I note this week, at high summer, great expectations, before you take to the road, and greater relief, once home.
Shaw wrote, "I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad." I'm more like Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist, Macon Leary, who writes guide books describing how people can travel and feel like they've never left home.
For homebodies, the greatest joy comes, preparing; calling Triple AAA to order TripTiks, and plain old-fashioned maps, because just as much as I annoy our GPS guide-voice, the ever-recalculating Gladys, by impulsively darting off the highway onto scenic routes, I'd rather drive two-lane country roads, relegating TripTiks to find restaurant and motels, the same way I utilize MapQuest, measuring the way I'm going to go against how professionals advise I should go.
When the process is complete, navigator-wife, is left holding an annoying series of awkwardly folded maps, taped edge to edge, to decipher a sketchily pencilled oval track, incorporating an alternate return path (there was that 2-day wide-right, once, from Cape Cod to Virginia, to avoid a toll booth under construction on 95 in Delware, resulting in a night at an Allentown motel where I had to thread cable through dresser drawers, and over the bathroom sink, to watch the World Series, but, you know, life carries surprises when discovering short cuts no one's ever taken before, like Lewis and Clark, or Bear Grills, even).
It's all rather complicated but good training for special ops beyond summer vacations. When I read in the local rag that The Taming of the Shrew was to be performed on the lawn of Kenmore, an 18th century landmark in downtown Fredericksburg, I set about work, mapping Shakespare country, the same way I'd prep for any grueling wilderness journey.
First, obtain a play synopsis off the net, the purpose of which, is to isolate characters/landmarks, creating a spreadsheet, where relations can be drawn, especially in comedies where one player may possess one, or more, false identities, or have traded names, with multiple partners. In the end, the charts resemble a flow chart you might encounter at work except these resemble a plate of spaghetti.
Next, chart in hand, verify entries and notations against the plot summaries and character descriptions, including number of lines per character and act, to judge distances, using the Essential Shakespeare handbook, DK Publishers, American Edition, 2004 (many books claim to be "the essential guide" - believe me, this is the one).
Finally, sitting in the audience, after you've staked a claim by planting a beach chair in the first row, one last review before the play opens, like cramming before a final exam, perusing the "Everyman Tales from Shakespeare," written by Charles and Mary Lamb, described on the back jacket, as "First published in 1807, the tales were written to introduce Shakespeare to children by extracting an unclouded and approachable story-line from the complex texts of the plays." Children-unclouded-approachable: now you're talking this traveller's language.
Both times I've seen Shakespeare, on the lawn, Love's Labor's Lost at Wadham College in Oxford, and Shrew at Kenmore, I wouldn't have understood anything without first doing the homework. In a recent editorial, a local columnist, bemoaning today's emphasis on standard testing at the expense of the arts, wrote, it's "admirable when students are required to read plays, but it is only on stage that students can begin to see how a playwright's words come to life, and learn what it is to interact with an audience - to rouse and move them - and to improvise when a line is dropped, or the music is slow in rising, or a microphone goes dead."
Read first, then, interact: the first rule of Shakespeare.
And so it was in Padua, Italy, last Saturday night, transported to Fredericksburg, Virginia, when Petruchio offered a McNugget, which I ate, to the foot-stomping consternation of the starving Kate, and so it was in Navarre, at Oxford, when the disguised Mr. Bean-like King, and three Lords, wildly danced like Cossacks, to win the love of the Princess, and her three ladies-in-waiting, disguised as each other. I came, I saw; remarkably, I followed.
It's a rare joy when the journey exceeds expectations. Travelling to two cities, within cities, to watch plays, within plays, are such times.
Next summer, I'm already planning a trip to Cooperstown to break a curse as long and hard as the Boston Bambino hex - but that's a tale of another city for another time.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Beach Reads 2008: The Reviews
I note this week the danger of checking out books from a University library where dust jackets are removed. Where I'd reckoned, from all I knew about Doris Kearns Goodwin, impressionistically, that Wait Till Next Year is about attending games at Fenway, with her father, that never happened. It was only after she was a parent, herself, in Boston, that she took her kids to the ballpark.
What the book is about is something just as fine; the youngest daughter of a family who'd emigrated from Brooklyn to Long Island, desiring to please her father, upon his return home after a long commute, scores Dodgers games, played in the afternoon, broadcast by Red Barber on the radio, to replay the contest intimately after dinner for her dad. In the process, an historian and story teller is born.
The geography is familiar - after only a two-week infant residency in DC, in 1954, my family moved to Brooklyn, where we lived for almost ten years, before moving to Long Island for three more. Since the Dodgers had already left for California before I reached baseball awareness in 1961, and the Mets, founded shortly after, never caught my fancy (for a youngster, even Stengel-ese incompetence isn't necessarily charming, it's just embarassing), it's the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Ford, Howard, Boyer, Kubek, Richardson, Pepitone, and Tresh, I carry, as Kearns holds Robinson, Snyder and Campanella in her heart.
Where I'd attribute the love of NY baseball to environment, I acknowledge an Anglophillia as genetic, maternally inherited, though reading The Brideshead Generation at the beach resulted in a deeper realization of something else.
Across from Persimmons Drive, where the rented beach house in the Outer Banks stands, lies the tiny Corolla Library which we frequented to check on emails. I'd told the wife, whenever I see her approaching the counter with a stack of books in her arms, it's quite sexy, and so, she didn't disappoint, filling a tote bag (at $15 a load, satchel included)! I, naturally, couldn't resist a contribution, and tossed a tome called The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasli Mitrokhin, onto the pile.
Unknowingly I'd purchased a complement to Brideshead, since Sword is the history of Soviet foreign ministry espionage and that story can't be told excluding the bio's of Philby, MacLean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross, the infamous Cambridge 5, who betrayed England for the USSR.
The Oxford-Brideshead Generation dismissed politics in lieu of art. The Cambridge crew committed treason, dedicated to a cause, that proved bankrupt. The arts and antics of the former, even when frivolous, outlasted the far more serious and deadly politics of the latter.
Indeed, although I didn't read so far at the beach into the Yeats biography, by Jeffares, to confirm whether Yeats' poetry was finally informed more by nationalism than Irish mysticism, at the point where I left off, the author writes, "he still wished for some system of philosophy which would include his belief that the legends, personalities and emotions handed down by poets and painters, philosophers and theologians were the nearest approach he knew to truth."
Reading, for me, is seasonal. Summer is for grand achievements in the arts while winter is for the historical reality, against which the hope, represented in the arts, is measured and overcome.
Upon return from the beach, the principles interweaved together magically at Wolf Trap, where for the first time, James Taylor performed. As he sang told tales and sang tunes like Sweet Baby James, the past 40 years of progressive politics were incoporated into a larger more enduring gentle presence which doesn't force any issue but quietly represents what it is we sought to be and how we live our lives.
Perhaps, after all he's gone through over the past four decades, publically and privately, James might not be adverse to Lewis Hyde's words, in the last of the 2008 beach reads, The Gift, "Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature."
For James, obviously, the gift is music. For me, the cultural legacies of a New York childhood, Eastern European-English genetics, and a life otherwise lived in the South, and Mid-Atlantic, make way for an inner garden not yet fully grown. That nutriments may be found in a life already existant as the political change desired, seems right; perhaps more can be explained through contemplation of the dolphins we watched at play in the ocean.
What the book is about is something just as fine; the youngest daughter of a family who'd emigrated from Brooklyn to Long Island, desiring to please her father, upon his return home after a long commute, scores Dodgers games, played in the afternoon, broadcast by Red Barber on the radio, to replay the contest intimately after dinner for her dad. In the process, an historian and story teller is born.
The geography is familiar - after only a two-week infant residency in DC, in 1954, my family moved to Brooklyn, where we lived for almost ten years, before moving to Long Island for three more. Since the Dodgers had already left for California before I reached baseball awareness in 1961, and the Mets, founded shortly after, never caught my fancy (for a youngster, even Stengel-ese incompetence isn't necessarily charming, it's just embarassing), it's the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Ford, Howard, Boyer, Kubek, Richardson, Pepitone, and Tresh, I carry, as Kearns holds Robinson, Snyder and Campanella in her heart.
Where I'd attribute the love of NY baseball to environment, I acknowledge an Anglophillia as genetic, maternally inherited, though reading The Brideshead Generation at the beach resulted in a deeper realization of something else.
Across from Persimmons Drive, where the rented beach house in the Outer Banks stands, lies the tiny Corolla Library which we frequented to check on emails. I'd told the wife, whenever I see her approaching the counter with a stack of books in her arms, it's quite sexy, and so, she didn't disappoint, filling a tote bag (at $15 a load, satchel included)! I, naturally, couldn't resist a contribution, and tossed a tome called The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasli Mitrokhin, onto the pile.
Unknowingly I'd purchased a complement to Brideshead, since Sword is the history of Soviet foreign ministry espionage and that story can't be told excluding the bio's of Philby, MacLean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross, the infamous Cambridge 5, who betrayed England for the USSR.
The Oxford-Brideshead Generation dismissed politics in lieu of art. The Cambridge crew committed treason, dedicated to a cause, that proved bankrupt. The arts and antics of the former, even when frivolous, outlasted the far more serious and deadly politics of the latter.
Indeed, although I didn't read so far at the beach into the Yeats biography, by Jeffares, to confirm whether Yeats' poetry was finally informed more by nationalism than Irish mysticism, at the point where I left off, the author writes, "he still wished for some system of philosophy which would include his belief that the legends, personalities and emotions handed down by poets and painters, philosophers and theologians were the nearest approach he knew to truth."
Reading, for me, is seasonal. Summer is for grand achievements in the arts while winter is for the historical reality, against which the hope, represented in the arts, is measured and overcome.
Upon return from the beach, the principles interweaved together magically at Wolf Trap, where for the first time, James Taylor performed. As he sang told tales and sang tunes like Sweet Baby James, the past 40 years of progressive politics were incoporated into a larger more enduring gentle presence which doesn't force any issue but quietly represents what it is we sought to be and how we live our lives.
Perhaps, after all he's gone through over the past four decades, publically and privately, James might not be adverse to Lewis Hyde's words, in the last of the 2008 beach reads, The Gift, "Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature."
For James, obviously, the gift is music. For me, the cultural legacies of a New York childhood, Eastern European-English genetics, and a life otherwise lived in the South, and Mid-Atlantic, make way for an inner garden not yet fully grown. That nutriments may be found in a life already existant as the political change desired, seems right; perhaps more can be explained through contemplation of the dolphins we watched at play in the ocean.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Beach Reads 2008: Outrageous Things in Stylish Phrases
I note this week advice Evelyn Waugh gave to his son when he met with difficulties at school. He wrote to Auberon, "Don't become an anarchist. There is no superiority in shirking things and doing badly. Be superior by cultivating your intellect and taste."
Sounds terribly British, if not downright snobbish, eh? Even so, it remains the dutiful fate of non-shirking readers, such as in this family, where the maternal, not patriarchal advice, "what did we learn from this," holds sway, an edict formed after we'd watched another episode of an idiotic, though addictive, tv series called Surface where swimming Iguanas took over the world. The lizards didn't get to where they were by cultivating intellect, I can tell you. Despite that, and why must it feel confessional?), I'm forced to admit (why forced?), or even apologize, that I intend to learn from the books I'll be lugging to the beach, though unlike Waugh's son, it's doubtful folks of my acquaintance will note any positive effect on taste nor intellect.
Speaking of the Waugh's, and English mothers, the first thick tome, weighing down the 2008 beach bag considerably, is Humphrey Carpenter's 'The Brideshead Generation,' which, believe it or not, is laugh-out loud funny, including the tale of the distant aristocratic mother who when asked which of her four children she'd like to take to church, responded, 'how should I know, the one that goes with my blue dress.'
A Brideshead's addict since the tv program, and later after taking a course at Oxford during one magical summer, reading Carpenter's The Brideshead Generation means greeting old friends as if at a class reunion. Charles Ryder had spoken of entering a low narrow door in the garden when he first approached Lord Sebastien's rooms, and for many, exploring the literary and social world of Oxford-Brideshead gains for the reader similar entrance to an exotic place whose dimming flame exists reflectedly today in only a few formidable descendents like Oxford alum Christopher Hitchens, who Alexander Linklater describes as "raffish, old-fashioned, and insolently charismatic," so much so, "viewers of American current affairs shows invite him on to say outrageous things in stylish phrases."
To discover why we like what we like, Freud developed free association, scientifically identifying the next beach bag selection as more about wanting to like but hardly finding anything to like - namely, poetry, where there are few I've completed, only instead, glimpsing enticingly of what might have been, such as in the highly recommended A.N. Wilson history, 'God's Funeral,' which interweaves the poetry of Thomas Hardy.
Wistfully, then, I'll be packing amongst the sun tan oils, A. Norman Jeffares' W.B. Yeats, Man and Poet, where, for a start, at least, Irishness free associates comic-tragic images formed by a mystical walk through a Killarney forest of royal deer, a pint of the purest Guinness at Mulligans in Temple Bar, and a horse lying dead in a Dublin street after being hit by a car.
Yeats wrote of modern life circa 1920:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity --
capturing just the very people and things one hopes to get away from at the beach; whether Yeats will be a good vacation companion, or not, remains to be seen.
In Freud's "The Future of Illusion," Clive James reckons when he "defined civilization as the overcoming of nature," it blinded him dangerously to the murderous intent of the Nazi's. In a round-about, far less lethal way, the third book in the bag, "Wait Till Next Year," by Doris Kearns Goodwin, relies upon the inevitability of continuity through games she scored with her father at Fenway, in a country, unlike Freud's Vienna, where there's always the certainty of next season measured stately one inning at a time.
As Tom Verducci pointed out last week in Sports Illustrated, "attendance is up for the fifth straight season," and, "none of the teams with the five highest payrolls held first place," and Tampa Bay (of all teams!), in first, "winning with pitching, defense and young players, the sometimes forgotten commodities of the power-obsessed Steroid era from which baseball is trying to escape."
Indeed, the last book in the bag, a light paperback, thank God, is "The Gift, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World," by Lewis Hyde, noted on the back cover, as a "brilliant defense of the value of creativity and its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities," just as baseball is likewise finally regaining a field overrun by profit, cheap shortcuts and sordid theatrics.
As with Yeat's poetry, I'm unsure whether I'll get far into The Gift - the first several chapters are anthropologically devoted to a complex Native American system of trading presents, but it does carry an Endless Summer vibe and may go down well after several Bartles & James Blue Hawaii wine coolers...
Freud might have psycho-analyzed this year's selection of Beach Reads, in common, diagnosing the Spotsyltuckian's ego as formed by an "unquenchable naivety," or per Yeats, acknowledging his vulnerability to "the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the life of action." Isn't a week at the beach all about contemplation, undoing daily sordidness, so as to believe again in the possibilies of next season, just as at the end of Brideshead, the story culminates in the presence of an inextinguishable flame flickering in an otherwise empty chapel?
Such, indeed, is the naivety of those who reject anarchy, bullying and cheating, searching on their own, and in other's creativity, for the antidote, not by shirking, but by undertaking deliberate journeys to where there is always 'something to be learned from this.'
Thanks, mom.
Sounds terribly British, if not downright snobbish, eh? Even so, it remains the dutiful fate of non-shirking readers, such as in this family, where the maternal, not patriarchal advice, "what did we learn from this," holds sway, an edict formed after we'd watched another episode of an idiotic, though addictive, tv series called Surface where swimming Iguanas took over the world. The lizards didn't get to where they were by cultivating intellect, I can tell you. Despite that, and why must it feel confessional?), I'm forced to admit (why forced?), or even apologize, that I intend to learn from the books I'll be lugging to the beach, though unlike Waugh's son, it's doubtful folks of my acquaintance will note any positive effect on taste nor intellect.
Speaking of the Waugh's, and English mothers, the first thick tome, weighing down the 2008 beach bag considerably, is Humphrey Carpenter's 'The Brideshead Generation,' which, believe it or not, is laugh-out loud funny, including the tale of the distant aristocratic mother who when asked which of her four children she'd like to take to church, responded, 'how should I know, the one that goes with my blue dress.'
A Brideshead's addict since the tv program, and later after taking a course at Oxford during one magical summer, reading Carpenter's The Brideshead Generation means greeting old friends as if at a class reunion. Charles Ryder had spoken of entering a low narrow door in the garden when he first approached Lord Sebastien's rooms, and for many, exploring the literary and social world of Oxford-Brideshead gains for the reader similar entrance to an exotic place whose dimming flame exists reflectedly today in only a few formidable descendents like Oxford alum Christopher Hitchens, who Alexander Linklater describes as "raffish, old-fashioned, and insolently charismatic," so much so, "viewers of American current affairs shows invite him on to say outrageous things in stylish phrases."
To discover why we like what we like, Freud developed free association, scientifically identifying the next beach bag selection as more about wanting to like but hardly finding anything to like - namely, poetry, where there are few I've completed, only instead, glimpsing enticingly of what might have been, such as in the highly recommended A.N. Wilson history, 'God's Funeral,' which interweaves the poetry of Thomas Hardy.
Wistfully, then, I'll be packing amongst the sun tan oils, A. Norman Jeffares' W.B. Yeats, Man and Poet, where, for a start, at least, Irishness free associates comic-tragic images formed by a mystical walk through a Killarney forest of royal deer, a pint of the purest Guinness at Mulligans in Temple Bar, and a horse lying dead in a Dublin street after being hit by a car.
Yeats wrote of modern life circa 1920:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity --
capturing just the very people and things one hopes to get away from at the beach; whether Yeats will be a good vacation companion, or not, remains to be seen.
In Freud's "The Future of Illusion," Clive James reckons when he "defined civilization as the overcoming of nature," it blinded him dangerously to the murderous intent of the Nazi's. In a round-about, far less lethal way, the third book in the bag, "Wait Till Next Year," by Doris Kearns Goodwin, relies upon the inevitability of continuity through games she scored with her father at Fenway, in a country, unlike Freud's Vienna, where there's always the certainty of next season measured stately one inning at a time.
As Tom Verducci pointed out last week in Sports Illustrated, "attendance is up for the fifth straight season," and, "none of the teams with the five highest payrolls held first place," and Tampa Bay (of all teams!), in first, "winning with pitching, defense and young players, the sometimes forgotten commodities of the power-obsessed Steroid era from which baseball is trying to escape."
Indeed, the last book in the bag, a light paperback, thank God, is "The Gift, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World," by Lewis Hyde, noted on the back cover, as a "brilliant defense of the value of creativity and its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities," just as baseball is likewise finally regaining a field overrun by profit, cheap shortcuts and sordid theatrics.
As with Yeat's poetry, I'm unsure whether I'll get far into The Gift - the first several chapters are anthropologically devoted to a complex Native American system of trading presents, but it does carry an Endless Summer vibe and may go down well after several Bartles & James Blue Hawaii wine coolers...
Freud might have psycho-analyzed this year's selection of Beach Reads, in common, diagnosing the Spotsyltuckian's ego as formed by an "unquenchable naivety," or per Yeats, acknowledging his vulnerability to "the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the life of action." Isn't a week at the beach all about contemplation, undoing daily sordidness, so as to believe again in the possibilies of next season, just as at the end of Brideshead, the story culminates in the presence of an inextinguishable flame flickering in an otherwise empty chapel?
Such, indeed, is the naivety of those who reject anarchy, bullying and cheating, searching on their own, and in other's creativity, for the antidote, not by shirking, but by undertaking deliberate journeys to where there is always 'something to be learned from this.'
Thanks, mom.
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