About a month ago I re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick 1968; aka Blade Runner), in which people have this very special relationship with the few animals that they've managed not to kill off yet, and it's a huge status thing to own an animal but more than that, it's almost the only remedy for the spiritual deadness the remaining inhabitants of earth feel.
And then today I was watching animal videos and was so mushified by this little buddy
it got me thinking about how much people seem to have this - it seems - increasing relationship with videos of animals. Of course there's easier access than ever. Maybe people living in industrialized landscapes have always had this sense of longing and greater peace when they watch animals? So maybe it wasn't exactly prescience on Dick's part, but at the very least pretty perceptive.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Elizabeth Rex
Just got back from Timothy Findley's Elizabeth Rex at the Saidye Bronfman Centre. Was charmed to be sitting two seats away from my CEGEP English teacher Yvonne Klein, who assigned us Findley (Not Wanted on the Voyage). It took me until intermission to place her. Surprisingly, I recognized her face, even though I am utterly incompetent at facial recognition in almost all contexts, including people I know well.
The play is full of clever lines, and most of the actors were good; there was something lacking in the direction though. The play is set in a barn where William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, and their respective entourages (actors and court ladies) spend a night awaiting the execution of Essex and Southampton for treason. It's a sill setup but made slightly less silly than it sounds as summary here. One of the men that Elizabeth has consigned to death is her ex-lover. In the barn there is an actor with the pox who plays female parts. He got the disease from his lover, an army captain. And so they are pat complements to one another: he the man playing women's parts, given a deadly disease by his lover. She the woman playing a man's part, bestowing death upon her ex-lover. And they spar, with words and at one point with a prop sword (I mean it's a prop within the action as well as without). Anyhow, it is one of those plays where the lines are good and the setup is good but there is perhaps not enough development, and so the second half was not as interesting as the first. And yet there are writers are of very wordy plays who manage to get out of this trap: Tom Stoppard always has some difference between his acts, so that you feel like maybe something is moving though there may be little in the way of action. Still, always hard to know with a play one encounters for the first time whether the faults are in the text or the production. And despite these faults it was fun and entertaining to sit through.
The play is full of clever lines, and most of the actors were good; there was something lacking in the direction though. The play is set in a barn where William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, and their respective entourages (actors and court ladies) spend a night awaiting the execution of Essex and Southampton for treason. It's a sill setup but made slightly less silly than it sounds as summary here. One of the men that Elizabeth has consigned to death is her ex-lover. In the barn there is an actor with the pox who plays female parts. He got the disease from his lover, an army captain. And so they are pat complements to one another: he the man playing women's parts, given a deadly disease by his lover. She the woman playing a man's part, bestowing death upon her ex-lover. And they spar, with words and at one point with a prop sword (I mean it's a prop within the action as well as without). Anyhow, it is one of those plays where the lines are good and the setup is good but there is perhaps not enough development, and so the second half was not as interesting as the first. And yet there are writers are of very wordy plays who manage to get out of this trap: Tom Stoppard always has some difference between his acts, so that you feel like maybe something is moving though there may be little in the way of action. Still, always hard to know with a play one encounters for the first time whether the faults are in the text or the production. And despite these faults it was fun and entertaining to sit through.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Reasons why 32 is better than 25 was
Anytime I have a moment of worry that getting old is some kind of disability and that I should mourn for my lost twenties, I remind myself how much better pretty much everything is now than it was even just a few years ago, not to mention how incredibly much better it is than when I was a teenager. Then I realize that there's no point in being upset over a number when absolutely all the meaningful effects of that number are positive. Here's a short list:
1) No more law school -- wait, not strictly true, but the PhD allows much more freedom and individuality
2) The loss of embarrassment
a) dancing
b) when by myself in a social situation
c) walking down the street
d) running down the street
i) to catch a bus
ii) as its own activity
e) as a result of this the better ability to understand what I want in life and not confuse the wider community's goals -- money, prestige, fancy clothes -- for my own
f) slowly but surely -- and only quite recently -- loss of some general embarrassment about not looking right, being too fat, too unkempt, not wearing makeup or heels all that jazz
3) Less passion -- meaning fewer crying jags, reduced mood swinging, sense that some next step is the be-all and end-all, and all in all more control over my mental states
4) Better (I think) ability to appreciate the good things and people around
Funny so many of these are about losing something, rather than gaining something, but the overall effect is definite gain.
1) No more law school -- wait, not strictly true, but the PhD allows much more freedom and individuality
2) The loss of embarrassment
a) dancing
b) when by myself in a social situation
c) walking down the street
d) running down the street
i) to catch a bus
ii) as its own activity
e) as a result of this the better ability to understand what I want in life and not confuse the wider community's goals -- money, prestige, fancy clothes -- for my own
f) slowly but surely -- and only quite recently -- loss of some general embarrassment about not looking right, being too fat, too unkempt, not wearing makeup or heels all that jazz
3) Less passion -- meaning fewer crying jags, reduced mood swinging, sense that some next step is the be-all and end-all, and all in all more control over my mental states
4) Better (I think) ability to appreciate the good things and people around
Funny so many of these are about losing something, rather than gaining something, but the overall effect is definite gain.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
List: Memories of remembering
Week of lists on remembering day 5: a list of memories of memories:
1) I remember a day when I was about eight years old being struck by an awe-inspiring vivid memory from my infancy: it was flannel. The whole memory was just the feel and close-up look of flannel. But it came to me with the very distinct attendant feeling that it was a memory from when I was a baby. I was very excited about this. Even at the time I questioned its authenticity and now of course I must question it even more, because I don't have the memory anymore; all I can do is remember remembering it. I'd be really curious to know if other people have similar memories (or pseudo-memories).
2) When I was four my parents emptied their RRSPs and boarded a plane with their 12-year-old, eight-year-old and soon-to-be-five-year-old kids to drive around Europe in a rented car for three months. There are lots of pictures of this trip and lots of stories got told about it for years after. Also, when we came back we made some of the pictures into a collage that was then framed and still hangs in my parents' dining room (maybe if I become clever I will find a way of appending a picture of the collage to this post). Anyhow, I remember a lot of things that happened on this trip, but I believe that most of those things I remember I actually don't remember at all, I just have heard the stories and seen the pictures of me there and my brain has put it all together into a form that is indistinguishable from real memory.
3) There are also some memories from that Europe trip that are a bit like a mix of the first and second: I am sure I remembered them at some point, and now I think I remember remembering and also know the stories from my parents, and have seen the pictures. For instance, I remember that when I turned five in Delphi, we went into a little restaurant and they ordered me a tiny chocolate cake that had one candle in it, and the people at the table next to us sang along to happy birthday. I thought this was awesome. What I mostly remember now is how later, as a kid, I remembered how awesome it was that the people sitting next to us sang along. As an aside, funny how a five-year-old thinks it's so cool when there's other anglo tourists who happen to be right there at the table next to us by good fortune of having chosen the same restaurant in all of Delphi. That five year old has something over the later version of the Western tourist (though I try to fight the snobbery, I'd still be way happier if my chosen restaurant had only Greek speakers in it now).
4) It has happened to me at least once that I have 'remembered' being somewhere when someone tells a familiar story, to be told that I wasn't actually there. My mother does this all the time. It's a slightly worrying view into my future.
1) I remember a day when I was about eight years old being struck by an awe-inspiring vivid memory from my infancy: it was flannel. The whole memory was just the feel and close-up look of flannel. But it came to me with the very distinct attendant feeling that it was a memory from when I was a baby. I was very excited about this. Even at the time I questioned its authenticity and now of course I must question it even more, because I don't have the memory anymore; all I can do is remember remembering it. I'd be really curious to know if other people have similar memories (or pseudo-memories).
2) When I was four my parents emptied their RRSPs and boarded a plane with their 12-year-old, eight-year-old and soon-to-be-five-year-old kids to drive around Europe in a rented car for three months. There are lots of pictures of this trip and lots of stories got told about it for years after. Also, when we came back we made some of the pictures into a collage that was then framed and still hangs in my parents' dining room (maybe if I become clever I will find a way of appending a picture of the collage to this post). Anyhow, I remember a lot of things that happened on this trip, but I believe that most of those things I remember I actually don't remember at all, I just have heard the stories and seen the pictures of me there and my brain has put it all together into a form that is indistinguishable from real memory.
3) There are also some memories from that Europe trip that are a bit like a mix of the first and second: I am sure I remembered them at some point, and now I think I remember remembering and also know the stories from my parents, and have seen the pictures. For instance, I remember that when I turned five in Delphi, we went into a little restaurant and they ordered me a tiny chocolate cake that had one candle in it, and the people at the table next to us sang along to happy birthday. I thought this was awesome. What I mostly remember now is how later, as a kid, I remembered how awesome it was that the people sitting next to us sang along. As an aside, funny how a five-year-old thinks it's so cool when there's other anglo tourists who happen to be right there at the table next to us by good fortune of having chosen the same restaurant in all of Delphi. That five year old has something over the later version of the Western tourist (though I try to fight the snobbery, I'd still be way happier if my chosen restaurant had only Greek speakers in it now).
4) It has happened to me at least once that I have 'remembered' being somewhere when someone tells a familiar story, to be told that I wasn't actually there. My mother does this all the time. It's a slightly worrying view into my future.
Monday, June 18, 2012
List of items I remember seeing in my Bubby Freida's house
1) Lots and lots of flowers made out of beads (she strung these herself, each bead individually to make a strand which would be joined with others to make a petal, joined to other petals to make a flower, added to bouquets that would were pushed into clear marbles at the bottoms of crystal vases)
2) Two mosaics (she made these too; she was very crafty)
3) a painting of trees with red leaves fallen everywhere (also by Freida)
4) a sectional couch covered in clear plastic
5) a blue pail of toys on the floor, behind the corner section of the couch
6) a big television
7) a remote control (we didn't have one of those so it was exciting)
8) a mirrored jewellery tray; on it a gold latticework ring with little diamonds in it, and a small gold watch
9) a white-enamel and metal perfume bottle
10) Jell-O with pieces of fruit in it
11) Whippets
12) a plastic cube with different pictures of Cousin Daniel on five sides.
2) Two mosaics (she made these too; she was very crafty)
3) a painting of trees with red leaves fallen everywhere (also by Freida)
4) a sectional couch covered in clear plastic
5) a blue pail of toys on the floor, behind the corner section of the couch
6) a big television
7) a remote control (we didn't have one of those so it was exciting)
8) a mirrored jewellery tray; on it a gold latticework ring with little diamonds in it, and a small gold watch
9) a white-enamel and metal perfume bottle
10) Jell-O with pieces of fruit in it
11) Whippets
12) a plastic cube with different pictures of Cousin Daniel on five sides.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Week of lists day 3: list of lists I'd like to make
A list of lists about remembering that I'd like to write
1) Birthdays I can remember
2) Earliest memories, real and imagined
3) List of funniest things my father has said ('those men are so old if they were alive today, they'd be dead')
4) List of inside jokes in my family (there'll be overlap with list 3)
5) Things I can remember about each of the three grandparents that I met
6) List of commercials I can still remember that stopped playing by 1992
7) List of things that make my brother and I laugh till it feels like my insides might rupture
and, not a memory one, but a birthday-related one,
8) List of characteristics I'd like to have when I'm 42 and 72
1) Birthdays I can remember
2) Earliest memories, real and imagined
3) List of funniest things my father has said ('those men are so old if they were alive today, they'd be dead')
4) List of inside jokes in my family (there'll be overlap with list 3)
5) Things I can remember about each of the three grandparents that I met
6) List of commercials I can still remember that stopped playing by 1992
7) List of things that make my brother and I laugh till it feels like my insides might rupture
and, not a memory one, but a birthday-related one,
8) List of characteristics I'd like to have when I'm 42 and 72
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Week of Lists Day 2: Why I hated elementary school
I remember really hating elementary school. I disliked pre-maternelle, they were always trying to tell me what to do -- for instance one time I tried to paint a rooster and they told me the assignment was to paint a christmas tree and that I had to do the assignment, with the result that somewhere in my parents' basement there is a green roster with a trunk instead of feet. I thought they were idiots - who cares if I draw a christmas tree or a rooster? I disliked maternelle, too, which was at the same school as my elementary, Ecole Nouvelle Querbes. But I hated grades one through five.
1) The other kids scared me. They were intimidating and it seemed like you could always say the wrong things.
2) Though I really liked Yves, my grade one teacher, he went on burnout leave and never came back, so for grades two and three we had a series of medium-term subs, none of whose names I remember. Is that weird, that I don't remember their names? They were there for months, and there were probably only three of them in total. I characterized them as temporary, though, and didn't think much of them. This is a guess.
3) I had no friends. I was conscious of this and as a fact about myself I think it bugged me. I don't think I thought enough about the reality of these things to consider what having a friend in class would have meant, so I can't say that the lack of friendship was in itself actively upsetting, but the fact of it disturbed me. I did have one friend from when I was four, Edith, who was at Querbes, and she was tough and got along well with the other kids, bu she was in another group and I didn't see her much. In grade 5 I became somewhat friendly with a girl called Sarah Pépin, but she couldn't invite me to her birthday party because her best friend Miriame said she wouldn't go if I did (I had caught Miriame cheating at a board game a year earlier, perhaps these were related?) As consolation, Sarah invited me to her grandparents' cottage for the weekend.
4) In everyone else's defence, I definitely was a weird kid. I didn't brush my hair for a year because it hurt too much to brush it once a week. I wore jogging pants to school (not always). In grade 5 there was a girl called Daphné who announced one lunchtime she would be organizing a fun project for a group of kids, which turned out to buy a shopping trip to get me some more acceptable clothing. Daphné asked how much money I could get from my parents and I offered a guess of $20.00, at which point she said forget it and went back to ignoring me. I was bothered by all this. For one thing I had this feeling maybe the whole thing was a ruse to steal from me. From what I can remember, which isn't much, I didn't care enough about clothes to even feel insulted on that account.
5) I didn't understand anything very well. I understood books, though, but somehow couldn't really translate their narratives into what real life was about. The world was a source of frustration all the time. The 4-5-6 teacher -- a fairly unpleasant person named Ruth -- was a mystery, my own feelings were a mystery, communication with other kids, clearly, a mystery. What they did when they left school, what their lives were like, was quite a preoccupying and befuddling mystery.
6) I believe I craved some kind of order or purpose. The alternative-school model works well for some kids, maybe it's better for happier children? Or ... I don't know. I am not a very conventional person, and I wasn't conventional then, and maybe would have hated rows of desks facing a preachy adult just as much or more. I remember feeling quite stupid, and perhaps discovering that I was smart would have made me happier? I used to think having grades or report cards in elementary school might have led me to seeing that at least in some ways I was smart. I was a very unhappy kid. But I loved reading and there were other things I also loved -- I loved the ocean, when we went to it one summer for a few days.
1) The other kids scared me. They were intimidating and it seemed like you could always say the wrong things.
2) Though I really liked Yves, my grade one teacher, he went on burnout leave and never came back, so for grades two and three we had a series of medium-term subs, none of whose names I remember. Is that weird, that I don't remember their names? They were there for months, and there were probably only three of them in total. I characterized them as temporary, though, and didn't think much of them. This is a guess.
3) I had no friends. I was conscious of this and as a fact about myself I think it bugged me. I don't think I thought enough about the reality of these things to consider what having a friend in class would have meant, so I can't say that the lack of friendship was in itself actively upsetting, but the fact of it disturbed me. I did have one friend from when I was four, Edith, who was at Querbes, and she was tough and got along well with the other kids, bu she was in another group and I didn't see her much. In grade 5 I became somewhat friendly with a girl called Sarah Pépin, but she couldn't invite me to her birthday party because her best friend Miriame said she wouldn't go if I did (I had caught Miriame cheating at a board game a year earlier, perhaps these were related?) As consolation, Sarah invited me to her grandparents' cottage for the weekend.
4) In everyone else's defence, I definitely was a weird kid. I didn't brush my hair for a year because it hurt too much to brush it once a week. I wore jogging pants to school (not always). In grade 5 there was a girl called Daphné who announced one lunchtime she would be organizing a fun project for a group of kids, which turned out to buy a shopping trip to get me some more acceptable clothing. Daphné asked how much money I could get from my parents and I offered a guess of $20.00, at which point she said forget it and went back to ignoring me. I was bothered by all this. For one thing I had this feeling maybe the whole thing was a ruse to steal from me. From what I can remember, which isn't much, I didn't care enough about clothes to even feel insulted on that account.
5) I didn't understand anything very well. I understood books, though, but somehow couldn't really translate their narratives into what real life was about. The world was a source of frustration all the time. The 4-5-6 teacher -- a fairly unpleasant person named Ruth -- was a mystery, my own feelings were a mystery, communication with other kids, clearly, a mystery. What they did when they left school, what their lives were like, was quite a preoccupying and befuddling mystery.
6) I believe I craved some kind of order or purpose. The alternative-school model works well for some kids, maybe it's better for happier children? Or ... I don't know. I am not a very conventional person, and I wasn't conventional then, and maybe would have hated rows of desks facing a preachy adult just as much or more. I remember feeling quite stupid, and perhaps discovering that I was smart would have made me happier? I used to think having grades or report cards in elementary school might have led me to seeing that at least in some ways I was smart. I was a very unhappy kid. But I loved reading and there were other things I also loved -- I loved the ocean, when we went to it one summer for a few days.
Friday, June 15, 2012
A week of lists
While on the theme of memory (see last post), I thought I would do an exercise and post a list of remembered items every day for a week (this is also the week of my birthday so maybe a remembering theme is particularly fitting?)
List # 1: Books I loved as a kid (between roughly 6 and 8)
1) Beware the Fish by Gordon Korman (and pretty much all other Gordon Korman books)
2) From the Mixed-Up Files of mrs Basil E. Frankweiler
3) Richard Scarry books (I guess a little earlier than 6?)
4) James and the Giant Peach
5) The B.F.G.
6) Sweet Valley High books
7) Babysitters' Club books
8) Pride and Prejudice
9) Anne of Green Gables
10) Emily of New Moon
11) The Story Girl
12) A book from the Outremont library kids' section called Angela and Luke (I think)
13) Marsupulami comic books
14) I remember really liking Courte echelle books by Christine Brouillet, but I don't remember their names. I liked some other Courte echelle books too, but the only title that comes to me is from one I didn't particularly like, called Le Nombril du monde.
15) Harlequin romances
16) Stalky and Co.
17) Archie comics
This is just the things that came to the front of my mind in five minutes. It feels terribly incomplete. Maybe I'll add more in comments as I think of them. I liked Judy Blume books a lot too -- Superfudge, Tales of a Fifth-Grade Nothing, Sheila the Great. Oh, and Lois Lowry, I liked her books a lot too -- none of the names come to me right now.
List # 1: Books I loved as a kid (between roughly 6 and 8)
1) Beware the Fish by Gordon Korman (and pretty much all other Gordon Korman books)
2) From the Mixed-Up Files of mrs Basil E. Frankweiler
3) Richard Scarry books (I guess a little earlier than 6?)
4) James and the Giant Peach
5) The B.F.G.
6) Sweet Valley High books
7) Babysitters' Club books
8) Pride and Prejudice
9) Anne of Green Gables
10) Emily of New Moon
11) The Story Girl
12) A book from the Outremont library kids' section called Angela and Luke (I think)
13) Marsupulami comic books
14) I remember really liking Courte echelle books by Christine Brouillet, but I don't remember their names. I liked some other Courte echelle books too, but the only title that comes to me is from one I didn't particularly like, called Le Nombril du monde.
15) Harlequin romances
16) Stalky and Co.
17) Archie comics
This is just the things that came to the front of my mind in five minutes. It feels terribly incomplete. Maybe I'll add more in comments as I think of them. I liked Judy Blume books a lot too -- Superfudge, Tales of a Fifth-Grade Nothing, Sheila the Great. Oh, and Lois Lowry, I liked her books a lot too -- none of the names come to me right now.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Memorization
Just came upon this article today, in my usual waiting-for-my-brain-to-wake-up rounds of sites likely to provide short articles that I will find moderately interesting: http://www.salon.com/2012/06/13/make_kids_memorize_poetry/
It starts off by reporting the negative reaction of progressives to a new proposal by Michael Gove, Britain's Education Secretary, to have schoolkids memorize poetry. I can sort of understand why people would be against it -- if one believes it's a step in turning all education into rote memorization, then it might seem really dangerous and creativity-killing. The article goes on to mention memory-building benefits to memorizing poetry. It also interviews a progressive who is home-schooling her kids with poetry memorization as part of the program, who says her kids seem to enjoy it. I can certainly believe that. Hanging out with my two young nephews (currently 4 and 5) is that the more they hear something the better they like it. Up to a point, of course, eventually the thing becomes to simple for them and they move on. But that comes waaay later than the memorization point. At two and a half, my nephew could sit at the dinner table and recite all of Where the Wild Things Are (with maybe a little help from my brother -- my brother now knows at least forty different kids' books entirely by heart, and can do scene-by-scene recounting of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, including many of the lines). All of this is to say, I would expect that with the right poems and the right playful attitude, a great many kids (though not all) would enjoy memorizing poetry.
Last summer I started memorizing The Waste Land. I haven't looked at it much recently. I have about 240 lines down, which is a bit more than halfway. I keep meaning to get back to it but doing a PhD and living in two countries and all that other not-fun everyday stuff has gotten in the way a bit, but also I guess just that I'm nt good at being consistent at anything, even if I enjoy doing it. Other than watching television -- I've been incredibly consistent at devoting time to that, which I am currently trying (again) to change. The thing I felt about memorizing, though, was that it brought so much more to the language. I've recently started to think that poetry reading is harder for people whose thinking style tends towards quickness -- it takes an effort for me to slow my mind down enough to appreciate the words individually, which is where poetry comes to life. I can do it, and then it's amazing, but I have to consciously remind myself to. I have a sense that for other people that comes more naturally (I would like to know if this is true; maybe they simply have better training? Maybe it's some other difference entirely? I am also of an analytical bent, which can get in the way of some activities). But memorizing illuminates the words in a way that no slowness or concentration of reading could. I feel the connections between lines that are far from each other, and not just the obvious ones where the line is being repeated with a twist, but subtler things. Not that it's taking me to any great intellectual level, but it's incredibly enjoyable to see and feel the poem in that way. I can also imagine never getting tired of those words, which is great. It gives me something to do on walks on when standing in line. I guess the trouble is, when a huge institution brings it into its curriculum, it's likely to fuck it up and make it seem like an awful irrelevant chore. The experience of one intellectual and free-thinking mum with her two kids is likely to be quite different than that of a bunch of harassed, underpaid and possibly not entirely poetry-loving teachers with their sea of students.
It starts off by reporting the negative reaction of progressives to a new proposal by Michael Gove, Britain's Education Secretary, to have schoolkids memorize poetry. I can sort of understand why people would be against it -- if one believes it's a step in turning all education into rote memorization, then it might seem really dangerous and creativity-killing. The article goes on to mention memory-building benefits to memorizing poetry. It also interviews a progressive who is home-schooling her kids with poetry memorization as part of the program, who says her kids seem to enjoy it. I can certainly believe that. Hanging out with my two young nephews (currently 4 and 5) is that the more they hear something the better they like it. Up to a point, of course, eventually the thing becomes to simple for them and they move on. But that comes waaay later than the memorization point. At two and a half, my nephew could sit at the dinner table and recite all of Where the Wild Things Are (with maybe a little help from my brother -- my brother now knows at least forty different kids' books entirely by heart, and can do scene-by-scene recounting of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, including many of the lines). All of this is to say, I would expect that with the right poems and the right playful attitude, a great many kids (though not all) would enjoy memorizing poetry.
Last summer I started memorizing The Waste Land. I haven't looked at it much recently. I have about 240 lines down, which is a bit more than halfway. I keep meaning to get back to it but doing a PhD and living in two countries and all that other not-fun everyday stuff has gotten in the way a bit, but also I guess just that I'm nt good at being consistent at anything, even if I enjoy doing it. Other than watching television -- I've been incredibly consistent at devoting time to that, which I am currently trying (again) to change. The thing I felt about memorizing, though, was that it brought so much more to the language. I've recently started to think that poetry reading is harder for people whose thinking style tends towards quickness -- it takes an effort for me to slow my mind down enough to appreciate the words individually, which is where poetry comes to life. I can do it, and then it's amazing, but I have to consciously remind myself to. I have a sense that for other people that comes more naturally (I would like to know if this is true; maybe they simply have better training? Maybe it's some other difference entirely? I am also of an analytical bent, which can get in the way of some activities). But memorizing illuminates the words in a way that no slowness or concentration of reading could. I feel the connections between lines that are far from each other, and not just the obvious ones where the line is being repeated with a twist, but subtler things. Not that it's taking me to any great intellectual level, but it's incredibly enjoyable to see and feel the poem in that way. I can also imagine never getting tired of those words, which is great. It gives me something to do on walks on when standing in line. I guess the trouble is, when a huge institution brings it into its curriculum, it's likely to fuck it up and make it seem like an awful irrelevant chore. The experience of one intellectual and free-thinking mum with her two kids is likely to be quite different than that of a bunch of harassed, underpaid and possibly not entirely poetry-loving teachers with their sea of students.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Today: coffee, Ashmolean museum, unpalatable lunch in Hall, exhibit at the Bodleian Library, Vanessa Redgrave, Wit
My mother is here visiting me for a day and a half so we made the most of our day today. We had coffee out then walked through the covered market. From then to the Ashmolean Museum, where we saw Mughal paintings and drawings, which were small and very detailed and quite interesting, accompanied by descriptions that found the right balance between explaining and being short enough. From there we went and got some rolls to make sandwiches for our train trip tomorrow morning. At 12:30 we went to lunch in Balliol's Hall. Stupidly I took the fish option, since I don't eat meat and the vegetarian option -- a baked potato stuffed with lentil curry -- didn't look very nice. Anyhow, I ate the carrots and the dessert of chocolate cake. The room itself is very lovely, which is why I took my mum. She enjoyed it, and also didn't mind the food as much as I did. On our way back from Hall we detoured through the Bodleian Museum where they had an exhibit on about romance and knights and the effects of those stories on later art & literature. The narrative they were trying to string together didn't interest me as much as the beautiful books themselves: on display were a first folio Shakespeare, several handwritten illuminated manuscripts, the first book printed in the English language, and several other weighty tomes. I guess these are all part of the Bodleian's own collection (the two items that were lent from the V&A were listed as such, so I assume everything else was from home, though I didn't look closely at every single tag). It pleased me to wonder what these books do when they aren't part of a special exhibit. And presumably dozens if not hundreds more of equally unique artefacts. Are they on some dusty stacks in the back? Surely not, but what? Individual steel boxes in a humidity- and acidity-controlled room? Do rooms have acidity levels? Then, lawyer that I am, I was thinking about the insurance implications of having all these books about.
Back to my room for a fifteen-minute rest and then across the street to the law faculty, where Vanessa Redgrave was speaking about human rights and Shakespeare. She spoke almost without ceasing for three hours (including a half-hour question and answer period). She spoke about her family a lot, about King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, about Virginia Woolf, about various plays and movies she'd been in. She's played Cleopatra of A&C five times, and directed the play three times. It gives you a certain perspective, and she had a lot of interesting insights, I thought, about the play. One of her takes was that Antony is not as lovestruck as he's often played, that in fact he's highly political and strategic, even though he is truly in love with C, at least at the end, but that part of what he's going through is an intense fear of Octavius, because Octavius is 20 years younger than him, and because his soothsayer has told him Octavius will win (and Redgrave cautioned against thinking of the soothsayer as someone who should be "rubbished off" as a quack). So when he turns his boat around it might be his own fears guiding him, not his beloved queen. She said, think of him when he's the Antony in Julius Caesar, driven and savage. He's the same guy. Anyhow, she talked a lot also about politics and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so on. My mother asked a good question about how, given that Redgrave had just said that one shouldn't overly demonstrate the bad qualities or good qualities of a character one is playing but let the audience think for themselves a bit, had she played the very bad Volumnia in the film version of Coriolanus that has just come out? She gave a really interesting answer. Originally she told Ralph Fiennes that she couldn't do it, because she couldn't connect to the character. He said he knew she could. She thought back to when she was six years old, during the Second World War, and how she'd wished she could be a grown-up and go and fight, and defeat Hitler. She then thought about the military people she had met during her several trips to Sarajevo and Kosovo during the war, and how they had been good people, and finally she found the inner understanding of this woman who believes in war and honour above all else.
I had not in any way expected that the talk would last from 3 to 6, and we had reservations for a play that started at 7:30 so we ran off to eat some pasta before finding the theatre. The play was Wit, put on by students from Trinity College. It's about a very severe and unsociable poetry professor who is diagnosed with end-stage metastasizing ovarian cancer. She identifies so much with the researchers, since research has been her whole life, that she lets them do all these horrible and painful things toher in the name of progress, pretty much understanding that it won't help her at all, though they of course try and elide that part when getting her consent. They were pretty good. I thought they were better at the intellectual parts than the emotional parts. The one who played the old woman who is the poetry professor's own poetry professor was my favourite, and that brought me back to thinking about Redgrave, who told us that her first job out of drama school was a job that paid seven pounds a week to put on a different play each week (and you had to provide your own costumes!) and that they'd hired her because they'd seen, from the class's graduating performance, that she could convincingly play old people. So I wondered if the one who played the old professor might be the most talented of the lot. The main character was also good, she did a very believable job retching and writhing, but there was a kind of emotional depth that I felt was lacking. Also, a play called Wit should elicit some laughter, and there were some funny parts but they didn't resonate enough. The old woman got the most laughs, in what was also a fairly sad scene right at the end - and her performance actually made me cry, as well. Part of that maybe is the problem with a small audience, fewer chances of someone taking the step of being the first person to start laughing, and when no-one else has laughed it seems like sometimes the crowd finds it harder overall to discern the comedy bits. They were there. The play itself was interesting, though not amazing, and the players were likewise very competent.
Got home at 9:30 quite exhausted.
Back to my room for a fifteen-minute rest and then across the street to the law faculty, where Vanessa Redgrave was speaking about human rights and Shakespeare. She spoke almost without ceasing for three hours (including a half-hour question and answer period). She spoke about her family a lot, about King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, about Virginia Woolf, about various plays and movies she'd been in. She's played Cleopatra of A&C five times, and directed the play three times. It gives you a certain perspective, and she had a lot of interesting insights, I thought, about the play. One of her takes was that Antony is not as lovestruck as he's often played, that in fact he's highly political and strategic, even though he is truly in love with C, at least at the end, but that part of what he's going through is an intense fear of Octavius, because Octavius is 20 years younger than him, and because his soothsayer has told him Octavius will win (and Redgrave cautioned against thinking of the soothsayer as someone who should be "rubbished off" as a quack). So when he turns his boat around it might be his own fears guiding him, not his beloved queen. She said, think of him when he's the Antony in Julius Caesar, driven and savage. He's the same guy. Anyhow, she talked a lot also about politics and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so on. My mother asked a good question about how, given that Redgrave had just said that one shouldn't overly demonstrate the bad qualities or good qualities of a character one is playing but let the audience think for themselves a bit, had she played the very bad Volumnia in the film version of Coriolanus that has just come out? She gave a really interesting answer. Originally she told Ralph Fiennes that she couldn't do it, because she couldn't connect to the character. He said he knew she could. She thought back to when she was six years old, during the Second World War, and how she'd wished she could be a grown-up and go and fight, and defeat Hitler. She then thought about the military people she had met during her several trips to Sarajevo and Kosovo during the war, and how they had been good people, and finally she found the inner understanding of this woman who believes in war and honour above all else.
I had not in any way expected that the talk would last from 3 to 6, and we had reservations for a play that started at 7:30 so we ran off to eat some pasta before finding the theatre. The play was Wit, put on by students from Trinity College. It's about a very severe and unsociable poetry professor who is diagnosed with end-stage metastasizing ovarian cancer. She identifies so much with the researchers, since research has been her whole life, that she lets them do all these horrible and painful things toher in the name of progress, pretty much understanding that it won't help her at all, though they of course try and elide that part when getting her consent. They were pretty good. I thought they were better at the intellectual parts than the emotional parts. The one who played the old woman who is the poetry professor's own poetry professor was my favourite, and that brought me back to thinking about Redgrave, who told us that her first job out of drama school was a job that paid seven pounds a week to put on a different play each week (and you had to provide your own costumes!) and that they'd hired her because they'd seen, from the class's graduating performance, that she could convincingly play old people. So I wondered if the one who played the old professor might be the most talented of the lot. The main character was also good, she did a very believable job retching and writhing, but there was a kind of emotional depth that I felt was lacking. Also, a play called Wit should elicit some laughter, and there were some funny parts but they didn't resonate enough. The old woman got the most laughs, in what was also a fairly sad scene right at the end - and her performance actually made me cry, as well. Part of that maybe is the problem with a small audience, fewer chances of someone taking the step of being the first person to start laughing, and when no-one else has laughed it seems like sometimes the crowd finds it harder overall to discern the comedy bits. They were there. The play itself was interesting, though not amazing, and the players were likewise very competent.
Got home at 9:30 quite exhausted.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Ulysses
I haven't been keeping very good track of the books I've been reading, but thought it worth recording (for the sake of my own bad memory) that I finished Ulysses about a month ago. I had tried it once before, as required reading, got about 150 pages into it, and thought that since I could understand absolutely nothing, there was no difference between reading it and not reading it. So I gave up. This time, I kept feeling some kind of dismay at my former reading self who couldn't understand: it gets hazy, but never so much that you actually lose the general flow of what's happening, if you're paying attention. Perhaps I didn't really know how to pay attention before -- or, which seems more likely, couldn't differentiate between when I was paying attention and when I wasn't. In a sense, it's like poetry that way -- which is fitting because, although Ulysses is not written in verse, its source book, The Odyssey, is a poem. If you don't focus on the individual words, it turns into a blur around you. As an aside, this is why I've become such a convert of memorizing poetry -- when I start memorizing, I feel like I'm only then beginning to properly read.
I won't bother with any exposition on Ulysses for now, it's been done enough by people who actually know what they're talking about. I will say: somewhere in the middle I felt like I was kind of reading just to get to the end, but around the second to last chapter I started to get a feeling from it, like there was a general wavy, whelming ambiance that I was finally getting. It had to build up sufficiently before I started to feel it, but then I felt it backwards through the book, redeeming the middle parts. Then it feels big and real, and worthwhile.
I won't bother with any exposition on Ulysses for now, it's been done enough by people who actually know what they're talking about. I will say: somewhere in the middle I felt like I was kind of reading just to get to the end, but around the second to last chapter I started to get a feeling from it, like there was a general wavy, whelming ambiance that I was finally getting. It had to build up sufficiently before I started to feel it, but then I felt it backwards through the book, redeeming the middle parts. Then it feels big and real, and worthwhile.
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