To A Past Love

So I’ll admit this post is only tangentially relevant to reading, but it is relevant to being a bohemian in suburbia. Last night I was sitting around with two old friends and as part of a discussion of open-source programming, they tried to explain basic computer science to me. I had the slightly panicked feeling I’ve often had over the last four years, of being the stupidest one in the room, and considered, not for the first time, the fact that the things I chose to study exhaustively in college never seem to come up in basic conversation with my “home” friends. I seldom have a chance to impress people with my grasp of Alice Saltzman’s 14 scene study questions, or the vowel progression. (I did try to show my mom how I could speak with different resonances once, but I think she was unconvinced of its larger real-world applications.)

In bed later, I was reading The New Yorker, which I have loved and subscribed to for probably almost ten years, and which I generally aspire (with mixed success) to read cover-to-cover each week. I gave my mom the food issue to read recently and she said she liked it, but that there was a shortage of “warm and fuzzy articles”—that they were all sort of tough. This is fairly characteristic, and usually it doesn’t bother me (I feel I am exercising my brain), but last night I was reading an article about a religious organization which has declared a British political economist their Messiah figure, and finding it uncharacteristically one-sided and a little tedious, when I came across a poem. I often skip the poetry in The New Yorker—it’s usually over my head, and I’m too impatient to spend the time with it that is required—but this one caught my eye because it was titled “New York Poem.” (The author is Terrance Hayes.) It begins, “In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown…” and goes on to give disconnected images of people on the street, audio clips (“Someone says ‘abattoir’ is such a pretty word/ for ‘slaughterhouse.’ Someone says/ mermaids are just fish ladies”), and sweeping, near-cliché statements (“In New York/ not everyone is forgiven”). The poem addresses the city and the people of the city, captures the disjointed bustle, fragmented existence, ambivalence and juxtaposition of unmatching things (sci-fi, Miles Davis) that characterize a New Yorker’s daily life, and although most of its specific images meant nothing to me, the rhythm of it, the stew of all those things, good, bad, mundane, wild, shook me awake. I felt a little jolt of recognition and delight—my city, you’re still the same—that moved me much more than anything in the well-researched, excellently written article about the cult. And this was sort of a double validation—not just, oh New York! but oh poetry! Oh art! At this moment you’re trumping journalism and the “real world,” and my chosen path doesn’t seem so useless and irrelevant.

But of course, the dick of it is, I’m not in New York anymore, and I’ve had a lot of ambivalence over whether to go back. A friend of mine asked me recently what had made me fall out of love with New York, and the answer is complicated. In some ways it really has been like a breakup—when I decided to leave, I felt like I had to abandon something that had been a source of joy and inspiration to me for most of my life. I could no longer read E. B. White’s Here is New York for comfort, no longer feel pride and kinship watching Woody Allen movies. I had to be mentally disciplined enough to stop romanticizing it, the way I’ve tried to make myself stop romanticizing men I’ve broken up with, so I could get over it and start my new life elsewhere.  But it’s difficult, when the friends who do validate the artistic existence, who I can talk to about Shakespeare and Chekhov and Adler for hours, are all inextricably woven into the fabric of the city. One of my best friends called today to tell me about taking a cab the wrong direction to a breakfast date; a line in Hayes’ poem, “everyone/writing poems about and inside and outside/ the subways, dear people underground/ in New York,” made me miss my friends badly, thinking of those girls in boots with bags full of books and notebooks, scribbling and journaling and reading and trying to fit creativity into a hectic life where you travel two hundred blocks a day minimum just to go to work and back.

The answer to my friend’s question about falling out of love, I think, is simply that as a child, I fantasized that I would come to New York and become part of the skyscraper-successful, high-heeled elite; that I would be a glamorous, ambitious workaholic, caught up in the frantic pace, ravenously taking in theaters and museums, mastering the life of the very busy and talented. And when I began to feel like I would never be one of those people, and instead spend my life feeling inadequate as they rushed past me on the sidewalk and cursing the construction crews that woke me up at 5 a.m., it seemed easier to look for a different place to be a star than to tough it out in the Empire City. It really was like a breakup—I wept, I said nasty things, I fantasized about other cities, and in the end, on my last day, I took a walk by the East River and said a calmer, more loving goodbye, acknowledging that it wasn’t New York’s fault, we just weren’t as compatible as I originally thought.

But it’s been the case in my romantic life that sometimes, even when I think something’s over, it’s not; and that the time we spent apart was a necessary growth period enabling us to move on to the next stage of being together. And I haven’t given up hope that that may be the case with New York as well. So I’d like to leave you with the other poem in this issue of the New Yorker. It’s a sestina, one of the only poetic forms I’m actually familiar with, because I wrote a sestina about New York in eleventh grade.  Poets.org offers this definition: “The sestina [is] a thirty-nine line form…[that] follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi.” This sestina by Ciara Shuttleworth is made entirely out of end words.

“Sestina”

You

used

to

love

me

well.

Well,

you—

me—

used

love

to…

to…

well…

love.

You

used

me.

Me,

too,

used…

well…

you.

Love,

love

me.

You,

too

well

used,

used

love

well.

Me,

too.

You!

You used

to love

me well.

The Writing of Plays

One of the many unpaid but arts-related things I am doing as a bohemian in suburbia is reading script submissions for a theatre in DC. So far I’ve read only one script, but I read it a lot, because I wanted to be sure not to a) throw away the next Angels in America or b) waste my supervisor’s time because I was too polite to be honest. Already I feel like I’m getting a bit of an education in playwriting. Like many of us, I suspect, I have my own eternally gestating only semi-autobiographical play that I pretend I will someday write (which was developed mainly in college while not paying attention in class), and I felt a surprising sympathy with the author of this play (who I will call M), despite her semi-rude cover letter (addressed “Dear Whomever”) and the work’s obvious flaws.

For some reason I expected to be cold-blooded, cruelly analytical and highly critical, searching for evidence that I am a better writer than most of the world. (Please tell me that’s how most of us read unpublished writing.) But instead I found myself touched by M’s ambition. Her play is a family drama set on one day in the1940s, framed by the main character as an older woman looking back. In a monologue at the beginning of the show, the narrator has some lovely lines about memory, and the stage directions ask that the lighting mimic the effect of thoughts swirling around the mind. My embryo of a play uses a similar device—it’s in memory, framed by one character’s reflections—and I’m pretty sure I came up with that idea because I just didn’t know how to start. I didn’t know why it was important to tell the story, or even maybe what exactly the story was, so I decided to push that responsibility off onto this poor character. I’d find some reason the story was important to her, and that would carry the weight of justifying the existence of the play as a whole.

The problem in M’s script, however, was that her play ultimately didn’t have anything to do with memory, and the narrator character seemed to have acquired no wisdom in the fifty years that had elapsed since her experience as a young woman. She served mostly as a voiceover of her younger self’s thoughts, albeit with a slightly indulgent, removed tone. She made no mention of a secret family illness brought up in the past-day plotline, nor did she really reflect on the choices she made as a young woman. It seemed silly to have the framing device at all, since it didn’t add any depth to the story.

But the greater danger, I realized, is not that you’ll include an unnecessary style element, but that you’ll be tempted to express in the narration (or voiceover) whatever you’re trying to say—what you want to write a play about—without your play necessarily living up to those promises. M’s play never really got anywhere, even though its dialogue was often entertaining and I was sometimes swept up in the characters. Ultimately it didn’t explore a theme, or come down on either side of a question. What was expressed in the monologues was never really expressed in the dialogue and the action of the greater play. That is the harder trick, I think—to somehow make your characters tell the story, and not by saying, “This is the story.” In Translations, Hugh articulates some of the themes of the play, but his proclamations are in keeping with his pedantic nature, mocked by some of the other characters, and supported by the overall action.

Another difference between experienced playwrights and people like me and M is that the professionals seem to feel less necessity to dictate every moment. (I’m generalizing here, of course; some well-known playwrights are outrageously specific with their stage directions, like Eugene O’Neill, or Frederick Knott, who wrote Wait Until Dark and seemed to think actors had no ability to interpret any but the most straightforward lines). Again, I sympathized with M on this. I definitely understand the impulse of, “I see it in my head, I want to describe it so that the director makes it happen exactly like that.” Ultimately, though, if you’re writing something that doesn’t leave any room for interpretation by other artists (actors, directors, designers), you’re writing a novel. What amazes me about great playwrights is how they learn to tread that line. Write something incredibly specific and evocative, so it’s inspiring to other artists—they have some idea of what to do with it—and yet something that leaves room for them to do what they do. Or, to phrase it more concretely, it’s learning to tell stories mainly through dialogue, which seems like a skill set totally different from telling stories through pictures, as in a screenplay, or through inner thoughts/narration, as in a novel.

Obviously, there’s a craft involved with any work of art, and there’s plenty of writing, amateur and professional, that would be vastly improved with a more rigorous edit. Maybe one rule of thumb should be to tell your story as simply and concisely as possible, at least as an exercise, to make sure there really is a story underlying whatever fancy stylistic trappings you dress it up in. (Another favourite fantasy of mine is to allow key plot points to emerge through dance, my personal substitute for the movie montage; really just an excuse to be lazy about writing the scene itself.)

But ultimately, I think part of what makes a great work of art is ambition and a willingness to risk overreaching. Every time I read Angels in America, I am astonished at Tony Kushner’s creative audacity. Putting God on trial? Roy Cohn haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg? Talking Mormons in the diorama? Outrageous! But a masterpiece. Thank god he never said no to himself, I always think. On the other hand, he had something to say that was huge and powerful enough to justify his 6-hour two-part epic. And that, I suspect, is the other half of the battle. As one of my teachers might say, you have to develop a huge soul along with a huge craft.

The Gaelic People

So it makes sense that as a writer, one would have a healthy respect for language. (At least, you would hope so.) But in his 1980 play Translations, Brian Friel suggests that in for the Irish, language is not only important—it’s the core of their very identity. Translations is set in 1833 in the fictional town of Ballybeg in Donegal, Northern Ireland. A group of English soldiers have come to the town as part of an initiative to map all of Ireland, and part of this mapping includes “standardizing” (ie, Anglicizing) Irish place-names. The English characters speak only English, and several of the Irish characters speak only Gaelic, but this is shortly to be remedied by the foundation of a new, free public school system in Ireland, in which only English will be spoken. According to my director, the generation of young people represented in the play is the last to speak only Irish; our hypothetical children will go to the National School and speak English at school and Irish at home, and their children will speak almost exclusively English. Thus in one generation the Irish national language is almost swept away, relegated to something studied in school or spoken in a few remote hamlets.

The unease that one of the English soldiers, Yolland, feels about the erosion of the Irish language is dismissed by Owen, a native of Ballybeg who has lived in Dublin for six years and is now working with the English army.  (Sorry for that abominable use of the passive voice there, dear readers.) Owen’s older brother Manus, who has never left Ballybeg, finds it extremely disquieting that the mapmaking is being carried out by soldiers—“It’s a bloody military operation, Owen,” he says. The play is skillfully constructed so that this relatively gentle, apparently innocuous act of English imperialism—changing place-names into English—foreshadows the physical brutality at the end of the play as the English, seeking information on the now-missing Yolland, plan to kill all the livestock in Ballybeg (this is in a society, remember, where agriculture and livestock are so critical to survival that stealing someone’s horse or sheep is a capital offense). If they still have not found their missing officer, they will begin evicting and leveling every house in the parish, rendering all the inhabitants homeless. This violent plan of action comes as a shock to most of the characters onstage when it is announced, but one has the sense that if Yolland or Manus were present, they would consider it no more than a physical extension of the linguistic and cultural attack the British were already carrying out.

Friel’s argument, articulated most eloquently by Hugh, the bombastic but astute Irish schoolmaster, is that language defines identity. This is a question that could be taken back to the most abstract philosophical grounds—does language define existence and thought? Is to think of something to name it?—and a conversation between Owen and Yolland compares their place-naming to God in the garden of Eden, naming things and bringing them into existence. But Hugh also argues that language, and the oral and written cultural heritage that accompanies it, is particularly important in Ireland. He tells Yolland, “Certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives…It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes, our only method of replying to…inevitabilities.” He says dismissively of English that it’s a language “particularly suited” to commerce, as opposed to Gaelic’s suitability to romance, mythology, fantasy and hope. In a land of extremely impoverished, poorly educated and politically oppressed people, the spiritual and intellectual treasures of their accumulated literature and history is all the Irish have in the way of pride in themselves and gifts to hand down to their children. And in this way, we see, the leveling of homes and killing of livestock is only a temporary, limited, if devastating attack on a few individuals; the leveling of the Irish language is an attack on an entire people.

McDonagh, You Clown, You

Well, ladies and gentlemen, today we are starting our Irish unit, which will probably go on for the next several months. Joyously, just as I was beginning to fall into the depths of despair, I have finally been cast in something, and that something is Brian Friel’s Translations. Whee! In gratitude, and out of my own natural nerdiness and curiosity about my heritage, I have decided to do some investigation of the literature and history of the Emerald Isle. And this began with the reading of three plays by a playwright I ought to have already known (post B.F.A.) but had never read or seen anything by, the unmatchable Martin McDonagh.

I knew he had a reputation for being both brutal and dark, and as I tend to favor the Sarah Ruhl school of lyrical, optimistic drama, I approached the Galway trilogy (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West) with some trepidation. The back cover of the book describes the town of Leenane, where all three plays are set, as “so blighted by rancor, ignorance and spite that, as the local priest complains, God himself seems to have no jurisdiction there.” The three plays each feature four characters, none of whom appear in more than one play but several of whom are mentioned in plays in which they do not appear, which not only links the three together but contributes to the sense of a tiny town where everyone knows everything about everyone, and most of them hold grudges for decades. To my surprise, I found all three plays compelling, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking, and although they each stand alone, the experience of reading all three one after the other contributed greatly to my enjoyment and my understanding of Leenane.

 McDonagh’s characters do terrible things to their family members, but somehow (especially in Lonesome West, which I think was my favorite) he makes their quarrels blackly funny; I never feel with him, as I do with some authors, that he’s indifferent to the loss of his characters’ lives or even to the gloom of lives warped by selfishness and loneliness. Have you ever felt that? That a writer (or movie director) is killing someone off or making someone miserable for effect or for a moral, without really weighing the cost of a human life, and you think, hey! You can’t do that! I’m not buying that! It needs to mean more! McDonagh, on the other hand, without taking his characters’ pain lightly, allows them to express it in hilariously human, petty ways (until they give in and murder each other); the complacency and indifference with which most of the town regards their crimes is absurd, almost farcical, and McDonagh allows himself some great self-referential moments to the insanity of it all.  It was fun, in The Lonesome West, to finally meet the ineffective local priest, Father Welsh, whose name no one can quite remember and whose attempt to maintain some optimism about the souls of his parish is gradually worn down by alcohol and the unnatural deaths of several parishioners. Father Welsh is a wonderful character because he, almost alone of anyone, is aware of the awfulness of life in this town, the horrors of people murdering their mothers and fathers and wives, and his flabbergasted protestations that this is altogether unacceptable are both comical and the voice of reason in a mad world.

Maybe McDonagh is simply following the old secret of comedy (and tragedy)—he takes an ordinary human condition (being unable to stand your neighbors and relatives) and pushes it to the furthest possible extreme. Because you recognize and believe the scenes of the mother nagging her daughter about buying the wrong cookies and the brothers fighting about toys they stole from one another as children, it’s an easier leap than one might expect to believing they might blackmail one another for their inheritance money or bash one another’s head in with a fire poker. Without judging his characters or condescending to them, McDonagh never descends to heir level of their ignorance and cynicism. It takes a deft hand for a playwright to express more with his work than what his characters say, without making them unlikable martinets, and McDonagh does it skillfully and entertainingly.

As with the Shakespeare plays I’ve already written about, there are so many moments and lines I’d like to copy out for you, things that made me laugh or stuck in my head or haunted me a little. But one thing I am slowly learning (after years of compulsive quote-copying into my notebook) is that at a certain point, what you’re really trying to do is copy the whole book, and you can’t do that. At that point, just go back and read it again. So, dear readers, I would like to urge you to go out and read these plays yourself, if you haven’t already. I can promise you’ll be entertained—I have a weak stomach for violence and darkness, so if I found McDonagh not only palatable but hilarious, chances are so will you. 

P.S. More on Translations soon!

Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Susan Vreeland’s occasionally exquisite novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue traces the heritage of a painting believed to be by Vermeer in eight discrete, reverse-chronological chapters. Beginning with Cornelius, a late-twentieth-century professor at an American boys’ school, and moving backwards to the painting’s subject in seventeenth-century Holland, the book uses the painting to investigate the role of art and beauty in a variety of societies; the ability of a physical object to outlive its creator by centuries; and the question of whether the inherent aesthetic and emotional value of a painting can be separated from its material and historical value as the work (or not) of a master.

The first chapter is narrated by Richard, Cornelius’s art teacher colleague. Cornelius invites Richard to his apartment to show him the painting, insisting it is a Vermeer but refusing to have it appraised or show it to anyone else. It emerges that Cornelius’s Nazi father looted it from a Dutch Jewish family he deported to a concentration camp during WWII.  The guilt of keeping his father’s secret has warped Cornelius’s adult life, preventing him from sharing the painting with anyone (until now) and even from making any close friends. Cornelius even considers burning the painting, as an act either of atonement or erasure of the past. On the one hand, the thought of destroying an undiscovered, unrecorded Vermeer is legitimately spine-chilling. On the other, it seems almost too easy and contrived to pit the epitome of evil, the Nazis, against the incarnation of beauty, Vermeer.

The narrative then moves backwards in time to the Jewish family in Amsterdam who owned the painting before Cornelius’s father, and continues to trace its heritage as it moves around the Netherlands. There are some unexpectedly lovely descriptions of the Dutch countryside, but some of the little girls and young wives aching for beauty in a bleak existence failed to assert themselves as distinct characters. I liked a cynical, materialistic French diplomat’s wife who committed adultery under the eyes of the painting and then sold it to buy passage back to Paris, giving the seller the wrong artist’s name to raise its price; her regret over rendering the painting “illegitimate” by distancing it from its true parent is an interesting and telling contrast to her blithe indifference to her and her husband’s mutual infidelities. She reflects, “How love builds itself unconsciously out of the momentous ordinary,” a phrase that echoes a recurring theme of the importance of contemplation and the appreciation of the small details before you. This entreaty, along with the necessity of beauty and art even in a life struggling for survival, supports a value system I agree with and enjoy reading about, and initially I loved the way the Vermeer was a stand-in for all art. For some reason, perhaps unfairly, my appreciation was slightly diminished by learning that the author is planning several other books about artists (she teaches art history as well as writing). I’m not sure if it led me to question her true love for Vermeer (I was similarly discomfited to know she’d never seen a Vermeer face to face, though she’d read numerous books and gallery catalogues on his work), or to wonder if rather than seeing the painting as a metaphor for all art, I should have taken a narrower view on Vermeer’s specific talents and contributions. Fundamentally, of course, this speculation is irrelevant to the novel’s merits, but somehow it dampened my enthusiasm just the same.

Several of the chapters were initially written as stand-alone stories and published separately, and it wasn’t until Vreeland filled in the gaps in the narrative that she found herself with a novel on her hands. Although later chapters explicitly answer plot questions raised in earlier chapters, I felt the book failed to build on itself in a more fundamental way, and that each chapter existed separately. I also felt that several of the characters had similar voices and experiences with the painting, and wish she had explored a broader range of reactions and characters. The French woman was merrily amoral, but still able to, at the last, appreciate the innocence and purity of the painting; several of the other stories could have benefited from that level of complexity and ambiguity. 

Imogen: If Juliet Was Luckier, or Desdemona Was Braver, or Olivia Was Ruder

 And now it is time for little-known Shakespeare plays #2: Cymbeline. In some ways this was even more exciting to read because I had no idea of the plot. I didn’t even know whether it would end happily or not, with the heroine alive or not—it’s usually classified as a “romance” (with Winter’s Tale and Pericles and Tempest) but the official title is “The Tragedy of Cymbeline.” Cymbeline is the king of Britain between 33 B.C. and 2 A.D. (according to Holinshed, according to the notes in the back of the Yale edition), a time equivalent with Caesar Augustus. The plot is complicated but mostly follows Cymbeline’s spirited daughter Imogen, who marries a poor but noble orphan her father brought up at court. This is of course against the wishes of her father and step-mother, who want Imogen to marry the Queen’s son from her first marriage, Cloten, so he will inherit the kingdom. Imogen’s husband is banished, a wicked Italian tries to wreck their marriage, the Queen schemes against everyone’s life, and then in the mountains of Wales we discover the King’s two long-lost sons. Meanwhile, Caesar Augustus is threatening war on Britain because the wicked Queen has convinced Cymbeline not to pay tribute, and it all ends in a fight on the battlefield, Imogen of course disguised as a boy, the wicked people conveniently dying, and all the nobles being reunited and the usual “Let us walk offstage and explain everything that just happened to each other, because I am amazéd,” line.

Like the plot, the language is surprisingly difficult—I tend to have a fair amount of faith in my ability to decipher Shakespeare, but this took a lot of re-reading and flipping to the notes in the back of the book. (And, as usual, half the time the notes explain something completely obvious, like what “hence” means, and blithely ignore what’s utterly incomprehensible, like “the bores of hearing.”) By reading slowly, however, I discovered an exciting story peopled by complicated, believable characters. The King, Cymbeline, is weak, foolish, easily manipulated by his wife, and given to brutality; at the end, when she confesses to all her wickedness, including having never loved him, on her deathbed, he is flabbergasted and dodges blame by insisting she was a very convincing liar. When the English win the battle with the Romans, he is ready to put all the captured Romans to death, until Imogen’s husband inspires him by showing mercy to the Italian villain who tried to seduce Imogen. Then Cymbeline promptly changes his mind and not only spares the Romans, but decides to pay tribute after all and make up with Caesar Augustus. His lack of sensitivity in contrast to Imogen is highlighted when he is reunited with his two long lost sons, whom Imogen has already met and hung out with in a cave. He says, “O Imogen!/ Thou hast lost by this a kingdom,” and she replies, “No my lord;/ I have got two worlds by ‘t.”

Which brings me to my main point: Imogen is awesome. A lot of the usual misfortunes of Shakespeare’s heroines are flung upon her: her husband, Posthumus, is banished, and later suspects her of infidelity and tries to kill her; she is pursued by not one but two unwanted suitors, her idiotic but surprisingly cruel step-brother Cloten, and the conniving Italian, Iachimo; she has to dress up like a boy and run away from home, where she hangs out with rough mountain men (not knowing they’re her brothers); and she accidentally takes one of those handy sleeping potions that makes you seem like you’re dead.  But she is courageous, ingenious, and most of all, fiery. When Iachimo tells her Posthumus is unfaithful, and then suggests she revenge herself by sleeping with him, she immediately sees through him, calls for her servant, and coldly informs him that he’s an asshole (although to be fair, she is taken in by his subsequent explanation that he was just testing her for Posthumus’s sake). When Cloten won’t leave her alone, she bluntly tells him, “sorry you’re making me say this, but I hate you.” When her loyal, long-suffering servant, Pisanio, reveals that Posthumus has instructed him to kill her because she is unfaithful, she bristles, “What is it to be false?/ To lie in watch there and to think on him?/ To weep ‘twixt clock and clock? If sleep charge nature,/ to break it with a fearful dream of him,/ and cry myself awake? That’s false to ‘s bed, is it?”

But she’s also touchingly real, especially in her love for and uncertainty over Posthumus. When she gets a letter from him, before she reads it she hopes that it will contain good news, that he is well and happy, but not happy that they’re apart; when Pisanio reveals Posthumus’s murderous change of heart towards her, she assumes he’s found someone else, “some Roman courtesan,” and that she is therefore obsolete. She has her blind spots, certainly, but she keeps her integrity and spirit high throughout, and is much less narrow-minded than her father.

Iachimo is pretty audacious and creepy (when Posthumus brags about Imogen’s fidelity, Iachimo bets him half his estate he can bed her); and Cloten, the other villain, is a genuinely frightening creation. He’s a vain, self-flattering imbecile (one of the courtiers marvels, in a brief soliloquy, how an evil genius such as the Queen could possibly have produced such a blockhead), but after Imogen tells him that should every hair on his head become another Cloten, the whole pack of them would be less dear to her than Posthumus’ meanest garment, Cloten—after sputtering “his meanest garment!” for the remainder of the scene—concocts a diabolical plan. When Imogen runs away to find Posthumus, Cloten acquires an old suit of Posthumus’s and sets off after her, planning to find them, kill Posthumus in front of her, then rape her wearing her dead husband’s clothes before kicking her back to her father (who he allows may be a trifle peeved at his rough usage) to marry him. It’s so brutal, but also so clearly motivated by the blow to his vanity from her remark. It’s a sinister portrait of what stupid, violent people are capable of.

There is so much more I could say about this play, from the unflinchingly noble and courteous Roman ambassador charged with the thankless task of declaring war on Cymbeline when he fails to pay tribute, to Cloten’s hilarious, unwittingly sexual lines. But this post is already too long, and before I close I want to say something about a tangential personal connection to this play. My very first drama teacher, Jillian Raye, at whose knee I first began my Shakespearean journeys, loved this play. She named her daughter Imogen (which, knowing Jill and now having read Cymbeline, makes perfect sense); and she directed a production of it a few years ago, which unfortunately I did not see. A year later, she passed away, and at her memorial service they sang a mourning song from her production. I had forgotten, and it was a sweet, ghostly surprise to come across the words in the text:

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

Thou thy wordly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,

Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;

Fear not slander, censure rash;

Thou hast finish'd joy and moan:

All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.”

If Iago Were a Lover

Sometimes, when you’ve spent as much time reading, watching and studying Shakespeare as most drama students have, even the works of genius get a little boring. I sometimes think I’d like to go ten years without seeing Midsummer, Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth. So when I recently read two Shakespeare plays I’d never read before, it was a surprisingly great pleasure. I sort of rediscovered his great talents anew—how funny his clowns are; how clear and human his characters are, as they tell us exactly what they are feeling; how noble his heroes, how sinister his villains.

And sometimes, how ambiguous a line between hero and villain they tread. Two Gentlemen of Verona is, ostensibly, a comedy, and the afterword of one edition remarks that Shakespeare improved upon virtually every feature of Two Gents in later comedies. That is somewhat true—and it’s also true that it seems, with hindsight, like a patchwork of plot elements from Twelfth Night, Midsummer and As You Like It, plus the obligatory tyrannical father banishing people and the narcissistic, idiotic rival prancing around for the hero to mock. It begins with two best friends, Proteus and Valentine. Valentine is about to go abroad to Milan, Proteus is staying behind to woo his beloved, Julia. Valentine, who’s never been in love, gently mocks Proteus for being whipped, and they part with great affection, promising to write. Immediately, inevitably, Valentine arrives at the court of the Duke of Milan and falls in love with the Duke’s daughter, Silvia. Proteus lands at the court not long after, when his father decides he needs more education and life experience and Proteus reluctantly tears himself away from his beloved Julia. Valentine greets him rapturously and confesses to now being wildly in love and renouncing all he ever said against it.

But this is where it begins to get interesting. Proteus takes a fancy to Silvia, which he admits is bizarre and a betrayal both of Julia and Valentine, but nonchalantly admits to the audience that if he can’t rid himself of the infatuation, he’s going to pursue her with all the cunning he possesses. It’s as if Iago has suddenly stepped into the lover’s role. He contrives to get Valentine banished from court, ingratiates himself with the Duke, and attempts to woo Silvia, who tells him to bugger off and stop betraying Valentine and Julia because she’s never going to fall for him. Julia, naturally, comes to court disguised as a pageboy and goes into Proteus’s service. On the surface, it’s a plot that’s not that different from Midsummer or Twelfth Night, except that Orsino hadn’t promised himself to Viola and wasn’t best friends with Sebastian when he wooed Olivia, and Demetrius is just sort of hard-headed and jockily asinine, not coolly plotting Lysander’s downfall while pretending to be his best friend. They all end up in the forest, briefly pursued by some outlaws, and then Proteus rescues Silvia and when she still won’t give herself up to him, threatens to rape her.

This is where, by modern standards at least, it all falls apart. Till now I was fascinated by Proteus, as much as I didn’t like him; he’s a complex, very cunning character, and Valentine’s loyalty and nobility (he agrees to lead the band of outlaws as long as they don’t rob helpless women or poor people) seem more admirable given this contrast.  As usual, the women retain their moral centers; Silvia not only refuses Proteus’s advances, but constantly berates him with his obligations to Julia, and Julia, witnessing this, can’t bring herself to hate or wish harm to Silvia, despite Silvia’s being the unwilling object of Proteus’s love. A complicated, interesting situation is set up, and you can sympathize with and admire three of the main characters, and at the very least be impressed with Proteus’s conniving. It’s the kind of ambiguity you might expect in a much more modern play.

But after Valentine stops Proteus just as he is about to force himself on Silvia, and expresses amazement and sorrow at Proteus’s betrayal, Proteus is suddenly overcome with regret and guilt. Valentine, to show he accepts his apology, offers to turn over Silvia to Proteus without a word to or from her. At this point, Julia (in disguise) swoons, and her identity is discovered. She takes Proteus back (albeit after a very minor tongue-lashing), and everyone is back where they belong in time for the Duke to arrive and conveniently change his mind about Valentine, who remains cheerful and noble to the end. Although I knew it was inevitable, I was appalled that Julia and Valentine forgave Proteus with so little fanfare; Silvia has no lines after crying out “O Heaven!” as Proteus is about to rape her, and I couldn’t help envisioning her standing in the back, keeping her mouth shut but looking sick to her stomach at the prospect of having to have Proteus over for dinner. I also wished the women hadn’t had so little to say at the end; this too is not unusual for a Shakespearean ending (with exceptions, of course, as Rosalind’s epilogue) but they’ve been so plucky and stuck to their principles so far, and I just found it hard to watch them muzzled as everything was sorted out neatly by the boys. It makes me wonder how bound Shakespeare was by the conventions of his time; the need to have a happy ending, lovers reunited, someone who started as good restored to goodness by the charity of his friends. I suppose later, in the tragedies, we get ambiguous characters like Macbeth and Brutus and Gertrude, who are neither totally evil nor totally good. And would it have been a satisfying ending for Julia and Valentine to have said, fuck you Proteus, and the Duke to have thrown him in prison? Probably not. But at the very least, he could have been ordered to a year of penance, or something, or Silvia could have said, don’t you ever talk to me that way again, or I will banish your ass.

But—as I said, up until the very last scene, I was wondering why people don’t do this play all the time. The saucy servants are hilarious, more comprehensibly on the page than some of Shakespeare’s saucy servants. And there is some lovely poetry, which I will leave you with here:

“What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?

What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?

Unless it be to think that she is by

And feed upon the shadow of perfection.

Except I be by Silvia in the night,

There is no music in the nightingale;

Unless I look on Silvia in the day,

There is no day for me to look upon.

She is my essence; and I leave to be,

If I be not by her fair influence

Foster’d, illumin’d, cherish’d, kept alive.”

The 19th Wife

Dear Readers,

Okay so far I am an utter failure at blogging. It has been over two weeks since my last post (which was only my second). All I can say is, I have been reading! And I have much to report. But in the interests of posting shorter, more frequent entries, I will confine this one to the book I read immediately following Beauty Myth, to wit, The Nineteenth Wife by David Ebershoff. This was a good example of one of those books that sweeps you up in the first two-thirds—it’s almost impossible to put down—and then suddenly ceases to be compelling and begins to drag, so that you become impatient to get to the end, not only because you want to know what happens, but because you are tired of reading the book. I try to finish every book I start (the lone act of discipline in a sloppy life) but I skipped a chapter of this one, without feeling I was missing anything all, and by the time I got to the end, my opinion of the craft and writing had dropped precipitously.

The 19^th Wife is partly based on the true story of Ann Eliza Young, who was the 19^th (approx.) wife of Brigham Young, the second President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). Ann Eliza divorced Brigham and fled Salt Lake City and the Mormon community in 1873 and traveled east across the United States speaking out against polygamy. She petitioned Congress, eventually succeeding in putting sufficient political pressure on the Latter-Day Saints that they renounced polygamy as a practice in 1890. However, a small splinter group broke away and formed the Firsts, continuing to practice plural marriage in a remote desert community in Utah. The novel alternates between Ann Eliza’s memoir, giving the history of the LDS Church and her own life story, and the present-day narrative of Jordan Scott, a young man who grew up in the Firsts and was kicked out onto the streets at the age of 14, because the Prophet told his parents it was God’s will. When his mother (who is also a 19^th wife) is arrested on suspicion of murdering his father, Jordan returns to the Firsts to investigate the murder and see if he can help the mother who abandoned him.

The Ann Eliza segments are based on her real-life memoir, also called the 19^th Wife, although the author explains (somewhat unclearly) in an Afterword that he has taken liberties and made additions and subtractions. These sections can still be extremely long and tedious, especially since there is a fast-paced murder mystery going on in the other plot line; Ann Eliza’s story covers about 40 years, while Jordan’s takes place in a week. Jordan is reasonably likeable and his sections tend to chug along, but the solution to the murder mystery was annoyingly inane, and the dangers of returning to the Firsts’ community were handled a little sloppily; I never felt all that nervous for him, and when he did meet with some degree of foul play, it seemed contrived and silly. I did like the fact that Jordan was casually gay; that the author wrote a gay protagonist without making it a plot point or a source of angst. He met a guy and had a little romance on the side of his detective work, and there was nothing pointed or heavy-handed about the fact that it was a gay romance.

What was most striking to me about plural marriage, and I’m not sure whether this says more about me or about the writing, was the heartbreak and humiliation endured by women (such as Ann Eliza’s mother) who married men they really loved and then were forced to share them. The objectification, economic hardship and degrading inequality of polygamy did not seem as profoundly awful as being told that a younger woman was being brought in to share your household and your husband’s bed. In a particularly sadistic twist, the first wife has to give her permission before her husband can take another wife, so Ann Eliza’s mother endured an agonizing ritual every time her husband (whom she married before the edict of plural marriage was issued, and who initially opposed it fiercely) took a fancy to another young woman. It destroyed their marriage to all intents and purposes—she moved out and ceased to see her husband after the third wife—and had a corrupting, morally weakening effect on Ann Eliza’s father, who began the book as a very decent man and a somewhat skeptical Mormon. Jordan’s mother, too, truly loved her husband and mourned when told she was being “phased out,” or taken off the sex schedule, to make room for his latest wife (also his step daughter). Of course, a system that teaches women to think of being a plural wife as an honor worth keeping is deeply sick. Ebershoff emphasizes the brainwashing arguments made to these women that plural marriage is absolutely central to salvation, which sort of explains why many of them go along with it so willingly. But I thought the novel was at its most powerful, and precise, in its close depiction of the way polygamy caused the once loving, once mutual marriage of Ann Eliza’s parents to crumble into disrespect and estrangement. 

Fat Days are the Fault of the Patriarchy!

Ladies, good news! Our vain, superficial obsessions with our hair, clothes, shoes, skin and weight, are not our fault. They're not even Sarah Jessica Parker's fault.

They are the fault of a CONSPIRACY by the patriarchy to preserve the status quo. By artificially creating a nearly unattainable beauty ideal and then putting enormous social, cultural and professional pressure on women to live up to it, the corporate power structure is sucking up women's excess time, energy, confidence and money in pursuit of beauty, in order to prevent them from organizing to demand social change and economic equality. Or at least, this is the thesis advanced by Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. This book, first published in 1991, describes the "Beauty Backlash" that developed in the 1970s and 80s to replace the cult of domesticity, as women left the isolation of the home and the imprisonment of the feminist mystique in pursuit of higher education, the workplace, and political and economic equality. The goals of the Beauty Backlash are numerous: to keep our consumer economy chugging along through the sale of expensive beauty products, diet products and cosmetic surgery; to occupy what's left of women's time and energy after their day job and work of running a household are done, by demanding rituals of exercise, skin care, and other beauty-related pursuits, so they can't use that time to agitate for, say, state-sponsored childcare; and, especially sinisterly, to force women to exist in a constant state of insecurity and uncertainty about their value, which not only holds individual women back by undermining their confidence but prevents women from banding together by cultivating an atmosphere of beauty-based rivalry and mistrust.


The Beauty Myth is not a terribly well-written book. It's highly academic and statistic-stuffed in places, and then occasionally veers off into strange, poetic passages that draw on Wolf's personal experiences. It's often alarmist and dramatic, drawing comparisons between the oppression of women by the Beauty Myth and slavery, the Holocaust, and genital mutilation of young girls in Africa. Though she pays ostensible homage to the shackles women have shaken off in escaping the centuries of political and economic repression that preceded the modern day, she suggests that our gains are severely compromised, if not entirely moot, in the face of the new oppression that has risen to replace the old. She tries to argue that beauty oppression has arisen as a direct result of women's progress, but it's still hard to imagine that the older generations of feminists Wolf so clearly admires--the suffragists, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer--would not find it, at the very least, silly and even a little churlish to compare the fact that women are besieged with ads for lipstick and liposuction to being unable to divorce, own property or vote.

However, although I think Wolf exaggerates both the extent of the conscious patriarchal political conspiracy and the devastating reach of its influence, many of her observations about the effects the Beauty Myth have on the female psyche are thought-provoking, and in some cases resonated powerfully with my experiences and those of other women I've known. The two aspects of beauty she focuses on most are weight and aging, what she calls the cult of the fear of aging and the cult of the fear of fat.

She talks about the dangers of eating disorders and cosmetic surgery in the pursuit of a super-skinny female ideal and the way models and actresses ("the beauty elite corps") have grown thinner and thinner, promoting an ever-more unattainable ideal. In many ways, twenty years after she's writing, we as a culture are aware of the unrealistic ideals held up to us, though it's usually blamed on Hollywood and the fashion industry, not the diet/exercise/cosmetic surgery industries which actually stand to profit hugely from a widespread paranoia about fat. We know about anorexia and bulimia and the fact that studies show that men choose an ideal body type a full size bigger than women do, slash have no idea if you've gained or lost five pounds. We also know about the obesity epidemic and the mortal physical and social dangers of being overweight--we are simultaneously urged to love our own best body and learn to embrace our curves (though never our lack of curves), and warned that becoming obese is easy, dangerous and basically unpatriotic.

Wolf, writing twenty years ago, brushes off any real medical danger from being overweight in a way I think is irresponsibly dismissive and inaccurate; she suggests that magazines that run articles on the danger of obesity do so to support their advertisers who work for the diet industries. It's almost certainly true that women's magazines, in particular, are highly constrained in their editorial content by their advertisers, and that's why they are so vapid and repetitive; still, I don't think it's fair to say that there's no truth to arguments about the dangers of obesity.

Where I do think she's spot on is the sense of obligation the Beauty Myth has succeeded in creating for, at the very least, young women (and I think many older and wiser women as well). In a chapter on religion, she discusses how the beauty interests have appropriated a language of morality--good/bad, guilt, punishment, redemption--to discuss the need to be thin and attractive. She suggests that dieting culture has become so  ingrained and pervasive that eating is now seen as a moral and spiritual weakness, the body conquering the mind, the way masturbation was once seen: "Where 'immature' women in the 1950s wanted clitoral orgasms, while 'mature' ones passively yielded, today oral desire is interpreted in a similar sexual code. It is considered immature for women to eat heartily, since they're told they risk their sexuality; they are seen as mature if they starve, promise to win sexuality that way" (200).

This is a pretty bald statement, and one that maybe those of us who consider ourselves relatively well-adjusted would dismiss; again, we all know about eating disorders. But I do think there's a culture of admiration for the woman who exercises great self-control in her eating habits and works out regularly, over and above the actual physical result of her labors; and a sense of contempt, if tempered by relief or envy, toward women who eat whatever they want, even if they stay thin anyway. More tellingly, these values--that women who work hard to maintain "healthy" habits are responsible and good, and those who don't are ignorant and irresponsible--are so deeply ingrained that it's hard for me to even see them as dysfunctional. After my first year of college, where I was confronted for the first time by dozens of girls my age who were eating salad and watching their weight, I went to work at a restaurant. A woman about my age took us through a few days of menu training, describing the dishes, including a french toast flambe, in which french toast was dipped in egg, sauteed, flambed in sugar and brandy, and then topped with syrup, english cream and sugary fruit; the girl describing it said, "It's basically like the best thing ever." I remember being shocked that she would admit, to a room full of people she didn't know, that she ate things like that. I've never been anorexic or even a particularly committed dieter; I've never given up junk food successfully for any period of time; still, it was inconceivable to me that one would admit to eating french toast flambe. My technique, and that of other girls I knew, was to pretend such caloric monstrosities simply didn't exist, and I was so firmly steeped in this way of thinking that it was a considerable shock to me to realize that other people still recognized that they did.

The moral guilt, and the depth of self loathing, that can attend eating too much or failing to exercise is profound. What resonated with me most was the identification of a female obligation to society to be attractive--not so much that in order to get a job, or attract a man, it is necessary to be beautiful; but that it is somehow your civic duty to wear makeup to the grocery store and blow dry your hair. I know this is silly. I know it's silly to expect it of myself and even worse to expect it of other women--the choices they make about their bodies are theirs alone, and their eating and exercise habits, unless they are literally physically endangering a woman I care about, are not mine to applaud or condemn. But nonetheless, the anti-fat value system is there, and so deeply held that even the idea of questioning it is nerve racking. Even as I read and was filled with righteous feminist anger at the machinations of the corporate interests, another part of me was filled with panic at the idea of abandoning the beauty ideals; being led away from the path of glamour, rewarding self-discipline, and aesthetic fulfillment promised by the perpetrators of the Beauty Myth. I caught myself hoping, as I read, to find  beauty secrets tucked in amongst the feminism, that maybe in a section labeled "what not to do," I would find a new weight-loss tip or a checklist of beauty ideals I could measure myself against. And this upsetting realization lent credence to more of what Wolf had to say that I might normally have given; seeing that the Beauty Myth is, in fact, pervasive enough that even the idea of challenging it provokes distinct anxiety.

A time wrinkle as well as a space wrinkle

Dear Reader,
    After eighteen years of  reading, journaling about what I'm reading, and compulsively nattering about what I'm reading to any unfortunate family and friends within earshot, I have at last decided to embrace the zeitgeist and put my uniquely witty and profound insights about books online. The hope for this is twofold. One, I will overcome my crippling fear of computers and the Interweb and prove I really can participate in the world of being twenty something and technologically literate, even if I do listen to more Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland than indie rock. Two, I will work out my thoughts and impressions about what I am reading in a reasonably critical and articulate manner, and so prevent my brain from completely atrophying in the sudden absence of formal education or artistic employment.
   And thus, with my mission stated, I begin!  In September, I moved from New York City back into my mother's house in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. After four years of living in New York, taking acting classes up to 24 hours a week, surrounding myself with fellow artists and making ends meet in between by waiting tables, I am now in my childhood home, spending time with an assortment of old friends, and occupying myself primarily by making dinner, washing dishes, and serving as part-time nanny for my nine-year-old sister. It's a peculiar combination of being a high school student and a housewife--chatting with the other mothers at the bus stop at 4 p.m., then coming home at 2 a.m. and making my tipsy way upstairs as quietly as possible without waking up my sleeping mother.
  Given my chronologically ambiguous situation, it seems only appropriate to begin with a childhood classic I just reread, Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. I'm hoping to audition for Meg Murray in Round House Theater's upcoming adaptation of it, and I already sent them a letter rambling about how relatable yet admirable Meg is, with her combination of short temper, insecurity, loyalty and courage. What was more striking to me than Meg's likeability, however, was a scene at the end of Chapter Five ("The Tesseract") when The Happy Medium shows Meg, Calvin and Charles Wallace an image of Earth shadowed by the Black Thing, a sort of general manifestation of evil and the powers of darkness. The children are shocked and horrified, but Mrs. Which says "'Wee wwill cconnnttinnue tto ffightt!'" and Mrs. Whatsit, describing the "grand and exciting battle...being fought all through the cosmos," tells the children that some of the very best fighters have come from their own planet. Calvin wants to know who the fighters have been, and Mrs. Who quotes John 1:5, the  King James version:  "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."  


"'Jesus!' Charles Wallace said. 'Why, of course, Jesus!'
'Of course!' Mrs. Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by.'
'Leonardo da Vinci?' Calvin suggested tentatively. 'And Michaelangelo?'
'And Shakespeare,' Charles Wallace called out, 'and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!'
Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. 'And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!'
'Now you, Meg,' Mrs. Whatsit ordered.
'Oh, Euclid, I suppose.' Meg was in such an agony of impatience that her voice grated irritably. 'And Copernicus. But what about Father? Please, what about Father?'"


I don't know if this passage retains its power out of context, but when I came across it in the book, I was breathtaken. First because of the sudden transition from sickening fear and despair into hope and confidence; the shift in tone, the sudden joy, that characterizes some of my favorite moments in other books. Virginia Woolf, I think, does it best--and I'm sure we'll get to her before too long--but it reminded me of my favorite scene in Zadie Smith's On Beauty, when the three children in the central family all run into each other by accident in the center of their hometown; the oldest back unexpectedly early from college, the youngest cutting high school, and the middle just fortuitously in the right place. They are all  delighted to see each other and amazed by the triple coincidence of all being together; it's beginning to snow; it's a magical afternoon.
Secondly, I love this passage because before it can get schmaltzy, character, humor and plot cut in. Meg's grouchy contributions break up the sentiment of the moment and reflect her incredibly narrow field of expertise (she is a mathematical prodigy, but utterly ignorant of literature, geography and art). Equally important, they get the story back on track by returning the focus to the central plot--the search for Meg's father. It's a wonderful, fantastically efficient line, without undermining the spirited hopefulness that precedes it. 
Finally, in a small and obvious observation: I love the value system reflected here, however briefly. Ambassadors of peace, science and art are ranked equally in the fight against evil; Bach and Rembrandt's contributions to humanity are considered as valuable and profound as those of Jesus, Gandhi and Copernicus. It says worlds, again with great concision, about L'Engle's view of the arts as weapons against evil and darkness, and I think for artists, it's always nice to be reassured that someone thinks what we do is important.