Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Or maybe that should be “the perils of stupidity”?

From an article on the enduring popularity of serial dramas, published in Drexel University’s online culture magazine, The Smart Set:

A telenovela is all about a couple who wants to kiss and a scriptwriter who stands in their way for 150 episodes.

That’s also the fun of both romance novels and romantic comedies, isn’t it? Although obviously for novels it’s the writer who’s in the way.

The article’s author, Stefany Anne Golberg, also makes an observation about how emerging technologies are changing the way people consume serials:

With the advent of On-Demand viewing like Netflix and Hulu, one is able to watch serials from start to finish without missing a moment. What’s totally different than the video rentals of yore is that you can also watch many episodes in quick succession, just like reading the chapters of a book. In a way, you’re having your cake and eating it, too. Each episode is a complete story and also adds to a greater narrative.

Could this help make serials more popular — by enabling people to sit down with them, as compared to receiving them on someone else’s schedule, by installment?

Will it affect the serial’s form?

Having watched West Side Story a few weeks ago, I came down with a severe relapse of the Shakespeare bug and so last night sat down and re-read Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to see how closely the movie followed the play.

Answer: yep, very closely. I’m sure this has all been written out before, so I won’t turn this post into an OMG!!! sophomorish comparative lit paper (at least not on that topic, heh) but suffice to say that about the only major differences were in the whole fake-my-death-in-a-doomed-ploy-to-be-reunited-with-my-lover device.

If you’re a lit nerd like me, it is kind of fun to enjoy the two side by side — to see how famous dialogue like “a rose by any other name” is handled in the musical. Try it, and do enjoy ;-)

Another thing struck me as I mulled the play, however.

This has probably been remarked before too but I’m going to work it out for myself anyway.

I published a post some time ago about how, in rereading Anna Karenina as a nominally-mature adult, I found it to be a different book than I once thought. It isn’t a starry-eyed celebration of doomed love — it’s a condemnation of weak character. Anna’s a deeply flawed individual, not a one-dimensional victim of social repression.

I had a similar reaction last night to Romeo & Juliet. The first tip-off was something I’d completely forgotten: that when we first meet Romeo, he’s a complete mess over another woman, fair Rosaline.

Huh?

The man has, apparently, been pining away for some time because Rosie doesn’t love him back — spending every night wandering around outdoors, weeping & sighing, and then shutting himself inside all day with the curtains drawn to make himself “an artificial night.”

Then, after spending an entire day insisting that he’ll never get over her, he meets Juliet — and within about a nanosecond is as smitten for her as he ever was for Rose.

I found that odd. What sort of true-hearted hero is this, Bill? Whose heart can veer so suddenly and violently (and unselfconsciously!) from one love to another?

Of course Shakespeare renders the love between Romeo and Juliet a beautiful thing. Heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Clearly he means to hold it up as a romantic ideal of sorts.

But there’s another critical layer to the story that I noticed after a bit: the consequences of the lovers’ extraordinary passion are every bit as destructive as the passionate “choler” that erupts whenever lesser members of the Montague and Capulet families run into each other in the street.

It seems to me Shakespeare creates an obvious parallel between the two. Romeo and Juliet never try to temper their passion with anything like common sense, let alone reason. They marry the day after they meet, for crying out loud — and in Act III Scene 3, after Romeo is banished from Verona by the prince for murdering Tybalt, it’s only the Friar’s scolding that stops Romeo from killing himself:

Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art –
Thy tears are wom’nish, thy wild acts denote
Th’ unreasonable fury of a beat.
Unseemly woman in a seeming man,
And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both,
Thou hast amaz’d me.

Get ahold of yourself, you ninny. The Prince has spared your life. You can bide your time and be reunited with Juliet by and by. It ain’t the end of the world.

Romeo calms down, but of course it’s only a prelude to yet another slew of rash acts that culminates with the final bloodbath.

It’s a marvelous thing, then, the way Shakespeare handles the first murder in the play. Do you remember it? There’s a street brawl, and Tybalt stabs Mercutio. But what’s interesting is that Tybalt does so by using Romeo’s body to hide from Mercutio the fatal thrust of his rapier.

Romeo he cries aloud,
‘Hold friends! Friends, part!; and swifter than his tongue
His agile arm beats down their fatal points
And ‘twixt them rushes; underneath show arm
An envious thrust from Tybalt hit the life
Of stout Mercutio . . .

This layer isn’t brought out in the same way in West Side Story. WWS is played, first of all, as a straight “star-crossed lovers” story — Tony has matured, he’s not hanging out on the streets any more, he’s got a job — but then he’s drawn back into the gangs’ fighting by his love for Maria, becoming a victim of the violent subculture he’d tried to leave behind.

And, in keeping with that trajectory, the circumstances of the first murder are subtly different: Tony holds Riff back from stabbing Bernardo, and Bernardo takes advantage of that to stab Riff.

It’s a subtle difference but a telling one. Tony is playing pacifist, physically restraining Riff. Romeo is also trying to break up a fight, but he functions as an unwitting screen behind from which comes the deadly thrust.

“Why the devil came you between us?” Mercutio asks Romeo before he dies. “I was hurt under your arm.”

Romeo’s read of the situation was naive –just as was Tony’s — and on the level of pure plot, that’s why the story turns tragic.

But in the Shakespeare, Romeo’s arm cloaks Tybalt’s — they become in that moment the same arm. So it isn’t just the street brawlers who are in the words of the Prince (Reason and Justice) “enemies to peace” . . .

Incidentally, if your library lacks a collected works of Shakespeare, I highly recommend you look for the marvelous but sadly out-of-print edition, The Yale Shakespeare

The beauty of it: it’s broken into 40 slim volumes. Here’s my Romeo and Juliet.

It’s 4X7 inches — light enough to hold open with one hand.

I have no idea if it’s considered up-to-par today from a scholarly perspective (my edition was published in 1954; the original came out in 1917) but it’s annotated to help with the more archaic bits.

And from an ease-of-use standpoint, it’s pure genius. When publishers shove Shakespeare’s complete works into a single volume, you end up with a book that is hugely unwieldy (and with paper that is thin as tissue to try to keep the weight down). Who wants to lug a 20 pound doorstopper around when all you want to do is read R&J while you’re parked in the dentist’s waiting room?

The Yale Shakespeare is kind of pricey (link above to Amazon has a couple sellers offering the complete set for $75 as of right now) but it’s well worth it, in my opinion.

Would be nice to see a re-issue. Wonder if it could be done for under $75 . . .

Oh, man!

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my melancholy baby . . .

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Inside Higher Ed’s Scott McLemee has details and a description of the poem. It’s titled “War Thoughts at Home,” was inscribed on the flyleaf of a book in 1918, and was discovered last year by Robert Stilling, a graduate student at the University of Virginia.

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Right about the time I transferred to the state school where I’d earn my B.A. (SUNY Geneseo) the college mandated a two-semester Western Civ course of all of its students. (It realized it could no longer assume its freshmen had been exposed to any W.C. in high school.)

Ah, those were the days . . . I just paged through their online academic requirements handbook and they’ve since dropped that requirement. No surprise there. Too bad. I have to say I got a good education for my dollar at that school and owe it to the people there who dared, at the time, to stand for, er, “traditional” academic principles.

Which isn’t to say that I agreed with everything they did. One of the fellows we had to read for the course was Sigmund Freud (I think what we read was Civilization and its Discontents but I’m not sure & don’t feel like pawing through my books for my copy right now); my reaction to him was “what an idiot.”

I then wrote a paper arguing that he should be dumped from the course and replaced by Jung ;-)

My prof nodded and smiled and remained unconvinced, of course. I sensed even then, through my undergrad fervor, the reason for his reticence: Freud might be an idiot but he was an influential idiot.

Still, I think ultimately even that assumption may prove false.

I predict that Freud’s influence will lessen with time to the point that he’s but a footnote. Because he really was an idiot and eventually people will be able to admit it, and with the admission of his idiocy will come a waning of his influence.

What brings this all to mind is this review, by Jerry Coyne in The Telegraph, of a collection of “dissenting essays” by Frederick Crews titled Follies of the Wise:

Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered . . .

Realizing the scientific weaknesses of Freud, many diehards have taken the fall-back position that he was nevertheless a thinker of the first rank. Didn’t Freud give us the idea of the unconscious, they argue? Well, not really, for there was a whole history of pre-Freudian thought about people’s buried motives, including the writings of Shakespeare and Nietzsche. The “unconscious” was a commonplace of Romantic psychology and philosophy. And those who champion Freud as a philosopher must realize that his package also includes less savoury items like penis envy, the amorality of women, and our Lamarckian inheritance of “racial memory”.

Crew then goes on to argue — an argument his reviewer fully supports — that we need to close ranks against any intellectual who claims to have unearthed some great truth while simultaneously discarding empiricism. Writes Coyne, “A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.”

Call my mind a mind in conflict, then, because I have no problem whatsoever with a dual yet intermingled world, one known by the senses, the other known by the mind. And so I look askance at scientists who seek to devalue the latter as something benighted and primitive.

Not to mention the fact that scientists cannot justify such attitudes in empirical terms. Crew himself gives this away, writing “. . . most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.”

Know in their hearts? LOL

Crew then forges ahead to step in it again:

Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.

Excuse me? Scientists may not “blow each other up” literally, but they are all too happy to mine each other’s professional reputations and careers if they feel their assumptions are political power is being threatened. Even when the “controversy” is as mundane as why our muscles get sore when we exercise.

The fact is, we can’t separate our human-ness from our science, and our human-ness encompasses much that is too slippery for physical measurements. But it’s okay to live with a bit of ambiguity. We’ve only been tinkering seriously with empiricism for a couple hundred years. It’s too soon to assert that it will never be reconciled with the spiritual.

Or put another way: Freud was an idiot not just because he failed to ground his assertions empirically, but because he allowed his work to be perverted by his own baser impulses. That is, he failed by a spiritual measure as well as a scientific one. And there’s truth in noting that failure as well.

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You know that, nowadays, anything is art. So this story was probably inevitable:

Artist David Hensel submitted a sculpture to London’s Royal Academy of Arts for consideration for its upcoming “Exhibit 1201″ exhibit. But at some point in transit the sculpture, “a finely wrought laughing head in jesmonite,” got separated from its plinth.

You can probably guess what happened next: the Academy blithely selected the plinth for inclusion in the exhibit.

Total number of applicants: 9000.

One wonders what these artists will choose to submit next year. This one’s going to be hard to top.

Actually, the funniest thing about the story is that the Academy has refused to reconsider its selection:

[T]he Royal Academy denies having made an error, for the plinth and hastily carved wooden support were, according to an official statement, “thought to have merit.”

(Ah, the passive voice, last refuge for rogues, thieves, and reality-challenged connoisseurs of art.)

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Courtesy of Google . . .

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Here’s a link to the May 1 entry of an online, hyperlinked copy of Chambers’ Book of Days, published 1869.

The book’s subtitle: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, & History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character.

What more could you ask for, really?

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