Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Quote of the Day (Reporter Gene Myers, on Inequities Facing the Disabled)

“My beat is full of stories where there's no happy ending: chronic underfunding, abuse and systemic failures that continue to harm vulnerable people. People are crying to me all the time. Now imagine also having a disability and having family members with disabilities. I can't think of any other beat I've covered that was tougher emotionally. The material I have to wade through, medical research, bills in Trenton, none of that is as rough as watching the toll these inequities have on people.”—Disabilities reporter Gene Myers quoted by Alex Nussbaum, “Inside the Newsroom: Giving a Voice to the Vulnerable,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), Dec. 8, 2024

At first, I was going to ask anyone reading this to keep in mind the struggles of the disabled community this holiday season. But that is insufficient, I believe now.

Try to keep in mind these physically and emotionally vulnerable people constantly, this holiday season and simply going forward. And together, let’s try to create a world where they have a better chance of surviving—and wherever possible, thriving—for the long haul.

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Quote of the Day (Francis Ford Coppola, on ‘This Thing Called My Life’)

“I'm starting to think that this thing called my life is a movie I'm making. I'm going to write the ending of it shortly, but I don’t know what it’s going to be.”—Oscar-winning American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, “The Gambler,” WSJ. , October 2024

Another force—God—will be the one to decide the final scene to the movie of his life, but the Almighty is likely to be more merciful and less fickle than Hollywood producers or even American filmgoers to daring, passionate, complicated Francis Ford Coppola

No matter the disappointing response to his latest, if not last, film this fall, the sci-fic epic Megalopolis, Coppola is assured a place in film history for, if nothing else, The Godfather Saga. His reception of Kennedy Center honors virtually certifies that.

Two speakers at yesterday’s ceremony helped to explain the enormous risks that alternately raised his career to undreamed-of heights and threatened to bring it asunder.

George Lucas: ““Here’s the thing: When you spend enough time with Francis, you begin to believe that you can jump off cliffs too.”

Al Pacino said the filmmaker was ready to break the first rule of Hollywood: Never put your own money in your movie projects.

Monday, December 9, 2024

Quote of the Day (Garry Shandling, on His Supposed ‘Intimacy Issue’)

“My friends tell me that I have an intimacy issue—but I don't think they know me.”—American stand-up comic, writer, director, producer, and actor Garry Shandling (1949-2016), quoted by Tad Friend, “Annals of Hollywood: The Eighteen-Year Itch,” The New Yorker, Apr. 13, 1998

The image accompanying this post, of Garry Shandling with then-girlfriend Linda Doucett, was taken Aug. 1, 1988, at that year’s Emmy Awards, by Alan Light.

Sunday, December 8, 2024

Quote of the Day (David Mason, on Fiction and ‘Small Passages of Civility in Our Lives’)

“Fiction allows us to mourn with strangers. Even horrifying stories create, by virtue of their shape and their empathy, small passages of civility in our lives. Civilization is something we must choose; humanity is something we must make. Novels are particularly well-equipped to show us how social problems affect individual lives, but artists rarely envision viable solutions to the problems they dramatize. Perhaps it is easier to forgive in the imagination than in the streets and pubs and houses.”—American poet, librettist ,essayist, and memoirist David Mason, “Forgiving the Past,” The Sewanee Review, Spring 1998 (“Irish Literature Today”)

Mason’s essay appeared in the relatively early days of American polarization, as ideologically driven cable news stations and Internet sites were just starting to exacerbate real but still not unbridgeable differences in the nation. Since then, more and more people are addicted to their mobile phones and anti-social media.

Genres that require time, patience, and understanding—very much including the novel—have been increasingly falling by the wayside in the last quarter-century—and those “small passages of civility in our lives” that Mason hailed are growing increasingly narrow.

(The accompanying outdoor photo of David Mason, taken Apr. 24, 2012, was sent by the poet to Christine Mason.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Psalm 55, With Lines Influencing Henry James)

“I am distraught by the noise of the enemy,
    because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they bring[a] trouble upon me,
    and in anger they cherish enmity against me.
 
My heart is in anguish within me,
    the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling come upon me,
    and horror overwhelms me.
And I say, ‘O that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
yea, I would wander afar,
    I would lodge in the wilderness,
I would haste to find me a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest.’”—Psalm 55:2-8 (Revised Standard Version)

These biblical verses are the source of not one, but two prominent book titles. One phrase gave rise to one of the cornerstones of modern philosophy: Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 title, Fear and Trembling.

The other might not be as recognizable to those who have read a novel whose title echoes another verse here: Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.

Contemporary readers of this work from the mature period of American expatriate novelist will hear the character Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, explicitly likened to a dove because of her innocence, and leave it at that. (James, incidentally, left a clue to the real-life source of the character through the initials “MT”—Minny Temple, a vivacious, innocent cousin who died of tuberculosis at age 24.)

But readers in James’ own time, familiar as they were with the Bible—especially in the King James version—would have heard an echo in Psalm 55’s “wings like a dove,” and would think back to the entire passage—someone beset not just by the “terrors of death,” but also “the noise of the enemy” and “the oppression of the wicked.”

Milly, like the narrator of the psalm—though without knowing it (at least initially)—is at the mercy of conspirators: in this case, the cash-poor lovers Merton Densher and Kate Croy, who hope that, by Merton marrying the soon-to-die Milly, he will inherit her money, freeing him to wed Kate.

James’ personal religious beliefs appear to be unconventional, a byproduct of his father, Henry James Sr., who rejected orthodox Protestantism and became a follower of Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But traditional faith can leave an indelible imprint, and James—Junior, like Senior—would likely hear that phrase “wings like a dove” reverberate in the imagination in contemplating the object of the web spun by Croy and Densher.

Kate and Merton have committed the worst kind of transgression in exploiting the innocence of another human being. That violation will not go unpunished.

In the quest for material possession that justifies and finally undermines the love of Croy and Densher, the novelist might have found an equally apt literary allusion from Psalm 68: “The women at home divide the spoil, though they stay among the sheepfolds—the wings of a dove covered with silver, its pinions with green gold.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1997 film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, with Alison Elliott as Millie, Linus Roache as Merton, and Helena Bonham Carter as Kate.)

Saturday, December 7, 2024

Quote of the Day (Amor Towles, on How Life Proceeds)

“Life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate, and our opinions evolve if not glacially, then at least gradually.”— American novelist Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

The attached photo of Amor Towles was taken Aug. 9, 2018, by librairie mollat.

Friday, December 6, 2024

TV Quote of the Day (‘Cunk on Shakespeare,’ on School in The Bard's Day)

"School in Shakespeare’s day and age was vastly different to our own. In fact, it was far easier because he didn't have to study Shakespeare."—English actress and comedian Diane Morgan, with her favorite line as ill-informed interviewer Philomena Cunk, on the BBC mockumentary “Cunk on Shakespeare,” original air date May 11, 2016, teleplay by Charlie Brooker, Jason Hazeley, and Joel Morris, directed by Lorry Powles

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Quote of the Day (Roger Ebert, on Being Inarticulate)

“Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate—to be unable to tell another person what you really feel.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert (1942-2013), review of the film Heat, December 15, 1995

(The accompanying photo, showing Ebert giving an interview at a Chicago public radio station, on the “Sound Opinions” program in 2006, comes from Flickr: Roger Ebert.)

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Song Lyric of the Day (Barber and Menotti, on Why ‘Must the Winter Come So Soon?’)

“Must the winter come so soon?
Night after night I hear the hungry deer
Wander weeping in the woods
And from his house of brittle bark hoots the frozen owl.”—American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981), “Must the winter come so soon?”, from the opera Vanessa (1957), with English lyrics by Italian-American librettist Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)
 
It seems like we were just making the acquaintance of the fall of 2024 when winter began blowing its icy breath on us. A lifelong resident of the Northeast, I expect as much. But this morning, a friend now living in Florida texted me that it was only 35 degrees down there.
 
Well, no bother. I can always wear a heavy sweater and pull a blanket tighter inside when it gets cold. On the other hand, when the temperatures turn subtropical, aside from cranking up the AC and staying indoors, there’s not much you can do on those muggy summer days.
 
For now, anyway, take what comfort you can in the lovely lyrics and music from Barber’s collaboration with Menotti.
 
I took the image accompanying this post, by the way, 14 years ago this month, only a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. It’s easy to imagine both “the hungry deer” that “wander weeping in the woods” evoked by Barber and Menotti, as well as the “hazy shade of winter” that Simon and Garfunkel sang about in the Sixties.

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Flashback, December 1804: Napoleon Disses Pope in Crowning Himself Emperor

In solidifying his hold on power but surpassing anything he had done previously in audacity, Napoleon Bonaparte compelled Pope Pius VII to come to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in December 1804 to consecrate him as Emperor of France—then simply crowned himself.

The capstone of five years of growing control by Napoleon and delicate negotiations by the papacy, the coronation was both a half-hearted throwback to medieval papal authority and a rude foreshadowing of the threats Rome would endure in the next two centuries at the hands of tyrants.

The pomp and spectacle of the ceremony could not conceal Napoleon’s literal power grab and more subtle insulted aimed at the pontiff.

Reaction against the French Revolution’s creation of a state religion that would have supplanted Roman Catholicism left the nation in a position not unlike Russia after the Marxist attempt to impose a godless society: with a new regime eager for the credibility of the surviving institutional church.

But, unlike the Russian Orthodox Church’s complicity in Vladimir Putin’s strategy of Christian nationalism, Pius, in his sweet-natured but firm way, resisted.

Gallic revolutionary fever had disrupted the Papal States enough that a Roman republic had been declared and Pope Pius VI taken as a prisoner of France, where he died in 1799. Even after the threat receded and something like the status quo ante resumed, the papacy was unsure how to counter this new force in Europe.

But in Pius VII, Napoleon faced an adversary he’d never encountered on the battlefield or in state chambers. Unlike so many of his haughty but maladroit predecessors in Rome, this pontiff exhibited genuine Franciscan gentleness and piety, a onetime monk accustomed to making his own bed and mending his own cassock. He met insults and threats with equanimity rather than fear or burning resentment.

After staging a coup d’etat on 18–19 Brumaire (the revolutionary calendar’s equivalent of November 9–10, 1799), Bonaparte had consolidated power by degrees. As First Consul of the republic, he named the group who drafted the laws, as well as ministers, ambassadors, army officers and judges; created the national bank; and reorganized the bureaucracy.

In resorting to one-man rule, use of censorship and propaganda, and strengthening of the military, Bonaparte crafted a blueprint for 20th-century authoritarians—a regime of ruthless efficiency and lightning-fast moves that the ancient, creaky, rules-based Vatican continually found difficult to counter.

Victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo put Bonaparte in effective control of Italy. Even while celebrating military victories abroad, the new strongman needed to quell unrest at home. Catholics remained angry at the restrictions on the Church imposed by the revolutionary regime, with some joining conspiracies and even assassination plots against Bonaparte.

Not surprisingly, then, the dictator sent a signal that he wanted a change in relations with the Holy See. “Tell the pope that I want to make him a present of 30,000,000 Frenchmen,” he told an aide.

Whatever relief Pius VII felt over not suffering the fate of his predecessor was short-lived, though. A Concordat concluded in September 1801 that recognized Catholicism as “the religion of the French majority” and reopening churches proved to be far less than the Holy See had expected when it signed the document, as Bonaparte soon issued 77 “Organic Articles” that effectively nullified major concessions to the Church.

In 1804, after declaring himself emperor, Bonaparte still wanted the credibility the Church could provide. His model for his projected coronation was the ceremony for Charlemagne, who inaugurated a period of order and learning after Pope Leo gave his blessing at a Christmas Day ceremony in the year 800.

But, even as the emperor-in-name sought papal acquiescence in the ceremony, Bonaparte wanted the pope—and even ordinary Frenchmen—to realize who was in charge now. To that end, he:

*met the pope accidentally-on-purpose while out hunting, so it would not appear to be a meeting of equals;

*gave Pius a wedding gift less substantial—and more insolent—than it initially appeared: a jeweled tiara decorated with stones stolen from the Vatican six years before; and,

*placed crowns on his own head and that of his wife, Josephine.

The prospective empress gave Pius his one point of minor satisfaction out of the whole affair: When she tearfully told him before the ceremony that Bonaparte had never gone through a Christian wedding ceremony, Pius said he would not go through with the coronation until this was taken care of first. The fuming dictator went through with it, with no witnesses present, the day before the coronation.

Pius' adventures with the pope were far from over. In 1808, French troops occupying Rome seized the pontiff and carried him off to the episcopal palace at Savona, where he was kept isolated from advisers. Relations remained tense between them until Bonaparte finally lost power at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

In the end, Pius did not merely outlast Bonaparte but triumphed over him. In the aftermath of the emperor's fall, when the pope offered his mother and sisters protection in the Papal States, Bonaparte had to acknowledge the goodness of the gentle man he had continually humiliated, calling him "an old man full of tolerance and light."

The pope’s conduct throughout the Napoleonic period carried wider implications, too, according to Sir Nicholas Cheetham’s Keepers of the Keys:

“Pius' tenacious adherence to the principles of his office, his fortitude in standing up to Napoleon and the patient humility with which he had endured his sufferings had both enhanced his own prestige and greatly encouraged the current Catholic revival throughout Europe.”

Pius’ strategy of passive resistance had repercussions that extended to the end of the century, noted Eamon Duffy in his history of the papacy, Saints and Sinners:

“In the light of the Napoleonic era…it was entirely natural that the popes should identify the defence of the Papal States with the free exercise of the papal ministry. On the lips of Napoleon the call for the Pope to lay down his temporal sovereignty and to rely solely on spiritual authority had been blatant code for the enslavement of the papacy to French imperial ambitions. Without his temporal power, Pius VII…had come within a whisker of signing away even his spiritual authority. If the pope did not remain a temporal king, then it seemed he could no longer be the Church’s chief bishop. That perception coloured the response of all the nineteenth-century popes to the modern world.” 

The image accompanying this post, The Coronation of Napoleon, was created by French painter Jacques-Louis David from 1805 to 1807.

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on the Need to ‘Know What You Prefer’)

“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”—British man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), An Inland Voyage (1878)

Few people have refused to say “Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer” so adamantly as Robert Louis Stevenson, who died 130 years ago today, in Samoa—half a world away from his birthplace in Scotland.

At crucial points in his twenties, Stevenson turned away from what “the world”—certainly his parents—wanted him to do: wear the conventional evening dress expected of one of his class, profess the Presbyterian faith, and pursue the family trade of engineering.

The last choice would prove most decisive, as Stevenson struck out determinedly on life as a writer.

In adolescence, I confess, I turned away from Stevenson. I associated him too closely with A Child’s Garden of Verses, and adventure books like Treasure Island and Kidnapped featuring vivid illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. All kids’ stuff, I thought.

I wasn’t’ the only one: For some decades in the 20th century, despite the admiration of the likes of Proust, Hemingway, Borges, Nabokov, James, and London, Stevenson’s critical reputation tumbled.

The deeper I got into middle age, however, the more I learned to appreciate him. Like G.K. Chesterton, he wrote vividly wherever his interests took him—not just verse or genre fiction (as good as those could be), but also travelogues and other essays. He more than fulfilled his aim of presenting readers with works that were “absorbing and voluptuous.”

Sickly for most of his life, Stevenson’s body died young. But he heeded his advice about keeping the “soul alive,” as a glance at almost any of his works will show you. Like the portrait created by John Singer Sargent that accompanies this post, they invite you into a world he never ceased to find intriguing.

Another manuscript by the prolific author, Weir of Hermiston, was left unfinished at the time of his death. Gillian Hughes’ fascinating 2017 post on the Edinburgh University Press blog analyzes how its bowdlerized published version in the early 1890s “inevitably altered the form and spirit of what Stevenson had been writing.”

Monday, December 2, 2024

Quote of the Day (Dave Barry, on What It Takes to be a Top Executive)

"I don't mean to suggest for a moment that all it takes to be a top executive is a custom-tailored European suit. You also need the correct shirt and tie." —Humor columnist Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week (1986)  

Sunday, December 1, 2024

Photo of the Day: Julia Gabriel People’s Garden, Morningside Heights, NYC

Late this past summer, after meeting for lunch old friends from Columbia University, I walked around the Morningside Heights neighborhood and came across this small garden at the intersection of West 111th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

(With temperatures dropping in the Northeast these last few days, I experience vicarious warmth just looking at this picture I took then.)

The volunteer-run Julia Gabriel People’s Garden is named for an area resident who saved the garden and its adjacent apartment buildings in the 1960s and 1970s—a victory over redevelopment by no means assured in that era.

Quote of the Day (Henrik Ibsen, on ‘These Heroes of Finance’)

“It’s such sport with these heroes of finance; they’re like beads on a string—when one slips off, all the rest follow.” —Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), The League of Youth, translated by William Archer (1869)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (bell hooks, on Fear and ‘Cultures of Domination’)

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In its rhetoric such a society makes much of love and little of the pervasiveness of fear. Yet we are all so terribly afraid most of the time. Fear is the prevailing culture force that upholds structures of domination.  Fear promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies with sameness, then difference will appear as a threat.” — Author, academic, feminist and social activist bell hooks, “Love’s Alchemy,” in Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, edited by Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke (1997)

The image of bell hooks accompanying this post was taken Nov. 1, 2009, by Cmongirl.

Saturday, November 30, 2024

Flashback, November, 1964: O’Hara Reaffirms Short-Story Mastery With ‘The Horse Knows the Way’

The publication of the latest short fiction collection from John O’Hara, The Horse Knows the Way, in November 1964 should have been cause for unalloyed delight for author and publisher alike. Its 28 tales, like his other work, not only garnered unusually high sales for short fiction but cemented his status as a master of the form.

Instead, O’Hara inadvertently provided more fodder for his detractors. In a foreword, describing his need to get down on paper all he knew about how the people of his town lived, he concluded, “I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it.”

More than a few critics, however—led by those in the highly influential New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review—transposed the key words at the end to read, “not afraid to do it.”

Just the kind of braggadocio you’d expect from O’Hara, they noted.

Predictably, that observation only increased the fury of a man who perceived slights everywhere he turned. It also reinforced why he requested that his publisher, Random House, officially release his books on Thanksgiving: Because, unlike reviewers in the more high-profile Sunday Times Book Review, he would get a respectful hearing from the paper's daily critic, Charles Poore (who thought highly enough of his work and character that he delivered the eulogy after O'Hara died in 1970). 

Worse, like so much else associated with this gifted but touchy writer, the mangled quotation originated from anything but a close reading of O'Hara's work.

Consider, for instance, Adrian Mitchell’s dismissal of the volume in The New York Times Book Review: “It’s not the flat, monochrome characters but the author’s flat, monochrome vision of their world which is so often discouraging.”

But this largely forgotten British novelist, poet, and critic missed what other authors (including E.L. Doctorow, whose left-wing politics was diametrically opposed to that of the increasingly conservative O’Hara’s) have picked up on: that, while O’Hara’s prose might be prismatic, his presentation is anything but. 

With abrupt, often stunning endings, his stories send readers scurrying back through these works, trying to pick up on the clues they missed earlier.

It was true that O’Hara could be his own worst enemy: openly craving the Nobel Prize, for instance, or an honorary degree from Yale University, an institution of higher learning he’d been unable to attend because of the financial complications following the death of his father. Asked why the school had never awarded him that degree, the president at the time, Kingman Brewster, responded simply, “Because he asked.”

But at his best—and the stories in The Horse Knows the Way are consistently good—they fulfill his intention of trying to tell the truth about his time.

Roughly speaking, his short stories occur in three locales, the places where he had spent most of his time: New York, Hollywood, and Gibbsville, PA (the fictional stand-in for his hometown, Pottsville). Like much of his other Hollywood fiction, an example from The Horse Knows the Way, “The Answer Depends,” spotlights the kind of actors who populate much of the fare on Turner Classic Movies.

But my favorite stories from the book are set in Gibbsville, whose physical and emotional geography he knew with bone-deep understanding. These are the stories to seek out in this volume: "At the Window," "The Hardware Man," "The Victim," "The House on the Corner," "Aunt Fran," and "All Tied Up."

“For a while, at least,” O’Hara warned his loyal readers, “this will be my last book of short stories.” It wasn’t so much that he had descended into sloth, however, as that he decided to focus his energy on other projects.

One, the novel The Lockwood Concern, which appeared the following year, at least earned some critical plaudits as among his better entries in the long form in the last part of his life.

The other activity, a syndicated column for Newsday, lasted only a year, and did nothing but swell his reputation for bumptiousness and bellyaching about his lack of respect.

Fortunately, he returned to the short story genre in 1966 with Waiting for Winter, whose title strongly hinted at his increasing concern for aging and mortality.

The Horse Knows the Way appeared midway through a decade of flabbergasting productivity in the short-story form for O'Hara: from 1960 to 1968, seven collections of 137 tales, bringing his career total to more than 400. 

Other writers (like my favorite, F. Scott Fitzgerald) impress with their shimmering style, but they never took the measure of so many people from so many walks of life as O'Hara. These late stories, like his earlier ones, rely heavily on dialogue. 

But, because O'Hara feared that younger readers would be more likely to miss the resonances of his tales set decades earlier, they are often more ruminating, even melancholy, as in this passage from "The Answer Depends":

"I don't try to follow the plot lines of Ned Revere's films. In a few minutes after one of his pictures has begun to roll, I am in a daze of recollection, of remembering Ned as a gay companion: irresponsible, Quixotic, romantic, attractive to men as well as to women, and with no illusions then as to his stature as an artist."

Surveying where life has left them, the narrator, a retired actor named "Bobby," concludes: "I don't know who is better off: me, at my TV, with memories as fresh as the news in the morning paper, or Ned, scornful of those pleasant and profitable days, and with the lingering bitter taste of that one success on Broadway."

Flashback, November 1604: Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ Premieres With Dark Mirror of Its Time

When it was presented by "the King's Majesty's players” 420 years ago this month, Othello seems to have pleased his primary audience, King James I, still only a year and a half into his reign.

Understandably, considering that “the Moor of Venice” is the only black character in all of William Shakespeare’s 38 plays, current dramaturgy tries to examine how the playwright speaks to the racism of our time. It has, as part of that process, thrown into question the common practice of actors donning blackface for the role.

But the tragedy should also be subjected to literary excavation to determine how the play was written, performed, and viewed in its own time—an era of danger and secrets.

Shakespeare had learned his lesson well while crafting plays under the watchful eye of James’ predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I: searingly depict the society and psyches of courts swirling with intrigue, but set the action far away, lest listeners find the plots and characters striking too close to home. 

(And Renaissance Venice was much farther away in time if not distance from England than we can ever imagine today: storms in the English Channel were known to delay passage to France for as much as two weeks.)

Clare Asquith’s 2005 study, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, with its contention that the playwright was a secret Catholic when the faith was banned in England, has hardly been universally accepted by Bardologists. But she draws some interesting parallels between Othello and James, including that both leaders:

*survived narrow escapes;

*professed that their wives offered life-saving love;

*came to their new status as foreigners (James had been James VI of Scotland before assuming the English throne, while Othello, “the Moor of Venice,” would have been understood by audiences of the time as being from modern North Africa);

*celebrated Venice’s preservation from Moslem invaders (James, in his poetry; Othello, in battle).

For all the coding and deflection that Shakespeare, like other literary figures of the time, resorted to throughout his work, he was also sending “an urgent message” to James in this new play: “Royal authority must not fall into the hands of base men like Angelo [the Me-Too-like abuser of Measure for Measure] and Iago; it must be exercised responsibly.”

Starting in 1600, Shakespeare wrote what are often considered his four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. Of these, the last is the most tightly constructed in character (three main ones: Othello, Desdemona, and Iona) and time.

The time element may be the most important, as Iago, with an energy to match his cunning, sets in motion with stunning speed the plot that will destroy the life, reputation, and happiness of his commander. Two days after Othello and Desdemona reunite in Cyprus with mutual ardor, they are dead.

Commercial, overcivilized, seething with intrigue, Venice provides a ripe environment in which Iago can plant the seeds of the downfall of his plain-dealing commander. But such is his sense of invention that even a military outpost like Cyprus, more congenial to Othello, furthers his nefarious purposes: this time, the innocent Desdemona is utterly at sea.

The Venetian republic had depended on foreigners to defend itself from Moslem attacks, as seen in the play by service personnel from Spain (Iago—interestingly enough, Spanish for “James”) and Othello (from North Africa). Even so, the court of King James and throngs who saw the play at both the open-air Globe playhouse and the indoor Blackfriars in the next couple of decades would have known that its possession Cyprus had eventually fallen to the Ottoman Empire.

Venice could ill afford, then, to lose the likes of great commanders like Othello, and their absence from future councils of war could only increase the vulnerability of the republic.

Even in this point of geographic deflection, Shakespeare was hinting to his audience that the personal could become the political very quickly.

In the case of the English monarch, listeners had a strong reason to think so: a monarch’s inability to produce a male heir had pushed the nation into the cohort of Protestant European nations under King Henry VIII, then had hastened the transition from his childless (Tudor) daughter Elizabeth to James (Stuart).

Literary and theatrical culture supplied Shakespeare’s plot. His major source was an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, translated into French (where, presumably, the playwright saw a translation).

Cinthio's “ensign” brings about the fall of his chief in this tale, too. But the lesson is decidedly different from what Shakespeare conveyed: children should obey their parents, even if—especially if— this means the bride should not marry a black male without their permission.

Shakespeare also drew on a tradition better known to English theatergoers: morality plays that were popular in his teens. As Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt observes in Will in the World, these productions had fallen out of favor by the time the playwright reached his creative zenith late in the Elizabethan era, but they had concentrated viewers’ attention on a representative figure of evil, often named Vice.

In Othello, the sin—jealousy—becomes the tragic flaw that Othello, so used to commanding men in battle, finds impossible to quell within his heart, with Iago serving as the supercharged symbol of evil.

I have seen several productions of Othello onstage or onscreen, featuring such compelling actors as Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and Ron O’Neal. This has continued the tradition that began with Shakespeare’s leading player, Richard Burbage, playing the role before King James.

But Jones’ 1982 Broadway hit crystallized one of the common dilemmas of the play: No matter how magnetic the star playing Othello might be, the spotlight, more often than not, swings to the actor embodying Iago. 

Ecstatic reviews for that show’s Iago, Christopher Plummer, considerably annoyed Jones (and, let’s face it, brought out a jealous streak not unlike his character), who was already perturbed by his co-star’s penchant for hamming up scenes with crowd-pleasing humor, according to Plummer's memoir In Spite of Myself.

But this tendency of Iago consuming greater viewer attention is also grounded in the play itself:

*Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies such as King Lear, evil is massed in one character rather than dispersed across multiple ones;

*Iago not only has more lines than Othello, but also, because he appears before he comes onstage, has the opportunity to set expectations about their relationship;

*Iago’s soliloquys render the audience complicit in his plotting;

*Iago neither makes amends for nor adequately explains his actions—indeed, he offers so many, with so little real justification, that he appears to be grasping at straws to fill what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge memorably called the villain’s “motiveless malignity.”

The great essayist William Hazlitt, in his book Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, aptly summarizes Iago as possessing a "diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter."

(The image accompanying this post shows a particularly celebrated influential production of Othello, from 1930 at London’s Savoy Theatre, with Paul Robeson as the title character and Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona.)

Quote of the Day (Rebecca West, on Art as a Way to ‘Cultivate Annoyance With Inessentials’)

“For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.” —British novelist, biographer, journalist and critic Rebecca West (1892-1983), “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” The New Republic, November 7, 1915

(Photograph of Rebecca West by Madame Yevonde.)

Friday, November 29, 2024

Quote of the Day (Charles de Gaulle, on Courage in the Face of Obstacles)

“Let us be firm, pure and faithful; at the end of our sorrow, there is the greatest glory of the world, that of the men who did not give in.”—French soldier and statesman Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), Bastille Day Speech, July 14, 1943, Algiers

Thursday, November 28, 2024

TV Quote of the Day (‘Friends,’ on a Thanksgiving Necessity)

Joey Tribbiani [played by Matt LeBlanc]: “You can't have Thanksgiving without turkey. That's like Fourth of July without apple pie, or Friday with no two pizzas.”—Friends, Season 8, Episode 9, “The One with the Rumor,” teleplay by Shana Goldberg-Meehan, directed by Gary Halvorson

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Quote of the Day (Rose Horowitch, on College Students’ Fewer, and Slimmer, Books)

“Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”—American journalist Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic, December 2024

I well remember the shock all over an English teacher’s face in my parochial high school in the mid-1970s when one of her students confessed that he’d never read a book all the way through. When she was finally able to recover her composure, she demanded to know how he’d managed to get through 11 years of elementary and secondary school without accomplishing what she saw as a basic educational task.

My high school classmate would have plenty of company these days. Rose Horowitch’s report from the current groves of academe begins with a student telling a teacher in the literary humanities course at my college alma mater, Columbia University—an institution considerably more selective than my high school way back when—that she, too, had never read a book cover to cover.

Columbia is hardly the only college facing this dilemma. Most of the 33 academics contacted by Horowitch related similar experiences.

So, what gives? The article offers several reasons for this, including:

*Electronic devices that compete for attention with apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

*New educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core that led to short informational passages that mimic standardized tests, rather than longer texts.

*Shifts in values rather than skill sets—i.e., students can still read long books, but they don’t want to.

*Jobs and extracurricular activities that sap the time they need to read in depth.

*Identity politics that makes young readers less inclined to tackle the thinking of writers far away in place and time.

*Grade inflation that doesn’t penalize students for failing to keep up with the course load.

I read with particular interest an admission by Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American Studies professor at the school, that, in now teaching a seminar on short works in American literature rather than a full survey course, he had dispensed with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in favor of the author’s Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

For my American lit survey course back in the day, my class had to read these shorter works and the epic novel. Our professor urged us, if we had time, to get a jump on Melville’s stab at the Great American Novel: “It’s a long whaling expedition,” he joked.

I finished reading this article right after listening to a podcast on the English novelist Anthony Powell, who created a 12-novel sequence chronicling more than four decades in 20th-century life, A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell’s style is not daunting, and believe it or not, readers years ago managed to plow through most, if not all, of this work.

But it’s inconceivable to me that many readers today will make it through just one of his novels, let alone all of it.

It should also be said courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) have made the appeal of humanities course offering mass immersion in reading less lucrative.

That high school classmate of mine, for instance? He entered the armed forces, where he learned computer sciences—and ended up making considerably more money, after he left the military, than fellow high school graduates who took the time to make it through one long book after another.

(The image accompanying this post, if you haven't guessed it from the guy with the long hair, is a relic from a bygone era, in more ways than one. It shows a Shimer College student reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty under a tree on the school's original campus in Mount Carroll, IL. The photograph was published in the school's 1973-1974 catalog. I hope that this seminal work of political science, at any rate, continues to be read in its entirety, but I’m not betting on it.)

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Quote of the Day (Thomas Hardy, on a Woman’s Communication of Feelings)

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” — English poet-novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was published. It was a notable success that enabled him to marry Emma Gifford, and to give up architecture so he could concentrate on writing.

The novel also marked a turning point in his subject matter and setting, as he first used the name “Wessex” to represent an imaginary region of south and southwest England.

The heroine of the novel, Bathsheba Everdene, was played by Julie Christie (pictured here) in the 1967 film adaptation by John Schlesinger.

Monday, November 25, 2024

Quote of the Day (Tom Hanks, on Squandering Time)

“I’m 68, and I must say, I view time differently. I used to think a day was 36 hours long, and now I’m convinced it’s only 18. I never get done what I want. I guess I’m aware of being on the back nine — that time is a very, very finite thing. And to squander it, I think it’s a sin.”—Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks quoted by Melena Ryzik, “A New Age For Some Old Friends,” The New York Times, Nov. 3, 2024

The image accompanying this post, of Tom Hanks at the premiere of his film Elvis, was taken June 6, 2022, by Eva Rinaldi from Abbotsford, Australia.

Movie Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, As a Psychoanalyst Futilely Interacting With a Patient)

Psychoanalyst [played by Robert Benchley]: “Ah, you think both your father and mother were normal?”

Patient [played by John Butler]: “How should I know? They looked all right to me!”

Psychoanalyst: “Was either one of them ever psychoanalyzed?”

Patient: “No, of course not.”

Psychoanalyst: “Just how would you describe your phobia?”

Patient: “My what?”

Psychoanalyst: “Your phobia—this fear that you seem to have—uh, what it is you're afraid of.”

Patient: “Oh, I seem to be afraid of falling all the time, falling off things.”

Psychoanalyst: “You're afraid of falling off high places.”

Patient: “Huh? Uh, no—off of low places.”

Psychoanalyst: “Would you please explain that a little more fully?”

Patient: “Well, whenever I get on anything low like a milking stool or a suitcase—you know, [motioning toward his knee] about that high—I'm just afraid I’ll fall off, that's all.”

Psychoanalyst: “Well, it's a clear case of gluctophobia. Have you ever actually fallen off a milking stool or a suitcase?”

Patient: “Oh, sure—all the time.”

Psychoanalyst: “Very interesting, very interesting. When did you first notice this?”

Patient: “When I first fell off.”— Mental Poise (1938), film short written by American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945) and directed by Roy Rowland