A sorry little drama.

29 April 2008 at 6.01 pm (Ben)
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Enter Ben, at right, attired in the usual doublet (with ruffs!) and hose, armed with a Latin grammar in his left hand, and bearing his own collected works in his right; crowned with self-appointed laurel. At left the English undergrad, immaculately attired in oxford shirt and jean pantaloons, armed with a .5mm pencil in her right hand, and bearing a mug of coffee in the right. At her feet is a pile of play books and the Yale Ben Jonson’s Collected Masques.

Ben. Callet!* A word with thou!

EngU. What is it now, Ben?

Ben. Now? how mean you “what is it now”?

But what is has been for a pair of years

A woman, handling my works! a piece!*

EngU. Ah, but who else will write “pieces” on you?

Ben. Your modern puns are dull. Thou’rt

A parcel poet*: your parcels* are poor.

EngU. You know, Ben, no one understands a word you’re speaking. Can you help me shorten the glossary of terms and just deliver your complaints in plain modern English? Without all the abuse?

Ben. The article of yours, two Fridays last –

EngU. The one on Thomas Middleton? Everyone loved that! The most comments yet.

Ben. And it was about Thomas Middleton! A fulsome pismire!*

EngU. It was his birthday. Besides, I mentioned you.

Ben. Eight times, merely, and you barely talked about my work. Why are you writing about “Chapter One” anyways? What about your Introduction? You haven’t come near to mentioning my masques!

EngU. To be honest, Ben, they’re pretty dull. Perhaps if we could see some of those ridiculously expensive costumes and your old accomplice Inigo’s ingenious sets[i], or if we could gossip about which ambitious young lord is sitting next to Queen Anne’s ladies (we all know what that means), maybe then some of our readers would be interested. As it is, reading ten pages of set description, with the occasional interluding speech –

Ben. They are the most delightfully wrought poems and lyrics, not speeches!

EngU. Yes, but be realistic, Ben, I mean consider:

Help, help all tongues to celebrate this wonder:

The voice of Fame should be as loud as thunder.

Her house is all of echo made

Where never dies the sound,

And as her brows the clouds invade,

Her feet do strike the ground.

Sing then good Fame that’s out of Virtue born,

For who doth Fame neglect doth Virtue scorn. (The Masque of Queens, 139)

EngU. It’s all allegorical and sing-songy.

Ben. It is a song. Did not you see the title? The one that reads “Song”?

EngU. Fine, it’s a song, but without the music, we’re missing a key part of the masque. Also, we’re supposed to imagine a bunch of courtiers dancing for the next ten minutes? I’m not saying these little dramas weren’t fun to watch or even participate in back when James’s court was in full “swing,” but you’re condensing a two-hour drama into ten pages, and something tells me the scripted parts aren’t the most important bits anyways. Much as you’d like them to be.

Ben. Well, you wrote about my masque poetry in your Introduction. Remember the Masque of Blackness?

That in their black the perfec’st beauty grows,

Since the fixed colour of their curled hair,

Which is the highest grace of dames most fair,

No cares, no age can change, or there display

The fearful tincture of abhorred grey,

Since death herself (herself being pale and blue)

Can never alter their most faithful hue. (52)

Ben. So they must be important. Not that you wrote anything clever about them.

EngU. Dr. Martin is right, Ben doesn’t know what he wants. [Aside]

What I wrote was that you were trying to make a point about essential bodies that exist in spite of changing costumes. Since the Queen herself was disguised in this masque, you excused her theatricality, explaining how the disguise can’t change the virtue beneath her apparent blackness and provocative costume. Of course, you were also trying to fix her in the position of a “virtuous” woman: chaste, silent, and obedient; that was a bit of a personal illusion though, as she commanded you to write this masque in the first place, right?

Ben. Perhaps you are forgetting –

Also, I compared the unmasquing of the dancers here to the de-robing of the boy actor at the end of Epicoene, so illustrating your little trick of revealing the fixed qualities of the body underneath: one of your favourite tactics in defending the idea of essential gender.

Ben. It works most excellently.

EngU. Of course it does, when your plays have no female characters. Your late plays seem to have a lot of them though. I guess it would be too cruel to quote Hamlet’s “ay, there’s the rub” line…

Ben. This is why I don’t like women.

[Exeunt]

Works Cited:

Jonson, Ben. The Complete Masques. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1969.

Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson’s Plays. Ed. Felix Schelling. Vol.1 London: JMDent & Sons, 1953. (Glossary definitions)

End Notes:

Inigo’s ingenious sets. Referring to Inigo Jones, Jonson’s partner in the court masques from 1605-1631, and the designer of the elaborate sets and costumes which were, much to Jonson’s chagrin, more popular with the court audience than his moralising poetry.

29 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines.

Glossary of Terms:

Callet. n. (obs.) Woman of ill repute.

Fulsome. adj. (obs.) Foul, offensive.

Parcel poet. n. (obs.) A poetaster, or hack. Parcels: articles, with a pejorative connotation.

Piece. n. (obs.) Person, used for a woman or girl; a gold coin worth in Jonson’s time 20s or 22s.

Pismire. n. (obs.) An ant.

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Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew: Bartholomew watches television.

26 April 2008 at 5.03 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
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With the exception of occasional trips to various book depositories to collect more research material, I do most of my thesis work in my own room, where access to my library is, well, most accessible. Bartholomew, as it happens, also spends most[i] of his working days in this same room[ii]. Consequently, the pair of us spend a bit of time together, and have developed a fondness for the same activities. This week, for example, I was marking exams with Planet Earth* on in the background, and Bartholomew, with a clear vantage point from his early modern perch, was watching with me. I like Planet Earth for its (by now) familiar shots of elusive Siberian camels and African wolf dog hunts, as well as David’s comforting British narrations. Bartholomew likes all the rapid-growth footage of cherry blossoms and arctic tundra. We both win when David utters his fabulous “From the ashes rises the phoenix: Grass.”

This line, taken from the “Great Plains” episode, is characteristic of the punning and anthropomorphising language David uses in his narrative. While this narrative gives me delight, it also gives me pause.

The BBC has gone to great lengths in Planet Earth to point out their filming ethics. In the “Planet Earth Diaries” (ten-minute “makings of” videos that follow each 50 minute feature) the film crews discuss their “non-intervention” policies: they film from helicopters and hides, they refuse to help animals that are hungry, preyed upon, or separated from their herds.[iii]

Too, the separation of the video diaries, which show the filming, from the features themselves, which include no evidence of the human film crew, reflects the production team’s mandate to show the remotest and previously unfilmed habitats as one would encounter them in nature: that is, without intervention by other humans. In cutting the film in this way, the BBC offers an exact copy of the natural world, allowing the viewer to gain familiarity with it without having to disturb the environment himself.

In other words, the BBC creates a simulacrum of these environments[iv]:

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. [...] It is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control — and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. (2)

The above is Baudrillard’s definition of the simulacrum from his Simulacra and Simulation. In Baudrillard’s terms, the possibility of infinitely reproducing the digital film images in Planet Earth is problematic, precisely because it replaces the filmed environments themselves. The viewer takes the image for the reality. This is a problem Baudrillard identifies occurring in human (non)interaction with the caves of Lascaux*:

In the same way, with the pretext of saving the original, one forbade visitors to enter the Lascaux caves, but an exact replica was constructed five hundred meters from it, so that everyone could see them (one glances through a peephole at the authentic cave, and then one visits the reconstituted whole). It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial. (9)

One problem that Baudrillard fails to address in his essay is why, exactly, it is important to have a relationship with the real. One might argue that in preserving fragile habitats on film we reduce the number of human visitants that erode, clutter, or otherwise destroy the natural beauty of, for example, the caves of Lascaux. More, since certain animals, like the Amur Leopard in “From Pole to Pole” are already nearing extinction (David reports there are only 40 left in the wilderness), film preserves the image and habits of an animal so that others can learn from it (and its destruction) in a future world from which it will foreseeably be absent.

Humans, however, are already a part of the environment shared by endangered (and non-endangered) plants and animals. Indeed, the Caves of Lascaux are not primarily valuable because they are ancient geological formations, but because they are a record of human origins and our interactions with our environment in the past. What is the point, then, of preserving these caves, or even the “untouched” caves of Lechuguilla [v] in Planet Earth’s “Caves” episode, if we are never to interact with these environments again?

Baudrillard’s complaint might also be that the possession of the pervasive simulacra reduces our appreciation of the original: as long as we think the caves or leopards or rainforests are preserved on film, we no longer feel we need the real sources of the image. More, the viewer does not notice the further deterioration of the real because every time we view our own simulacrum, it appears in exactly the same state as the last time we saw it.

Baudrillard’s use of the passive voice in phrases like “one forbade” and “an exact replica was constructed,” however, perhaps [vi] suggests that his critique is not necessarily of the act of simulating itself, but of the fact that we hide that the simulated product is a simulation. This allows those who create the simulacra to remain hidden, and from their hiding place direct the individual’s beliefs and desires. We think these beliefs and desires are both tied to real objects and also completely our own, when they are non-real ideologies constructed by others.

One might counter that in including the “Diaries” at the end of each episode, the BBC draws attention to, rather than obscuring, the process of simulation behind the images. Yet the BBC’s openness with their procedures and mandates perhaps distracts the viewer from more subtle directorial methods that direct us to think and emote in a BBC-directed way. For example, the candidness with which the “Diaries” discuss filming methods, and show the arduous physical suffering of the film crews who keep up their good-humoured banter in spite of their frustration, the emotional trauma they encounter having to helplessly watch struggling animals, even the occasional breaks from non-intervention policies as with the penguin chick, constructs an image of the BBC as an empathetic, industrious institution striving for a worthy environmental cause. This image distracts us from the fact that the documentary also won prestige and financial success for that same institution; the ends of the documentary are not necessarily as altruistic as the viewer thinks. Moreover, as consumer of the documentary, we perhaps think that our financial support of the BBC’s endeavour is toward a “good” cause. It is possible that this judgement of the documentary’s social worthiness, though, stems not from any innate values the viewer possesses, but is constructed by the discourse of the film itself.

I wonder, however, if this discourse cannot be viewed more optimistically. True, Planet Earth is an artificial representation of the natural world, and true it has been cut, narrated, and scored to direct its viewers to a specific ideology and emotions.[vii] This does not mean the ideology and emotions themselves are inherently lacking value.

David’s attitude towards the grass is not the only time he uses humourous or punning language to narrate its subjects in human terms. In this same episode, for example, he claims that “fire sparks panic in the [gazelle] herd” [my emphasis] and, concerning an arctic fox trying to collect five or six goose chicks in its mouth, “sometimes, one mouth simply isn’t enough.” The music which accompanies these shots is equally as anthropomorphic. Composer George Fenton matches a hunted caribou herd with trumpets in a minor key, playing grazioso (gracefully), providing a sad majesty to their plight. The wolves which hunt them, unsurprisingly, get pulsing strings and drums, and runs of chromatic thirds, providing a sense of urgency: it becomes clear where the viewer’s sympathies should lie in this hunt. The rather adorable arctic fox in segment three, in contrast, is accompanied by a jaunty arrangements of strings and flutes as she hunts for her even more adorable cubs. Finally, the square-headed Tibetan wolf in segment four hunts mountain pika to a Mission Impossible-esque theme.

These musical interludes, one might argue, along with David’s anthropomorphic language, direct the viewer to project certain human emotions onto the animals and plants that we witness. This tactic threatens to appropriate these untouched habitats into a discourse of civilisation; it makes the non-human human, eradicating its own origins and languages in favour of our own, proving Baudrillard’s point that humans do not study historical or natural objects to learn from the other, but to reaffirm our own existence.

Don McKay, however, takes a different view on the matter. For him, anthropomorphic language provides us with

a sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism. The coat-hanger asks a question; the armchair is suddenly crouched: in such defamiliarizations, often arranged by art, we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy — its rawness, its duende, its alien being. (21)

For McKay anthropomorphism functions the way that all metaphors function: they claim that a thing both is and is not another thing. In the example of Planet Earth, the music and narrative bring these unfamiliar wildernesses within the human world — we understand them as possessing the same emotions that we possess, and have empathy with them: we are part of the same environment. Simultaneously, we recognise the absurdity of suggesting that grass undergoes mythic transformations, or that a wolf hunting rabbit-like animals is akin to an undercover heist. The BBC’s focus on capturing behaviours and locations previously unfilmed heightens the disparity between familiar language/emotions and organisms that are completely outside our realms of familiar encounters. Here anthropomorphoses emphasises how far separated the viewer is from the “real” world that we can only see through simulation, and perhaps encourages the viewer to seek re-engagement with that real in an ethically aware manner.[viii]

End Notes:

[i] most. Except when I take him out for water.

[ii] in this same room. Perhaps you think I should refer to it as “our” room. Well, Bartholomew doesn’t contribute to the local economy much, so I retain singular possession of the space, grammatically. This gives me the illusion of power. Like court spectators who vied for seats nearest to King James, trying to increase their social and political value. See Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.

When Bartholomew starts contributing more to my thesis than an occasional skeptical “hmm…” and dropping Thomas Middleton collections on my head as I write, then maybe I’ll include him in the lease agreement.

[iii] separated from their herds. One exception occurs in the “Ice Worlds” episode, where the Antarctic team frees a penguin chick trapped in the ice, reuniting it with its frantic mother. Yes, this one incident is minor enough that neither the habitat or behaviour of the penguins is not going to be altered which is what non-intervention ethics are concerned with, but I wonder, does the mother penguin’s familiarity and acceptance of the team in her habitat indicate that in the very act of filming the animals’ behaviour alters. Then again, research teams of all kinds are a regular part of the Antarctic environment anyways.

[iv] a simulacrum of these environments. Once again, I owe this line of thinking to a comment Prof. Dickinson made in lit. theory redux.

[v] caves of Lechuguilla. The fifth longest cave in the world, located in New Mexico (Carlsbad Caverns). it took the BBC two years of negotiations with the New Mexico government before they could access the caves for filming, and following filming the caves were closed even to research teams.

[vi] perhaps. It may be a matter of translation.

[vii] has been cut narrated and scored. The complexity of this cutting, scoring and narrating is well worth paying attention to: for example, the viewer can liken the grass in “Great Plains” to the “major theme” of the episode, as in a piece of music. The episode begins with the grass in its infancy in the Mongolian summer, and is depicted growing with the seasons across different geological locations. The subjects of the episode are the habitats that grow with the grass. This theme, in fact, is matched by a musical theme played by oboes and strings and a single violin the upper-octave, and swells and falls as the summer approaches and passes.

[viii] to seek reengagement. Not Bartholomew, though, he’s “rooted” to his ceramic pot.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of the Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Shiela Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.

McKay, Don. “Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home & Nature Poetry. Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2001. 11-33.

26 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Lascaux. Paleolithic cave system in the Dordogne region, discovered in 1940 and closed in 1963. The caves contain human-made wall paintings now visible online at the official site.

Planet Earth. n. nom. possibly the best nature documentary series yet made. Well, it was made with “an unprecedented production budget, using high definition photography, and revolutionary ultra-high speed cameras, five years in the making, over 2000 days in the field, using 40 cameramen across 200 locations” (Planet Earth, the complete series, 2007). I’m aware this is BBC marketing-speak here, but the high budget and quality technology is evident in the visual and aural quality, as well as the subject-matter, of the series. It’s beautiful.

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On the couch with Freud*

25 April 2008 at 3.59 pm (General musings)
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I am both amazing and profound.

25 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Freud, Sigismund Schlomo. n. nom. A man worth reading: I mean, look at him! He’s a man, he’s a puppet, he’s an author-function for that whole pile of books. If that doesn’t convince you, just look at that wee blazer!

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Things for which Gaurav Is Useful: Edition 3.

24 April 2008 at 3.38 pm (Maintenance)
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1. Helping me get one step closer to reading Hornby’s A Long Way Down. That’s right, folks, I am now in possession of the book.

2. Using as an excuse for writing short articles (I really need to get some marking done).

By the way, as a bit of maintenance, Gaurav is apparently NOT pleased with the image I’ve chosen to represent him in my archive. So for those of you with access to photos of him, please send your nominations via the usual Gmail/Facebook routes.

24 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines

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Ondaatje, post-structuralism, and a lot of disorganised thinking.

23 April 2008 at 7.44 pm (General musings)
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I was listening to Mussorgsky’s* Boris Godunov last weekend, and found myself in the usual state of awe. I’m not a musical idiot. I don’t play well, but I have enough experience that I know basic performance theory, have learned how to listen to the several parts of a symphony, know when the various instruments are playing in correct time and pitch. I’ve read Greco-Roman and Medieval all the way up to post-structuralist music theory, know the history and development of the modern orchestra, and am well grounded in the symphonic canon: I can distinguish between the baroque* and the classical, an opera and an operetta*, Sibelius* from Saint Saëns.*

None of that helps, however, describe how and why certain pieces affect me. Being able to pick out all of the variations of the “Frere Jacques” theme in Mahler’s* first symphony, or knowing the narrative behind the night of the witches’ sabbath movement in Berlioz’s* Symphonie Fantastique, or the weather imagery in Tchaik’s Fifth,[i] for example, cannot explain the consistent emotional response these pieces evoke. I can describe them, tell you they sound eerie, or sad, or triumphant: but these are just figures of speech that categorise; the music itself eludes description.

From what I gathered by my brief stay in Prof. Royal’s Aesthetics of Music class, musicologists have spent most of their time arguing over this very problem: why does music affect us? The long-dead Pythagoras believed music was a reflection of the perfect math which also ordered the universe: as the perfectly proportioned heavenly spheres turned, they emitted a divine music. Our reaction to music, if this theory were correct, would be innate, absolute even.[ii] Modern semiotic theories of music propose that the emotions we feel when hearing music (for example, a minor chord evoking a “sad” feeling) is simply a reaction based on convention.

Neither theory, however, adequately describes the individual’s personal relationship with a specific piece of music.

As much as I love studying a piece of music, learning the different themes, symbolism, history, or the meaning of the words behind a particular piece, the best way to listen to music is still, to listen to it: to stop trying to understand it, or to possess it somehow, and simply to let it pervade you, and take you over.

Which is sometimes how I feel about poetry:

Read him slowly. dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. he is a writer who used pen and ink. he looked up from the page a lit, I believe, stared through the window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick, and too North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph is is otherwise. (The English Patient, 94)

I’m not certain whether knowing about Kipling’s idiosyncratic writing habits matters at all, but yes, to allow yourself the time to enter the text, to consider the materiality of its sound, to allow each word to repeat itself, unfolding all its potential meanings, to stop looking for the “correct” interpretation momentarily, and allow your mind to simply play within the spaces of the text, this seems very good advice indeed.

Not that a million post-structuralists[iii] have not proposed this space of play before: indeed, the official[iv] post-structuralist term for this space is jouissance, and includes all the potential misinterpretations and new meanings that occur in the spaces between letter and letter, word and meaning, old meaning and new, text and reader, text and text, text and other reader, and so on. To engage in jouissance is to admit one’s lack of control over the text, and in admitting this lack of control, to know it in the only meaningful way possible.

This principle of jouissance, I think, applies to physical spaces as well as the space of the text. At least, it does in the Ondaatje poem I transcribed [v]. The customs, fears, and signatures of all the individuals living within the Medieval village permeate that space as small thirty miles, saturating it with meaning. [vi] Our speaker within the poem must experience this meaning, but cannot hope to encompass all the “secret mark[s]” that comprise its many languages (spoken and unspoken) and relationships; he can only offer us nouns and adjectives: “circus in-laws,” ” home life,” “a familiar animal”. We can, in turn, only make meaning from these by reading in the same slow, open-to-permutations manner in which Almasý advises Hana above. Or by physically entering the locale with an openness to its otherness.

End Notes:

[i] Tchaik’s Fifth. Anything I would try to write on these pieces would be effusive and fairly empty. Just find them, get comfortable for an hour, turn up the volume, and listen.

[ii] would be innate, absolute even. Johannes Kepler in the 1500s believed so much in this idea that he set down the scales of each of the planets. Of course, Kepler also believed there were people living on Jupiter.

[iii] a million post-structuralists. Of course, we’d have to bring in a few Saussurians to manage the event; the post-structuralists can’t be relied upon to arrange a gathering of these proportions: they’d just keep deferring their responsibilities to others.

[iv] official. According to Roland Barthes. See From Work to Text. Is it ironic that I can’t find an online version of this text for reference? Presumably because it’s copyrighted. It seems the author is not so dead after all.

[v] the Ondaatje poem I transcribed. Hopefully my decision to let the poem stand on its own for a while makes sense at this point.

[vi] saturating it with meaning. Yes alright, I stole this phrase from Certeau’s “Walking in the City,” where Certeau writes about the discourse he names the “local authority”: It is a crack in the system that saturates places with signification and indeed so reduces them to this signification that it is impossible to breathe in them.’ It is a symptomatic tendency of functionalist totalitarianism [...] that it seeks precisely to eliminate these local authorities because they compromise the univocity of the system” (106). I haven’t thought the implications of this idea as it relates to jouissance, place, and music, but I think the entire coastal village functions as a local authority for the speaker in the Ondaatje poem, just as I think poetry and music provide a similar sort of space for the reader/audience. Though what these spaces are resisting seems undefined. Again, perhaps non-organisation is the point here.

Works Cited (the all-Michael edition!):

de Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendell. Berkely, LA, and London: U of California P, 1984. 91-110.

Ondaatje, Michael. “The Medieval Coast.” Handwriting. Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1998. 20.

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage, 1993.

Steen, Michael. The Lives & Times of The Great Composers. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2005.

23 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines.

Glossary of Terms (all-musical edition!):

Baroque. n. nom. The music of the 17th and early 18th century, written by Bach, Purcell, Monteverdi, and other harpsichord-playing, Latin-music-singing folks with not-so-powdered wigs. It is preceded by the Medieval (or “chanting monk”) and Renaissance periods (bring out your recorders!), and followed by the Classical (Handel, Mozart Beethoven, and other men in overly-powdered wigs), Romantic (c.1800-1900; brazen as the thunder! narrative as an epic poem!) and Modern periods (FRAG themes MEN and TED narratives: think TSE’s The Waste Land, or, better yet, a Stravinsky piece). There are also rumours that “postmodern” music exists, but you know, no one’s really sure.

Mahler, Gustav. n. nom. Modern. German. Composer. Though I’ve also heard him called romantic. Musicians are hazier about these things than literary folks. Then again, considering my point about music resisting categories, that’s probably a virtue. Anyways, Mahler wrote 10 symphonies, and a bunch of lieder (songs). He was also a celebrity conductor. Ever notice the quality of our celebrities has declined a bit?

Mussorgsky, Modest. n. nom. One of the “Mighty Five” of Russian music (Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussorgsky, if I haven’t bored you to tears already. Actually, I suspect no one’s made it as far as this footnote anyways; if you have, you’re a special, and particular sort of person, and this week’s code is Roland. Tell M. I’ll be late for the secret assembly.) Mussorgsky set the “tone” for later Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky. If I was only allowed to listen to one composer for the rest of my life, it would be Mussorgsky.

Operetta. n. (pedantic). An opera, but with a few speaking parts thrown in for good “measure”.

Saint-Saëns, Camille. n. nom. French Romantic composer. His mother once wrote to him “I have raised only a girl of degenerative stock…Either you will play well, or I will renounce you as my child” (Steen, 619). Sure it’s misogynist, but it must have been effective motivation back in the 1800s: CSS’s Danse Macabre is pretty fantastic.

Sibelius, Jean. Probably the most famous Finnish composer, working between the Romantic and Modernist periods. Want to know how great he is? Steen writes that “During the Second World, when tobacco was rationed, he was supplied with a special issue from the factories” (742). Finlandia and Valse Triste are among his best-known works, and easiest to find, though his second symphony is my own favourite.

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22 April 2008

22 April 2008 at 1.51 am (Maintenance)
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My darling archive,

Though you have less materiality than my other texts, I shall return to you: just as soon as I have done writing about Magritte and van Eyck and the entire history of Western art.

It is true that our affexion is but newly formed; yet I have never, I think, given you reason to doubt its worthiness: did I not stick by you through the Baudrillard paper of 11 April? Nor will you have forgotten my constancy in the Literary Criticism Exam of the 15th. We shall not even speak of my great fidelity during the harrowing events of “Chapter One.”

Fear not then, dear archive: this ordeal will end, and we shall happily return to our old ways together, singing the praises of Michael Ondaatje, and making good-humoured fun of Roland Barthes.

With all the rapture that is appropriate,

Your humble protagonist, the English undergraduate.

22 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines

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Explanation to follow.

20 April 2008 at 11.53 pm (General musings)
Tags:

The Medieval Coast

A village of stone cutters. A village of soothsayers.

Men who burrow into the earth in search of gems.

Circus in-laws who pyramid themselves into trees.

Home life. A fear of distance along the southern coast.

Every stone-cutter has his secret mark, angle of his chisel.

In the village of soothsayers

bones of a familiar animal

guide interpretations.

This wisdom extends no more than thirty miles.

Works Cited.

Ondaatje, Michael. “The Medieval Coast.” In Handwriting. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998. 20.

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Non-Accredited Book Reviews: Nick Hornby

19 April 2008 at 8.30 pm (Non-Accredited Book Reviews)
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Dear Mr. Hornby,

Please stop writing your column; I have enough to read already.

I would never actually write this to Nick Hornby. First, I’m disturbingly enamoured with his writing. Second, the man is British.

I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t comply with my request anyways. Hornby seems to exhale text the same way the rest of us exhale carbon dioxide. He’s written seven novels (fiction and non-fiction included), edited four anthologies, and been involved in the adaptation of five of those books into film (About A Boy, High Fidelity, A Long Way Down, and two versions of Fever Pitch). And all that since 1992.[i]

Additionally, Hornby is a fairly prominent literary critic (and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature!*), contributing to journals like the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, and The Independent. His most regular column, however, is the “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” a feature in the literary magazine, The Believer [ii].

I can’t say I’m as familiar with The Believer as certain people named Gaurav, but I can with confidence claim my complete and thorough knowledge of all of Hornby’s columns in the magazine from 2003-2006.[iii] McSweeny’s has collected and republished the “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from these years into two volumes: The Polysyllabic Spree: A Hilarious and True Account of One Man’s Struggle with the Monthly Tide of the Books He’s Bought and the Books He’s Been Meaning to Read (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2004) and Housekeeping vs. The Dirt: Fourteen Months of Massively Witty Adventures in Reading Chronicled by the National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2006).

The subtitular clause “and Books He’s Been Meaning to Read,” suggests that even though Hornby would never comply with my request to stop writing, he would, in fact, understand it. Every article in “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” begins with two columns: “Books Bought” and “Books Read,” with the former generally outweighing the latter. For all his film adaptations and “I’m a famous person” interviews, Hornby, like me, and like you [iv], finds himself having to come to terms with the sheer volume of books in existence which even the most devoted* reader will never be able to read.

Because no article in The Blotted Line would be complete without a lengthy excerpt, here’s a bit from “May 2005″ in Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt:

Earlier today I was in a bookstore, and picked up a new book about the migration patterns of the peregrine falcon. For a moment, I ached to buy it — or rather, I ached to be the kind of person who would buy it, read it, and learn something from it. I mean, obviously I could have bought it, but I could also have taken the fifteen pounds from my pocket and eaten it, right in the middle of Borders, and there seemed just as much point in the latter course of action as the former [...]

This month, my taste in books seems to have soured on me: every book I pick up seems to be exactly the sort of book I always pick up. On the way home from the bookstore, as I was pondering the unexpectedly seductive lure of the peregrine falcon, I tried to name the book least likely to appeal to me that I have actually read all the way through, and I was struggling for an answer. Isn’t that ridiculous? You’d have thought there’d be something, somewhere — an apparently ill-advised dalliance with a book about mathematics or physics, say, or a history of some country that I didn’t know anything about, but there’s nothing. [...] I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900; I’d like people to look at it and think, How the hell did he end up right over there? As it is, I make only tiny incursions into the territory of my own ignorance — every year, another classic novel conquered here, a couple of new literary biographies beaten down there. To be honest, I’m not sure I can spare the troops for conquests further afield: they’re needed to quell all the rebellions and escape attempts at home. (49-51)

What English student (or literature addict) can’t relate?

Now before you accuse me of liking Nick purely for self-affirming reasons, I’d like to preempt you with an eloquent “so what?” Hornby’s witty perspective on the potentially frustrating limitations which all bibliophiles encounter is both cathartic and reassuring. More, the concision with which he writes enables me to fit these cathartic readings into the regular mountains of canonical and theoretical readings assigned by a despotic and anxiety-inducing syllabus.

Not that Hornby doesn’t often add to that anxiety: just flipping through his columns this morning, I am reminded that I need to read Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (New York: Picador, 2001), Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin (London: Harvil Press, 2003), and Hornby’s own A Long Way Down (Riverhead: London, 2006). Given my already lengthy summer reading list, I know that these titles will probably not be read by the end of this, or even next summer (though, who knows, my well-intended plans to read the major novels of V. Woolf might not come to fruition; hopefully I’ll at least make it through Orlando before she gets shunted aside for some flashy young upstart novelist).

Even if I don’t make it through another of Hornby’s novels, I know he’ll forgive me: because he understands, you see? Which is another reason to read self-affirming literature. Us literary-types spend much of our time reading quietly on our own, thinking circular thoughts about our own research, building anxiety about our own procrastination and limitations as students and teachers, it’s nice to have a figure — especially a successful public figure — remind us we are not alone in these limitations, and to ease up on ourselves occasionally. [v]

So Mr. Hornby, please keep writing about all the clever, ennobling and innovative stuff you’ve been reading that I’ll never have time to read. Better yet, keep recording your experiences with all the clever, ennobling books that you’ll never have time to read. I’ll keep intending to read them all.

End Notes:

[i] And all that since 1992. Additionally, he has a family, is a founder parent of TreeHouse, and a devoted (ecstatic?) fan of Arsenal, as well as a lot of other stuff which you can read about in his blog.

[ii] The Believer seems to be the home of all the good American writers and musicians these days. I can’t really do it justice, but it is the reason I sort of know about Chabon, Lethem, and Dave Eggers, etc. Of course, I only know about this magazine through Gaurav, so ask him for more information. Or better yet, visit their site and read some articles.

[iii] from 2003-2006. If I’m a bit behind on the more recent articles it’s because Gaurav hasn’t lent me his recent Believers. How selfish of him. I mean, it’s not like he actually reads them each month. He just buys them as part of his on-going attempts to appear snooty and pretentious.

[iv] like you. I’m assuming that most people who make it through my ridiculously lengthy articles about Barthes and Thomas Middleton are going to be of the literary type.

[v] ease up on ourselves occasionally. I’m waiting for Gaurav to call me a hypocrite for this statement. Just waiting.

19 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Devoted. adj. One who is willing to give up his/her job and all friends and family in order to become a scary library hobo for the sake of reading as much of the canon as possible. They’re almost like students, except they have no deadlines, and they don’t pay for their reading time. On the other hand, legitimate students get the use of the Interlibrary Loan; also, they’re better groomed. Usually.

Royal Society of Literature. n.nom. “The Royal Society of Literature was founded by King George IV in 1820, to ‘reward literary merit and excite literary talent’.” That’s from the website, folks, so it has to be accurate. The RSL is also exclusively “devoted to the promotion and enjoyment of really good British writing” which is an oh-so-welcome sign of elitism in this day and age (but, hey, they have an “Ondaatje Prize”: I think he’s been Canadian since 1962. I’ll let that slide, though, because I like to see Michael promoted in any form).

Also (and this has to be set apart from the rest, I think you’ll agree), in the RSL, “Fellows sign the roll book with Dickens’s quill or Byron’s pen”. Hail Britannia, you truly are amazing! Even if you do try to steal Michael Ondaatje.

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Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew: Bartholomew meets Thom.

18 April 2008 at 6.33 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
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The last couple of weeks or so, Bartholomew and I have been reading the works of Thomas Middleton and Ben nigh exclusively. For me, this effort has been part of my on-going battle with the 4P99 paper: Thom and Ben are the subjects of my first chapter [i]. For Bartholomew, it’s a chance to get better acquainted with the early modern dramatists with whom he shares his shelf space.

When it comes to choosing favourites between the pair, I think it’s unsurprising that I’m going to pick Ben every time. Bartholomew, though, he’s throwing his lot in with Thom. Hence the theme of today’s Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew. You see, Bartholomew recently discovered that today is the 428th celebration of Thomas Middleton’s birthday [ii], and has demanded I make a fuss over the occasion.

I must admit, I sort of see his point. Thomas Middleton is, after all, pretty fantastic, and, like most of the dramatic early modern poets who don’t have the good fortune to be named Will Shakespeare, he’s sadly overlooked by the casual reader.

So why is “T.M. Gent.” deserving of your attention? Well, for starters, the man was a proficient networker. In an age of poetic collaboration, Middleton was the collaborating-est poet around, working with most of the big* names in London theatre, including John Webster, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, John Marston, and, of course, with Ben himself. He even worked with the afore-named Will Shakespeare, on Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, and Macbeth (critics suspect he wrote the witch scenes) [iii].

Middleton is also the author of A Game at Chess (1624), the single most financially successful play during the English renaissance [iv].

Finally, Thom. is probably the early modern dramatist you’d most like to spend time with at the pub. In his city comedies*, Thom. writes on a lot of the same themes that Ben and Will are writing about: the hypocrisy of aristocrats, the debauchery of the peasants (and the aristocrats), problems of sexual licentiousness and greed in London’s market, the power politics of marriage, and, of course, the theatre itself. Yet Thom handles these subjects with a lot of liberty and understanding: he doesn’t demand we cut out our gambling and lying altogether. Too, he’s fairly supportive of homosexuality and women. In fact, since I like to quote myself so much, here’s what I wrote about his play The Roaring Girl [v]:

The simulation and dissimulation common in early modern London is the theme of both Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and Jonson’s The Staple of News.[vi] Middleton, however, reveals (and revels in) the potential for London as not merely a simulation but a hyper-reality, a society where the signs of gender, desire, and wealth possess no real referents; his critique is mainly of the hypocritical attitude of males within this hyper-reality who insist that women conform to essential gender qualities which cannot exist as long as males insist upon women as objects of exchange in the hyper-reality. The possibility of a hyper-reality in which women are active autonomous subjects is, for Jonson, repugnant, and he takes what could be likened to an anti-theatrical stance on the problem, attempting to expose the hyper-reality of London as insubstantial system which ultimately fails against the essential virtue of a self-regulating patriarchy. Jonson’s attempt to distinguish an appropriate “essential” theatre that can operate congruently with the self-regulating patriarchy, however, fails in his inability to reveal the “essentially” virtuous Pecunia as either wholly female or male. (2-3)

That’s a bit dull, really. I only include it as part of my on-going efforts to give friends and readers an idea of what I’m writing about in my thesis (and also to prove that I am indeed getting some work done — you aren’t suffering my long-winded discussions of Ben without cause). Here’s a bit in Thom’s own words:

Lord Nol. Why, thou hadst a suitor once, Jack: when wilt marry?

Moll. Who, I my Lord? I’ll tell you when, i’faith;

When you shall hear

Gallants void from sergeants’ fear,

Honesty and truth unslandered,

Woman manned, but never pandered,

Cheats booted, but not coached,

Vessels older ere they’re broached;

If my mind be then not varied,

Next day following, I’ll be married.

Lord. Nol. This sounds like doomsday.

Moll. Then were marriage best;

For if I should repent, I were soon at rest. (5.1.110)

I admire Moll, far more than Shakespeare’s Katherine even (The Taming of the Shrew). Fearless, independent, and witty witty witty. She forces the men of the play to recognise her as an autonomous being.

So happy birthday, Thom! Bartholomew has asked that I send you belated congratulations, too, on the recent Oxford edition of your collected works! [vi]

End Notes:

[i] my first chapter. This chapter was finally submitted today; Martin gave it the eloquent working title “Chapter One.”

[ii] Thomas Middleton’s birthday. Well, not really. Birth records in early modern London were a bit sketchy; most have to be guessed at from church records, which were much more dependently kept. 18 April 1580 is the date of Middleton’s baptism registration. His birth would have occurred in the week prior to this date.

[iii] the witch scenes. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? That’s right, the great Will, like any other dramatist of this period had a lot of input from other writers and sources. (I must take care: this archive is quickly becoming the “knock Will down a peg or two; that’s unfair. I like him too. There are other playwrights though, folks!)

[iv] A Game at Chess. It was a political play, satirizing the Spanish court, and the Infanta Maria, who was being considered as a marriage match for young Charles I. The play was so contentious that it was shut down after nine days (the longest continuous-running performance in London at the time), and the Globe Theatre prosecuted by the Privy Council. With characters like the “Fat Bishop of Spalato,” it is fairly offensive to the Catholics/Spanish. (The marriage to Spain never occurred, by the way, but as Charles got his head chopped off in 1649, it was probably for the best.)

[v] The Roaring Girl takes as its subject the famous female transvestite, Mary “Moll” Frith, who not only wore men’s clothing, but was also known for her habits of smoking tobacco, carousing in pubs, and dueling. Moll is thought to have attended one of the performances of the play, sitting in the on-stage audience with the other roarers.*

[vi] The New Inn is the first of Ben’s late plays. Set in London, the action of the play takes place in and around the newly-formed rumour mill (yes, it actually sells gossip), and critiques the spending habits of a miser (Pennyboy Sr.), a prodigal (his nephew, Pennyboy Jr.), and the prodigal’s “dead” father, Pennyboy Canter, who learns them all a lesson in civic virtue.

[vii] collected works. Speaking of birthdays, I was going to recommend this as an excellent gift idea for anyone considering mine. Then I realised it’s $255 (I’m pretty sure it was much much much cheaper when first released). Even I think that’s a bit much for Middleton. Take a look at it anyways: it’s a nice edition.

http://www.amazon.ca/Thomas-Middleton-Collected-Gary-Taylor/dp/0198185693/ref=pd_rhf_f_i_k2a_1

Works Cited:

Me! “Chapter One.” In Obviously Unpublished. (April 2008 ). 1-18.

Middleton, Thomas. The Roaring Girl. In Thomas Middleton. Vol.II. Ed. Havelock Ellis. London: T Fischer Unwin. 1-114.

18 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Big. adj. Of large magnitude. Another relative term; for example, “Erin thought dramatists like Middleton and Jonson were a big deal, but her readers thought she was completely nutters.”

City Comedy. n. (lit.) Genre of comedy, you guessed it, set in the city! Usually that city is London, but Shakespeare set his Measure for Measure in Vienna. Ben’s four most popular Jacobean comedies are in this genre, as are most of Middleton’s. City comedies usually take the problems of commerce, law, prostitution and the fair as their themes/settings. Also, the plots usually involve the different characters attempting to outsmart/swindle each other.

Roarer. n. (obs.) Name given to youths in early modern London who ate, drank, gambled, drank, dueled, and generally kicked up a ruckus (while drinking). During the Protestant Interregnum under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, roaring took on a more political meaning as roarers fêted with the spirit of carpé diem, against the oppressive social regime.

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Things for which Gaurav Is Useful: Edition 2

17 April 2008 at 2.38 am (General musings)
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It’s the 610th anniversary of Chaucer’s first reading of The Canterbury Tales in the court of Richard II. In honour of this occasion, I plan on reading a bit of the “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” to Bartholomew, and maybe even a few passages from Treatise on the Astrolabe. Also, in honour of England’s first great poet, I thought I’d write a British-themed post. I’m certain Gaurav will appreciate the gesture. For this week then,

1. He encourages my weird obsession with David Attenborough.*

2. He calls to tell me when Rafe Fiennes is on In the Actor’s Studio.

3. He procured me a book on English festivals and holidays. (Roud, Steve. The English Year. London: Penguin, 2006.)

4. He is solely responsible for my knowledge of several fine British bands, including The Decemberists and Travis.

17 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Attenborough, Sir David Frederick. n. nom. British natural scientist (specializing in geology and zoology), and the hilariously anthropomorphizing narrator of the BBC’s Blue Planet and Planet Earth. David Attenborough is British in many ways: he’s related to the British actor Richard Attenborough, attended the Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester, and once worked with Sir Julian Huxley. He is also the member of many highly esteemed British orders including the Order of Merit, Order of the Companions of Honour, Royal Victorian Order, Order of the British Empire, the Royal Society, and the Zoological Society of London. David Attenborough IS Britain.

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