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" This is a good book to read for someone with limited background in philosophy and cultural anthropology. Barthes deals with the underlying meaning of ...moreThis is a good book to read for someone with limited background in philosophy and cultural anthropology. Barthes deals with the underlying meaning of many activities and events. Not all pieces in this collection are equally interesting and accessible. His essay on "Wrestling" is particularly good and widely anthologized. What Barthes shows us is how wrestling functions as a spectacle with symbolic values. Since wrestling is not standard competition,
in which the outcome is in doubt, there must be another reason for its popularity. Barthes sees wrestling less as sport and more as ritual: a wrestling match plays out in a predictable manner, with stock characters behaving in expected ways, and has an outcome that fulfills the audience's emotional needs in the same way that the Greek tragedy fulfilled the audience's need for catharsis.
Barthes' concept is ingenious: by understanding human habits and pastimes, we can gain insight into the human psyche and deepest motivations. The outside reflects the inside.(less)"
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Ian Tattersall's book, The Fossil Trail, is a good introduction to the history of paleoanthropology for someone who knows very little about the subject. If you have read any of the primary source materials, i.e.articles and seminar talks by some of t...moreIan Tattersall's book, The Fossil Trail, is a good introduction to the history of paleoanthropology for someone who knows very little about the subject. If you have read any of the primary source materials, i.e.articles and seminar talks by some of the leading paleoanthropologists, or even some good textbooks on the subject, you may be a little bored or frustrated with this pop-bestseller approach. The good, hard information is buried in the narrative flow. There are too many discoveries and not enough theories; too much context and not enough to put into it.
Of course, I spent several months struggling with harder source materials and it was torture, but when I finally managed to absorb the jargon, definitions, and theories, I really felt like I knew something...when you read a book like The Fossil Trail, you will probably have more questions than answers...or you will decide that you don't want to know more, thank you.
After reading this book, I am revising my opinion of all such science books for the general public, including classics like THE DOUBLE HELIX. How much does one really learn from them? I guess there is no substitute for field work, regardless of the field or pursuit. No earn, no learn.(less)
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TS ELIOT AND WALLACE STEVENS: A CONTRAST BETWEEN TWO OBLIVIOUS POETS
There are basically two kinds of poets, those who want you to understand and those who don't care. The difference between the poetry they make is simple. The accessible poet w...moreTS ELIOT AND WALLACE STEVENS: A CONTRAST BETWEEN TWO OBLIVIOUS POETS
There are basically two kinds of poets, those who want you to understand and those who don't care. The difference between the poetry they make is simple. The accessible poet writes foremost to communicate, to put himself out there for you the reader to learn from, to like or to dislike. He has a story to tell and uses verse to tell it. Even when he employs obscure terms, they are like rare ornaments or odd accessories to a central character and location that are easy to identify. With the accessible poet you know how he feels about his subject and how he wants you to feel about it; when you read his verse, you usually know where you are. Allen Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen, Carl Sandberg, EA Houseman, and Robert Frost were accessible poets. WB Yeats was accessible most of the time, until he sailed to Byzantium and slouched toward Bethlehem, and spoke to us about a perne in a gyre. But even in his most mystical, astrologically driven moments, Yeats is fairly easy to locate. He likes to tell a story.
The oblivious poet also writes about a subject, but the reader quickly realizes that what he is reading is not what the poem is about, the words are figures, signifiers that are as far from the signified as the earth is from Alpha Centauri. And then the reader makes another uneasy discovery that may make him queasy: he doesn't know how he wil ever understand this poem. That is because the words and statements of these poets are like the short-cuts on a computer desk-top. They link you to real files, but only if those files actually exist in your hard drive. The problem is they usually don't. Those points of reference, those short-cuts, exist only in the poet's memory. And unless you, the reader, can somehow access the poet's mind and experience, you will not be able to recover that point of reference. Therefore, you will have no way of understanding or emotionally connecting with that poet. TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens are such poets as these.
Of course, it would be unfair to simply say that Eliot and Stevens are arcane and enigmatic and not worth the trouble of reading. In fact, both poets demonstrate just how little we need to understand a poem in order to be seduced by it. Maybe we like poetry because it points out flamboyantly a property of even the most mundane communication: we talk, we listen, but we are never quite sure of what our interlocutor has said and how much we understood. Yet, we continue to talk and listen--why? For the pleasure of communication, of the words pouring on our ears and into my minds and hearts. And also for the time and effort we spend remembering the bits and pieces of what was said and the fun of putting it back together into something coherent and comforting. When Stevens asks Ramon Hernandez why the singing ended and why the lights in the boats marked off the dark water of the harbor as if creating a Cartesian grid, we also want to know. We want to know what things mean, we also want to believe that the cosmos has a pattern.
In imploring Ramon for some key to what he senses, Stevens comes as close as any poet can without crashing on the rocks of prose to explaining the life-long objective of his career in verse: to find God, a universal soul or spirit, or intelligence behind the apparently random beauty and horror in the cosmos. Stevens can lose us with his blackbirds and his uncle's monocle and when he tells me that "life is a bitter aspic" I want to tell him to send it back to the kitchen with a footnote.
But for every obscurantist poem of Stevens there is a beautifully clear and evocative one, like Martial Cadenza" or "The Dwarf." Stevens is always trying to solve a problem and even if he is sometimes like the mumbling math genius professor who scrawls inscrutable symbols on a blackboard in impossibly dense equations only to erase parts of them while we look on, he does so with such an unerring placement of words and sounds and such sincerity that we cannot help but try to go along with him on his adventure.
We as readers and consumers of stories and explorers of science also wish to understand the world around us. We look to the poet to tell us something about it. TS Eliot was that unique poet who did not really care about telling us anything about our world. He did not seem to share our need to understand the world he lived in and his poetry reflects this purposeful dismissal of our expectations. He understood the world all too well and it disgusted him. It was a world in which he did not fit in. It was a world in which nobody seemed to be fitting in. It was a world in which humanity seemed to be blossoming like one large teeming larval army. It was a world of Coney Island, canned food, and Model Ts, of factories and immigrants for whom his erudition and eloquence might as well have been on the other side of a black hole.
TS Eliot was not nearly as comfortable as Wallace Stevens in his skin or in his home or on his street. He did not feel like a master of his environment. He could not tell us about Key West or Naples or Paris or his stately house. He was not someone trying to make sense of a world of intriguing phenomena--he'd given up on that. The best he could do was to try to deal with his debased environment with satire, sarcasm and an elegiac eloquence that often comes off as faintly romantic, except that the romance is about something without name or reference. That eloquence, as hypnotic at times as an oyster's saliva, can turn Eliot's anguish and irritation about the low quality of life around him into a pearl of linguistic beauty. For him, poetry is a victory over billboards, bad music and degraded values. It is how he turns it all into something resembling art.
At times, Eliot uses his wit and erudition like a hammer. He bludgeons "the young man carbuncular" and others with his grand diction. Eliot was deprived of finer things. He would have been an angry young man, but his education and Anglo-Saxon sense of class superiority and entitlement made him unfit for soapboxes and the vulgarity of politics. In any case he did not have much good to say and wanted to steer clear of stating his case or explaining himself for fear that his "message" might not be more than a well-articulated shout of disgust and despair.
He gives us J Alfred Prufrock,the Wasteland, Sweeney and The Nightingales, The Hollow Men and Gerontian because he wants to speak without making a statement, to attack without committing to conquest. He wants to smother his grievance in lacquer and does not want us to be pinned down to particulars. Eliot may have started in a very similar place to Stevens, but rather than enjoying the world in an Epicurian way, he sank into its depths. While Stevens could permit himself to meditate on the dark conundrum of beauty and ugliness, life and death, Eliot could only make snide comments about it. His only way out was religion and he found it. Then his poetry calms down, becomes simply sad and dignified.(less)
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I received a copy of "How to Talk Dirty..." from, of all people, my English professor and thesis advisor at Amherst, Professor Bill Pritchard. It was an enlightened gift, and since I was going into the Peace Corps, I would have a lot of time and soli...moreI received a copy of "How to Talk Dirty..." from, of all people, my English professor and thesis advisor at Amherst, Professor Bill Pritchard. It was an enlightened gift, and since I was going into the Peace Corps, I would have a lot of time and solitude in which to absorb it. I had ambivalent feelings about Lenny Bruce. I related to the pain of his personal life, his broken home, and poverty, his outsider status and hatred of authority, which ultimately led to his dishonorable discharge from the Navy. But when I read this book I was seeking a role model, and Lenny Bruce was not the one. He was like one of the characters in "Crash", the David Cronenberg movie, except that Bruce used himself rather than a car. He was a drug addict, had abysmal relationships with women, and was burdened by a death wish. He also did not seem to have much insight into his situation. He seemed to enjoy being the enfant terrible, martyr and first amendment darling of the elite liberals, but was caught up in the turbulence. He was no Houdini, no trickster, but rather like one of those daredevils who rolls over Niagara Falls. You can admire his temerity, but not his intelligence. In the end, Bruce had very little wisdom to impart to an impressionable young man seeking a path to make a difference in the world. If anything, Lenny Bruce influenced me NOT to become a comedian. Whatever desire I had was snuffed by the details and sordid undertones of his book. Bruce was adept at suggesting the brutality and depravity of the nightclub scene he worked, the lack of community and social connection. But his book influenced me also on another level. His lack of reflection and the bluntness of his prose suggested to me that I was not of the same ilk. Finally, I saw some footage of Lenny Bruce doing his act, and it wasn't funny. I think Mort Sahl was better at the kind of social and political satire Bruce tried to do...but Sahl had none of the notoriety of Bruce. Yes, Bruce died prematurely, and that is a shame, but he did not die for the first amendment. He has become a first amendment saint, but so have Larry Flynt, Hugh Hefner, flag burners, and the American Nazi Party. Is that a point of pride?(less)
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There have been times when I considered Shakespeare's plays overrated. They are as formulaic as even our best motion pictures and television series. The bard didn't bother to devise his own stories and plots; he did not want to gamble on the public's...moreThere have been times when I considered Shakespeare's plays overrated. They are as formulaic as even our best motion pictures and television series. The bard didn't bother to devise his own stories and plots; he did not want to gamble on the public's tastes but to satisfy it.
Yet, despite these drawbacks, I love the poetry that appears in his plays in so many places and his aphoristic precision on human psychology. There is also the performance factor. When a Shakespeare play is done with conviction and charm, like the "As You Like It" production I saw last year at the Old Vic in London, no one in the audience is unaffected. A handful or more of Shakespeare's plays can provide as much entertainment and cogent commentary as anything the best of our dramatists could bring to the contemporary stage.
I have had the good fortune to read and see "As You Like It." For me, it excels as both a document and a play--and is one of the best in the canon. "As You Like It" is classified as a romance, not a comedy, because its mood is not boisterous and light. Indeed, the play's solution lies not so much in the working out of a cognitive mistake, but in a radical and global change of heart. The themes of "As You Like It"--loyalty, treachery, exile, adaptation, survival, and redemption--are handled with few pratfalls. The events of this play have a gravity and reality that cannot be euphemized. They will not go away and cannot be ignored or deferred. It is not about the evil of one man, but a society that has become depraved, a society that HD Thoreau would inveigh against in a much different place and time.
Danger and institutional injustice pervade "As You Like It," which is why it occasionally veers toward tragedy. The deposed duke and his coterie are not having the best of times in exile. Although they take comfort in their honor and righteousness, they know the cost of a good conscience and experience the lashes of hunger and cold. The audience is not permitted to minimize the suffering that comes of being just in an unjust regime. It is also touch-and-go until the end whether the good will inherit the earth or so much as survive.
Yet, in the end, as with any pastoral, love wins out and nature, represented by Arden, cleanses souls, heals hearts, and turns the world right. "As You Like It" faithfully follows its ancient format, by concluding in a communal wedding of sorts, which is the goal of the pastoral dream--to unite all creatures in a prelapsarian harmony of all species.
However, "As You Like It" does not only look backward to the romance of Longinus for its themes and inspirations, but forward to an age in which women's strengths prove more powerful than men's in the struggle to survive--because they are more adaptable to changing environments. Orlando may be the noble savage--man at his best, simple, strong and virtuous--but he is not as "fit" as Rosalinde, who can change form, even gender, to accomplish her ends. She is the one best suited for Arden. Her intelligence will see to the perpetuation of the species, by marrying Orlando and sending Phoebe back to her earnest but dim-witted suitor, Sylvius.
Like "The Tempest", another romance that depicts a wild frontier, "As You Like It" limns a world of dynamic social change, where the human chameleon is on the ascendent and the shapes and appearances we take can have transcendent power. It is a carnival not so different from our American frontier depicted by Mark Twain, in which kings and Dukes play cards on Mississippi barges. "As You Like It" presents a shifting environment where restless country folk like Phoebe long to escape to urban glitz and greater sophistication represented by the cross-dressing Rosalinde/Ganymede. To rustics in paradise, the corrupt city had an intoxicating allure. Shakespeare knew this well, having come from the north to seek his dream in London. For him and Phoebe, the civilized city was a different sort of paradise (Oz-like) where the human spirit was free of the agrarian tyranny of days and seasons and might muse, imagine, venture, re-invent iself and seek its fortune. There, gender, social class, professional position were all fungible and changeable properties to be manipulated for power and influence.
In this teetering balance between nostalgic pastoral virtues and contemporary urban grit and glamor,"As You Like It" also gives evidence of a shift in the elements of sexual selection. For Phoebe, Ganymede's "metrosexual" qualities--good grooming, elevated speech, a pleasant voice and smell--have superseded the more conventional male attractors--physical strength, aggression, and courage--characteristic of your typical shepherd and farmer. The subversive message in Phoebe's infatuation with Rosalinde seems to turn the famous Henry Higgins' song from "My Fair Lady" on its head: 'Why can't a man be more like a woman?'
Under all of the fun and analysis of "As You Like It" lies one powerful formula. Shakespeare was a very clever literary chemist. "As You Like It" demonstrates his skill at blending ancient forms, like tragedy, Roman comedy and the pastoral with a perspicacious vision of the modern world that was only dawning in the Elizabethan era of expansion and discovery.(less)
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A number of years ago, just after 9/11, a terrible aeronautic tragedy took place. A jetliner filled to capacity with Dominican people crashed near JFK airport in an outlying neighborhood of Queens, New York. Airplane debris smoldered on streets, and ...moreA number of years ago, just after 9/11, a terrible aeronautic tragedy took place. A jetliner filled to capacity with Dominican people crashed near JFK airport in an outlying neighborhood of Queens, New York. Airplane debris smoldered on streets, and peoples' homes were immolated and smashed. Such accidents occasionally occur near airports across the metro area. They are not metaphors, but tragedies.
In "The House of Blue Leaves" the American dream crashes into the Queens neighborhood of Artie Shaughnessy, a luckless and desperate song-writer and zoo-keeper. Like the airliners that sometimes miss runways at adjacent airports, "The Dream" leaves many injured and few survivors.
Artie has been victimized by the stochastic and brutal power of luck that, like an inverted tornado, lifts some individuals to lofty heights of honor and wealth and leaves others flat and desolate. In this instance, Fate has plucked Arnie's childhood friend, Billy Einhorn, out of obscurity while leaving Artie in the wallow of a lower-middle class Queens apartment with a depressed and erratic wife, a demented son, and a deskful of corny, tinny songs.
The American Dream is so close to Artie that it shadows and torments him. It is like a life-long hangover he cannot shake or cure. He waits for its fulfillment like he waits for the animals in his zoo to finally give birth. When curtain opens on the "The House of Blue Leaves" the animal births, like the realization of Artie's dream, are in precarious balance.
An aura of imminence and excruciating anticipation surrounds "The House of Blue Leaves." It is the same quotidian suspense in which we all live--will our precious, little plans go well or awry? This exquisite sensation pumps from the heart of Henry James's novella "The Beast in the Jungle", that destiny awaits us like a splendid and dangerous beast, just beyond our view.
This sense of imminence in "The House of Blue Leaves" comes from external events that are historic, even mythic, in scope, yet as distant from the fates of these characters as a black hole swallowing a distant star. This is 1964 and the pope is coming to Queens. Bunny Flingus, the muse of Artie's declining middle age, is so thrilled that she is going out to meet His Holiness at 5:15 AM. Bunny is the huckster, the beater of drums, the woman who believes in luck and Hope and dreams even though she has been fired a hundred times. Bunny's imagination is so kinetic, so exciting, yet unreliable that she believes, like Ion in Plato's dialogue, that she understands medicine because she worked in a doctor's office.
When such major events come to such mundane places like Queens, the displacement is enormous, the voltage intense and dangerous. Miracles, meteor showers, and divine intervention are potential. Bunny is the medium for these hopes. She will stand along the path the pope will take and be blessed by him, then transfer this blessing to Artie. Artie is skeptical, not because he is smart, but because he feels doomed. Nothing can help him.
Even so, his passive melancholy is no match for Bunny's enthusiasm. When he learns that Billy, his famous friend, is coming east to research his next motion picture, Bunny convinces Artie to phone him and ask for his help. Artie phones Billy on his jet and the mogul agrees to pay a visit. Suddenly, all of the dreams are dusted off like old sheet music and Artie's future is back in business.
But then Ronnie, Artie's disturbed son shows up, AWOL from the army. He is a commando on a mission to destroy the American Dream. Unlike Artie, Ronnie's dream suffered irreparable damage at a tender age. His self-esteem was aborted early enough for a dark personality to grow over it. In a brilliant, two minute monologue, Ronnie reveals how he auditioned for Billy when he was a child and how this pivotal event destroyed his life. In one of the funniest, most painful moments in theater, Ronnie suggests with insane clarity and eloquent hyperbole how the American dream explodes.
Three nuns also show up. They, too, have come to participate in the pope's historic visit by viewing the event from the roof of Artie's building. They are unquestioning believers whose frustrations express themselves in so many tics and preoccupations. They, too, seem to need a miracle, some excitement,a touch of glamor, or at least a pep rally. They climb into the Shaughnessy apartment to avoid the cold. The nuns are comical figures of deprivation. The youngest nun consumes a jar of peanut butter as though it were an inexpressibly delicious alien food. The older two nuns are downtrodden but full of whacky enthusiasm and petty rivalry.
In the secular world, there is no figure with more power to bestow boons than a Hollywood mogul. He is a pagan hybrid of pope and oracle, with intimate knowledge of the holy mysteries of success. But Billy has no intention of soiling his shoes on Artie's abject floorboards. He sends his fiance, Corinna Stroller, a movie star, as his emissary to Chez Shaughnessy. Corinna smiles and understands nothing. She reveals to the audience that she is deaf from an accident on the set of one of Billy's films. How apt it is that a Hollywood producer's consort is unable to hear him. Deafness might be the only protection against the hype.
But even for the high and mighty there are scores to settle. As Corinna Stroller exits with the nuns, Ronnie gives her a gift for Billy. It will never reach its target. Only grief and remorse bring Billy to Artie's house. Bunny finally cooks--this is her special sexual allure--and the fates of the characters are set. Billy will return to Hollywood to make pictures that Artie and all of the "little people" will pay to see. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the U.S. of A.
No one emerges from the events of "The House of Blue Leaves" better than when they came in, or even wiser. If redemption and a happy ending are what you came for, you may want to send the playwright an angry letter. What this play demonstrates more trenchantly than any other is how powerfully the culture of celebrity has pervaded American life, and how awful it feels to be a "nobody." Contrast this with the Walker Percy novel "The Movie Goer", where the protagonist walks around in post-cinematic daze, wishing life would have the special quality of a movie. Eventually he snaps out of it and sees the possibilities around him. In "The House of Blue Leaves" the animals in the zoo all give birth, but there are no other possibilities for Artie and his family of losers. Bunny Flingus cashes in her culinary chips by getting hired to cook for Billy, the Hollywood mogul. That is "as good as it gets" for these forsaken characters.
The genius of "The House of Blue Leaves" is in how it acknowledges, celebrates and repudiates such a sacred tenet of American life, "the divinity of success," while never forgetting to laugh about it. This could have been "Death of a Salesman" but John Guare was having too much fun laughing at destiny and pricking these dreams, which like balloons, are empty in the middle. If life is cruel, comedy is crueler. "The House of Blue Leaves" integrates the grit of realism with a zany nihilism. Beneath the wasted lives and devastated psyches of a fairly squalid domestic scene is the cosmic laughter of the absurdist, who is unafraid to expose and explode life as it is really lived.(less)
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Voltaire, that prankster of intellectual history, the pin up boy of the Age of Reason, made me laugh like no author had ever done. Without knowing a thing about Leibnitz and the doctrine of Optimism, I fully understood Voltaire's iconoclastic opposit...moreVoltaire, that prankster of intellectual history, the pin up boy of the Age of Reason, made me laugh like no author had ever done. Without knowing a thing about Leibnitz and the doctrine of Optimism, I fully understood Voltaire's iconoclastic opposition to it. This old man of the eighteenth century, one of the original nerds and geeks of all time, struck an immediate and enduring chord with my fractious adolescent character. He showed me that it was possible to be snide and heroic at once, the virtue and necessity in debunking hypocrisy. He showed the evils in euphemism and intellectual dishonesty and subterfuge. He showed me that it was okay to look at things lucidly and without sentiment.(less)
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" Frankenstein was probably written as a fictional speculation on the vast creative powers of mankind gone monstrously wrong. Mary Shelley was at the v...moreFrankenstein was probably written as a fictional speculation on the vast creative powers of mankind gone monstrously wrong. Mary Shelley was at the vortex of the Romantic vanguard and it must have seemed inevitable to her cohort that human imagination and ingenuity would one day create life, not merely through the womb, but by the mind.
In a sense, Frankenstein stands as one of the first popular science fiction novels. However, for me, it is a cautionary parable about the inconvenient contingencies of creativity. You've made a mechanical man...now what? What does one do with one's off-spring? How does one properly integrate it in nature and society? Rousseau asked the question in "Emile." Truffaut would later explore the matter cinematically in his charming film, "The Wild Child." Does the creator owe anything to his creation and to the society on which he foists it? Does he litter his nearest wetlands with old tires and refrigerators,as happens in the New Jersey Meadowlands?
In the end, Dr. Frankenstein must take responsibility for his creation, in the same way that parents must care for that bawling, incoherent infant that cries out for them. The creator must socialize his creation.
There is a poignancy to the final scene of Frankenstein. The monster runs across the white Alpine landscape chasing his father, beseeching his love and guidance. He is after all just another child trying to figure out what why he is here.
But there is also something abject and awful about the monster running amok in the pristine mountains. He is the first Model T off the assembly line, the prototype of uncontrollable man-manufactured life let loose upon the world. He is the stain of creation, a harbinger of what has come,the Anthropocene Epoch of the earth, in which humans are the predominant force of nature.(less)"
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