Politics, Poetry and Reviews
We went to the Botanical Gardens this evening to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Behind the Scenes. This is the latest of the Australian Shakespeare Company’s Shakespeare in the Park performances, which are always good fun. Since they were selling tickets cheaply just before Christmas I grabbed a couple for me and Andrew.
It’s utterly, magnificently silly, and a lot of fun.
Mike Brown is an astronomer who likes planets (apparently the moon is his nemesis, which I find amusing since his wife is called Diane. Amusingly, despite his sense of humour and the amount of time he spends in this book looking up the names of mythological figures, the coincidence of names has passed him by. But I digress. Already. Oh dear.). He’s the person who discovered the dwarf planet Eris (formerly known as Xena) and her moon, as well as two other very large bodies in the Kuipfler belt (an area beyond Neptune staffed by such well-known dwarf planets as Pluto), Haumea and Makemake (formerly known as Santa and Easterbunny).
Also, he has a daughter who was born right when he was discovering Eris, defending Santa from Spanish pirates, and trying to get Pluto demoted from planet status. Because he is a scientist, he has graphs of all her sleeping and feeding times (which you can find online, incidentally – apparently young Lilah had quite a following), which he analyses in various ways.
Oh, and the relevant part is that he is the author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, a very funny, completely fascinating and extremely educational book about planets, astronomy, the workings of science, and why you really need a good sense of humour to be married to a scientist.
Yesterday, I went to see The King’s Speech. It’s the first time I’ve actually been to a cinema since Chicago came out, so that was a little strange. I’d forgotten how dark they are, how bloody long the ads and previews go for, and how many irritating people there are in the audience. Given that my main reason for not going to the cinema is that a) I’m not good at sitting still for a whole movie and b) I want to comment and ask questions and generally theorise and chatter, which is not polite behaviour in a cinema, I found it rather irritating to have people on my left fidgeting and moving and bouncing up and down and people to my right talking and asking questions and finishing the King’s sentences. I mean, really. It’s a film about stuttering! How is this a clever thing to do?
Anyway, my conclusion is that I loved the film, but I still prefer watching films at home where I can ask about things or comment on things or think about them or even go away and research them as they occur to me. And this film has a lot of things I want to think about and research some more. I’m definitely going to be seeing it again, possibly even in the cinema.
Preliminary thoughts:
We’ve just watched the first Act of the BBC Henry VIII. This is a play to which I come with no preconceptions, as it is I think the only play that I have never read or seen and that I have not even encountered as Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.
Of course, one can never be entirely without preconceptions in a history play – I’ve successfully picked a number of characters so far based on a combination of lines and costume, though Henry’s reign is one I know relatively little about (aside from the obvious). In fact, they have dressed everyone to resemble their Holbein portraits as far as possible, at least for their first scenes. This amuses me, because the romance novel I read yesterday featured a troupe of players, and one of them commented that it was easy to pick out Henry VIII’s costume from a wardrobe, as ‘they always make him look like the Holbein portrait’.
Naturally they do – that’s what Henry looks like to everyone from the 17th century onward, I’m sure, and it’s easy to forget that in his youth he was supposedly the handsomest man in Europe (though I imagine the bar is set a little lower for kings). Continue reading
Yesterday, I read Mary Robinette Kowal’s debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey. I can’t quite decide what I think of it; bits of it are exceptionally good, but I can’t quite bring myself to go back and re-read it. I’m not sure if I will feel differently later. I do know that I would be interested to read whatever she does next, because I would say that this novel is almost extremely good… and I think she might make it all the way next time.
This sounds like damning with faint praise, which isn’t fair either, because (and I realise I am repeating myself here), bits of it really are exceptionally good. In fact, it might be true to say that all the component parts are really good, but they don’t quite come together to make the fantastic whole you would expect from these parts.
Of course, books that are so tantalisingly close to being *right* are the ones it is impossible to resist reviewing. And I do want to go around recommending it, especially to people who like, say, Sorcery and Cecelia (which is both a better book and not quite such a good book, depending how you look at it. I definitely prefer Sorcery and Cecelia, myself). Kowal has obviously immersed herself in Austen and written an Austenian world in which magic (or rather ‘glamour’) is simply another ladylike accomplishment. And she has done this world-building exceptionally well.
I’ve just finished reading The Shakespeare Secret (published in the US as ‘Interred with their bones’), by JL Carrell and it’s very good (at least as far as I can tell – there are far too many qualified Shakespeareans around here for me to dare be too definitive!). Somewhere between a thriller and a murder mystery full of conspiracies and conspiracy theories – the blurb rather unjustly compared it to the Da Vinci Code (this is the least of the blurb’s sins, I regret to say); I’d say Katherine Neville was closer and that this was still out of her class.
I bought the book after hearing Carrell interviewed by one third of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. She sounded intelligent and entertaining and as though she had done her research, and this seemed like a good enough reason to give the book a try.
And after dinner, we watched the BBC version of Romeo and Juliet. I still haven’t decided what I think of it overall.
Let’s see… well, to start with, in this production Tybalt is played by a terribly young-looking Alan Rickman. He’s very good, as one might expect, but I do find it hilarious to note that he already has that sinister Alan Rickman voice even with the rather chubby young face and unfortunate costuming.
Juliet is played by Rebecca Saire in this production, and she was 14 at the time it was filmed. For me, she was the stand-out character – I’ve never seen Juliet played by a 14-year-old who could still make Juliet convincing, and Saire did a lovely job. Her Juliet had innocence, wit, passionate emotion and self-possession, she went from childlike to frighteningly adult and back again very convincingly, and the expression on her face when the Nurse advises her to marry Paris (and her delivery of that line about how she is much comforted) was excellent – you could see her just closing off and deciding that clearly she was going to have to act on her own, then, without her needing to say a word. I loved her relationships with her family and her household, and especially liked the way Lady Capulet played her role – she and Juliet had a really warm and affectionate relationship, which is not something I’ve seen before (Lady Capulet usually seems to be a bit of a Lady Macbeth in training). I was interested to see that in the big confrontation between Juliet and her parents, Lady Capulet’s ‘You are too hot’ is aimed at her husband, not to Juliet – and her final line “Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word: Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee” was delivered in a hurried, frazzled sort of way – it sounded more like “fine, do what you like, I can’t stop you”, as she hurried out of the room to try to calm down her husband. Juliet’s nurse was also good, though she annoyed me by being far too ladylike – the Nurse is meant to be vulgar, and she really wasn’t!
And then we have Romeo, whom I did not like one bit. Firstly, he was 28, and it showed. He looked about twice Juliet’s age (because he was) and he and Juliet had absolutely no chemistry. Actually, I would say they had anti-chemistry, and in trying to create chemistry their scenes together he came across as somewhat sleazy. I couldn’t watch them together, actually. The age thing didn’t help, but clearly wasn’t all of it, because Paris also appeared to be in his mid-twenties, and his interactions with Juliet seemed more natural and far less skin-crawly (in fact, he’s the first non-sleazy Paris that I have seen in a production of this play). Really, you don’t want Paris to be more appealing than Romeo. Oddly enough, when Juliet and Romeo were talking to other people about their love for each other, they were entirely convincing (especially Juliet). But I was not at all convinced when they fell in love in the dancing scene, and the rest does sort of need to follow from that or there is no plot.
Incidentally, have you noticed that if only Romeo or Juliet had even a little bit of patience, this play would be a comedy? If Romeo had waited for Tybalt to be arrested for Mercutio’s death… if Juliet had actually followed the Friar’s advice and waited that extra day before taking the potion, thus allowing time for the message to arrive… if Romeo had waited for a message from the Friar before going off half-cocked…
But I digress. The Friar, incidentally, was very good, and I did like his relationship with Romeo.
Then there was Mercutio, played by Anthony Andrews. Andrew really liked him. I was in two minds… I did like a lot of things about his acting, but I did think his Mercutio was a little more unstable than he needed to be. However, I am completely incapable of being impartial on this subject, because the first Shakespeare I ever saw or read was the school production of Romeo and Juliet, in which the actress playing Mercutio was really exceptional and I imprinted both on the role and on her interpretation of it. So nobody else ever does it quite right… He did make it nicely bawdy, though, which was a relief – I was worried they were all going to be as well-behaved as the Nurse, and that would have been a crime.
The ending – particularly Lady Capulet’s reaction to Juliet’s second death – did make me cry. It doesn’t always. I even felt bad for Romeo, though not as bad as I did for Paris, who really did not deserve to die, poor boy.
So yes – I’d say it was definitely worth a look, if you haven’t seen it, even if Romeo does have 70s hair and an annoyingly sleazy nature. Juliet makes it all worthwhile.
Well, that was interesting. I finished reading La Nuit des Temps (which I gather was translated into English as ‘The Ice People’) yesterday.
It’s… interesting. Strange. Surprisingly good in places, surprisingly difficult to take seriously in others. I’m not sure if the latter is because of the way it has dated (the Cold War atmosphere was pretty all-pervasive), or because there were certain cliché elements, or because I was reading in a foreign language and was that little bit more removed from the text. But while much of the book was so very predictable in certain respects, the two sudden twists at the ending did manage to catch me by surprise – especially the second – and made me rather happy in a sort of Shakespearean way. Though it must be admitted that much of my enjoyment of this book came from the sheer preposterousness of certain minor elements of the story.
Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a life
Harriet McBryde Johnson
2005 Picador, New York NY
“I used to try to explain that in fact I enjoy my life, that it’s a great sensual pleasure to zoom by power chair on these delicious muggy streets. But it gets tedious. God didn’t put me on this street to provide disability awareness training to everyone who happens by…
“For me, living a real life has meant resisting these formulaic narratives. Instead of letting the world turn me into a disability object, I have insisted on being a subject in the grammatical sense: not the passive “me” who is acted upon, but the active “I” who does things. I practice law and politics in Charleston… I travel. I find various odd adventures. I do my bit to help the disability rights movement change the world in fundamental ways.
“And I tell stories.”
And she does. Magnificent stories. Stories that had me glued to the computer screen for an entire weekend after discovering her published essays online, then resolving to find a copy of her book and devouring it in the space of one day when it finally arrived.
Harriet McBryde Johnson’s memoirs begin with her realisation at age three or four that – according to popular telethon wisdom – she will die young. But at the same time, life is not over – “When I die, I might as well die a kindergartener,” she reflects. This experience will help inspire her later protests against telethons which are “all about stirring up pity when we don’t want pity”. She recounts her teenage fascination with Dracula, whose story shows that ‘death is not only for people like me’, and her surprise that others appear unaware of this.
This probably makes the essay sound morbid. It isn’t. Like all the essays in this book, it is thought-provoking, fascinating and often hilarious.
The essay which riveted my attention when I found it online appears in this book as “Unspeakable Conversations”. It recounts Harriet McBryde Johnson’s conversations and email exchanges with Professor Peter Singer, an Australian-born ethicist who “insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was…”.
She talks about the surreal experience of speaking to his Practical Ethics seminar class about infanticide and ethics, and recounts how, during dinner, her elbow slips, and she requests Singer to assist her by replacing it on her knee. Friends in the disability rights movement are appalled that she would allow him to provide even minor physical assistance. But “I didn’t feel disempowered; quite the contrary, it seemed a good thing to make him do some useful work. And then, the hard part: I’ve come to believe that Singer actually is human, even kind in his way…”. One does not have to be a monster to believe monstrous things.
On a lighter note, McBryde Johnson describes her trip to Cuba to attend a disability rights convention, and her experience with a different political system and approach to disability rights – as well as her ironic reflections on visiting a special school similar to the one she attended as a child. “We, too, used to act cute and engage visiting dignitaries in conversation. But when the visitors left, we had a contest among ourselves: Who’d met the stupidest visitor? Bonus points for a pat on the head!”. She hopes that she “will not be named the Stupidest Visitor when the kids run their contest”.
I could go on. And on. Because I enjoyed these memoirs immensely – they made me laugh and they made me think, and they gave me an insight into the everyday aspects of living with a disability. The last essay in the book is lyrical and sensual – a poem on the pleasures of life, both those of the non-disabled world and those “that are so bound up with our disabilities that we wouldn’t experience them… without our disabilities”. This celebration is a fitting end to a book that is in many ways a celebration of the richness of life.
Harriet McBryde Johnson died on June 4th of this year, aged fifty. For a taste of her writing, you can visit http://www.cripcommentary.com/harriet/, a memorial site which, among other things, contains links to many of her essays online. But I suggest you read the book. You won’t regret it.
Addendum: I wrote this review for a newsletter, but in the course of writing it, I also went to McBryde Johnson’s website and read a *lot* of her essays, and blogged briefly about them:
I’m now obsessively reading everything of hers that I can find. But this article is completely absorbing – it’s about conversations and email discussions and meetings she has had over the years with Peter Singer – a rather notorious Australian ethicist who argues that since we allow termination of pregnancy for fetuses with disabilities, and since we allow newborns with serious disability to be ‘allowed to die’ by not giving them lifesaving medical assistance, we should also, logically and ethically, allow parents the choice of ending the lives of disabled newborns. I shall not go into his arguments for this. I had to read one of his books on the subject for a genetic counselling essay, and that was quite enough (I should note that the previous reader appeared to have been a fundamentalist christian with no inhibitions about writing in library books, which added a certain something to my reading experience). McBryde Johnson, as a person with MD, was once one of the very babies whose euthanasia Singer would advocate, on the basis of quality of life. As you can imagine, they don’t see eye to eye – but her description of their interactions is fascinating.
The other thing that struck me (in a separate article) was her description of visiting an exhibition at a Holocaust museum and seeing a really, really fantastic wheelchair:
Then I see the wheelchair. It’s similar to other prewar wheelchairs I’ve seen, but there’s something unusual about the frame. Is this a tilting mechanism? A fancy suspension system? Looks like fine German engineering. I like vintage wheelchairs. An obsolete Everest & Jennings drive belt hangs in my office as a bit of nostalgia, like an old wagon wheel in a barbecue shack. I have an urge to jostle the chair, to see what that frame does. The sign mentions a German institution. So, no single owner. But even in institutions, people manage to bond with chairs. A state-owned chair may be occupied by the same person every day, parked beside that person’s bed at night. Maybe the chair was used by someone with cerebral palsy until he died, then someone with a stroke until he died, and on down the line, until.. . .until they all died?
The people who used this wood-and-metal survivor probably loved it, liked to move about even as they were sucked into the nightmare. The nightmare began when the state removed them from their families, concentrated them in institutions. The same state provided them with beautifully engineered chairs and then killed them for eating up the resources of the “fit.” (full article here)
It’s the last line which is the kicker – that the same, really state-of-the-art, science that could so perfectly design this wheelchair could also decide that those who need it were not worthy to live is, to me, both chilling and paradoxical. Presumably, the minds designing and the minds making this decision were not the same – but the culture was. And let’s not forget that pretty much every western country was into eugenics before the Nazis took it to its ‘logical’ conclusion…
I watched the Olivier Henry V for the first time on Sunday. I intended to follow this immediately with the Branagh version for comparison’s sake, but it was getting late, and it didn’t happen. I’ll be watching it this week though. In any case, I first saw the Branagh Henry V when I was 17, and saw it more recently last year. For me, therefore, it was the definitive version, so what I primarily noticed about Olivier’s version was the bits that were missing. Well, and the radically different style of filming and acting, and the awful French accents, but that’s another matter. I had been told that Olivier’s version, being filmed in 1944, was very pro-war, whereas Branagh’s was very anti-war. Perhaps Branagh was more subtle, or perhaps his view resembles my own too strongly, but it still seems to me that his version is closer to Shakespeare’s original.
Olivier presents a very unified vision, and to this end, he takes out a lot of the ambiguities in Henry V’s character, and in the war itself. The hanging of Bardolph is lost; the threats to Harfleur omitted; the three treasonous nobles never appear, and Williams never finds out who he spoke to and challenged on the night before Agincourt. There were other omissions, I’m sure, but these were the ones that I particularly noticed. (He also omitted the lines where Harry tells Kate that he is so ugly that he’ll only improve with age – a rather endearing instance of vanity, I thought). In terms of things that Branagh didn’t show, we had the slaughter of the boys and the destruction of the campsite (though not Henry’s reciprocal slaughter, now I think about it, though Branagh didn’t show that one either. Maybe I imagined it?); we also got a much more distant and triumphal view of the battle – the glory of war, rather than the gritty reality. I don’t think Branagh showed the scene with all the French nobles expounding on their own shame after the battle, either. Olivier’s actors played that with rather a lot of enjoyment, I felt…
I also noticed that Henry did not admit to Montjoy that he still didn’t know who had won the battle – but after what we had seen, it would have been an unconvincing denial. Branagh’s Henry V, surrounded by the noise of the battle and the bodies of his soldiers could deliver that line with conviction, and did.
I should add that I have not read Henry V recently, so I’m working from memory here. Still, it seems to me that Branagh omitted less from the text, which one would think would bring him closer to Shakespeare’s original conception; and in terms of Henry’s characterisation, I think it does. On the other hand, his vision of Agincourt as completely chaotic and close fighting, and his apparent uncertainty over who had won are probably further from Shakespeare’s view – that whole tally of how many thousands of French have been killed versus the tiny number of Englishmen suggests a Glorious and Overwhelming Victory, which was certainly what Olivier portrayed; it seems to me that Shakespeare, while enjoying the not-always-noble nuances of Henry’s character, saw Agincourt as a Glorious English Victory over the Arrogant and Perfidious French (the characterisation of the French lends credence to this view), and that’s what Olivier showed. Branagh gave Agincourt a much greater ambiguity, I think more than Shakespeare intended. That said, I still prefer his version.
There were some interesting choices of characterisation and setting in Olivier’s Henry V; I loved the interactions with the audience in the early part of the play, and I rather wish he had continued doing the film that way. His characterisation of the French King as rather senile and doddering was also interesting, and has the advantage of explaining why the Dauphin seems to be running things as much as he does. I was less convinced by the Katherine, and of course the chemistry between her and Henry did not compare well to that of Branagh and Thompson (but how could it?). I rather liked the Dauphin, too – he was utterly arrogant and irritating, but a rather convincing character.
Altogether very interesting – I think this is the first time I’ve really understood just how much a director’s vision of a play can change it’s meaning. I’m really looking forward to watching the Branagh version again, and to our reading of the play itself, to see what other angles I’ve missed.
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