In which I feel sort of like a space pirate.
Yes, I have been watching /Firefly/. And it seems like the most sensible thing to do now is to write a blogpost in its style.
The main observation I have is that I used to have this strange impression that people who had been in Irvine for two years or more were powerfully and almost distressingly composed. At the time, I thought that might be some innate quality that the had. Now that I’ve been here for two years, I think it’s a consequence of having survived Irvine for two years.
Saying that makes me feel like a space pirate.
It seems to me that one purpose of a blog is to put one’s thoughts, words, opinions (but mostly opinions) out there on the tubes. I’m not convinced yet that I have enough opinions for this model to work out for me. (Stay tuned, again, for June 15 when my school year will be over and I will be expressing, in more detail, my thoughts on these matters.)
Until all of that happens, I hope that you’ll click through to the poem below. I found the link on Rachel Maddow’s twitter feed. It is funny and lovely. There is not enough poetry, I think, on regional traditions of automotive etiquette.
It being Boston, I got out
of the car yelling, swearing at this woman,
a little woman, whose first language was not English.
But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew,
we both knew, that the thing to do
is get out of the car, slam the door
as hard as you fucking can and yell things
Updike’s Salesman
I can’t say that I think much about John Updike in my day-to-day life. Then again, I think the world will be better the more people have read the following line from Philip Roth:
Updike knows so much, about golf, about porn, about kids, about America. I don’t know anything about anything. His hero is a Toyota salesman. Updike knows everything about being a Toyota salesman. Here I live in the country and I don’t even know the names of the trees. I’m going to give up writing.
I found it in Julian Barnes’s memorium for the man.
The one thing that I always remember about John Updike is that he worked for two hours a day. Maybe more when he was younger. Two hours a day. It’s sort of like being a vampire, or, at least, what I imagine being a vampire is like.
McWhorter’s Shakespeare
I know that John McWhorter brings out the hateface in some people. I don’t have a strong opinion. He does, however, have this post about Shakespeare (which is a response to an earlier one). I wanted to write a comment, but I can’t afford the New Republic subscription. Maybe I just don’t know the benefits of membership.
But I thought I’d throw it out here:
Having modern playwrights write revisions of Shakespeare? Gee, golly, neat-o. Except, like, couldn’t their time be better spent writing plays about, I don’t know, things about which we give a shit? Speaking as someone who (at one time) knew all the first lines of Shakespeare’s plays, I feel a certain amount of authority in saying: Do We Seriously Need Another Version Of Hamlet / Midsummer / Twelfth Night / Julius Caesar? Because god knows those plays really speak to the Universal Condition Of Humanity. As long as we leave out, you know, the facts.
OK, that was a cheap shot. Nothing new there. But here’s the thing: I remember back in my high school days when the notion of Translating Shakespeare into Regular English filled me with sadness and contempt. Reading McWhorter’s essay, I was filled only with weariness and exhaustion. Maybe because you know none of the fun plays are getting Translated. No one wants to write / read / see Troilus and Cressida in Tehran or King John: Origins. We’ll be unleashing a murder of MacBeths on the world and 27 Dresses or What you Will, no doubt.
Why am I so cranky? Hard to say. It’s coming down to paper o’clock here. That surely has something to do with my Shakespearean tetchiness.
More than that, I think, comes from the August Wilson comparison with which McWhorter starts his earlier post. Isn’t it, I don’t know, good that recent writers speak to us more than old dead ones?
Further: we have a pretty good collection of Shakespearean adaptations in the world, from Dryden’s Tempest to Nahum Tate’s Happy Lear to the BBC’s Shakespeare Retold series. And you know what we do with them? We mock them. We talk about how they’ll never live up to the original. Maybe they didn’t do that to Tate at the time, but that’s our game now. So if you’re asking a writer to Translate Shakespeare, pretty much you’re asking them to give it a go so that we can mock their unworthiness.
It doesn’t matter that, as McWhorter suggests, that no one can understand Shakespeare anymore (which I don’t buy as much as he says), we’ll do it anyway. With bells. That, as I recall, was the lesson of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival. If It Ain’t Shakespeare, People Walk Out.
Which isn’t to say that writers should rewrite Shakespeare. Only if you’re going to do it, for the love of god, blow it the hell up.
400 Years of Animatronic Dolphins.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are the gossip pages of the canon. Love, betrayal, swerving sexualities. There is something about the sonnets that drives normally sane people deep deep intoWill In The World territory. You know, that state of mind where you read a line about “Arion on the dolphin’s back” and immediately begin to scour the records of Elizabethan England for instances of animatronic dolphins.
And now, apparently, the sonnets are 400 years old: published or pirated on May 20, 1609. Articles like these, more than anything, make me want to hide under the bed until April 24, 1616, which (I hope) will inaugurate a blissful 50+ years without Shakespearean anniversaries to celebrate.
Belated Buffy Blogging.
Memorial Day weekend is coming up. That means it’s time to get out, hit the road, and head for the beach. I won’t be doing this for two reasons. Reason One: I already live close to the beach. Reason Two: Thanks to the University of California’s quarter system, I’ll be here languishing in class / paper madness for a couple of extra weeks.
This means, also, that my plan to devise a plan for this blog (and there is one) is going to have to wait for a few more weeks. But that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be anything in this space. It does mean that whatever I write, a lot of it is going to have to do with Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
In the last month, I’ve watched the first four seasons on Hulu (Seasons One and Two) and DVD. Last night, I started on Season Five. Now, I know that Buffy hasn’t been on the air in six years. (Season Eight is still a going concern.) So I was thinking that Buffy would be a dumb thing to write about. After all, the modus operandi of the blog is currency: news, book news, issue news. While most blogs are, in some sense, personal blogs, the truly personal blog seems to be a lesser genre. I want to hear bloggers opine about issues of general concern, not necessarily about their Netflix queue.
Here’s how I justify my Buffy blogging:
1. There weren’t any blogs when Buffy was originally broadcast. I can step into that breach.
2. I remember many of my Buffy-watching friends expressing annoyance at the appearance of Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg – now of Gossip Girl). Seven episodes in to Season Five, I have come to the following conclusion: Dawn is awesome. It is high time for some Dawn rehabilitation. That is a niche I can fill.
I’m sure that, as this project continues, new reasons will appear.
The abracadabrant sky.
Sometimes someone invents a word that you know you should have invented. You know it will eat away at you. You will use it at parties and people will be impressed; you will not give credit where credit is due, but you will know, nevertheless that credit is due. What am I saying? Really I just want to quote this:
He doesn’t know, he can’t say, before the facts, and he doesn’t even want to know or to say; the facts themselves loom, before the understanding, in too large a mass for a mere mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too numerous to make a legible word. The illegible word, accordingly, the great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky, to his imagination, as something fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known language, and iti s under this convenient ensign that he travels and considers and
contemplates, and, to the best of his ability, enjoys.
That’s from Henry James’s The American Scene, which was written in 1907, so I’m only 100 years late.
