November 22: The Break-Up

So in this Guardian article Jeanette Winerson is saying

So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

(Via, incidentally, The Page, indispensable for the poetry-inclined). This gives us a test -- does Dryden's account of the unpleasantness between Dido and Aeneas measure up, toughness-wise?

What have I said? where am I? Fury turns
My brain; and my distemper’d bosom burns. ...
I should have torn him piecemeal; strow’d in floods
His scatter’d limbs, or left expos’d in woods;
Destroy’d his friends and son; and, from the fire,
Have set the reeking boy before the sire.

That's pretty good. I had to make some cuts for optimal pissed-off-ness, but no question that Dido's drift is gotten.

It's good of Virgil to let Dido make her case that Aeneas is the biggest loser ever, considering that the whole point of the poem is to make the case that Aeneas is the founder of the #1 res publica. You don't see Toby Keith allowing the opposition to make its case in his national epics. On the other hand it's probably easier for Virgil because the Romans had already sown Carthage with salt, and we haven't done that to the Middle East (yet).

The other thing I liked is actually in the argument -- that synopsis at the start of the chapter. I needed to turn to it because I got a little lost (not Dryden's fault). Dido's rage and bargaining is termed thusly: Dido finds out his design, and, to put a stop to it, makes use of her own and her sister’s entreaties, and discovers all the variety of passions that are incident to a neglected lover. I love that. You can make a long list of the advantages our age has, starting with Zappos.com and working your way down, but we don't have the knack for circumlocution that they did in wordier days. The last good one I can think of is when Hirohito, after Hiroshima, told the Japanese that "the situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage." The situation was the same for poor Dido. Tough language didn't help her any.

UPDATE: Robert Going of The Judge Report couldn't post in comments, but he reminded me of how our high school Latin teacher, Sister Anna Roberta, used to teach it in Latin IV, although I didn't have her in Latin IV; she retired around III, I think. She actually taught very little Latin by my time, but I did learn a lot of rhetorical terms like chiasmus and hendiadys (a wonderful word to say, by the way).

Another Harvard classic

Full prank here.

November 21: Recycled, or maybe vintage, insights

I think I found a mascot.

How do newspaper columnists do it? Here I was all set to type up some fresh insight about Voltaire, and at the last minute I remembered it was an insight I'd had two months ago. That insight was probably not all that fresh then, either, but my lack of knowledge about Voltaire prevents me from knowing who's had what insights about him. (The reason ignorance is bliss is that the ignorant brain always has that morning-fresh feeling.)

Of course, when it comes to recycling insights, I observe that newspaper columnists seem to be washed clean of shame. Maureen Dowd's been writing the same column for fifteen years. At this point, all she has to do is hit F6 and the column is extruded -- shitty pop-culture metaphors gently circling, one atop another, like the coils of a McDonald's shake. The Internet is unfair.

You could say that Voltaire's "English Letters" recycle the same insight -- which was that England equals progress, and guess what French-speaking nation does not -- but at least he makes himself find fresh examples. Today it's inoculation; the English have had the good sense to steal this disease-fighting practice from the Turks, who (Voltaire says) did it to make sure the pipeline of good-looking prostitutes would continue to flow. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who seems like an extremely interesting person, brought it to England, and Voltaire, who seems like a guy who knows how to kiss up, manages to credit someone higher-ranking:

Lady Wortley Montague...at her return to England, communicated the experiment to the Princess of Wales, now Queen of England. It must be confessed that this princess, abstracted from her crown and titles, was born to encourage the whole circle of arts, and to do good to mankind. She appears as an amiable philosopher on the throne, having never let slip one opportunity of improving the great talents she received from Nature, nor of exerting her beneficence...The moment this princess heard of inoculation, she caused an experiment of it to be made on four criminals sentenced to die.

See how enlightened she is? She performs medical experiments on prisoners! (My understanding, however, is that by the standards of the House of Hanover this is enlightened.)

The only other insight I'm going to dust off from the inoculation story is the notion that Western Civilization, so called, is largely a collection of stuff from other civilizations that we stole and then repurposed. Like how a bunch of John Philip Sousa instruments got turned into jazz. Recycling can be fun!

November 20: The power of dress

     Right.                      Wrong.

One of the things I don't like about comedy writers, as a class, is that they dress in a low-status way, with their baseball hats and flannel shirts, which is what I'm wearing right now. Plus pants, I hasten to add. On the other hand, you can't dress too fancy out here, or you're weird, and it's hard to live up to weird.

But while it's all very well to say that it doesn't matter what you look like, it's what's in your heart that counts, the truth is that we prefer a whited sepulchre to one that's tumbling down, and this lesson is reinforced for the children -- who, I have heard it said, are our future -- in today's Grimm's Fairy Tale. Our hero is a little tailor who kills seven flies at once, stitches himself a "girdle" commemorating this fact, and then is deferred to by giants and kings and stuff. Not that they don't suspect him of boasting -- they're constantly asking him to prove himself. But he always outwits them in harebrained ways, a lot like those Duke students who are going to save the economy so they can keep their frat house. Here's an example:

After a while he perceived both giants. They lay sleeping under a tree, and snored so that the branches waved up and down. The little tailor, not idle, gathered two pocketfuls of stones, and with these climbed up the tree. When he was half-way up, he slipped down by a branch, until he sat just above the sleepers, and then let one stone after another fall on the breast of one of the giants. For a long time the giant felt nothing, but at last he awoke, pushed his comrade, and said, “Why art thou knocking me?” “Thou must be dreaming,” said the other, “I am not knocking thee.”

I think we can guess how this will end.

The only other thing to note is that our hero, like many heroes in unsantized fairy tales in my experience, is an extremely disagreeable man. Here's how we meet him:

Then came a peasant woman down the street crying, “Good jams, cheap! Good jams, cheap!” This rang pleasantly in the tailor’s ears; he stretched his delicate head out of the window, and called, “Come up here, dear woman; here you will get rid of your goods.” The woman came up the three steps to the tailor with her heavy basket, and he made her unpack the whole of the pots for him. He inspected all of them, lifted them up, put his nose to them, and at length said, “The jam seems to me to be good, so weigh me out four ounces, dear woman, and if it is a quarter of a pound that is of no consequence.” The woman who had hoped to find a good sale, gave him what he desired, but went away quite angry and grumbling.

What a jerk! And he's a self-promoter. And his comeuppance is that he gets to be rich and powerful. Let that be a lesson to you, children.

November 19: Old-fashioned workmanship

The Excalibur in Vegas. It was not of this that Tennyson wrote: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/And God fulfils Himself in many ways,/ As here, where the town's loosest slots reside."

Tennyson can't be fashionable. As discussed, he is superfruity and Victorian. And it is impossible to read today's poem, "Morte d'Arthur", and not think in parts of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail":

In those old days, one summer noon, an arm
Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
Holding the sword...

Which, as we know, is no basis for allocating political power. And yet I admire the poem. It has narrative drive -- enough so that you find yourself yelling at the character of Sir Bedivere, whom the mortally wounded Arthur tells to deep-six Excalibur. He can't do it -- it's too bright and shiny -- so he lies when he reports back to Arthur, proving that Cover Your Ass belongs in the very realm of myth (it occurs to me that Adam and Eve provide literal proof of this as well):

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:
“I heard the ripple washing in the reeds
And the wild water lapping on the crag.”

Come on, Sir B. just told the boss what he wanted to hear -- is he really bold? Plus Arthur can tell in an instant that he's lying. So then Arthur sends him to destroy the sword again, again he can't do it, and he comes back and tells him the exact same lie! I realize, for poetical purposes, that the refrain-ness of repeating the same answer lends a certain Mythic Greatness to the poem. But it would never happen that way in real life.

But here's the passage that finally made me like the poem for good. Bedivere has finally ditched the sword, and now must carry the dying Arthur to the lake so he can make his ferry:

But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking as he walk’d,
Larger than human on the frozen hills.
He heard the deep behind him, and a cry
Before. His own thought drove him, like a goad.
Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon.

First of all, "Clothed with his breath" is a great phrase. But mostly, as I sat on my patio reading, the craft in this passage -- and I don't even know anything about poetic craft -- jumped out at me. The phrases don't end at the lines because he has to keep moving -- although he get one sentence for the long shot ("Larger than human"), and a state-of-mind status report ("His own thought drove him, like a goad.") And look at the sound pattern -- not just the alliteration, but "barren" and "bare" in consecutive lines, or how "goad" echoes "drove" -- "drove" drives "goad," almost. The craft is conspicuous -- it would pretty much have to be, for me to pick up on it -- but it doesn't seem ostentatious.

It's still Victorian and superfruity and, though easy to admire, hard to love. It's sort of like the way you admire the Victorian lords and ladies for being able to endure those clothes and those long afternoons in those antimacassar-filled rooms without running away screaming and dunking their head into a sink full of absinthe. Good on them for not doing that. But we'd probably have to.

Noted

Our Girl In Chicago, who really should post more, has an excellent appreciation of "To Autumn" (dealt by me very superfically here last month). This is how it's supposed to be done

November 18: Things I DIdn't Know About William Tell

Old-school parenting.

• He apparently did not exist.

• But if he had existed, the reason he shot the apple off his son's head, according to Schiller, was because he was made to do so by an evil colonial official.

• This led to Swiss independence because people finally saw how evil colonial officials are:

Rud. My people I forsook—renounced my kindred—
Broke all the ties of nature, that I might
Attach myself to you. I madly thought
That I should best advance the general weal
By adding sinews to the Emperor’s power.
The scales have fallen from mine eyes—I see
The fearful precipice on which I stand.
You’ve led my youthful judgment far astray,—
Deceived my honest heart. With best intent,
I had well-nigh achiev’d my country’s ruin.

• This example has not deterred colonial adventures in the centuries since. (Actually I did know that, but not in reference to William Tell, so it counts.)

• Tell's son went willingly to his post of being shot at, which only shows that the younger generation hasn't gotten any more reckless since the 14th century.

• Apparently in Switzerland the country people all talk in unison, in a manner reminiscent of The Plain People of Ireland:

Country People (surrounding TELL). Our last remaining comfort goes with you!

• I'm aware that this is a crappy moldy translation, but nevertheless I am of the opinion that William Tell would be small potatoes and not in the Harvard Classics if it weren't for Rossini's overture, which should give all the budding lyricists out there a reminder of which is more important, the words or the music.

November 10: Country and City and Goldsmith and Willie and Laura Mae Jones

Okay, so I'm doing last Monday's reading, which I had read but not written about, mostly because it saves me labor, but also because it's on a favorite topic of mine: the alleged virtues of the country over the city. Or, in Oliver Goldsmith's case, the superiority of The Deserted Village of Auburn over the stinking lanes of London.

There's always been good money in this take. Hell, there still is -- Thomas Kinkade, Master of Light, doesn't paint the evening traffic on the 405, he paints stuff like this:

How often have I paused on every charm,
The shelter’d cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topp’d the neighbouring hill;
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whispering lovers made!

You can just see the set of plates. To be charitable, this poem is also a social commentary: Auburn is deserted because the land has been taken over for big, Hamptons-style mansions, and people have left for the city to find work:

Where, then, ah! where shall poverty reside,
To ’scape the pressure of contiguous pride? ...
Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide,
And even the bare-worn common is denied.

If to the city sped—what waits him there?
To see profusion that he must not share;
To see ten thousand baneful arts combined
To pamper luxury and thin mankind;
To see each joy the sons of pleasure know
Extorted from his fellow-creature’s woe.

Which is pretty trenchant. You could also express this sentiment (gone are the old ways, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot) in prose. It fact, it's been done, at least once, like so:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Italics mine; they are italics of wonder, because (digression!) why do conservative religious people ever ally themselves, politically, with capitalists -- the very people who want to open the mall early on Sunday? I never understood that. I also make the English major-y note that Goldsmith uses a couple of stages-of-life metaphors when he's describing this decay, as if this regrettable process is completely natural and so incapable of reform -- it can only be deplored.

Despite the trenchantness, though, I find Goldsmith just a tiny wee bit condescending toward the country people. Please note, I'm being sarcastic -- it's actually immensely irritating, partly because I come from (and have just come back from) the type of town that city folk either dismiss condescendingly or laud in the same way. Goldsmith gives this game away early when he confesses why he's so upset at poor Auburn's demise:

I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,
Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;
To husband out life’s taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:
I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,
Amidst the swains to show my book-learn’d skill,
Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;

He was going to do us hicks a favor by living among us and telling us about how he knew Sir Joshua Reynolds. No thanks, pal. (Unless you're buying.) What's worse to me is that what's so charming about us is that we're dumb. Here's the schoolmaster:

The village all declared how much he knew;
’Twas certain he could write, and cipher too; ...
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.

I trimmed a few lines in this passage and now notice that Goldsmith uses "knew" twice for his rhyme in a short space. Who's the genius now?

Finally, to show how eternal Goldsmith's take is, here's a couple of lines near the end:

Good Heaven! what sorrows gloom’d that parting day,
That call’d them from their native walks away;
When the poor exiles, every pleasure past,
Hung round their bowers, and fondly looked their last.

And here's Tony Joe White (via Dusty Springfield) on the same subject (especially in the third verse; note that there's basically no video, but I like this song a lot, so too bad):

New post tomorrow

Which will be either Carlyle on Scott (technically tomorrow's reading), or Oliver Goldsmith (which I had read last week but then didn't write on).

I won't say when tomorrow, though: I have paying work to go through too.

Work suspended

When I started this blog I knew my dad would love it; after all, they were his volumes that all my childhood were in the bookcase in the upstairs hall, before I shipped them across the country to the bookcase in this upstairs hall. After a couple of weeks, when I proved to myself that I could do this every day, I opened up the blog and told him. He did love it, and on days when I didn't feel like reading or writing I did it anyway, because I knew he'd be checking in, and his enjoyment of it would keep me going and made me feel good.

Today my dad received the last rites. It's time for me to go back across the country one last time on his behalf, like I did last week; but last week he could tell Mad Men-like stories about working for the Travelers' Insurance in Boston in 1960, and today he can't talk at all. And no longer will I sit at my desk here in LA, and smack a post about one of these readings across the Net and wait for him to return it. Our game is called on account of darkness.

I'll return at some point in the next couple of weeks. I want to see the year out -- now more than ever, really.

Melanoma got him, and quickly. Wear your sunscreen.

UPDATE: I suddenly remembered that he copied out these lines (from "Arkansas Traveller," by Charles Wright) and had them on his desk:

Knot by knot I untie myself from the past
And let it rise away from me like a balloon.
What a small thing it becomes.
What a bright tweak at the vanishing point, blue on blue.

November 9: Psalms on Psunday, or, It Is Not Enough To Succeed. Others Must Fail.

I can't really add to much to the two prior reading of Psalms that we've had this year, but one thing did strike me in this bunch, which is that of the nine Psalms (137 to 145) to read today, almost all of them make sure to add a little "and kill my enemies, Lord" there at the end; the Biblical equivalent of driving the car up onto the sidewalk to pick off someone who's looking at you funny.

But don't take my word for it. Take the Word's word for it:

137 ("By the rivers of Babylon"):

O daughter of Babylon, that 3 art to be destroyed,
Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee
As thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
Against the rock.

139 ("For I am fearfully and wonderfully made"):

Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God:
Depart from me therefore, ye bloodthirsty men.

I hate them with perfect hatred:
They are become mine enemies.

140 ("Deliver me, O Jehovah, from the evil man")

Let burning coals fall upon them:
Let them be cast into the fire,
Into deep 2 pits, whence they shall not rise.

141 (which, to be fair, does say, "Let the righteous smite me, it will be a kindness")

Let the wicked fall into their own nets,
Whilst that I withal escape.

143 ("My soul thirsteth after thee, as a weary land")

And in thy lovingkindness cut off mine enemies,
And destroy all them that afflict my soul;
For I am thy servant.

144 ("What is man, that thou takest knowledge of him?")

Cast forth lightning, and scatter them;
Send out thine arrows, and discomfit them.

145 ("I will extol thee, O God")

Jehovah preserveth all them that love him;
But all the wicked will he destroy.

The last one is the prime example -- a beautiful song of praise that makes sure to sprinkle some blood-of-the-wicked as a spice. Not that this is unique to the Psalms; it's just the Judeo-Christian version of jihad, really. Or maybe you could say that the Psalms have a touch of Irish Alzheimer's: Let me forget everything, Lord, except mine enemies.

November 8: Versifying is hard

Milton's verse may linger in your brain, but Milton's Pop-Tarts stay in your arteries.

Sequels now I sing, sequels Miltonic
With syntax grand, wherein the sentences
Like Slinkies cascading slowly downward,
Traverse the lines, till wish’d-for periods --
Those precious pausing drops that signal rest --
Appear at last to bring them to a close.

Since my skill in verse is like to Homer’s
I should be brief. Here’s my favorite excerpt
From this classic already once excerpted
(To set it up, Christ is in the desert
Musing expositional on his youth):

When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing; all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do,
What might be public good.

And swiftly in my mind an image formed
Of young Jesus, in new sandals, sent to school
Where He the games decries, the Purim masks --
And a locker, then, is with our Saviour's stuff'd.

November 7: Islam giveth, and Islam taketh away

They say the classics aren't relevant anymore, but today's story starts like this:

O PRINCE OF THE FAITHFUL, my story is wonderful; for these two bitches are my sisters...

But -- sorry hiphop fans -- it turns out the two bitches are just dogs. By now I should expect such transformations from "The Thousand and One Nights." As has often happened in the other readings from this volume, we have not only the presto/chango, but rooms full of gold, and also what seems to have been a key concern in the mentalité of the Arab World of the time, commercial shipping:

...I replied, Ye are welcome, O my sisters; for I have no one dearer to me than yourselves:—and I received them, and treated them with every kindness, and we remained happily together for the space of a year.

After this I resolved to fit out a vessel for a mercantile voyage.

Our narrator (or narrator within the narrator, or, possibly the narrator within the narrator within the narrator -- it's hard to tell sometimes with the "Thousand and One") then recounts her trip, where they come upon a people rich, but, unfortunately, turned to stone. Except for one guy, who quite conveniently turns out to be the Prince of the place, who was also a secret Muslim -- in this translation, "Muslimeh," or Canadian Muslim.

So naturally, they fall in love -- our Prince being, in these stony circumstances, something like the last man on earth, but with the added advantage of being rich. So they decide to head to Baghdad, where you can get a decent meal from people who aren't literally as dumb as rocks. And here's where Allah gets all capricious:

We continued our voyage with a favourable wind, and, quitting the sea of peril, entered the sea of security, across which we proceeded for some days, until we drew near the city of El-Basrah...but as soon as we had fallen asleep, my sisters took us up in our bed, both myself and the young man, and threw us into the sea. The youth, being unable to swim, was drowned; God recorded him among the company of the martyrs; while I was registered among those whose life was yet to be preserved.

In other words, God saved him long enough so that he could be drowned in the sea of security, where, I suppose to make it even more ironic, he sank like a stone. And what's worse is that it sounds like a clerical error -- "upon further review of your case, your application to live has not been granted because you have been recorded to be among the martyrs," etc.

Fortunately our heroine frees a Jinnyeh who transports her back home with all the loot intact and turns her sisters into dogs --

...She then said to me, I swear by that which was engraved upon the seal of Suleyman, that, if thou do not inflict three hundred lashes upon each of these bitches every day, I will come and transform thee in the like manner:—so I replied, I hear and obey:—and have continued ever since to inflict upon them these stripes, though pitying them while I do so.

Hmmm...I smell a PETA-neoconservative Islamophobe alliance in the works.

November 6: Gravity lets you down

Figure 5.

Mr. Faraday continues his lecture on gravity that he began back in May, and I continue to be completely beguiled by the illustrations, as you can see.

It's hard to really form a blistering opinion about gravity -- I think we're all in favor of it, especially those of us who just pile things up on their desks instead of filing them -- so I will note that Faraday uses the word "beautiful" four or five times in the course of this lecture, including these sentences (technically not in the reading):

Hence, we come into this world, we live, and depart from it, without our thoughts being called specifically to consider how all this takes place; and were it not for the exertions of some few inquiring minds, who have looked into these things, and ascertained the very beautiful laws and conditions by which we do live and stand upon the earth, we should hardly be aware that there was any thing wonderful in it.

Here I have what we call a weight [an iron half cwt.]—a thing called a weight because in it the exercise of that power of pressing downward is especially used for the purposes of weighing; and I have also one of these little inflated India-rubber bladders, which are very beautiful although very common (most beautiful things are common), and I am going to put the weight upon it, to give you a sort of illustration of the downward pressure of the iron...

Burnt-out literature professors are a common trope, but are there burnt-out scientists? There must be. But the relatively few science folk I have known (mostly science majors who turned to comedy writing in the vain hope of being cooler) are still geeked on what they study. And maybe that's because for them, as for Faraday, science is an aesthetic pursuit. Only instead of imposing an aesthetic upon the world, they seek to find how the world imposes its principles upon us.

Hey, maybe that's what'll get kids interested in science -- just tell them it's a branch of aesthetic philosophy! Also, a cartoon cat of some sort might be helpful. Like a jaguar or something. Also also, illustrations, like my friend Figure 9 here:

Nuff said!

November 5: Politics

Also, I believe that it will become fashionable again to join the Masons. You just watch.

Today I will start off with a confession, and then hopefully it will wind around to the reading. The confession is this: I voted for Nader in 2000. My exculpations are as follows: 1) I wouldn't have done it if I'd been living in someplace like Pennsylvania instead of safely blue California, but 2) I was sympathetic to the radical critique that our political opinions are forced into narrow little boxes, as if we were veal. (Recall, too, that 2000 is pre-blogosphere; it was a lot harder then to get your nutty ideas out to the people.)

In fact, given my default Tory sensibilities, wrapped up in my readings like old plaids (to paraphrase Larkin) as I am, I am skeptical of the words on the dollar bill: Novus Ordo Seclorum. But sometimes, even for us cynical believers in the overarching power of The System, change happens; I felt decidedly uncynical yesterday, and here is more pro-change evidence today, in an account of Thomas More written by his son-in-law.

More is remembered, of course, as a martyr and creator of martyrs. But before that unpleasantness he was Speaker of the House of Commons, and his petition to King Henry to allow the Commons to speak freely during debate is so groveling it is shocking:

Yet such is the weight of the matter, such is the reverend dread that the timorous hearts of your natural subjects conceive towards your high Majesty (our most redoubted King and undoubted Sovereign) that they cannot in this point find themselves satisfied, except your gracious bounty herein declared put away the scruple of their timorous minds, and animate and encourage them out of doubt. It may therefore like your most abundant Grace (our most gracious King) to give to all your Commons here assembled, your most gracious licence and pardon freely, without doubt of your dreadful displeasure, every man to discharge his conscience, and boldly in everything incident among, declare his advice, and whatsoever happeneth any man to say, it may like your noble Majesty of your inestimable goodness to take all in good part, interpreting every man’s words, how uncunningly soever they be couched, to proceed yet of a good zeal towards the profit of your Realm and honour of your Royal person, the prosperous estate and preservation whereof (most excellent Sovereign) is the thing which we all your most humble loving subjects, according to the most bounden duty of our natural allegiance, most highly desired and pray for.

I like that "timorous" is used twice; also, "most dreadful displeasure". In light of this, maybe you don't have to be a full-on subscriber to the Whig interpretation of history to feel that we're making progress, even though this is exactly how I imagine Bush's advisers have to talk to him. Still, compare More's rhetoric with this story about New Yorkers yelling at Bloomberg for wanting a third term. Democracy in action! And Bloomberg's even richer than Henry VIII was.

Also of note is a little snapshot of More the dad:

...to provoke his wife and children to the desire of heavenly things, he would sometimes use these words unto them. “It is now no mastery for you children to go to heaven. For everybody giveth you good counsel, everybody giveth you good example. You see virtue rewarded, and vice punished, so that you are carried up to heaven even by the chins.” If his wife or any of his children had been diseased, or troubled, he would say to them. “We may not look at our pleasure to go to heaven in feather beds, it is not the way. For our Lord himself went thither with great pain, and by many tribulations, which is the path wherein he walked thither, and the servant may not look to be in better case than his Master.”

I don't really have any opinion, I just like the diction ("carried up to heaven even by the chins" -- my poor children are going to be hearing this, mark my words.) He also taught his daughters Latin, which was considered quite remarkable in his time, while in ours, by contrast, it would merely be considered remarkably eccentric. So maybe change is the only constant.

November 4: Greetings from the Golden Age

Golden Age Beer -- For refreshment that complies with the dramatic unities.

The Golden Age is now.

At least it is for us upper-middlebrows with Internet connections. Classical music pours out of Pandora like nothing on earth. The WFMU blog brings us footage of Jack Benny interviewing Issac Hayes. A college professor who talks to journalists about Niebuhr and who's willing to be photographed wearing a bike helmet could be President of the United States. And the Harvard Classics are all on line -- and, what's more, there's Wikipedia and Google (see also: "Google, The") to ameliorate the frequent incomprehensibilities of the Harvard Classics.

Take today, Corneille's Polyeucte. At first glance, it just seems like a boring nonsensical old 17th century drama translated into sub-Richard Wilbur doggerel. But, thanks to Wikipedia, you can take the "nonsensical" right out of it. Then it becomes intriguing -- not to read, god knows, but to think about, for this appears to be a drama where everyone is so damn noble.

In our scene we meet Severus (this is set in Roman times), who's in love with Pauline (it's not set too strongly in Roman times), who has been promised to another:

Duty—her father—Fate—these willed, she but obeyed;
Not hers the woe, the strife that envious Ate made!
Untimely, Fortune’s shower must drown me, not revive;
Too lavish and too late her fatal gifts arrive.
...Peace! Peace! She comes!

FABIAN. To thine own self be true!

SEV. Nay! True to her! Shall I her life undo?
She loves the Armenian!

"She loves the Armenian" doesn't quite make it in the lists of the All-Time Tragic Lines of Love, I'm afraid. Then Pauline comes and says, more or less, it cannot be -- Duty has promised her to another, Polyeucte. So then we're expecting Polyecute to whisk her away, right? But no, he wishes her well: "May Heaven shower bliss and peace on Polyeucte and thee!" Then Polyeucte arrives and Pauline tells him about what just happened, completely torpedoing the possibility of skulking around. And Polyeucte says it's OK! For -- and this is the part I needed Wikipedia's help with -- he's about to become a Christian martyr and saint, after which, apparently, he will match up Pauline and Severus.

I was fascinated, thinking about whether we could actually bear to see a drama in which everyone's the good guy. But then I realized that it's sort of like Casablanca from Ingrid Bergman's husband's point of view, but with less Epstein brothers wisecracks and more declamations. And it would probably be a lot more boring, because who can even remember Ingrid Bergman's husband's character's name? I can't even remember who played him -- Bill Pullman, probably. And yet I could look it up on IMDB -- because, as I said, this truly is a golden age for a pedant.

November 3: No Pliny today

I am travelling without my books, and my Daily Reading Guide link can't possibly be right: I was assured that I was to get a ringside seat to Christian persecution, but instead I find letters from Pliny to Trajan about stuff like what the interest rates should be; interesting, in a way -- if only because it gives me the sense that the Christians were just another in a long line of pains in the ass to the provincial governor -- but, in another and more realistic way, completely uninteresting.

Tomorrow we will return with stirring tales from the French drama that couldn't be less relevant to the election.

November 2: The Audacity of Audacity

One of the things that characterizes really great people in any field, I think, is that they're conscious of their greatness. They have to be, or how would they dare to do what only the great can do?

The problem is that one of the things that characterizes crazy people is that they're also conscious of their greatness. And, speaking for myself anyway, I have a default setting of preferring false modesty to no modesty at all. Dante, however, doesn't agree, as we find in this moment in the Inferno. Dante is hanging out in Limbo with Virgil and Homer and Horace -- you know, famous classical poets whose names are now given to the kids of eccentric parents at your preschool:

When they together short discourse had held,
They turn’d to me, with salutation kind
Beckoning me; at the which my master smiled:
Nor was this all; but greater honour still
They gave me, for they made me of their tribe;
And I was sixth amid so learn’d a band.

In other words, is Dante the equal of Virgil and Homer? Sure he is -- just ask him! He's a mouthy entertainer, like Terrell Owens or Shaq or someone like that. Or John Lennon, although Dante takes pains to let you know he's less popular than Jesus.

Limbo smees like a nice place, by the way. The only drawback, according to Virgil, is "that we live/Desiring without hope." It's just like Hollywood! (And so many people think Hollywood's close to Hell already.)

November 1: Shakespeare and Nice Buns

All the world's a mall.

There’s a goodly amount of theater stuff in the Harvard Classics, which they choose to call by the more fancifying name of “drama.” But in the Daily Reading Guide – the “tasting menu” of the 50 volumes – you could call the drama selections “Act I, Scene i: An Anthology.”

Not that that’s all bad. In fact it’s been educational. One thing I’ve learned as a TV writer from this year of reading has been to be less afraid of the obviously expository. Your audience needs exposition! And that’s what we get today, pages of it, in the opening of “The Tempest.”

Of course exposition on TV, where people can bail on you instantaneously, is a little different than in the theater, where the audience is eager to get into the story, because they paid for their tickets and so are rooting for their money. (Digression: when I was a well-paid TV writer, a condition that sadly no longer obtains, we used to go to New York where we’d see Broadway shows, and there’s an example of people rooting for their money. I never saw jokes so over-liked.) Also, I suspect, people liked lots of fancy talkin’ in Shakespeare’s time -- talk is cheap, and the Elizabethean budget was not exactly spacious. So you get stuff like this:

...I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness 7 and the bettering of my mind
With that which, but by being so retir’d,
O’er-priz’d all popular rate, 8 in my false brother
Awak’d an evil nature; and my trust,
Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood, in its contrary as great
As my trust was; which had indeed no limit,
A confidence sans 9 bound.

I do like Prospero's admission, here, that his usurpation is kind of his fault; but otherwise, about the themes and stuff, I can’t say. Or rather I could try to say, but I’m intimidated because it’s Shakespeare. There is one line, however, that really sticks out, and perhaps has been unappreciated by scholars.

Gon. I’ll warrant him for drowning though the ship were no stronger than a nut-shell and as leaky as an unstanched wench.

As leaky as an unstanched wench. Gonzalo is, we are informed, a wise old counselor, so presumably this person was played by the Philip Baker Hall of his day. And he’s saying something dirty! I can’t tell you how tickled I was when I put this together. You see, I (and I am far from only among my comedy writing friends) have an acute appreciation for the trope of old people talking sexy and/or with hiphop slang – like the rappin’ Granny in the trailer for The Wedding Singer or the Granny who says “He’s got nice buns!” in the trailer to, I think, The Runaway Bride. It’s always hilarious! Sexy talk and/or hiphop slang is like the absolute last thing you’d expect an old person to say! It’s like the record-scratch sound effect – age cannot wither, nor custom stale, its awesome effect. Especially in a trailer.

And here I thought the “I speak jive” lady in “Airplane!” was the godmother of this trope. But no, it’s Shakespeare. That dude should have written trailers.

Warning

I am called away from today thru Election Day so it is dicey whether I'll be able to post. Just think of every day that I do as a victory! In case I don't, though: