Creating the American West: Boundaries and Borderlands by Derek R. Everett (University of Oklahoma, 2014)
There is actually another book with the title of this post, but it's loose, anecdotal, and speculative. This book is a scholarly study of several specific western U.S. state border segments, thoroughly researching the reasons for placing the borders where they are, and also discussing the effects on the surrounding populations.
After an introductory section on the previous history of state border-drawing, going all the way back to the "sea-to-sea" colony grants of James I, it concentrates on the 19C creation of six exemplar borders:
1) Arkansas and Indian country (later Oklahoma), or how the whites kept granting the Indians land and then changing their minds and taking it back, pushing them further and further out.
2) The "Honey War" between Missouri and Iowa over competing lines for a poorly-surveyed border. What I hadn't known about that is that the governor of Iowa Territory at the time was the same man who'd been Governor of Ohio during the similar "Toledo War" with Michigan. Both times, his side won.
3) Oregon and Washington, and how the governors of same ignored jurisdictional borders to cooperate moving troops around during the Indian wars, to the annoyance of the feds, who thought they should be rigidly separate.
4) California and Nevada, and the chaos that ensues when people have no idea which side of an unsurveyed border they live on. (It seems like they're wrong more often than not.) Also each state's attempts to lay claim to the other state's territory.
5) New Mexico and Colorado, or how Colorado was created with a bite taken out of New Mexico just so it could be a perfect rectangle, and how the New Mexicans in the area felt about being moved to a hostile Anglo-dominated jurisdiction.
6) North Dakota and South Dakota, or, should the Dakota Territory be split at all, and if so in which direction and where?
I found this a fascinating account of just the kind of niggling detail that interests me.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Monday, June 28, 2021
ill literacy
So last week I wrote about the closed-captioning that gave us titles like Adipose Wrecks, and today I open my local newspaper and what do I see? Two articles on the front page.
1. Fears that amateur fireworks displays will set off wildfires in our drought-stricken landscape. Such fireworks are illegal, "but that has done little to stop their rising use in the days leading up to a crescendo on the Fourth of July."
Crescendo - that's a technical term. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
2. Prospective candidates for the gubernatorial recall election are facing a new law: it requires them to submit five years of tax returns. (A law originally aimed at DT, but ruled ineligible for presidential elections, it lives on gubernatorially.) This is a rare provision: "Vermont is one of the only other states that has something similar."
"One of the only"? What does that mean, "one of the only"? It sounds as if you started to say "one of the few" and then changed your mind to "the only." Which is it?
1. Fears that amateur fireworks displays will set off wildfires in our drought-stricken landscape. Such fireworks are illegal, "but that has done little to stop their rising use in the days leading up to a crescendo on the Fourth of July."
Crescendo - that's a technical term. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
2. Prospective candidates for the gubernatorial recall election are facing a new law: it requires them to submit five years of tax returns. (A law originally aimed at DT, but ruled ineligible for presidential elections, it lives on gubernatorially.) This is a rare provision: "Vermont is one of the only other states that has something similar."
"One of the only"? What does that mean, "one of the only"? It sounds as if you started to say "one of the few" and then changed your mind to "the only." Which is it?
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Frederic Rzewski, 1938-2021
(it's pronounced zhev-ski)
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues. You want music that actually sounds like a cotton mill, but which is also smooth and jazzy with a hint of ragtime? Here:
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues. You want music that actually sounds like a cotton mill, but which is also smooth and jazzy with a hint of ragtime? Here:
Friday, June 25, 2021
not a play
My experiences with pandemic-era streamed theater productions have not been good. I liked the first one I saw, which was a video of the last in-person performance of a production of Amadeus before it was shut down, but the ones performed without audiences have not appealed to me. It's not just that there's no audience and consequently that which should get a reaction - not just laughter - falls flat, and the actors have nothing to build their energy off of, but also that the absence of an audience enables the cameras to be closer in than they were for that Amadeus. And since stage actors perform for a large room, get too close to them and they'll look like they're overacting.
In particular, I've got to learn to stop being tempted by Terry Teachout's rave reviews of various regional theater productions. The latest one I was burned by was a comedy called It's Only a Play by Terrence McNally, set at the opening night party of a new Broadway play which turns out to get terrible reviews. The author is there, the star, the director, the producer, a critic, various other hangers-on. They're all lovey-dovey to each other's faces and biting behind their backs, and they're all frantic to convey the farce in a script which isn't really all that funny. It might have been better with some audience laughter, but even then not all that much better. Teachout says the cast have "contagious zest," but I found it deadly and could only watch a few minutes at a time.
What I found most interesting, and even amusing, was the transcription once I turned the close captioning on. One character exclaims bitterly, "I'm no good" several times, which came out in the caption as "I know God." Then he mentions several works for the stage, whose titles were transcribed as adipose wrecks, waiting for couture, and libel whim.
You shouldn't have any trouble guessing what the first one really was, and the second shouldn't be too difficult either. But if the third one stumps you, what the speaker actually said was, La Bohème.
In particular, I've got to learn to stop being tempted by Terry Teachout's rave reviews of various regional theater productions. The latest one I was burned by was a comedy called It's Only a Play by Terrence McNally, set at the opening night party of a new Broadway play which turns out to get terrible reviews. The author is there, the star, the director, the producer, a critic, various other hangers-on. They're all lovey-dovey to each other's faces and biting behind their backs, and they're all frantic to convey the farce in a script which isn't really all that funny. It might have been better with some audience laughter, but even then not all that much better. Teachout says the cast have "contagious zest," but I found it deadly and could only watch a few minutes at a time.
What I found most interesting, and even amusing, was the transcription once I turned the close captioning on. One character exclaims bitterly, "I'm no good" several times, which came out in the caption as "I know God." Then he mentions several works for the stage, whose titles were transcribed as adipose wrecks, waiting for couture, and libel whim.
You shouldn't have any trouble guessing what the first one really was, and the second shouldn't be too difficult either. But if the third one stumps you, what the speaker actually said was, La Bohème.
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Wagnerism
Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020)
New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross's third epic-length book on the history of music (660 pages, not counting notes and index) purports not to be about Richard Wagner, but about his influence on the other arts, particularly literature, and on politics and the general culture. But it keeps forgetting itself and being about Wagner anyway. When approaching one especially sensitive subject, Ross writes, "What Wagner thought of Jewish people and people of color is an inescapable question, although the answer is not as simple as it seems. Since this is a book about Wagnerism, the even more crucial issue is what Jews and people of color thought of him." An appropriate distinction, but it doesn't prevent Ross from going into the first question in considerable detail too.
This book is very long on many writers and thinkers who were obsessed by Wagner, from ones whom I know nothing about, like Baudelaire, to ones I know a little about but didn't know they were Wagner fans, like Willa Cather, to ones I do know something about. Like Hitler. Or let's say like Bernard Shaw or Philip K. Dick. For the late 19th and early 20th century, these relationships are explored in great detail; in the final, post-1945 chapter, they get hastier, and sometimes of somewhat wobbly interpretive accuracy; the chapter includes a run through a series of modern philosophers - Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Sontag, and others - of particularly unintentionally comic brevity.
Also apparently unintentional is the evaluation of Wagner's work presented, which has a lot more negative in it than Ross apparently had in mind. In a personal postscript, he writes that his first encounter with Wagner left him with "a kind of auditory seasickness," and while he later came to love the work, it was more through emotional connection with the characters than with the music, and the ghost of his first reaction haunts the book. I first noticed this in the opening chapter going through Wagner's own life. Ross writes of Die Walküre: "Settled in Zurich, [Wagner] composed at a manic pace. By September, he had churned his way through the first act." Yes! I thought. Churned? That's exactly what it's like to listen to it! Auditory seasickness indeed. What's more, many of those touted in the book don't like Wagner either. Starting with Schopenhauer, who read the text of Die Walküre and at the end of Act 1, where it says "The curtain falls quickly," he notes, "And it's high time."
I set aside the long discussion of Nietzsche, who apparently went insane, so his violently anti-Wagner period is no more meaningful than his violently pro-Wagner period. But I found a key point in this skepticism when the narrative reached William Morris (p. 124-26). Having already noted Wagner's appeal to English artists of a pre-raphaelite bent because of his "proximity" (delicate way of putting it) to the Matter of Britain, here Ross emphasizes how Morris's and Wagner's interests and topics "overlapped ... to a remarkable degree." But then he is forced to acknowledge, "Yet Morris loathed the very idea of Wagner." Why? He doesn't say, except to hint that their philosophical conclusions differed.
This stricture becomes useful over 500 pages later when Ross gets to a brief, hasty, and sloppy consideration of Tolkien (p. 642-43). Again he starts by citing parallel or overlapping interests, including Tolkien's own retellings of the Siegfried stories, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which at least he's up to date enough to know about. He then notes that "Tolkien fans have sometimes argued that the manifest resemblances to Wagner result from a common use of older sources," an argument he could have gotten from my own article on Tolkien and music, though I'm not cited; but he then adds, "but the claim does not withstand scrutiny." Only because he doesn't scrutinize it very much. Ross says that Tolkien's One Ring "has no plausible antecedent" except Wagner's; but, even leaving aside the glaring fact that it doesn't have to have an antecedent, the relationships between the Ring and the magic, especially the invisibility factor; the role of the Ring as treasure; the way in which its power is used; the whole history of its ownership; etc etc, are so totally different in the two stories as to leave nothing in common but a magic ring with a curse on it (the curses, and their nature, are totally different too: Tolkien's isn't even actually a curse, it just functions as one). And a cursed treasure is a fairy-tale motif a lot older than Wagner. As for Ross's claim that Tolkien's "restorative ending" also comes from Wagner's Ring, that's just absurd. Again, they're nothing alike.
(What makes Wagnerians so eager to seize on flimsy evidence for an influence on Tolkien, anyway? They seem desperate to find something, anything, to claim as a resemblance between these artists, which is why it's necessary to point out how entirely disparate they are.)
So that leaves very little likelihood that Tolkien got the idea of the Ring from Wagner, and even if he did, it's reduced to so trivial a borrowing that it's of no significance whatever. The Morris case becomes a useful parallel when Ross spends the next two paragraphs of the Tolkien section itemizing some deep philosophical differences between Tolkien and Wagner. You realize, even if Ross doesn't, that the two really have nothing much to do with each other (also that Ross doesn't understand Tolkien very well, but never mind that). For evidence that Ross can consider an apparent borrowing to be insignificant when he wants to, turn back to the section on the Nazis, where you'll find Ross arguing that Hitler - a known, avowed, and deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic Wagner fan - was not very influenced by Wagner's philosophy after all (p. 515-16) and didn't even get his anti-semitism from Wagner (p. 532).
Here you'll also find, as I've read elsewhere, that while Hitler loved Wagner, most of the other Nazis didn't, and Hitler had to keep poking them to wake up during performances of Wagner operas that he'd forced them to attend. What was new to me was that Winifred Wagner, the virulently pro-Nazi and Hitler-loving daughter-in-law who was running the family businesses at the time, knew all of this and feared that a post-Hitler Nazi regime might lose interest in the government financial and publicity support which was keeping their Bayreuth festival running. Ross remarks dryly, "This was one problem the Wagners did not have to face."
New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross's third epic-length book on the history of music (660 pages, not counting notes and index) purports not to be about Richard Wagner, but about his influence on the other arts, particularly literature, and on politics and the general culture. But it keeps forgetting itself and being about Wagner anyway. When approaching one especially sensitive subject, Ross writes, "What Wagner thought of Jewish people and people of color is an inescapable question, although the answer is not as simple as it seems. Since this is a book about Wagnerism, the even more crucial issue is what Jews and people of color thought of him." An appropriate distinction, but it doesn't prevent Ross from going into the first question in considerable detail too.
This book is very long on many writers and thinkers who were obsessed by Wagner, from ones whom I know nothing about, like Baudelaire, to ones I know a little about but didn't know they were Wagner fans, like Willa Cather, to ones I do know something about. Like Hitler. Or let's say like Bernard Shaw or Philip K. Dick. For the late 19th and early 20th century, these relationships are explored in great detail; in the final, post-1945 chapter, they get hastier, and sometimes of somewhat wobbly interpretive accuracy; the chapter includes a run through a series of modern philosophers - Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Sontag, and others - of particularly unintentionally comic brevity.
Also apparently unintentional is the evaluation of Wagner's work presented, which has a lot more negative in it than Ross apparently had in mind. In a personal postscript, he writes that his first encounter with Wagner left him with "a kind of auditory seasickness," and while he later came to love the work, it was more through emotional connection with the characters than with the music, and the ghost of his first reaction haunts the book. I first noticed this in the opening chapter going through Wagner's own life. Ross writes of Die Walküre: "Settled in Zurich, [Wagner] composed at a manic pace. By September, he had churned his way through the first act." Yes! I thought. Churned? That's exactly what it's like to listen to it! Auditory seasickness indeed. What's more, many of those touted in the book don't like Wagner either. Starting with Schopenhauer, who read the text of Die Walküre and at the end of Act 1, where it says "The curtain falls quickly," he notes, "And it's high time."
I set aside the long discussion of Nietzsche, who apparently went insane, so his violently anti-Wagner period is no more meaningful than his violently pro-Wagner period. But I found a key point in this skepticism when the narrative reached William Morris (p. 124-26). Having already noted Wagner's appeal to English artists of a pre-raphaelite bent because of his "proximity" (delicate way of putting it) to the Matter of Britain, here Ross emphasizes how Morris's and Wagner's interests and topics "overlapped ... to a remarkable degree." But then he is forced to acknowledge, "Yet Morris loathed the very idea of Wagner." Why? He doesn't say, except to hint that their philosophical conclusions differed.
This stricture becomes useful over 500 pages later when Ross gets to a brief, hasty, and sloppy consideration of Tolkien (p. 642-43). Again he starts by citing parallel or overlapping interests, including Tolkien's own retellings of the Siegfried stories, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which at least he's up to date enough to know about. He then notes that "Tolkien fans have sometimes argued that the manifest resemblances to Wagner result from a common use of older sources," an argument he could have gotten from my own article on Tolkien and music, though I'm not cited; but he then adds, "but the claim does not withstand scrutiny." Only because he doesn't scrutinize it very much. Ross says that Tolkien's One Ring "has no plausible antecedent" except Wagner's; but, even leaving aside the glaring fact that it doesn't have to have an antecedent, the relationships between the Ring and the magic, especially the invisibility factor; the role of the Ring as treasure; the way in which its power is used; the whole history of its ownership; etc etc, are so totally different in the two stories as to leave nothing in common but a magic ring with a curse on it (the curses, and their nature, are totally different too: Tolkien's isn't even actually a curse, it just functions as one). And a cursed treasure is a fairy-tale motif a lot older than Wagner. As for Ross's claim that Tolkien's "restorative ending" also comes from Wagner's Ring, that's just absurd. Again, they're nothing alike.
(What makes Wagnerians so eager to seize on flimsy evidence for an influence on Tolkien, anyway? They seem desperate to find something, anything, to claim as a resemblance between these artists, which is why it's necessary to point out how entirely disparate they are.)
So that leaves very little likelihood that Tolkien got the idea of the Ring from Wagner, and even if he did, it's reduced to so trivial a borrowing that it's of no significance whatever. The Morris case becomes a useful parallel when Ross spends the next two paragraphs of the Tolkien section itemizing some deep philosophical differences between Tolkien and Wagner. You realize, even if Ross doesn't, that the two really have nothing much to do with each other (also that Ross doesn't understand Tolkien very well, but never mind that). For evidence that Ross can consider an apparent borrowing to be insignificant when he wants to, turn back to the section on the Nazis, where you'll find Ross arguing that Hitler - a known, avowed, and deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic Wagner fan - was not very influenced by Wagner's philosophy after all (p. 515-16) and didn't even get his anti-semitism from Wagner (p. 532).
Here you'll also find, as I've read elsewhere, that while Hitler loved Wagner, most of the other Nazis didn't, and Hitler had to keep poking them to wake up during performances of Wagner operas that he'd forced them to attend. What was new to me was that Winifred Wagner, the virulently pro-Nazi and Hitler-loving daughter-in-law who was running the family businesses at the time, knew all of this and feared that a post-Hitler Nazi regime might lose interest in the government financial and publicity support which was keeping their Bayreuth festival running. Ross remarks dryly, "This was one problem the Wagners did not have to face."
Tuesday, June 22, 2021
mattress abortion
I guess the story of our mattress should begin close to 20 years ago, when B. and I took our fabulous, once-in-a-lifetime, vacation in Rome. We stayed in a rooftop apartment in the medieval quarter, which we'd rented from an Airbnb-like agency before Airbnb existed. We slept in what I'm told Italians call a "marriage bed": a king-size bed made out of two twin-size mattresses put together in a single frame with a single set of sheets. The idea is that if one party gets up during the night or twists and turns a lot, vibrations through the mattress don't disturb the other person's sleep.
When we replaced our mattress the next year, I thought we should get something like that. But for some reason it wasn't available, so instead we minimized the vibration factor by getting a mattress without connections between the coils. This has served us fine, except that such a mattress doesn't spread out the pressure from where you sleep, either, and over time develops sags in the spots where you are.
B. awoke from a bad night's sleep on Monday and said, "We're going mattress shopping, today." OK, but I need a lot of time to get ready these days. We went to the same shop where we bought the previous mattress, and their records go back that far. Nobody there except the manager, who was very helpful. And yes indeed, they do now have the Italian marriage bed, which is called a "split king," and furthermore each half has an independently controlled hospital-bed function to raise both the head and the foot, and we could really go for that.
Though it does mean that, though we can share blanket and comforter, we'd best use separate sheets for the two halves.
It's in stock, so delivery: next day, Tuesday. I did warn the mgr: when we moved, soon after buying the old mattress, getting it up the twisty staircase to our new bedroom required folding it in half and strapping it down (because a fat mattress doesn't want to stay folded), and it still took three strong guys a lot of struggle to do it. B. showed him some photos she'd taken of the stairway area. He thought the removal could be done.
The mattress deliverers came today. Two of them. First they were confused that they were delivering two twin mattresses but there was only one frame, but once we got over that, they wrestled the old mattress into the upstairs hallway and then realized they couldn't get it downstairs. They couldn't fold it, because an old mattress would probably break up. They couldn't flip it over the hallway railing into the area above the staircase, because the weight of the mattress would probably break the railing. It would take four guys to do it properly, and they didn't have two extra guys.
So they put the mattress back and will return on Friday. And the cats wonder what the heck is going on to disturb the normal course of their lives.
When we replaced our mattress the next year, I thought we should get something like that. But for some reason it wasn't available, so instead we minimized the vibration factor by getting a mattress without connections between the coils. This has served us fine, except that such a mattress doesn't spread out the pressure from where you sleep, either, and over time develops sags in the spots where you are.
B. awoke from a bad night's sleep on Monday and said, "We're going mattress shopping, today." OK, but I need a lot of time to get ready these days. We went to the same shop where we bought the previous mattress, and their records go back that far. Nobody there except the manager, who was very helpful. And yes indeed, they do now have the Italian marriage bed, which is called a "split king," and furthermore each half has an independently controlled hospital-bed function to raise both the head and the foot, and we could really go for that.
Though it does mean that, though we can share blanket and comforter, we'd best use separate sheets for the two halves.
It's in stock, so delivery: next day, Tuesday. I did warn the mgr: when we moved, soon after buying the old mattress, getting it up the twisty staircase to our new bedroom required folding it in half and strapping it down (because a fat mattress doesn't want to stay folded), and it still took three strong guys a lot of struggle to do it. B. showed him some photos she'd taken of the stairway area. He thought the removal could be done.
The mattress deliverers came today. Two of them. First they were confused that they were delivering two twin mattresses but there was only one frame, but once we got over that, they wrestled the old mattress into the upstairs hallway and then realized they couldn't get it downstairs. They couldn't fold it, because an old mattress would probably break up. They couldn't flip it over the hallway railing into the area above the staircase, because the weight of the mattress would probably break the railing. It would take four guys to do it properly, and they didn't have two extra guys.
So they put the mattress back and will return on Friday. And the cats wonder what the heck is going on to disturb the normal course of their lives.
Monday, June 21, 2021
past events
Things I didn't mention at the time.
1. A week ago on the date of our anniversary, with my brother being in town, we held a reunion of the surviving members of our wedding party: my brother, B's sister and her husband. Only all of our parents were there then but are no longer with us. The celebration took the form of a post-pandemic dinner at an Italian restaurant, a place we'd liked before, but it's in the middle of a crowded downtown so parking was worse than I expected, and walking nearly half a mile back from the nearest parking space is ceasing to be in my repertoire. The other problem was that B's sister insisted on paying. This should not be so: they were our guests. But she arranged this before we got there, the rotter.
2. On the same day, the Tolkien Society held another one of its online trivia quizzes. Only about 50 participants, which is perhaps how I managed to come in fifth and have my nom-de-game on the big board at the end. Go me.
3. Our MythSoc discussion group met online to discuss another novel, The Way Between, by our next Author GoH, Rivera Sun. B, unusually, wasn't there - she was off practicing with her orchestra - and didn't even read the book, but she bought it on Kindle and gave it to me to read. No wild enthusiasm, but everybody rather liked the book: and for the first of a series, it ended at a good stopping place.
4. Next day I had a medical appointment, but I had a cough so they sent me home. Figured that in that case I should be tested for the virus - you can still get it even if vaccinated; our niece-in-law's parents both did - so I did that the next day. All clean. Anyway, by that day after the appointment, my cough, which had started the day before the appointment, had disappeared. Must have been just a cough.
5. Our play-reading online group, having wiped out A Midsummer Night's Dream and Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, has moved on to The Crucible, our first serious play since Anne of the Thousand Days. Serious, yes; dire, even; but at least not dour, like, say, Death of a Salesman. Full of scenes with like 13 people in a room, all of them talking at once, so a bit of a challenge to arrange for only four speakers.
6. Yesterday, online concert by Brocelïande, I think their first in this format. Usual delightful folk/Renaissance repertoire, with uneased comments by the performers on how odd it was to perform to a camera in an empty room instead of to rows of attentive faces.
1. A week ago on the date of our anniversary, with my brother being in town, we held a reunion of the surviving members of our wedding party: my brother, B's sister and her husband. Only all of our parents were there then but are no longer with us. The celebration took the form of a post-pandemic dinner at an Italian restaurant, a place we'd liked before, but it's in the middle of a crowded downtown so parking was worse than I expected, and walking nearly half a mile back from the nearest parking space is ceasing to be in my repertoire. The other problem was that B's sister insisted on paying. This should not be so: they were our guests. But she arranged this before we got there, the rotter.
2. On the same day, the Tolkien Society held another one of its online trivia quizzes. Only about 50 participants, which is perhaps how I managed to come in fifth and have my nom-de-game on the big board at the end. Go me.
3. Our MythSoc discussion group met online to discuss another novel, The Way Between, by our next Author GoH, Rivera Sun. B, unusually, wasn't there - she was off practicing with her orchestra - and didn't even read the book, but she bought it on Kindle and gave it to me to read. No wild enthusiasm, but everybody rather liked the book: and for the first of a series, it ended at a good stopping place.
4. Next day I had a medical appointment, but I had a cough so they sent me home. Figured that in that case I should be tested for the virus - you can still get it even if vaccinated; our niece-in-law's parents both did - so I did that the next day. All clean. Anyway, by that day after the appointment, my cough, which had started the day before the appointment, had disappeared. Must have been just a cough.
5. Our play-reading online group, having wiped out A Midsummer Night's Dream and Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, has moved on to The Crucible, our first serious play since Anne of the Thousand Days. Serious, yes; dire, even; but at least not dour, like, say, Death of a Salesman. Full of scenes with like 13 people in a room, all of them talking at once, so a bit of a challenge to arrange for only four speakers.
6. Yesterday, online concert by Brocelïande, I think their first in this format. Usual delightful folk/Renaissance repertoire, with uneased comments by the performers on how odd it was to perform to a camera in an empty room instead of to rows of attentive faces.
Friday, June 18, 2021
two book talks and a play
I had a very busy day online on Thursday. Besides a previously-scheduled Zoom meeting, I attended two online book talks and a play. It was useful to see how much of these I found it physically possible to sit through.
First, the University of Glasgow Centre for Fantasy held a Zoom interview with Katherine Langrish, a children's author who's written a book called From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my nine year-old self. Immediately I thought of The Magician's Book by Laura Miller, whose childhood Narnia fan was crushingly disillusioned by the books when older. Langrish isn't like that. Though she says she has some criticisms, her talk suggested that her book is mostly about the greater appreciation adulthood brought, for instance realizing Lewis's use of literary antecedents, e.g. Sir Gawain in The Silver Chair. (At which point someone in the chat mentioned looking forward to the upcoming movie of Sir Gawain and others replied, "There's a movie?!" Yes indeed, and here's the trailer. Looks a heck of a lot more authentic to the source than that Beowulf movie was.)
Langrish said some gratifying things. As a child she wrote Narnia fanfic, but gave it up because "I found that writing about Narnia wasn't the same as reading about Narnia." Yes! And this is why I have no interest in fanfic of my favorite worlds. She's avoided movies of Narnia because she prefers the vivid pictures in her own head, another sensible reaction. I don't understand people whose reaction to a vivid book scene is to want to see it depicted in a movie. Langrith also praised both Lewis and Tolkien for the sense they give "of the physicality of the world." If you thrust a shovel into their landscape, there'd be real soil underneath, unlike some fantasy worlds which feel like you'd break through into empty air.
Unfortunately Langrith also had some gratuitous criticisms of Tolkien (as did Miller). She found The Hobbit condescending to the child reader where Narnia is not. Where Narnia is not? Really? She did see the Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings and thought they captured the book's essence, which is ludicrous, and offense even to suggest; and worse, she thinks the negative responses were for leaving parts of the book out. No, no, no! It's for the nonsense the films put in in its place.
Second, the Wade Center had CS Lewis scholar Michael Ward for a book launch: his book, After Humanity, is a gloss on CSL's The Abolition of Man. The talk was rather abstruse, but then Abolition is a rather abstruse book. Not their fault, but I had to bow out of this one before the Q&A session.
Third, I'd bought a ticket for the livestreamed version of a live performance of a local theater company's production of a one-man play, Shylock by Mark Leiren-Young. Doug Brook plays a Shakespearean actor who's frustrated by having drawn abusive criticism for his interpretation of Shylock. It emerges over the course of his monologue that, for all his paeans to artistic freedom, he believes it's just wrong to portray Shylock sympathetically. He's the villain of Merchant, so he should be played that way. So this actor does, and he gets slammed and literally spit on for being racist and a self-hating Jew (he's Jewish).
But then he starts drawing parallels to reinforce his argument against this response, and by the time the play's 2/3 over, it's devolved into a right-wing rant against a caricature of "cancel culture."
The second problem is that I've seen many productions of Merchant over the years with many different readings of Shylock, and it's usually seemed to me that Shylock portrayed as a pure villain comes across as a litigious crank; you can't even be sure that any of his accusations are real. It diminishes him. And the third problem is that the actor in this show gives some examples of his readings of Shylock's lines, and no, it doesn't sound like a particularly villainous reading, so that kind of undercuts the anger he claims the audiences showed.
I didn't give up before this was over, though I thought of it, and I did think that if I were there in person, I couldn't leave without causing a fuss.
First, the University of Glasgow Centre for Fantasy held a Zoom interview with Katherine Langrish, a children's author who's written a book called From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my nine year-old self. Immediately I thought of The Magician's Book by Laura Miller, whose childhood Narnia fan was crushingly disillusioned by the books when older. Langrish isn't like that. Though she says she has some criticisms, her talk suggested that her book is mostly about the greater appreciation adulthood brought, for instance realizing Lewis's use of literary antecedents, e.g. Sir Gawain in The Silver Chair. (At which point someone in the chat mentioned looking forward to the upcoming movie of Sir Gawain and others replied, "There's a movie?!" Yes indeed, and here's the trailer. Looks a heck of a lot more authentic to the source than that Beowulf movie was.)
Langrish said some gratifying things. As a child she wrote Narnia fanfic, but gave it up because "I found that writing about Narnia wasn't the same as reading about Narnia." Yes! And this is why I have no interest in fanfic of my favorite worlds. She's avoided movies of Narnia because she prefers the vivid pictures in her own head, another sensible reaction. I don't understand people whose reaction to a vivid book scene is to want to see it depicted in a movie. Langrith also praised both Lewis and Tolkien for the sense they give "of the physicality of the world." If you thrust a shovel into their landscape, there'd be real soil underneath, unlike some fantasy worlds which feel like you'd break through into empty air.
Unfortunately Langrith also had some gratuitous criticisms of Tolkien (as did Miller). She found The Hobbit condescending to the child reader where Narnia is not. Where Narnia is not? Really? She did see the Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings and thought they captured the book's essence, which is ludicrous, and offense even to suggest; and worse, she thinks the negative responses were for leaving parts of the book out. No, no, no! It's for the nonsense the films put in in its place.
Second, the Wade Center had CS Lewis scholar Michael Ward for a book launch: his book, After Humanity, is a gloss on CSL's The Abolition of Man. The talk was rather abstruse, but then Abolition is a rather abstruse book. Not their fault, but I had to bow out of this one before the Q&A session.
Third, I'd bought a ticket for the livestreamed version of a live performance of a local theater company's production of a one-man play, Shylock by Mark Leiren-Young. Doug Brook plays a Shakespearean actor who's frustrated by having drawn abusive criticism for his interpretation of Shylock. It emerges over the course of his monologue that, for all his paeans to artistic freedom, he believes it's just wrong to portray Shylock sympathetically. He's the villain of Merchant, so he should be played that way. So this actor does, and he gets slammed and literally spit on for being racist and a self-hating Jew (he's Jewish).
But then he starts drawing parallels to reinforce his argument against this response, and by the time the play's 2/3 over, it's devolved into a right-wing rant against a caricature of "cancel culture."
The second problem is that I've seen many productions of Merchant over the years with many different readings of Shylock, and it's usually seemed to me that Shylock portrayed as a pure villain comes across as a litigious crank; you can't even be sure that any of his accusations are real. It diminishes him. And the third problem is that the actor in this show gives some examples of his readings of Shylock's lines, and no, it doesn't sound like a particularly villainous reading, so that kind of undercuts the anger he claims the audiences showed.
I didn't give up before this was over, though I thought of it, and I did think that if I were there in person, I couldn't leave without causing a fuss.
Thursday, June 17, 2021
pocket air conditioner
We're having the first serious heat wave of the summer (about 97-100 F) and I'm sitting here getting moderate relief with my new pocket air conditioner. B. ordered us a couple of these. It's about 7 inches by 5 inches, 6.5 inches high, and it runs on a battery (recharged by plugging it into a USB port) and a small bottle of water that snaps upside down into a holder. When I turn the fan on, a faint stream of coolish air comes out the back and makes a modest attempt to refresh me. Really, it's at least as comforting as pitiful meows from a cat or two.
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
scares children
The other thing I learned from my visit to the public library yesterday is that I have evolved to the state where now I frighten small children.
What is it about me that does this? How should I know? Perhaps it is the sight of a large elderly man, face obscured by mask, beard, glasses, and hat, clumping slowly along with a cane.
All I know for sure is the manner in which the small children skitter nervously away.
And to think that once I was a small child myself. Well, that was a long time ago. But it cuts. Even in mid-adulthood, playing with small children was a joy - I remember play sessions with a 4-year-old, doing her parents the favor of getting her out of their hair, and that must have been 15 years ago because now she's 19 - but I may be more cautious about such sessions in the future, especially so long as masks are on.
What is it about me that does this? How should I know? Perhaps it is the sight of a large elderly man, face obscured by mask, beard, glasses, and hat, clumping slowly along with a cane.
All I know for sure is the manner in which the small children skitter nervously away.
And to think that once I was a small child myself. Well, that was a long time ago. But it cuts. Even in mid-adulthood, playing with small children was a joy - I remember play sessions with a 4-year-old, doing her parents the favor of getting her out of their hair, and that must have been 15 years ago because now she's 19 - but I may be more cautious about such sessions in the future, especially so long as masks are on.
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