Barbara Ardinger's Blog, page 4

I had one of those dreams last night

It’s the dream I have in the wee hours, right before the cats arrive on
my bed, stand two inches from my face, and tell me it’s time for breakfast.
(This usually occurs about dawn.) I’ve been having these dreams nearly
all my life.




Sometimes I’m driving a blue car of no make or model I recognize around
a city. (One time, though I was on a blue skateboard.
Me. And I wasn’t falling off!  Just picture that—me on a skateboard.
Splat!) The city looks vaguely familiar, but it sure isn’t Ferguson
or Long Beach or anywhere else I’ve ever lived in this reality. There’s
a huge, busy downtown area with tall buildings and really big stores and
I often see a capitol building in the distance. The streets are arranged
in a grid and the buildings usually have dark windows. Sometimes I’m wandering
in and out of the buildings—looking for someone? for something?—but more
often I’m driving up and down the streets, often around block after block.
I always think I know where I’m headed, but I never get there. I see bicycles
occasionally and sometimes have to climb over a couple bikes to get to
a door that led out of the building I’m in. The buildings are generally
featureless, like huge, mostly empty warehouses. I keep thinking I know
where I’m going. I turn corners thinking I’ll recognize what appears just
around the next corner.




But sometimes I’m out in the country. I’m usually driving down a curving
road that winds down a hill and toward a beach, which I can see in the
distance. I never get there, either. Sometimes I go through what might
be a railroad tunnel but without the tracks. When I come out of the tunnel,
I’m still going downhill.




This morning’s dream had a new wrinkle. I had a cell phone with me. Not
the Jitterbug I really have, but a model that didn’t look like any iPhone
I’ve ever seen. The icons were weird, and no matter what I pressed or clicked,
nothing useful ever appeared on the screen. That’s when I shook the phone
(which didn’t do it any good), then put it back in my pocket and climbed
over the bicycles in front of the door and got outside…at which time Heisenberg
jumped on my bed and brought me back to wherever it is I live in what is
my “real life.”




Anyone who’s ever driven anywhere with me has heard my usual line—“If
I supply the driving directions, then we’re gonna end up in Cleveland.”
It’s a fact that for the forty-odd years I’ve lived in the Los Angeles
Basin, every time I’ve been on the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10), which goes
west to the Pacific Coast Highway and east to San Bernardino and points
east all the way (I think) to New Orleans…well, no matter what the signs
say, I am always convinced I’m driving in the opposite direction. The signs
say I’m westbound, but I’m utterly sure I’m heading east. I’m used to this
now, so I believe what the signs say.




I am a really good worrier. (Ask my son.) One thing I’ve worried about
all my life is getting lost. Like I do in that dream. Like I feel on the
Santa Monica Freeway. At the same time, it’s a demonstrable fact that I’ve
never been so lost that I’ve never been found. Here I am! Right here. I
go out a lot, sometimes to theaters that I’ve never been to before because
they’re doing a show I want to see. I don’t have a GPS (not in my car,
not on my phone, especially not in my head), but I print driving directions
and always get where I’m going—with, yes, the occasional detour—and then
I get home again, too. When I did temp office work for a decade, I always
arrived early or on time at the assignment. So I know I’m not lost.
I’m in transit. But something about me still worries about being
lost. Is this an existential quandary, or what?




Thirty-odd years ago, I talked about the driving, wandering dream with
my friend R’becca. Here’s her theory: I’m dreaming about another life,
probably not one on this planet. I’m always zooming around out there, wherever
“there” is. I’m busy going somewhere. (Yeah, it sounds existential to me,
too.) She kept telling me I’d “eventually get there.” Neither of us ever
quite decided where “there” was. And as far as I know, I’ve never arrived.
I wonder if I ever will. And what I’ll find there.




But is that a cool theory, or what? I’m a walking sf movie. Or maybe I’m
Schroedinger’s Cat and I’m in one of those other multiple universes. I’ve
done some reading in quantum physics, but I’ve never read anything that
explains where the Cat actually goes. Or if it’s driving a little blue
car and has a weird iPhone. I wonder if Erwin Schroedinger ever gave any
thought to where the Cat went and what she did when she got there. No physicist
I’ve ever talked to has been able to explain my dream travels or connect
them with alternate universes.




The day after daylight savings time started this year, I dreamed I was
back at aerospace company where I edited proposals in the early 80s. I
was carrying a proposal (for what I have no idea) in a pink, four-inch-thick,
three-ring binder. They remembered me! I put the proposal down on someone’s
desk and promptly got lost in the building. I couldn’t figure out how to
get back to where my proposal was. You know what? It’s really good when
I wake up from one of these dreams and open my eyes, and see two purring
cats saying, “Get up! We want our breakfast.” Cats are extremely effective
reality anchors.

"You can get anything you want....

… at Alice’s Restaurant.” Way back in 1965,
Arlo Guthrie, son of folksinger
Woody Guthrie and called by many an “American troubadour,” celebrated
Thanksgiving at a deconsecrated church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. After
dinner, he and some friends decided to take out the trash. There was a
lot of trash. They loaded it up in a red VW minivan and drove to the city
dump. The dump was closed for the holiday, so they drove some more and
found a pile of junk at the bottom of a cliff. They contributed to the
pile of junk. And got arrested for littering. When Arlo was drafted and
went to his physical, he had to admit he’d been arrested for littering…and
the rest, as they say, is history. Or at least it’s a hugely popular “

talking guitar blues” that lasts 18 minutes and a
1969 movie directed by Arthur Penn and starring Arlo (who was 19 years
old at the time) and Matthew Broderick’s father.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,
and Arlo is touring the country singing the song in his concerts. I’ve
been a fan of Arlo’s for most of those 50 years and bought my ticket for
the concert about an hour after I received the announcement from the Irvine
Barclay Theater. I went to see Arlo about ten days ago. It’s the fourth
time I’ve seen him in person in five years. Arlo’s stage persona is a sort
of hillbilly folksinger, and he sounds a lot like his father, who, in case
you don’t know, wrote “
This Land Is Your Land.” (Click on the link and you can see the famous
sign on Woody's guitar.) He sits downstage center and sings, plays guitar
(six and 12-string), harmonica, and piano. And he tells stories, hilarious
and touching stories. He’ll be singing along and suddenly stop and tell
a story, then go back to the song. He toured with
Pete Seeger, who I think was one of the major heroes of the earth,
for more than 40 years. I got to see them once back in the late 80s. Because
“Alice’s Restaurant” is so long, Arlo had stopped singing it at his concerts.
He says he forgot the words. Now he’s singing it again.  

Who else was in the audience? A lot of old folkies. I sat next to a couple
of Vietnam vets and got to hear a few of their stories before the concert
began. There were also some younger folk music fans in the audience, but
as Arlo noted from the stage, very few millenials or younger people. Well,
gee—the Vietnam War is Ancient History now. The Tet Offensive might as
well be Thermopylae.

It was a lovely concert. Arlo sang and played and talked and sang some
more and talked some more. Backing him up were another guitarist, his percussionist,
his bassist, and his son Abe, playing another keyboard. The concert was
also a majorly cool light show, and there was a screen upstage on which
they opened the concert with an old, old claymation movie of Arlo’s “
Motorcycle Song.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJpKA... He also
sang songs by friends of his father’s, like
Lead Belly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Belly He says that his
earliest memory is standing next to Lead Belly, who died when he was two
years old. But they didn’t say anything. Which always gets a laugh. One
song he sang was the “
St. James Infirmary Blues.” I first heard this song my freshman year
in college when I met the guitarist I married three years later. He courted
me with classical guitar (I can still recognize the Sor Etudes) and folk
songs. As a newlywed, I cut my fingernails and learned to play the guitar.
My repertoire consisted of “Jesus Loves Me” (because it was easy to play)
and Tom Lehrer’s “
The Old Dope Peddler” (just because). But then I let my nails grow
again. (How Dolly Parton can play the guitar with her long fingernails,
I have not a clue.)

Arlo also talked about Woodstock. While that was happening, I was in southeast
Missouri, having just finished my M.A. and getting ready to move to Carbondale,
Illinois, to start my Ph.D. I don’t think the famous Sixties ever reached
southeast Missouri or central Illinois, at least not while I was teaching
high school English, speech/theater, and French in two small towns in those
locations. I got my own, private Inquisition in the small town in central
Illinois when I was accused of being a communist and an atheist and haled
before the school board. It was actually a case of xenophobia (I was the
only person in town who'd been born more than 50 miles away), and after
I was acquitted, I resigned and went back to Cape Girardeau to start graduate
school. Woodstock was on the news in the summer of ’69, but that’s all
I know about it. But Arlo was there. His stories are hilarious.

He opened the second half of the show with “Alice’s Restaurant” with scenes
from the movie projected on the screen behind him. It lasted 26 minutes
and the refrain turned into a sing-along. The lyrics were projected, but
I’d bet serious money that not a person in the audience needed to read
them. We sang along and we sang loud. And we repeated the refrain several
times. Another song Arlo sang is one I especially love. This is Steve Goodman’s
“
City of New Orleans,” which is about the Illinois Central Railroad’s
train that travels (I think it still does) between Chicago and New Orleans.
I’ve been on that train. The railroad goes right through the middle of
Carbondale, and when I was a student there, having to wait for the train
was a legitimate excuse for being late to class. After I finished my Ph.D.,
I treated myself to a trip to New Orleans. I flew down (with a stopover
in Memphis) and took the train back.

By the end of Arlo’s concert, I was soggy with nostalgia, and I bet everyone
else in the audience was, too. We clapped and whooped and hollered. Arlo’s
encore was one of his father’s songs, “
My Peace.” We sang along, and then we clapped and whooped and hollered
some more.

Kafka and Dogberry in Long Beach

As you know, I live with two rescued cats named after physicists. I hadn’t
registered them with the city until this year. That’s because when you
adopt from Maine Coon Adoptions, you sign a promise to keep the cat indoors.
Rescued cats don’t need to go back out on dangerous streets. So I figured
we could live happily without the red tape. However, when I took them in
for their vaccinations a couple months ago, the veterinary hospital must
have notified the city. I received a notification from Animal Care Services.




I read the form carefully. It said “Current License Fee Cat $10” and “Senior
Citizen Cat $5.” So I sent them a check for $10, which is $5 for each cat.
I also wrote on Heisenberg’s form “This cat is 14 years old” and on Schroedinger’s
form “This cat is 13 years old.”




They sent my check back. “Incorrect amount.” Also checked on the return
form: “Senior Discount—Must Be Altered.” Yikes! I have to be altered to
get a fifty percent discount??




So I wrote a polite letter to the clerk (a city employee) and explained
that in the phrase “senior citizen cat,” the words “senior citizen” are
a compound adjective (lacking the hyphen) that modifies “cat.” That means
elderly cat. I added that I am a senior citizen, too, and I can prove
it. I photocopied my California driver’s license and put the copy in the
envelope with the two senior citizen cat forms (notice: no hyphens), my
original check, and my polite letter. I guess ambiguity is just one of
the facts of life when you’re dealing with a bureaucracy: bureaucrats are
not grammarians. Dealing with bureaucrats can of course become mildly Kafkaesque.

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote some of the spookiest literary works of
the early 20th century. In his short story “The Metamorphosis” (1912),
a traveling salesman wakes up one morning to find himself metamorphosed
into a “monstrous vermin,” which is usually translated as a cockroach.
(But he’s nowhere as witty as Archy the Cockroach.) As I recall, he never
learns why he’s been transformed. In his novel
The Trial (1914), which Kafka never finished, a man finds him being
tried for an unknown crime before a remote, inaccessible authority. Wikipedia
tells us that the adjective “Kafkaesque” refers to situations in which
“bureaucracies overpower people, often in a surreal, nightmarish milieu
which evokes feelings of senselessness, disorientation, and helplessness.”
I have not been overpowered by Animal Care Services, but we all know about
that “surreal, nightmarish milieu”—we’ve visited the DMV, possibly had
encounters with the nice folks at EDD (whence cometh our unemployment “benefits”),
and waited eternally in waiting rooms at all kinds of institutions. You
know it. Those lines and encounters and waiting rooms can get pretty Kafkaesque.

Shakespeare knew about bureaucrats four centuries ago. The best example
comes from his comedy
Much Ado About Nothing, in which a head nightwatchman named Dogberry
brings proto-Kafkaesque farce into a situation that really isn’t very funny—Borachio,
who works for Don John, who hates the world, makes love to Hero’s maid
in her window while Claudio and Don Pedro are watching from below, with
the result that Claudio and Don Pedro think it’s Hero up there, with the
further result that Claudio accuses her of being lascivious and disrupts
the wedding before it begins—




          Would you not swear,


          All you that see
her, that she were a maid,


          By these exterior
shows? But she is none:


          She knows the heat
of a luxurious bed [“luxurious” means “lustful”];


          Her blush is guiltiness,
not modesty.




—at which point Hero faints and the friar suggests that they pretend she’s
dead. (This play is a comedy primarily in the Aristotelian sense that it
ends in a marriage. Two marriages, in fact.) Pretty soon, Dogberry and
his men hear Borachio bragging and arrest him.




I have three
Much Ado DVDs on my shelf. (1) Joseph Papp’s 1973 production set
in the U.S. about the time Teddy Roosevelt was president and starring Sam
Waterston as Benedick and Kathleen Widdoes as Beatrice, with Barnard Hughes
as Dogberry. The watchmen are Keystone Kops. (2) Kenneth Branagh’s 1993
version set in late 19th-century Tuscany and starring Branagh and Emma
Thompson, with Michael Keaton as a very Beetlejuiceish Dogberry. These
watchmen are unwashed and illiterate. (3) Joss Whedon’s 2013 version set
in Whedon’s own house in Malibu and starring Alexis Denisof as Benedick
and Amy Acker as Beatrice, with Nathan Filion as Dogberry. (I’d never heard
of any of Whedon’s actors; this production is excellent.) Filion’s head
of security is a straight-faced, totally serious, “just the facts, ma’am”
Sgt. Friday. He’s just like people we see being interviewed on the TV news
shows all the time.




Here’s what Dogberry says to Leonato in Act III, scene 5, when he brings
in Borachio and Conrade:




          One word, sir:
our watch, sir, have indeed


          comprehended two
auspicious persons, and we would


          have them this
morning examined before your worship.




And in Act V, scene 1 when he brings the criminals to Don Pedro, Dogberry
is Shakespearean clown as compleat bureaucrat. Pay attention as he enumerates
the charges:




          Marry, sir, they
have committed false report;


          moreover, they
have spoken untruths; secondarily,


          they are slanders;
sixth and lastly, they have


          belied a lady;
thirdly, they have verified unjust


          things; and, to
conclude, they are lying knaves.




Dogberry is of course using malapropisms. Our word “malapropism” comes
from a character named Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play
The Rivals (1775). Her most famous line is about the “allegories
on the banks of the Nile.” (Sheridan obviously invented the character’s
name by combining “mal” and “apropos.”)   




Just to be clear: I know several city employees. They’re smart people!
The Animal Care Services clerk who wrote the “senior citizen cat” line
on the registration form is neither a Mrs. Malaprop nor a Dogberry…but
you know what? I wish the people who create forms knew more about gooder
English!




P.S. My letter seems to have worked. I received two little metal tags,
one for each cat, plus another form. I filed the form. My cats don’t wear
collars, so I used nice blue ribbons to tie the metal tags to their doors
of their carriers.

The Promised (or Threatened) Drone Story

After I finished last month’s blog, I began thinking about writing a story
about drones. Well, now I’ve done it. (But no Pratchettian Wee Free Men.
They’re inimitable.) Here’s my version of drones ’n’ things.

They were migrating, hives in the millions, flying en masse, drones without
number called by an ineffable voice. They didn’t quite realize they were
unitary as they set out with no certain idea of a destination. Their little,
whirring golden bodies blotted out the sun and cast a great moving shadow
on the lands below.




Except for one hive, several hundred little metallic creatures that got
lost behind the greater flock. They had no idea how it had happened, but
they were lost. They swerved and flew lower to surveil a green land where
short people with blue skins were planting tall flowers along a yellow
brick road. Not our story, the hive mind said. They kept going.




Where do wild things go? The lost hive came to a big city. They swarmed
lower to get their bearings. Now they could easily read street signs. The
leading edge spotted a building with a sign on it. Drones Club. Aha! Is
this our new hive? Do we belong here? They flew in through the open front
door, passing several men in starched shirts, and then came upon a whole
gang of young men in expensive suits playing cricket with dinner rolls.
One of them (his chums called him Bertie) spotted the tiny golden flyers
and greeted them. “What ho, little thingamummies! Here for a good game?”
The little drones circled the taller human drones. How on earth, the group
mind asked, did there come to be two kinds of drones? This isn’t the right
place for us. And where are the crickets? Real insects? They zoomed out
the window. Let’s see where this river leads.




They came to another city in another time. Here was the Great University,
which had magnificent old buildings and crowds of young people hurrying
along the sidewalks. They were all carrying electronic devices, but few
real books. When some of them finally looked up, they were amazed to see
the tiny drones.




“How’d they get out of the lab?” “How’d they get so miniaturized? Real
drones are bigger.” “Who’s got the control device? Who’s steering them?”
“What’s their objective?”




“Guys—these aren’t our drones at all. I bet they’re spies. Get ’em!” “Yeah.
Let’s take ’em to the lab. Right-o! To the Engineer!”




The students opened apps, aimed their devices as the lost hive, and the
leading edge collided with an invisible electronic wall. The whirring stopped.
They began to fall. Tiny golden drones without number hit the sidewalks.
Except for the tailing ranks, a few hundred that managed to escape the
Niagara of their sisters. They turned a corner and fell into the greenery
outside a building a short distance away. After some effort, they regained
their balance. It was as if they were blinking, patting their arms and
legs to see if anything was broken. Remember the Munchkins! Hide in the
flowers! They piled together for comfort and began to look around.




The first thing they saw past the flowers was a circle of women. No. Statues
of robed women, nine of them holding a notebook, scrolls, a flute that
looked more like a guitar, a lyre, a tragic mask, a comic mask, a veil,
another lyre that looked less like a guitar, and a globe and compass. The
Muses, of course. Custodians of culture. In the center of their circle
stood a sundial, new technology to the lost hive. As the drones watched
from their hiding places among the flowers, the eyes of the goddesses opened.
Their heads turned.




The Engineer had always been the smartest guy in the room. Smarter than
99.99 percent of any given population. When his students began running
into the lab in a building labeled Campus of Applied Modern Technology,
he asked what they were carrying.




“We dunno. Little golden devices. They’re all over campus. Knee-deep.
Is this nanotechnology??”




The Engineer picked one up one. It was slightly larger than his thumb
and he could feel weak pulses of power in it, although its six little limbs
with their tiny propeller-like wings were flaccid. The smartest man in
the room looked closer. He had never seen anything like it. He was stumped.




The Consultant edged him aside. “They’re junk! The bleeping lab at that
other effing university…they’ve got the government funding. They’re obviously
making these to spy on us because we keep winning the big games.” The little
thing in his hand chirped. “It still has some power. But we have more power!
Go out there—collect them all. Bring in the live ones. We’ll take them
apart and see how they work. Burn the rest.”




“Then what is all this?” a student muttered. “Effing sf?”




The Consultant smiled an evil smile. “Neither science nor fiction. This
is Big Technology. But we will not be spied upon! Collect every one of
these devices you can find. Overlook nothing. We’ll examine the ones you
bring in and find out how they work.” And so, carrying rakes and garbage
bags, shovels and brooms and huge plastic garbage, the students spread
out through the university. The lost hive shivered among the flowers next
to a building named Arts and Letters.




“Oh, good,” said Calliope, the Muse of Epic Poetry. “They heard us calling.”
She looked at the flowers. “You’ve arrived! Come out, come out, wherever
you are.”




The lost hive crawled out of the flowers and gathered before the statues.
The Muses looked down at a weary, ragged remnant of the larger hive.




“But where,” said Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, “are the rest of you?”
She listened to the diminished group voice. “Sabotaged, eh? Shot down?”
The Muses looked at the marauding science and technology students. “Hijacked
and captured.”




“But you’re safe with us,” said Clio, the Muse of History. “We have plans.
And real magic. Look at the sundial. When the shadow has moved nine minutes,
you will be transformed!”




And so it happened. As the sun moved across the sky, the surviving members
of the great hive found themselves morphing into homunculi—Little People,
Brownies, Tiny Trolls and Fairies and Elves, Leprechauns and Imps, Smaller-Than-Usual
Dwarfs, Lumpkins and Grumpkins, Loblollies and Wobblies, and Flying Monkeys…they
turned into wild things, scary beings seen in cautionary children’s books.




In the lab, the Engineer and the Consultant who specialized in Serious
Technological Research were scrutinizing the thousand or so members of
the hive that still showed faint signs of power and had been tossed into
one of the experimental animal cages. Unable to fly, languishing in darkness,
they were fading. Every few minutes, someone reached in and removed another
tiny drone. Their screams, if indeed the technologues heard them, were
ignored as the drones were punctured by small but sharp tools and heartlessly
disassembled.




And suddenly—a real invasion! More than a hundred extremely angry homunculi
raced into the lab. They were small, but they were filled with power, both
solar and magical. The students talked for years about what happened next.
The little critters that looked like drawings from children’s books encircled
the Engineer and the Consultant like fighter jets around King Kong and
buzzed them until they fell. The Engineer managed to crawl away, and as
soon as he was outside, he sprinted toward the Pure Science Building and
found sanctuary inside. But the Consultant was tied up and tied down as
tight as Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Then the homunculi opened the
lab’s windows to let in the sunlight. They opened all the experimental
animal cages. As the drones in the cages powered up and flew out and away,
most of the students changed their majors to history, philosophy, music,
fine arts, and literature and ran to the building named Arts and Letters.
And the homunculi? They turned back into tiny live drones and took up residence
in the library, where forever after, students writing term papers received
not entirely serendipitous help as the appropriate books just happened
to tumble off shelves and Google searches just happened to scroll to the
right pages, tablets mysteriously swiped to the best screens, and the cloud
sprinkled intellectual riches down upon all seekers. The hive was safe,
culture was safe (at least for a time), and the Nine Muses were very pleased.

Technology. It's a puzzlement

I’ve been watching the reports about the Consumer Electronics Show on
Eyewitless News. The reporters say the show has flooded (maybe overflowed,
uhhh…overflown?) the largest convention center in the world. I’m amazed
at the things they’re showing. Smart jewelry, smart appliances and whole
smart houses, cars that drive themselves, drones for all seasons and purposes.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I’m a technological nincompoop.
An extraordinarily kind Ph.D. candidate named Xochitl Aviso posts my blogs
(including the pictures) on
FeminismandReligion.com for me. I am able to post my blogs, new Found
Goddesses, and pages from
Pagan Every Day here only because I was very well taught. One of
my jokes about myself is that even though I hold an advanced degree (well,
the “terminal degree,” which means I’m terminally educated) I am still
educable. Of course, sometimes I have to explain what that means: “capable
of being educated” or “fit to be educated.” (It usually refers to people
with learning disabilities.) The “duc” syllable comes from the Latin
educo, “I lead forth,” which also gave us “duke.” (And, alas, I just
found a website about “it’s [
sic.] etymology.” Oy. The world needs more competent editors.)

There’s a whole universe of stuff I don’t even know I don’t know. Oh,
sure, I can more or less use my iPad. I look up the actors in movies on
IMDb. I do email on it. I swipe around Google Maps to find out how to get
from here to there. (Note: I didn’t purchase the iPad; I won it in a drawing.)
But have I added any new apps? Not on your life. Nor do I add new apps
to my phone. I do the occasional text message on it, but I don’t use it
for email. It’s a telephone. I keep having this weird feeling that apps
are dangerous. They’ll get me so confused I’ll walk into walls. They’ll
invite hackers into my minuscule part of the universe.




Of course, you need to remember that I’m the one who thinks that when
my carbon monoxide detector flashes in the middle of the night when I’m
headed for the bathroom, it’s a tiny flashbulb in a tiny camera, and there’s
a teenager in Kiev who is taking pictures of me in my jammies. When I proposed
this absurdity in a blog last year, I got replies from smart people who
told me I was out of my mind. Granted.




But why shouldn’t there be a camera in my CO2 detector? They did cleverer
things than that on
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-68) and
Mission Impossible (CBS, 1966-73, ABC, 1988-90). And—oh, yeah!--on

Get Smart (CBS, 1966-70). If you’re not old enough to have watched these shows,
BTW, look ’em up. Netflix has ’em all, so you can watch ’em  right
now. They may be cold war adventure/spy series, but they were not only
great fun but they also had a lot of influence on the “real world.” (There’s
an U.N.C.L.E. exhibition in the Reagan Library.) Today’s
smart phones and other
smart devices are of course named in honor of Agent 86’s shoe phone.




We’ve got all those reports on the news and in the media about drones,
too. Not just the live video games that drop bombs on people in foreign
lands, but people flying them around for sport. Ideas that include Amazon
starting (sometime) to use drones to deliver our goodies. I’m beginning
to think maybe I should write a fairy tale about drones. Maybe they’re
really brownies. Or
Wee Free Men (see Terry Pratchett’s oeuvre). In armor. Stay tuned……….

A Child's Christmas in Dellwood

Although I have believed for about thirty years that the holy books of
the three standard-brand religions tell us interesting stories that are
closer to mythology than history, and last month I wrote about
scholars of mythologyfor Feminism and Religion.com, back in the post-war
years when I was a child, my family always held traditional, old-fashioned,
holiday celebrations. The world is so dystopic at present that thinking
back to my childhood (which is not ancient history) is comforting.

I was in a highly nostalgic mood a year ago when I wrote my annual holiday
letter, in which I described a typical family Christmas celebration in
the late 1940s and early 1950s. Here’s an edited version of that holiday
letter. My cousin Donna (who is three years younger than I am) wrote back
that she could see the whole thing in her imagination and it brought back
her childhood, too. Ahhhh, those lovely memories. I am soggy with nostalgia.

A Child’s Christmas in Dellwood

      Come in your imagination with me to the
house of a working-class family in a working-class neighborhood in north
St. Louis County. This neighborhood was so ordinary and almost rural in
the post-war years that a neighbor’s dog (a big, yellow beast) could sleep
undisturbed in the middle of Chambers Road, which today is exceedingly
busy. The dog wouldn’t last five minutes.


      Back then, the Village of Dellwood was
a paradise of sorts. Everybody knew each other. We were all white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants. Our dads worked at jobs that were not in offices and mowed
their lawns every weekend. The only jobs our mothers had was us. The boomers
were just being born, and there were lots of kids in the neighborhood.
It was safe for us to ride our bikes up and down our two side streets (a
block apart), which had almost no traffic and were just barely paved. I
grew up in the house my parents had built following their marriage in 1938.
In the summer, we kids spent every day outside and even stayed out catching
fireflies until bedtime. There was no thought that there might be any danger.
I don’t remember anything bad happening to us kids. We did not have “helicopter
parents.” Our mothers were probably glad we were gone all day. In the winter
we kids no doubt stayed inside and whined all day because we were bored.
I read every book in my mother’s bookcase, including all twenty volumes
of the Book of Knowledge they bought in 1949.


      Even though we played Christmas records
(78 rpm vinyl!) like “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells” by Bing Crosby
and the Andrews Sisters and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” by Frank Sinatra,
we had very few snowy holidays. The snow came in January. I remember snowball
fights and building really ugly snowmen. I also remember the crocuses peeping
out of the snow under the big oak tree in our side yard.


      My mother always spent at least a week
in early December addressing Christmas cards, which she bought in boxes
of twenty-five for a dollar. It seemed to me that she sent out a million
cards, every address copied by hand from her address book. She probably
sent out about a hundred. You could send that many in the late 1940s. First-class
stamps were 3¢ and mail deliveries happened twice a day. We received a
lot of cards, too. They covered the mantel and top of the buffet in which
my mother kept the good dishes and the good table linens.


      As far as I know, there were no electronic
communications—no email, no websites like this one. Until I was in high
school, when you made a phone call, you picked up the hand-and-ear part
of the black telephone and gave the operator the phone number of the person
you wanted to call. The dial tone arrived in Ferguson while I was in high
school. The only typewriter I ever saw until I took typing (on non-electric
Royals) in high school was my grandfather’s Remington, probably manufactured
in the 1930s. If someone wanted to send a Christmas letter, I guess they
had to type it on what was called a “ditto master,” find someplace to get
it run off, and then fold and put every letter in an envelope that was
addressed either by hand in ink or on the typewriter. Typed addresses were
only for business, however, and were considered tacky for personal greetings.


      Our family was one of those impatient,
open-the-presents-on-Christmas-Eve families. Our celebration began when
my grandparents walked in the back door. (The only people who ever used
the front door were out-of-town visitors, salesmen, and my piano teachers.)
All three of my grandparents lived in north St. Louis (the city and county
were and still are separate entities), not far from the big cemetery where
William Clark (of the Corps of Discovery Expedition of 1804) is buried.
My mother’s parents picked up my father’s widowed mother, who was very
thin and wore her white hair in a messy bun. I always thought she was at
least a hundred years old.


      The grandparents arrived in time for supper
(“dinner” was the noon meal.), which was usually pot roast with the potatoes
and carrots cooked the good way in the dutch oven with the beef. We usually
ate in the kitchen, but on special nights like Christmas Eve we ate in
the dining room on the good dishes and the good tablecloth, which I inherited
when my mother died in 1965. Gramma made the world’s best apple pie, so
guess what dessert was. After supper, we did dishes. That is, I washed
and my brother Dale dried while the adults sat in the living room talking
and my mother and grandfather smoked. (One of Grampa’s gifts was always
a carton of Pall Malls.)


      Dishes done, we progressed to the entertainment
portion of the evening. I played Christmas carols on the old piano my father
had remodeled (he took the player piano parts out of it) and my brother
sang. “O, Little Town of Bethlehem.” “Joy to the World.” “The First Noel.”
“Away in a Manger.” “Silent Night.” I had that book of carols and its simple
piano scores until I went to college. In 1964, my father hauled that piano
to Perryville, Missouri, where I had my first teaching job. Rather than
move it again, I donated it to a church when I went to another school in
another town.


      Next—Christmas presents! I remember Tinker
Toys and clothes, but not dolls. They probably didn’t give me any more
dolls after the summer I parked one in the driveway so I could jump over
her as I roller-skated down the slope. I left her outside, and she melted.
One year, the grownups led Dale and me downstairs. Two brand-new bicycles
parked in the basement! I got a blue girls’ bike, my brother, a red boys’
bike. With ribbons on them. Another year, Daddy suddenly said, “Listen!
There’s something on the roof!” Then the phone rang. It was our neighbor,
Aunt Lorraine, reporting that she was watching someone in a red suit walking
on our roof. Dale and I ran outside, but of course we were just seconds
too late to see Santa. It took me several years to figure out how they’d
cooked that up. It also took me several years to notice that Santa always
stored our Christmas presents on the top shelf in the closet in my parents’
bedroom. Mostly, Dale and I received clothes and books. The Adventures
of Robin Hood. The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. The Five Little Peppers.
Hans Brinker. The Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, and Hardy Boys series. Dale
and I always had at least one of our new books finished by New Year’s Eve.
And from our father’s mother…a $20 bill. That was a fortune in those days!


      What presents did I give? My grandmother
took me to the big department stores in downtown St. Louis every year.
We had lunch in the Famous-Barr tea room, and then I bought knick-knacks
to give. When I was seven, I gave my father the first story I ever wrote.


      Dale and I got to stay up late on Christmas
Eve. Most years, we went with our parents to the midnight service at the
Immanuel Evangelical & Reformed Church in Ferguson. That church is
still there, but it’s the Immanuel United Church of Christ now, and the
church the Google photo shows isn’t the old, familiar building. I guess
it’s been modernized. We slept late on Christmas Day and that afternoon
went to a bigger family gathering at the house of Aunt Ruth and Uncle Don.


      


      Today, centuries (OK, I’m exaggerating
for effect) later, much has changed. That old world is all gone. My grandparents,
my parents, and my brother are all dead. The last time I was back in St.
Louis (on my way to a college reunion), I wrote ahead of time to the people
who now own the house I grew up in and made arrangements to visit them
and see the house. A lot of it was the same, but they had a huge flat-screen
TV where the old console radio had been, the white picket fence had been
replaced by an ugly chain link one, the back yard was all wrong, and all
my father’s roses were long gone.


      I’ve come a long way from Dellwood. Today,
if I want to see snow, I can go outside and look across Los Angeles at
the snow-capped mountains sixty miles away. I’m still a member of the working
class. I work here at my computer five or six hours a day, editing books
for people who, as I say, don’t want to embarrass themselves in print.
When I was young, I got taken every summer to the
St. Louis Municipal Opera,  a huge outdoor theater that opened
in 1917 in Forest Park, to see half a dozen live Broadway shows on tour.
Grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles and cousins—we sat up in the free
seats. Today I earn enough, as I tell people to buy cat food and theater
tickets. I go to the theater as often as I can, sometimes three or four
times a month. Memories are good. Life is good.

I Can Cook, Too

This is the title of a funny song from Bernstein, Comden, and Green’s
1944 Broadway musical,
On the Town, which is about three sailors on a 24-hour leave in New
York. One of the sailors happens upon a taxi driver named Hildy Esterhazy,
who lures him to her apartment by telling him what a
good cook http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K2xSZ... she is. I was
once married to a sailor. I cooked actual meals for him. I owned a dozen
cookbooks. I baked bread, made my own mayonnaise (just once), and made
Christmas cookies from scratch. When President Johnson invited my husband
to go to Vietnam, he decided to join the Navy instead. On the way, he dropped
me off in Cape Girardeau, where I started graduate school. He made a right
turn, I went left, and that was pretty much the end of my domesticity.




But I can still cook! I learned from my mother and my grandmother. I remember
the post-war years, when my grandmother bought headless chickens. I watched
her pluck them and pull the insides out before she cut them up and dunked
them in flour and made fried chicken. Every Thanksgiving and Easter, my
mother and my two aunts crowded into Gramma’s kitchen in St. Louis with
raw ingredients and pots and pans and knives and spoons and—voilà, a couple
hours later, the whole family gathered for the best holiday meals served
on the planet. That was real home cooking.

For the first four or five years of our marriage, my husband and I invited
his parents (whom I adored) and my parents for Thanksgiving. I cooked to
impress. One year I found a recipe for Yorkshire pudding. It came out well,
and I got lots of compliments. Another year, it was duck with orange rice.
After I cooked a mountain of rice, my mother-in-law rescued me, explained
proportions of rice to water, and took some of the rice home. Another year,
another fancy meal, and my mother and grandmother reciprocated by rearranging
my living room furniture. I don’t think I’ve prepared a Thanksgiving meal
since then. I have never in my life roasted a whole turkey. Even when my
son was living with me, if I had, we’d still be eating turkey at Easter.
Now I get myself invited to Thanksgiving dinners, and if it’s a Thanksgiving
supper, I watch Gilbert & Sullivan operettas all day. And I take nicely
nuked broccoli as my contribution to the potluck meal.

I still use a few of my mother’s recipes. One of them is for gumbo…the
Great Depression-St. Louis version. No fancy creole spices like filé. No
shrimp. My mother’s recipe (which has probably never been written down)
begins “Take 10¢ of stewing beef.” That was one pound of beef. Then a pound
of ham and a pound of bacon. Keep in mind that cholesterol hadn’t been
invented back then. When I use the recipe today, I use less than half a
pound of each meat, to which I add canned okra (which is almost impossible
to find in Long Beach), tomatoes, and mushrooms. It’s served over rice
(which I now know how to cook). This is one of those recipes you simmer
all day, so I never make it unless I’m inviting friends for dinner. It’s
big food. I send some home with them and usually get another three or four
meals myself. When I was in high school, one of my best friends was from
New Orleans. Her mother made authentic New Orleans gumbo for me, but I
didn’t like it. It was all those weird creole spices.




I still use my mother’s recipes for deviled eggs and tuna salad, too.
For the deviled eggs, Mother used to put the hard-boiled egg yolks through
a little sieve; I just mash ’em up with a fork and then add a touch of
black pepper, a bit of sugar, and some mayonnaise. The tuna salad is equally
simple—no raw celery no raw onions. People have told me these recipes are
bland. Well, I like ’em. I guess that’s because I grew up with them.




The first time I ever saw a microwave was in 1966 or 67. It belonged to
my father-in-law, who was a cereal chemist. “Oh,” said I, “I’ll never,
ever, ever try to use one of those things. That’s not Real Cooking.” Foolish,
foolish me. My father-in-law loved to take people to good restaurants.
Once it was a seafood restaurant. But I ask you—what kind of seafood do
you get in St. Louis? Mississippi catfish. Rare, imported delicacies. I
tried squid once. It tasted (and chewed) like garden hose.




Nowadays, my stomach thinks it still lives in St. Louis. When I was in
graduate school, I’d fry up a Louisiana hot sausage and eat it on a bun.
If I did that today…well, you don’t want to know. I have a friend who loves
food from all over the globe. When she accused me of not liking any ethnic
food, I accepted that judgment until my son commented, “White people’s
food is ethnic, too.” See, I grew up in the Midwest in a German family
(second and third generations) and had a Dutch grandmother, so I got used
to pot roast, mashed potatoes, overcooked veggies (a sin I don’t commit),
white bread, and vanilla ice cream. We went to Chinese restaurants (and
the movies) for family birthdays. That was a big celebration. I was in
high school before I ever saw a pizza, and the first taco also arrived
in white-bread Ferguson about that time. I had Jewish friends in graduate
school, so I learned to like Jewish food and still do. One friend, a Conservative
Jew from L.A., lived in another little town near Carbondale, the home of
Southern Illinois University. She had a seventeen-mile commute every day.
We Midwesterners thought you had to pack a lunch if you were going to drive
across a big city. This friend invited me to her apartment for tacos. She
kept kosher. I could have either the meat or the cheese.




I am lucky today to have two friends who are foodies. One is Aaron Jackson,
who is also an artist and set designer. My friend Penny Hayes is the one
I call when I need culinary advice. She used to be a volunteer cook on
the
U.S.S. Lane Victory, a World War II ship now anchored near the Ports
of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and when she was cooking there, those guys
ate good. It’s Penny who gave me the method for reheating food I bring
home from restaurants. Preheat the oven to 350-400º. While it’s preheating,
put the food in the microwave for 30 seconds to cook its insides. Then
put it in the hot oven for ten to fifteen minutes to make the outside crispy
again. Keep an eye on it so it doesn’t burn. This even works for onion
rings.




All things considered, I think I’d rather watch my
On the Town DVD again than think anymore about cooking.
Bon appétit!

This is not a real book review

A few months ago, a magazine editor sent me a novel, 
The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker, to
review for her magazine. The blurb on the back of the book tells us that
a graduate student named Nora goes to a friend’s wedding, wanders off,
and “somehow finds herself in another realm.” She meets the “glamorous
and endlessly charming Ilissa, who introduces Nora to a decadent new world—and
to her gorgeous son. … It’s almost too good to be true.” But then Nora
wanders away from a party and comes into another realm in which she meets
men who tell her that Ilissa’s realm is evil and Ilissa just kidnapped
her to breed an heir. Sure enough, she gets pregnant. The handsome prince,
having done his duty, takes up with other glamorous (but evil) women. But
Nora’s baby dies and—

I got as far as page 48. At which point I wrote to the magazine editor
and told her the book is not only poorly written but its plot is awful.
It’s a clichéd, Disneyfied, dark fairy tale/romance novel. “Ditch it,”
the magazine editor wrote back.




But, hey—I’m a novelist, too, and I like fairy tales a lot, and I have
a good imagination. So here goes.




Alternate plot #1. Nora wakes up from this bad dream about the Land of
Faerie and learns that she’s been living her mundane life for forty years
and is still a graduate student. She’s still working on what appears to
be her doctoral dissertation, the writing of which has soared high in the
realm of obscure, esoteric, post-modernist litcrit discourse about hegemonies
and normative spaces. Her first dissertation director shot himself, her
second one retired, her third one got a job somewhere else, her fourth
one told her to choose a more relevant topic, her fifth one…well, you get
the idea. Her old boy friends all have jobs at prestigious universities
now, but she’s been working as a part-time waitress for those forty years
while she’s still trying to finish her dissertation. (Elements of this
plot come from observed real life. But not mine.)




Alternate plot #2. Having nothing better to do, Nora picks up her crossbow
and competes in a contest in Ilissa’s realm in which strangers are hunted
down, then killed, barbequed, and eaten. As the handsome prince’s divorced
wife, Nora is no longer a stranger, so she doesn’t have to start running
(or hide the barbeque sauce). But she’s basically a kind-hearted person
and is loath to join the hunting faction. This earns her the enmity of
the other glamorous but evil hunters, however, so she starts getting ambushed
or otherwise embarrassed and soon finds herself on the run anyway. She
meets dwarves and singing squirrels and talking trees (some of which throw
their apples at passers-by) and learns to live quite comfortably in tree
houses in the crowns of the latter. She also learns to leap from limb to
limb. Then she meets a really smart monkey. It’s love at first sight.




Alternate plot #3. Nora discovers she has super powers. And a hair-trigger
temper. She’s hugely pregnant, but when she utters the magic word—how about
“shazaam”—she turns into a lithe beauty wearing red hot pants and a cloth-of-gold
bustier. Among her super powers is the ability to create any kind of weapon
she can imagine using her magical 3D printer, which hangs from her belt
in a capsule and expands to life size when she flips the switch. The handsome
prince, who never learned anything in his life but how to be charming,
is still tomcatting around the palace, and, as in both her roles as abandoned
pregnant princess and superhera, Nora is getting really pissed. So she
goes off into the woods, stops near a tower with a singing maiden up on
the top floor, and sets up the magical 3D printer. Listening to the maiden’s
sad song, she decides on two print jobs. The first one is to make a lead
chastity belt for Ilissa’s son. “If I can’t have him to myself,” she mutters,
“nobody else can either.” The second print job is a ladder to get the singing
maiden down out of that tower. The maiden comes down. Nora directs her
to an alternative Julliard for proper voice lessons.




Alternate plot #4. Still pregnant, Nora remembers that she was a graduate
student in English literature in the other real world. The most recent
classes she can remember were Restoration drama, 18th-century novels, and
Victorian novels. She decides she’ll sit out the rest of her pregnancy
by writing a long epistolary novel describing Ilissa’s realm and all the
curious fauna and flora in it. She’ll cleverly give all the animals and
plants appropriate voices and philosophies. She’s also thinking she’ll
introduce the other realm by having her heroine, whose name is Caroline
Augusta Wortley Montague, fall down a rabbit hole and step out into the
court of Charles II of England. Which is being invaded by Ilissa’s army
of tin soldiers that can transform themselves into huge winged tanks and
humvees and MRAP vehicles. Charles’ army is really tired because it’s still
fighting against Puritans left over from the Interregnum, so they lose
the war…at which point Nora suddenly realizes that she’s lost her plot
somewhere. And she’ll never find it again. She decides to just have the
baby.




Alternate plot #5. Still pregnant, Nora realizes that (a) she needs to
get out of the palace once in a while and (b) she really needs to exercise.
So she heads out to the nearby gym/day spa/dance studio and signs up for
classes. The director of the dance studio is Busby Berkeley. Nora soon
learns that all you have to do in his dance classes is pose. Berkeley uses
his magical camera to turn a dozen flabby women into an army of chorus
girls who “dance” in kaleidoscopic patterns as the camera moves through
the forest of flailing female legs. At the same time, the magical camera
sucks all the cellulite out of those legs (and tummies, too). Nora gives
it a try, but Berkeley is more dictatorial than Ilissa herself, so she
quits and tries the day spa. It’s run by a corporation of retired cosmetic
surgeons who, along with their customers, put on elaborate carnival masks
and perform delicious sexual exercises. Pretty soon, though, Nora and the
Real Housewives of Ilissa County get mad at being taken advantage of (no
matter how delicious it is), so they call in an army of crocodiles and
the surgeons all run away. Now Nora turns to the gym, which is run by a
beautiful witch with impossibly glossy hair and cheekbones. The witch confides
that she has recently shed a hundred pounds, thanks to packaged nutritious
food (with snacks!) delivered to her door (at a huge price) every month,
plus daily yoga. Nora signs up, learns a bunch of yoga poses and—




—enough of this. I bet you can see where it’s going. I’m pretty confident
that none of these plots could ever grow into a novel. If you’re a movie
producer, though, I’m available for a conversation.

Pen pals then, email and blogs now—I’ve been writing to people all my life

In the olden days, when we had pen pals we wrote our letters in ink (sometimes
with a pencil, occasionally a crayon) on real paper. Nowadays, though,
we don’t write real letters, at least not the kind that might be collected
into books as the letters of famous people are. We post comments that zip
back and forth through the aethers of websites and in social media. Email
is really handy, and I suspect Facebook, Twitter, and the other social
media—all of which I’m too cranky to use—are even handier.

So, duh, there are all kinds of communications, and we can use them all
in the books we write. I’m forever telling the authors of novels I’m editing,
for example, to go sit in the mall and listen to conversations. Not to
eavesdrop but to get the rhythms of the sentences real people speak. You
don’t quite get the same rhythms from written notes and posts, but sometimes
email and FB comments and Tweets and such do indeed approximate spoken
language.

We learn a lot from notes and posts. Nearly all the queries I receive
come via email, and I’ve discovered I can get an idea of how the person
writes from how he or she writes an email. A verbose emailer will probably
be a verbose novelist. If an email is filled with misspelled words, incorrect
(or no) punctuation, or Tweetish (a new dialect of English), I know I’ll
have some work to do, if that author hires me, leading him to gooder English.

Nearly all my authors become my pen pals. This includes an author who
lives in Anaheim Hills, which is forty-five minutes away on the freeway,
one in Glendale, an hour up a different freeway, one in Irwindale, an hour
up another freeway, and three or four who live in Australia, South Africa,
and Pakistan. Plus lots of places in between. I have interesting conversations
on a multitude of subjects (beyond how to write a coherent sentence) with
all of them. I’ve worked with two authors in Australia, one of whom put
me in his novel because of something I wrote to him about Mozart. My Pakistani
author sends me exhaustive analyses of the news about the Middle East.
He knows a lot more than I do about that part of the world, so I’m learning
a lot from him. That is no doubt one purpose of having pen pals: we share
what we know and learn new things.

The first real pen pal I can remember was my high school freshman English
teacher, Mrs. McPhail. She and her husband were exchange teachers from
England. She gave my book reports and other papers A+’s and we had occasional
personal chats. When the McPhails went back to England at the end of the
year, I wrote letters to her, which she kindly answered. I learned a bit
about the English Midlands in the late 1950s. Our correspondence lasted
maybe a year. My second pen pal was my friend Dorothy, who was a year ahead
of me at Ferguson High School (yes,
that Ferguson). After she started college at Southeast Missouri State
(SEMO) College, we started writing to each other. A lot. Well, a first-class
stamp in those days was 7¢. For some silly reason, we wrote all over the
envelopes, too. I learned later that she had conspired with my mother to
lure me to college; now I think, where would I be today if she hadn’t?
We were roommates for two years in college. She studied foreign languages,
and my most vivid memory of her is watching her writing Cyrillic letters
in the air with pretzel sticks the year she took beginning Russian. We
were still friends in graduate school, but after she got married and moved
to Plano, Texas, we lost touch.

I also carry on nifty email conversations with, for example, some of the
other bloggers at
Feminism and Religion.com. A couple of the women I met when I went
to England are also pen pals. One owns the
Atlantis Bookshop,  which is just down the street from the British
Museum. I can still remember when she told me that William Butler Yeats
had trod the same floor I was standing on. I was so awe-struck I almost
levitated!   

One of my most interesting email correspondents currently is Andrew Vonderschmitt,
the executive and producing artistic director of the
Long Beach Playhouse, which has been presenting plays for 85 years. 
Andrew has a blurb in every program that says he can be reached “via email,
snail-mail, phone, fax, or you can drop by the Playhouse. However you choose
to contact me and tell me how I’m doing, I welcome it.” So I took him at
his word, and now I give him my reaction to plays I see on the two stages
at the Playhouse. My little reviews are not always totally positive, but
they’re honest, and he’s as much a theater geek as I am, so when I make
suggestions or talk about shows I’ve seen at other theaters, he always
knows what I’m talking about. For example, I have suggested (maybe too
often) that he run Noel Coward’s
The Vortex followed by Henrik Ibsen’s
Ghosts, with the same actors as the mother and the son. In
The Vortex (1924), the curtain falls as the son (originally played
by Coward) falls into a sort of cocaine-induced stupor;
Ghosts (1881) ends with the son falling into his mother’s arms as
he descends into syphilitic madness. I told Andrew I think that would make
a nifty, if depressing, half-season, but he replied (very reasonably) that
a community playhouse can’t get actors to commit to so much time. So now
I’m trying to get him to do
Once Upon a Mattress, the Broadway show that made Carol Burnett famous
in 1959. It’s based on “The Princess and the Pea,” and you know how much
I like revisionist fairy tales. I keep telling Andrew he could easily get
the bed with the twenty mattresses to fit under the lights on the Playhouse’s
Main Stage. I also told him about the recent production I saw at another
playhouse and how they should have hired actors who could sing and dance.
This week we’ve been “talking” about Shakespeare. They just did
Twelfth Night and did Sartre's
No Exit (a really cheery play) (NOT) earlier this year. I’m sure
he thinks I’m nuts, but I feel honored to have such a busy man among my
pen pals.  

I hope you all have pen pals in your lives. Writing notes on paper or
on a keyboard keeps us in touch with people and also gives us practice
in writing more clearly.
A note from the English teacher: be sure to reread any email and
spell check it before you click on Send. That’ll save considerable embarrassment.
Trust me. I know this.

When Is Too Much Shakespeare?

 

I’ve spent a lot of my life around the works of William Shakespeare. As
a double major (English-Speech/Theater) in college, I took all the intro
to lit courses. I still remember Dr. H.O. Grauel’s classes and how he introduced
a roomful of sophomores to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Measure for Measure,
King Lear, and other plays. That’s when I really began to start to
get what Shakespeare was doing. I was working primarily on an intellectual
level, of course, so when I took beginning acting and did my Shakespeare
scene (from
Two Gentlemen of Verona), the teacher (College Theatre’s director)
had only one comment: “Barbara, you have personally set the art of Shakespearean
acting back a hundred years!” Yeah. I was that bad. (But my scene from
Molière was marginally better, and so was my modern drama scene.) I have
no acting talent at all, but I’m a very good audience because I pay attention.

I read Shakespeare and his contemporaries in graduate school, too. My
M.A. thesis was a comparison of the Aristotelian unities of time, place,
and action in four plays each by Shakespeare and Molière. Aristotle said
that the action of a play should be in real time, that it should take place
in a single setting (no scenery in those classical Greek amphitheatres),
and that there should be only one plot (no subplots). That’s how the tragedies
of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are constructed. Because neoclassicism
didn’t arrive in England till long after his death, Shakespeare ignored
Aristotle, whereas Molière, who was writing during the reign of Louis XIV,
followed the unities in his comedies. My Ph.D. dissertation was also partly
Shakespearean. I inflicted literary criticism on the plays about Cleopatra
of Egypt written in English between1592 (Mary Sidney) and 1898 (G.B. Shaw).
One thing I learned is that
Antony and Cleopatra is the closest to actual history.




So…..a couple years ago, when I received a nice big check from one of
my authors, I spent some of it on the BBC Shakespeare. All thirty-seven
plays in a big, black box. I’d already seen most of the plays (I’d been
renting them from Netflix), but even though I own thirty-three DVDs of
nineteen plays, I lusted after that box. I have five
Hamlets, including the French opera in which Hamlet gets drunk with
the players and pours wine over his head. Three
Much Ado About Nothings, including the splendid new one by Joss Whedon,
none of whose actors I recognized.
Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony (with crisp diction!).
Othello with Lawrence Olivier, who painted his whole body black and
walked around with his tunic open—Lord Larry was gorgeous when he was young.
Al Pacino rehearsing
Richard III. A 1936
Romeo and Juliet with Norma Shearer (age 34) as Juliet (age 13),
Leslie Howard (age 43) as Romeo (age 18), and John Barrymore (age 54) as
Mercutio (ditto). The acting is wonderful. I also have the Baz Luhrmann
version, which I like. And two Julie Taymor productions.
Titus Andronicus is weird no matter who directs it. The only thing
wrong with Taymor’s
Tempest (with Helen Mirren as Prospera) is Russell Brand.  

Beyond those, I also have a DVD called
Silent Shakespeare (silent movies with bits of blank verse on the
intertitles).
Shakespeare Behind Bars (murderers in prison doing The Tempest—it’s
spell-binding).

Slings and Arrows, a series about a Canadian company that is
only slightly like the Stratford Festival. Although it’s mostly about the
actors and directors, we get terrific scenes from
Hamlet,
Macbeth, and
Lear. A bunch of documentaries.
Anonymous, a ridiculous movie about the Oxfordians, who believe the
17th Earl of Oxford wrote the plays because “the man from Stratford” was
an ignoramus who couldn’t possibly have written a single word.
Shakespeare Retold (four plays without the blank verse),
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
Shakespeare in Love, and the
Reduced Shakespeare Company. They do the complete works in an hour
and a half.  

As soon as the box arrived, I printed the
Wikipedia article, which is twenty-two pages long. It’s generally
accurate, though some characters’ names are misspelled and some of the
cast lists are incomplete. I made notes on those twenty-two pages while
I was watching the plays.

Then the box just sat there. And sat there. Finally, last month, I said,
“I’m gonna watch ’em all!” I figured it would take me about six weeks,
which is basically one long play (2 ½ to 3+ hours) nearly every night.

The producers and sponsors of the BBC Shakespeare (filmed between 1979
and 1982) prescribed a traditional, conservative, Elizabethan/Jacobean,
approach in setting and costuming. This meant Romans with beards. For some
reason, it apparently also meant lots of bare-chested men (yummy!). There
are a few exceptions.
Othello is costumed and set to look like the paintings of El Greco,
All’s Well That End’s Well looks like Vermeer,
The Comedy of Errors is vaguely commedia dell arte, and
Love’s Labour’s Lost is set in the 18th century.

As I watched the plays, I began to recognize members of what I came to
think of as the BBC repertory company: Michael Hordern, Claire Bloom, Ron
Cook, and Trevor Peacock (five plays each), Helen Mirren (three plays),
Derek Jacobi and John Gielgud (two each), and many others. I was especially
impressed by Paul Jesson (eight plays) and the range that all the actors
show. But I disagree with some casting choices. Jacobi played Hamlet as
a hysteric, though he’s not nearly as operatic as Richard Burton. He was
so melodramatic that I kept yelling, “Hamlet, shut up! Get on with it!”
Nicol Williamson played Macbeth like he did Merlin in
Excalibur: he practically sang his lines. Plus, the Wyrd Sisters
looked like Muppets and there was no dumb show. Some years ago, I saw a
production of
Macbethat Stratford that left me speechless. The BBC version did
not.

When is too much Shakespeare? Probably the Sunday I started at noon and
watched the second half of
Richard II(Jacobi was a splendid Richard), then
Othello (Anthony Hopkins in suntan makeup and a fright wig and Bob
Hoskins as a convincing, conniving Iago), then
King John, then half of
The Merry Wives of Windsor (such a stupid play I watched only half
of it), then half of
Troilus and Cressida, by which time it was 11 p.m. and I was prostrate
on the couch.

During the day, I’m reading Jane Austen, which I have not read since college.
I was standing in a bookstore and found a volume of four of her novels
for $7.98. Who could resist? And I’ve just finished

Nashville Chrome, a fascinating sort of novelized biography of
the
Browns, a famous country music trio of the 1950s and 60s that I’d
never heard of before. And having finished Shakespeare, I put a couple
Fred and Ginger movies in the DVD player. There’s no tapdancing in Shakespeare,
except maybe in Kenneth Branagh’s musicalized
Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Six weeks of Shakespeare plus Jane Austen plus 1950s country music plus
Fred and Ginger. Imagine what the voices in my head sound like.