May 03, 2004
The Lessons of Titus
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is a confusing play, but one lesson that it seems to impart is that sometimes idealistic value systems do not work when put into practice. Titus Andronicus goes to great — almost hyperbolic — lengths to make this clear, though it is often overlooked trying to make ethical sense out of a morality tale. I believe that Titus Andronicus shares this quality with Euripides’ Medea: both of these plays unsettle us in ways that we might not be willing to face. Neither are necessarily realistic, nor are they meant to be (mothers never murder their own babies today, right?). However, both play on social taboos to make the point that traditional values adhered to religiously do not always provide us with the correct answers. In fact, these values can often lead to tragedy.
April 30, 2004
Nanotech Update
As if they knew I just reread Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has updated their web site with new findings that suggest the imminent viability of molecular engineering. From their site: “Molecular nanotechnology (MNT) manufacturing means the ability to build devices, machines, and eventually whole products with every atom in its specified place. MNT is coming soon — almost certainly within 20 years, and perhaps in less than a decade. When it arrives, it will come quickly.” These current predictions put the practical use of nanotechnology ten to twenty years before Kurzweil predicted, and as the latter is a technological optimist, I am duly impressed at the seemingly rapid advancement of this technology. Read more on their site overview.
April 28, 2004
Found
Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One’s enough. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
[I’m not sure what the context is here, but I can imagine, especially with some of the prevalent attitudes wafting around today.]
April 12, 2004
Listen Up!
The narrator of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” like many of us, needs to learn how to listen. How many of us truly listen? Or do we just wait for someone we might be talking to to shut the hell up so we can continue our verbal assault without the slightest consideration as to what she might have to say? How often do we find ourselves thinking about what we’re going to next pull out of our word hoards rather than attempting to hear what someone else might have to say? Perhaps others are just as guilty. Maybe they need to listen to what I have to say. It would probably do them good, no? Yet, so often we are made deaf by our own beliefs that the tune someone else whistles sounds too dissonant for us to enjoy.
March 30, 2004
The Hours
believe me, Adia, we are still innocent
it’s easy, we all falter
does it matter? —Sarah McLachlan from “Adia”
I guess the aspects of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours are similar to those I love about Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: its rhizommatic structure, its stream of consciousness, its marveling in the everyday, its concern with how to live in a world of oppressive expectations and interruptions. Cunningham work, like Woolf’s, seeks to find a way to cope with the seemingly endless hours between the moments that make life wonderful. And are these moments, so precious and few, justification for facing the remaining hours? For some, like Clarissa Vaughn, the hours are tolerable; for others, like Richard Brown, they weigh too heavily.
Continue reading "The Hours" . . . March 03, 2004
Boal, Enzensberger, and Baudrillard
At the conclusion of the selection from Theater of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal writes that the main goal of the theater should be the “liberation of the spectator, on whom the theater has imposed finished visions of the world” (352). His conclusion is that the spectator becomes a voiceless victim of bourgeois drama, unable to do anything but passively accept visions of the world reflected by the artistic powers-that-be: “The spectator is less then a man and it is necessary to humanize him, to restore to him his capacity of action in all its fullness” (352). for Boal, the theater is not about catharsis, where all potential action is purged, but about change that begins with the theater: “dramatic action throws light upon real action” by allowing the spectator to become actor and direct the action, not to remain a passive receptacle for others’ perspectives (Boal 352).
March 02, 2004
Some Characteristics of the Literary Epic
Difference in the condition of the composition leads to a difference in the character of the poetry. Because Homer composed for recitation, his composition is in some ways freer and looser than Virgil’s. Both of Homer’s poems have a majestic plan — less closely woven than the Aeneid; their episodes are more easily detached from the whole and may be enjoyed as separate poems. The Greek epic poet composes on a grand scale, and could not always expect to recite his poems in their entirety; therefore, Homer’s epics share looser methods of composition — though they are not a collection of separate lays. They are single poems with single plans and consistency of language. Homer’s art is oral — Virgil’s is written. Virgil writes for the readers — i.e., he operates less with phrases and formulas than with single words; he fashions sentences carefully and individually; he takes care to avoid omissions, contradictions, and inconsistencies; he uses carefully planned poetic texture and exquisite choice of words and significance. Homer’s oral epic is characterized by it simplicity, strength and straightforwardness, movement of lines, splendid climax, singleness of effect, and unbroken maintenance of tragic or heroic mood. The real difference between primary and secondary epics results from distinctions of origins and character — whether oral or written.
Continue reading "Some Characteristics of the Literary Epic" . . .Odysseus
Always setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore
The identical reproaches, and somewhere
Out before him, the unraveling patience
He was wedded to. There were the islands
Each with it women and twining welcome
To be navigated, and one to call “home.”
The knowledge of all that he betrayed
Grew till it was the same whether he stayed
Or went. Therefore he went. And what wonder
If sometimes he could not remember
Which was the one who wished on his departure
Perils that he could never sail through,
And which, improbable, remote, and true,
Was the one he kept sailing home to.
—W. S. Merwin
An Ancient Gesture
I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don’t know where, for years,
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.
And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very bet tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture, — a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope…
Penelope, who really cried.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
March 01, 2004
The Sea Call
When Odysseus met Tieresias in the underworld, the prophet told him that he would reach home, but would then take another journey to a land where people live who know nothing of the sea. In this excerpt from a modern sequel to the Odyssey by the twentieth-century Greek poet Nicos Kazantzakis, Odysseus has returned to Ithaca. Sitting by the hearth with his family, his eyes alight with excitement, he relates his adventures. But then . . .
Continue reading "The Sea Call" . . .
