and left. There is some contemporary evidence for this, but still – what a great moment for a playwright to use.
Shakespeare was writing the sixteenth-century equivalent of propaganda films. They’re entertainment, first and foremost, but he’s careful to ally himself with the side that won at Bosworth Field in 1485.
We still revere Henry V, and think of Agincourt because of the play. Yes, he appears to have been the medieval ideal – young, handsome, militarily successful – but he also continued decades of war and then conveniently died before he could solidify his winnings. England spent the next 150 years steadily retreating from France.
In some ways, I think it’s a pity Shakespeare never got the chance to write about the Stuart kings. Imagine what he could have done with Charles I.
Without further commentary, I present to you this famous monologue from HENRY VIII:
KATHERINE: Sir, I desire you do me right and justice,
And to bestow your pity on me; for
I am a most poor woman and a stranger,
Born out of your dominions: having here
No judge indifferent, nor no more assurance
Of equal friendship and proceeding. Alas, sir,
In what have I offended you? What cause
Hath my behavior given to your displeasure
That thus you should proceed to put me off
And take your good grace from me? Heaven witness,
I have been to you a true and humble wife,
At all times to your will conformable,
Even in fear to kindle your dislike,
Yea, subject to your countenance–glad or sorry
As I saw it inclined. When was the hour
I ever contradicted your desire
Or made it not mine too? Or which of your friends
Have I not strove to love, although I knew
He were mine enemy? What friend of mine
That had to him derived your anger, did I
Continue in my liking? nay, gave notice
He was from thence discharged? Sir, call to mind
That I have been your wife in this obedience
Upward of twenty years, and have been blest
With many children by you. If in the course
And process of this time you can report,
And prove it too, against mine honor aught,
My bond to wedlock, or my love and duty
Against your sacred person, in God’s name
Turn me away, and let the foul’st contempt
Shut door upon me, and so give me up
To the sharp’st kind of justice. Please you, sir,
The king your father was reputed for
A prince most prudent, of an excellent
And unmatched wit and judgment. Ferdinand,
My father, King of Spain, was reckoned one
The wisest prince that there had reigned by many
A year before. It is not to be questioned
That they had gathered a wise council to them
Of every realm, that did debate this business,
Who deemed our marriage lawful. Wherefore I humbly
Well, it’s April again, and that means it’s National Poetry Month here in the United States. I’ve been pondering what to do about it this year, since I’m really not much of a poetry reader. The ones I’ve posted over the past two years are really the ones that come to mind when I think of poems I like.
But it occurred to me that I have spent nearly half my life in choirs, and listen to a lot of music. So this month I’m starting with songs and seeing where they take me.
This first poem is going to seem like an immediate contradiction of the plan to post different texts that have been set to music, but bear with me.
During my senior year of high school, I joined a choir that was intense and amazing and challenging. One of the pieces we tackled was a setting of Sara Teasdale’s poem “There Will Be Rest.” Eventually it proved too challenging even for us, and after only one or two attempts during concerts the director removed it from our repertoire. Indeed, one of those attempts stands out in my mind as a spectacular failure – the high voices, the sopranos and tenors, pushed so sharp that eventually the entire soprano section had to drop out. Not good!
But in my memory the poem and the music shimmer gently, like dewdrops on a spiderweb or the way starlight is sometimes set to music. And it’s this great unattained milestone in my mind, so I’ve never forgotten it. I went to poets.org to try and find the poem again.
Instead, I found this other one by Sara Teasdale that left my jaw on the floor.
I Am Not Yours
by Sara Teasdale
I am not yours, not lost in you, Not lost, although I long to be Lost as a candle lit at noon, Lost as a snowflake in the sea.
You love me, and I find you still A spirit beautiful and bright, Yet I am I, who long to be Lost as a light is lost in light.
Oh plunge me deep in love — put out My senses, leave me deaf and blind, Swept by the tempest of your love, A taper in a rushing wind.
This perfectly verbalizes something that’s happened to me a few times now. I find myself involved with someone who’s good and kind and funny and by all accounting someone who is a great match for me, and I desperately wish I was more attracted to him.
It happens to everyone at some point, and it’s so difficult. We want the fairy tale romance, to be swept off our feet and let the world fall away, but modern cynicism says that’s not possible. Except people keep writing about it, so it must happen to someone, right?
There’s this popular idea that if you have to stop and think about it, you haven’t been in love. And anyone who’s been in love will tell you that for a while at least the world DOES fall away.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings; How some have been deposed; some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d; All murder’d: for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
— Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2, William Shakespeare
George R. R. Martin’s sprawling fantasy epic A Game of Thrones is wildly popular – both the books and the critically-acclaimed television series. You really have to try to avoid having heard of one or the other, at least. Both have been recommended to me several times by many people. The theory is that I love fantasy literature (I did manage to get academic credit for studying The Lord of the Rings and related Tolkien works no less than three times) and I enjoy the kind of pseudo-feudal world Martin has created. Both are to some extent true, though I begin to suspect my preference is for specific authors’ creations rather than the genre as a whole.
I’ve tried watching the television show. It was well-done, I freely acknowledge that, and I greatly admire the performances of actors like Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke. But I felt no great drive to continue watching after the first episode or two. So I didn’t.
I’ve tried reading the book – in fact, I am about 100 pages into my fourth attempt to read the first book in the series. Each time I have gotten about 200-250 pages in and lost interest. Even though I know I’ll never have time to read all the books in the world, the fact that I have so little interest in reading a well-written (if ridiculously LONG) series of fantasy novels that are so popular kind of rankles. Perhaps this time I’ll finally give myself permission to stop trying.
Part of my disinterest is that most of my reading material is nonfiction, and has been for several years now. After all, why read Game of Thrones, featuring the struggles between the houses of Stark and Lannister (and others), when I can read about the REAL, historical game of thrones, featuring the struggles between the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England? Also, seriously, Mr. Martin, you didn’t even TRY to be subtle on that, did you?
For the past four nights I’ve watched one of each of the four plays of Shakespeare’s Henriad, the tetralogy that covers the last gasp of the Hundred Years’ War and the start of the Wars of the Roses in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In 2012, the BBC created four films of the plays and released it for television under the title THE HOLLOW CROWN. From Richard II through Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, and concluding with the brief flash of military glory that is Henry V, the series is breathtaking. Indeed, there were entire scenes during which I’m not sure if I was breathing.
The cast lineup is phenomenal – performances by Patrick Stewart, Julie Walters, David Suchet, Richard Griffiths, Clemence Poesy, Rory Kinnear, John Hurt, Geoffrey Palmer, Maxine Peake, James Purefoy, and many others are all wonderful. Jeremy Irons turns in a masterful performance as the aged and unwell Henry IV, burdened by the guilt of his usurpation years earlier. One of the things they did to make this such a personal, moving, gripping production was to continue the trajectory of the masters’ evolution in filmed Shakespeare. Laurence Olivier declaimed his speeches as though onstage in a very traditional kind of theater. Decades later comes Branagh, who speaks Shakespearean English as though it is his natural manner of speaking, but still the great powerful speeches are meant to rouse the troops, and they come smoothly, as if practiced. In THE HOLLOW CROWN, some speeches are done as voiceover, such as Henry V’s prayer before the beginning of the battle at Agincourt, or Falstaff’s speech about honor at the end of Henry IV, Part 1. The intention and effect is to seem not just like that’s how the actors normally speak, but as if they’re coming up with the lines on the spot. It is, for lack of a better word, vernacular in style.
In spite of the fact that Irons gets top-of-the-top billing, the three performances to watch for are Ben Whishaw as Richard II, Simon Russell Beale as John Falstaff, and Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal/Henry V. Beale’s was recognized by the director of the two parts of Henry IV as one of the best, if not THE best, of the past century.
I’d never actually seen any of these plays all the way through, though I read Henry IV, Part 1 in college and have seen parts of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. My impression of Falstaff as a character was fat, drunk, comic relief. I hadn’t understood from my earlier reading that the man’s a weasel. He’s a lying, cheating, thieving coward. Literally. It is incredibly difficult to feel any kind of sympathy for him, and yet, at the end of Henry IV, Part 2 when he tries to rejoin the newly-crowned Henry V’s company only to be publicly, harshly repudiated, you do feel grieved for him. In Beale’s performance you see a man who is stunned as if struck a heavy blow. Falstaff suddenly looks old, scared, and confused. At first he is in denial, believing he’ll be sent for privately, but then he and his companions are all arrested. By the start of Henry V he’s a defeated man, and though he has no lines in the play, is said to have died of a broken heart.
Tom Hiddleston, known to many of my friends as Loki from THE AVENGERS charts the young prince’s transformation from what can only be described as a fifteenth-century frat-boy to the ideal medieval king – young, athletic, and militarily victorious. He looks the part, too. Instead of trying to look like the extant portraits of Henry V, which feature the frankly unflattering haircut reproduced by Branagh in his version, the film’s designers worked with what they have, which is a man who at times looks like energy personified and at other times looks as though he might have been carved from marble, so perfect are the angles in his face. His pale eyes laugh at times, look sad at others, and can blaze and pierce you right through the screen.
The winning performance, however, is Ben Whishaw, who dives headfirst into the complicated role of doomed king Richard II. Richard II is one of the more troubling medieval kings of England. He ascended the throne as a child, and dealt with the Peasant’s Revolt at something like age fourteen. And yet he was not hugely popular as an adult. He was considered extravagant, morally questionable, and in short, the barons did not entirely approve of him. Even Shakespeare is unable to make him all sympathetic or all wicked. This is no Richard III, in which you know who the bad guy is. Richard II is all shades of grey. In fact, it was originally titled “The Tragedy of King Richard II,” and he is indeed a tragic character. In one analysis I read, the author writes, “Pathetic and yet too self-conscious to be entirely tragic, sincere and yet engaged in acting his own sincerity, possessed of true feeling and elaborately artificial in expressing it, Richard is the distant predecessor of more than one hero of the mature tragedies, who suffer in acute self-consciousness and whose tragedy expresses itself in terms that clearly point to the presence of the weakness that has been, in part, its cause.”
Whishaw’s performance is redolent with the air of otherworldliness that you see in someone like Michael Jackson – he is always on stage, always acting a part, and not entirely on the same wavelength as other humans. And yet you sense that in spite of the magnified presentation, his feelings are real and deep. In the making-of featurette to Richard II, the actor and the director spoke of Richard’s sense of himself as an almost messianic figure, and they worked with that. The image of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows also arises more than once, and the production does an admirable job of never quite straying into heavy-handed religious imagery. It’s there, it’s impossible to miss, but you don’t feel like it’s beaten into you.
This is an extraordinary set of films. I heartily recommend it. I suspect I will be returning to it to watch it many more times.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I finally saw LINCOLN tonight. My head is buzzing with so many thoughts that most of them go unfinished, like a person who’s so surprised by something that he or she merely stammers half-started sentences. I’m hoping that writing a little about it here will help me process what I’ve seen, or at least enough of it to let me sleep. It IS nearly midnight after all.
When the nominations for the 2012 Academy Awards were released, it was clear that in spite of the long list the award race came down to three contenders: ARGO, ZERO DARK THIRTY, and LINCOLN. To my mind, they represented three different kinds of voting the Academy could do. ZERO DARK THIRTY is the daring choice, and the Academy is infamous for being a few years behind the curve (I feel like I might be mixing metaphors, but I’m not sure – if so, I apologize). It’s in the same family as BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, I think. Both confident, in-your-face portrayals of the here and now. ARGO, on the other hand, was a middle ground. New enough and with a sufficiently ambiguous message that it would be seen as forward-thinking, as indeed it was. I have no wish to denigrate ARGO, which was a brilliant piece of cinema that entirely deserved the awards it received.
I had LINCOLN written off as a nod to the conservative streak in the Academy’s history. It was a safe choice, glorifying one of America’s most deified presidents, a political martyr who was assassinated on Good Friday. As author Sarah Vowell puts it, that Sunday pastors screamed comparisons between the martyred president and the martyred Jesus. Lincoln died that the country might live. Furthermore, LINCOLN is a Spielberg production. I think it would be hard to find anyone who would argue that Steven Spielberg does not hold an extremely high status in the film world. I thought the film would be good, as Spielberg’s movies almost always are, but that it wouldn’t be anything like its two primary rivals.
Having now watched the film, I must entirely recant my previous position.
LINCOLN is one of the best movies I’ve watched in a long time. Today, nearly 150 years later, we all take the Thirteenth Amendment for granted, that the abolition of slavery was inevitable. And perhaps it was, but we can look back and know that the same way that we know how so many other historical stories end.
Daniel Day-Lewis is extraordinary. The entire cast is extraordinary. I have no idea how the stars aligned to create great actors who can look so like Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, and Thaddeus Stevens (to name a few).
I’d like to know more about Mary Todd Lincoln. From what little I know of her, she seems like a tragic figure. Her emotional state was always, shall we say, unsteady. I don’t have the medical expertise to say whether she was clinically insane – to me, the descriptions read like bipolar disorder or maybe chronic depression. And who can blame her – four children, only one of which survived to adulthood, and that one survivor instigated a nasty and very public case to test her sanity. She lost one child when he was four, another died of typhoid at age eleven, and a third from some undetermined illness at eighteen. Her husband was shot while sitting next to her in a theater box. Can anyone blame her if she was a little cracked?
But what really strikes me is the language. The chaotic House of Representatives, in which name-calling is a legitimate political ploy – I now understand how Senator Charles Sumner was severely beaten (IN the Congressional chamber, no less!) by a fellow Senator. It’s kind of remarkable such occurrences weren’t more common.
And then of course there’s Lincoln. His gift of language was remarkable, from the ability to tell funny anecdotes to his ability to turn a powerful, almost Biblical-sounding phrase at the drop of a hat. The film ends with a portion of the Second Inaugural Address. Delivered in Day-Lewis’ rendition of Lincoln’s famously high-pitched yet husky voice, the words held me spellbound as they always do and I felt tears come to my eyes.
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
–Abraham Lincoln
Second Inaugural Address, delivered March 4, 1865
Truly one of the most beautiful pieces of rhetoric ever written.
One last poem, as we head out of April and National Poetry Month into May, which has all kinds of other things going on in it.
Elizabethan poet and dramatist Thomas Dekker wrote this poem, which was originally published in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600). Due to his lack of reliable patronage, most of his work has been lost, but Shoemaker’s Holiday is acknowledged as Dekker’s masterpiece. It’s a portrait of contemporary London life, and like most of Dekker’s work, tends towards the comic and the romantic.
I wonder who the Peg is in the poem. Peg is a nickname for Margaret – and it must be a character in Shoemaker’s Holiday, though I can’t find any mention of a Peg or a Margaret in the brief Wikipedia synopsis. Saucy little poem, this.
THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY
by: Thomas Dekker
THE month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!
O, and then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer’s Queen.
Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,
The sweetest singer in all the forest quire,
Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love’s tale:
Lo, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a brier.
But O, I spy the cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo;
See where she sitteth; come away, my joy:
Come away, I prithee, I do not like the cuckoo
Should sing where my Peggy and I kiss and toy.
O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green;
Between a trip East for an extended-family gathering and a vicious cold, I’m a little behind my preferred posting schedule of at least once a week.
Here’s another poem for you all. It’s a little cliche, perhaps, but I love it.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.