LPLP

I've recently discovered the journal Language Problems & Language Planning - and, by "recently", I mean I noticed it sitting on our shelves ages ago but I have finally taken the time to see what kind of articles are inside it.

It's a highly interesting journal that is dedicated to the decisions people make about languages.

The stuff that comes out of our mouths on a day to day basis is reasonably free of official decisions (some would argue it is reasonably free of decisions, full stop), but there are a lot of official decisions to be made about the language we use in governments, schools and courts - not to mention the languages that need official support to survive.

China is trying to build an "improved" standard writing system.  The Dutch spelling system is apparently doomed to eternal conflict.  Cornish is trying to come back from the dead.  French Canadians are trying to make sure they can continue to have their own schools.  Minority languages all over the world are trying to gain recognition and support.  Esperanto is just plain interesting - and still kind of almost trying to change the world (but only subtly - much like Fabian Socialism*).

Multilingualism, bilingual education, multiculturalism and heritage languages that won't just lay down and die...

I have a habit of thinking about languages in terms of grammar and vocabulary (and sometimes philology and literature) - but the history and politics of languages can be incredibly fascinating, and that's what LPLP takes as its focus.

Some of the issues I've mentioned above might be a little less than topical.  For some reason I've started reading through the journal beginning with Volume 20 - from 1996.  I went to that volume to find an article referenced in a more current issue... and ended up staying for a while.

I'm finding the language climate of the late 1990s quite fascinating at the moment.  I've just finished reading a 1997 article on the kerfuffle over the 1994 attempted spelling reforms for Dutch.  Dirk Jacobs points out that the biggest problem with fixing spelling is the fact that professional writers (journalists, authors, etc) have a large stake in the issue and more clout in the public sphere than linguists can muster.  He concludes that spelling reform will only be able to happen if you get the journalists on-side first (and doubts that will be an easy thing to do).

I've had a few ideas challenged since I starting reading this journal.  One of the more recent articles, by Sabine Fiedler, drew my attention to the unquestioning respect we have for native speakers, and raised the point that a native speaker isn't necessarily the be-all and end-all of a language.  That was an eye-opener.

It's a fascinating journal - and taking me on a fascinating journey.  I wonder if I'll keep travelling through the 1990s and 2000s.  I wonder what I'll learn along the way...




*-What do we want?
-Gradual change!
-When do we want it?
-In due course!

Jolly Hunter

Just playing with SoundCloud to see what can be done.  The following clip is a reading of "Jolly Hunter" by Charles Causely.

Slightly Foxed

I have previously mentioned my habit of subscribing to journals and magazines for a year to see if they are interesting enough to sustain my attention, and the fact that most of the time I end up wondering why I bothered.

There are various things that turn up in my mail box (my actual mail box) which produce a reaction much like this:

"Oh!  I have mail!  Oh.  It's only that."

Slightly Foxed is different. The fourth issue of my subscription turned up in my mail box a couple of weeks ago, and I felt happy for the rest of the day.

Have you ever had something arrive in the mail that actually made you clap your hands and say "Oh, good!"? Well that's what Slightly Foxed does for me.

I discovered this wonderful magazine by dint of a piece of paper that fell out of a copy of Literature Review, which I bought when I was trying to find Good Reading in a news agency that didn't have it.

I often find reading about books is much more achievable than reading the books themselves. Good Reading is a nice bit of fluff that's great for finding out what books are out there. Literature Review is like the book reviews you find in the "boffin" section of the Weekend papers - can be good, but can be a bit like hard work.

Slightly Foxed is just a nice read. It's a collection of essays about reading. The contributors talk about a book or an author or a movement that touched them in some way. Any given topic about books seems to be fair game. How Wind in the Willows shaped someone's childhood; What it was like running a subscription library out of a department store; what one particular series of out-of-print mountaineering books has to offer a reader lucky enough to find them...

The contributors are novelists, magazine editors, reporters, librarians... People from all over the place, and they are all writing about something they find quite interesting. This makes for a wonderfully eclectic collection of articles.  While I must admit that I don't read all of the articles immediately, I find I've usually read the entire issue by the time the next one arrives in my mail box.

The journal is run out of a bookshop in London - one that has taken to reprinting out of print books as well as their own quarterly collection of essays.  I expect I'll probably have to visit that shop if I ever go to London...

Oh, and the magazine is just lovely, physically. They use a buff coloured paper stock that feels wonderfully smooth to touch - and my first issue came tied up in a ribbon (seriously). You feel like these people really love books - not only the content, but also the form.

Slightly Foxed has become one of the few journals I have subscribed to for a second year - and, in a real first, I've actually bought a book as a result of reading one of the reviews.  A real book.  Brand new.  In hardcover.  It cost money.  This is not something I usually do.

I would happily recommend this publication to anyone who likes reading - especially if they like discovering works they've never heard of before.  It's a bit like sitting down with a group of bookish friends and asking the question "have you read any good books recently?"

A Fantastic Language

I’ve been looking more closely at Esperanto lately, and I must admit it is a fascinating thing to look at.

When you look at what it was meant to be and the concept behind it, you realise the language is absolutely fantastic, in almost every sense of the word.

The idea – or, rather, ideal – of the language was that everyone in the world would learn it as a second language.  Everyone would, therefore, have at least two languages to use:  their own, and Esperanto.  You could know other languages if you wanted to, but you would be able to communicate with everyone in the world through the shared medium of Esperanto.

Esperanto – a planned language that is intentionally simple, making it more accessible to everyone.  Esperanto – a neutral language that belongs to no one country, so it doesn’t carry any political or cultural baggage.  Esperanto – a language that subtly teaches you how languages work, so that learning further languages becomes easier.  Esperanto – a language that is always and forever a Second Language, so that everyone is in the same boat of having acquired it as a language learner, and no one has the advantage of knowing it as their first language.

Esperanto – which is really fun to say.  I enjoy putting it into random conversations, just because the word feels good rolling off the tongue.  Try it – you’ll feel almost smarter and just a little bit exotic.

Esperanto – a constructed language acting as a free and accessible communication tool, to enable us all to talk as equals and discuss things like rational human beings, rather than going to war or something equally silly.  An idea so powerful that the Nazis felt the need to ban it.

It’s fantastic, in that it is both a wonderful idea and a complete fantasy.

There are a few problems with Esperanto, which get in the way of reaching the ideal.

For one thing, far from everyone learning the language, very few people actually do learn it.  As second languages go, it is mildly more useful than Welsh… but not much.

Then there’s the matter of neutrality.  While it may be politically free of baggage, it isn’t culturally so.  It is a European language – and, significantly, an educated one.  Almost all Esperantists have, or can probably get, a higher education.  If you tried telling a farmer in rural China that a language spoken by European scientists was free of cultural baggage, he would probably tell you that you were wrong.

And while the language might be intentionally simple and useful as a language learning tool (studies have shown that learners in Taiwan find Esperanto easier to learn than English, and English easier to learn after learning Esperanto), it really is a gateway drug to Indo-European languages.  Learning Esperanto won’t really help you with Korean to the same extent that it would help with English or German.

And as for the part where it’s always and forever a Second Language?  Well, that’s not strictly true.  There are actually people who speak it as a first language.

For a planned language that has been around for less than 150 years and failed to take off as a form of diplomatic communication, Esperanto has been surprisingly successful as a family language.  Members of the Esperanto community meet, marry and use the language around the house – which results in their children growing up bilingual or trilingual, with Esperanto as one of their “native” languages. 

The really interesting thing about this phenomenon is that it gives the language more “cred” with the average man on the street.  I’ve had conversations with people who sneered at the very thought of an artificially constructed language until I mentioned the native speakers – and suddenly they took it a little more seriously.  Most people (myself included, until recently) completely miss the point of a constructed language, thinking it’s somehow in competition with “real” languages, or a game rather than a tool.

I’ve just read a very interesting article by Sabine Fiedler (doi: 10.1075/lplp.36.1.04fie) in which she points out that native speakers are confusing the issue when it comes to the role Esperanto is meant to play and it’s worth as a language in general.  In it, she also asks whether the rise of English as an International Language (EIL) means we should stop letting native English speakers decide what is and isn’t right for English.  It’s the first time I’ve ever really stopped to question the way we assume the native speakers are the be-all and end-all of a language. 

Is there an international standard of every language that should be determined by the people using the language as a co-operative tool, rather than the people who grew up with it?

And has EIL completely taken over from what Esperanto was meant to be?  Is there hope for the grand vision of the language yet?

Maybe.  “Esperanto” means “hope” after all…

In Action

When I was a child, I was absolutely held in thrall by an educational programme that would occasionally screen in the mornings on ABC.

The ABC had a programming schedule that would alternate between educational programmes and children's entertainment, depending on the day of the week.  I can't remember exactly which day was which, but if you were watching morning television on, say, a Monday you would see cartoons and such, but if you watched on a Tuesday you'd see programmes about maths and chemistry.  I loved those.

They were part of an educational support programme that ABC was running for schools in the 80s and 90s.  The broadcaster would have a schedule of programmes, which it would send to teachers, and those teachers could then arrange to have their class watch TV at that particular time.  My grade 5 class watched the entire series of something to do with Australian settlers (I can't remember what it was called, but it was something generic like The Colonials).  However, I think most classes at the time couldn't quite structure themselves around live TV, so most teachers asked their schools to buy the videos, if such things were available.

Sadly, my mother insisted on sending me to school, so I didn't get to see many of the educational programmes on ABC but, thanks to the fact that Aunty* ran its scheduling based on the school calendar for the southern states, I could watch a couple of weeks a year when the Queensland holidays ran a week earlier or later.  I was always secretly pleased when any sick days coincided with an episode of Square One (a maths programme), or something equally dorky.

But the show I loved most - and one that would occasionally be screened early on Saturday mornings - was French in Action.

It was actually my mother who got me onto that show.  She had an idea, at the time, that we would watch the programme together and learn French - one she vehemently denies, now.  I don't know how she heard of it, but I do remember her saying that she heard it was a particularly good language programme.

It was.  In fact, I've never seen anything that can compare to it - not just in languages, but in televised classes in general.  FIA was simply one of the best examples of education design I've ever seen.  Even today, whenever I watch an educational show or listen to a podcast, I find myself thinking "that's kind of like what they did in FIA, only FIA did it better..."

If I explain the format, you'll recognise most of it.  Other programmes have used similar techniques before and since.  There was a plot running through the entire series - each episode would show a few short chapters of this ongoing story.  Snippets would be repeated, with particular words highlighted.  Those words would be shown in other context, spoken by a variety of other people in a variety of other settings.  The spelling of the word would be shown, and a mime would act it out - just to drive it home.

Everything (apart from an introduction right at the beginning of each episode explaining what we were about to see) would be entirely in French.  Even the "class discussion" (there was a "class" who would often discuss what was happening in the story) was done entirely in French.  The learner was expected to "pick up" the meaning of the words based on the context(s).

Did it work?

Well, on the one hand I don't speak French. On the other hand, I did spend a lot of my childhood randomly spouting French things like "Je déteste ce!" and "J'suis malade" - these are things I picked up from the programme, and still remember to this day.  I didn't pick up useful things like counting and the days of the week.  They might have been in the episodes I didn't see, or they might have been left out entirely.

When I took myself to French evening classes for one semester in high school, I found myself in the peculiar position of being the only person in the class who couldn't count to ten, but could say entire sentences (albeit rather short ones).

And I have to admit that I'm finding what little French I do know a bit sticky.  I'll occasionally come up with the French word when I'm trying to think of the German or Estonian (both languages I am actually trying to learn at present, as opposed to French, which I'm not).  One day I'll probably start learning French again, and I expect I'll find a few more traces of FIA floating in the back of my brain.

I think I can safely say that FIA gave me a foundation in French that would have proved rather useful if I had built on it by continuing with the language.  What it definitely did, though, was give me a benchmark for educational design.  So often I find myself wondering how we can bring the FIA way of doing things into our own educational what-nots.

And so, just to indulge myself more than anything else, I'd like to finish by outlining six educational design principles that I first discovered in FIA, which I believe are worth pinning to a notice board if you are going to work on a series of vodcasts or podcasts:

1. Never underestimate the value of light entertainment (people engage with stories and anecdotes - they always have and they always will)
2. Give people a heads-up - let them know what they should be seeing and learning as a result of watching (or listening to) this thing.
3. Repeat your keywords.  Feel free to repeat them a little too often.  They become stickier by being slightly annoying.
4. Embrace the pastiche.  By mixing and matching different techniques to emphasis the important parts of your message, you are making sure your audience doesn't start tuning your "voice" out as background noise.
5. Write short and write long.  Each part should be able to stand on its own, but become richer when experienced as part of a bigger picture.  One episode on its own should be perfectly fine.  Three episodes in sequence should be even better.
6. Offer context.  Offer lots of context.  Let them see what you are talking about, and see it from a variety of different angles.

*"Aunty" is a common nickname in Australia for the ABC (from back when it was the Australian Broadcasting Commission).  It indicates something that is a part of the family, but a little bit dowdy.

Formats

So, here I am wondering whether we've reached the point where I should automatically be weeding anything in our collection that's on VHS, when I walk past the store and notice we still have Beta...

Too Many Acronyms Spoil the Broth

Today I was sent an email that started with the following sentence:

"Last Thursday, CAUL approved the CAIRSS Future proposal developed by the CAIRSS Advisory Committee (CAIRSSAC). "

Now, I barely know what CAUL stands for, I have no idea what CAIRSS stands for, and I noticed they very rarely used CAIRSSAC anyway (but they did eventually throw in a COSIAC).  The same email also referred to an ARC and a COP without any description of what these might mean.

I think I was sent this email because I'm part of something for which all of these acronyms must surely serve a meaningful purpose... but I have to admit that I took one look at the wealth of things I did not understand and thought "this email is not for me".

Where poets go to die...

 I had been looking forward to seeing Florence for months.  Florence is the city where English poets went to die.  Keats died there.  Elizabeth Barret Browning died there.  At least one other person I can't remember at present also died there.  I know Byron visited for a while.  I was looking forward to seeing this famously beautiful city which attracted so many poets.  I found it incredibly disappointing.

The day in Florence we had scheduled in our itinerary dropped us in the heart of the old town - where the tourists come in droves and the Italians, Indians and Africans gather in droves to take their money.

Indian and African immigrants apparently try to make a living in Italy by selling baubles to anyone foolish enough to step off a bus and stand still for more than three seconds.  They also have great difficulty hearing, because it doesn't seem to matter if you say "no" (or even, "go away"), they will stand around thrusting their nick-nacks at you until you leave or another bus turns up.  This is, at least, better than the Italian beggars, who will cross themselves continuously and talk earnestly (and incessantly) about their bambini, as if invoking both God and children is a magic formula that can make you forget that you have said "no" several times already.

I have a policy about giving money to people on the street.  If you aren't playing a guitar, I don't have any change.  I'm willing to be flexible about the kind of activity you are performing (I saw a great example of some chalk artists doing their thing in Florence, and I gladly threw money in their hat), but you need to be doing something more than just sticking out your hand.

I found the streets of this part of Florence oppressive, and the Uffizi Gallery, while interesting, suffocating.  It was lovely, up until the point where I decided I had seen enough and I should leave.  I thought the sign that pointed to the cafe, toilets and exit was an indication that, seeing as I was near the cafe and had just used the toilets, I was somehow near the exit.  I kept following the signs that pointed to the exit...  And kept following them... and kept following them...

I found myself travelling through room after room of exhibits of things that would probably have been beautiful and fascinating, if I wasn't getting increasingly desperate to get out of the building.  It just went on and on for ever.  I would begin to suspect that I had actually passed the exit and was now in a different part of the building entirely, when I would see another sign encouraging me to keep going.  I started to feel like was trapped in a labyrinth full of art, antiquities, and three hundred thousand pictures of the Virgin Mary (almost all of them looking like she was either bored or depressed).

Just when I was starting to feel as depressed as the pictures of the saints I had seen (why do they all look miserable?  And why does St Sabastian keep turning up in weird places, looking somehow bored by being magically transported to the birth of Christ?), I found the gift shop.  "Huzzah!" I thought, believing I had finally found the exit.  Except, when I followed the signs, it took me to another gift shop.  And then another.  It was the museum that never ended.  I found myself on the verge of shouting "let me out!  Let me out!" by the time I finally found a door that lead onto the street.

Then I didn't really have time to get further out from the tourist-trapping inner streets.  I decided to come back the next day during my "free time" instead of going to Lucca, just because I wanted to give myself a chance to see the beautiful city that I had been told was here.  I hired a bike and rode around for a bit, and I found the gardens (that aren't free) to be quite wonderful... but in the end I think I would have preferred to see Lucca.  I didn't find the Florence I was looking for.

Kassandra

After reading The Reader with it's short chapters and neat little sections, Christa Wolf's Kassandra was a heck of a change of pace. I started trying to read it side-by-side with the English translation, before quickly realising that a) stream-of-consciousness writing does not work in side-by-side mode, and b) the German version was far too dense.

So I switched to straight English translation (I tip my hat to the translator, Jan Van Heurck, who managed to take a completely delirious text and make it completely delirious). It's cheating, but I am trying to read other texts in German. Books more at my reading level (around about 8 Jahre alt, at present). Krashen (who likes to cite himself), Day and Bamford, Brown and a few other theorists would tell you it's better to read within my level or a little beyond it if I want to actually gain anything, linguistically. Too far out of my depth and it all becomes noise.

Kassandra came out at the same time as Bradley's Mists of Avalon and clearly shared a lot of the same Zeitgeist. Both took an essentially "masculine" series of myths and legends and plonked a priestess smack in the middle of it all.

In Bradley's book it was the Arthurian cycles, and she used Morgaine as the focal point. For Wolf, it was the Battle of Troy seen through the eyes of Cassandra. There are a lot of interesting cross-overs between those two books, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone has already written a thesis about it.

These days, all the stuff about priestesses and goddesses is a bit old hat, but back in the early 80s it would have been very much new shoes (oh, look, I've slipped into The Last Resort again). It's very strange to think that, if I were reading these books back when they were first released, I would be thinking about Feminism* - it would be foremost in my mind, and I would be seeing Feminist messages all over the place throughout both texts.

Having read them in the 2000s, though, I just enjoy the story - I have to be reminded that they are Feminist texts by reading other papers as it simply doesn't occur to me.

I think if I had been given a stronger education in "the classics", I would have found Kassandra terribly clever. I couldn't help shake the feeling that Wolf was using Cassandra's stream-of-consciousness ramblings and her role as an unreliable narrator to weave together various versions of the legends that might not be entirely complementary. However, my knowledge of Troy is sadly lacking. I never read The Iliad (well, who has?), or The Aenid, and I'd only read a little of Euripides. 

Besides that, I had a mild obsession with Greek myths in my childhood that lead me to read a few books about gods and things - but children's books never really go into much detail. So a lot of Kassandra was new and exciting and different... and confusing.

Now feel I need to find other works dealing with Troy in order to figure out what was going on half the time. You know - texts that have a beginning, middle and end.


 *I would also have been three years old, and thus a genius.

The Dare

"Nobody reads The Iliad."

Helen had been telling me about the Kindle App, which she had downloaded onto her smartphone. With great excitement she told me she had already downloaded a few free books - including The Iliad.

(Kindle. App. Smartphone. I wonder how long it will be before those words become complete nonsense once again? A few years from now, will any part of what I've just written make sense apart from the words "book" and "Iliad"?)

I asked her why she went to the trouble of downloading a book she was never going to read.

"I am going to read it," she insisted, "I've been meaning to read it for years."
"You're a librarian. If you were going to read it you could have borrowed it long ago."
"But now I've got it on my phone, so I can just read it wherever I am."

I told her I thought portability was irrelevant. It wouldn't matter how easy it was to access, she still wouldn't read it - nobody reads The Iliad.

"People just download it because it's free and it makes them feel smart to think they might read it one day, but no one reads The Iliad unless they have to."
"Well, I'm going to read it."
"No you won't."
"I'm going to start it tonight!"
"Lots of people start reading it - that doesn't count. You won't finish it."
"I will!"

She almost looked like she believed it.

"Okay," I said, "in that case I dare you to read it."
"What?"
"I dare you to read The Iliad."
"You dare me to read this book?"
"All the way from start to finish. And on your phone. I'll give you... $7.50 if you finish it."
"That's ridiculous."
"It's enough to buy a small coffee and a piece of cake. Maybe. And now I've given you a reason to read The Iliad, and I still don't think you'll do it."

She stared at me, incredulously, for a moment. And then:

"All right, you're on."

I smiled, knowing my money was completely safe.

"You're not going to read The Iliad."

And so these little moments pass into our personal mythologies. A few weeks ago I was talking to another colleague about Greek mythology, and they mentioned The Iliad.

"I've never read The Iliad," said Bronwyn.
"Well," I replied, "No one ever does. A couple of years ago I dared Helen to read it."
"Oh, yeah," said Helen, "That's right, you dared me to read it on my phone..."
"And did you?" asked Bronwyn.
"Um. No."

Nobody reads the Iliad.

The Last Resort

The other day, as I was browsing through the graphic novels in the Teen Fiction section of my local library, I stumbled across The Last Resort.

This seemed a bit odd to me, as it isn't a graphic novel - it's a picture book - and the last time I stumbled across this book it was in the Junior Fiction section. Mind you, that was very possibly a different library.

I can see why people would have difficulty classifying this book - it's an odd bingdingle of a thing. It is a picture book, but it's on the deep side. The book is very literary, and the more classic texts and old movies you've encountered the more you are likely to appreciate it. I would have loved it when I was ten, because I was the kind of freak who wanted to read unabridged classics as a child.

This is a picture book for people who love picture books, and a picture book for people who love literature. It's a book for people like me - which is probably why I've come back to it a few times.

I've borrowed it a couple of times - and will probably buy it if I stumble across it in a store - and I usually read it several times over when I have it in my possession. And yet I don't know if I like it - or, if I do, why. It's strangely compelling, for a book I can't completely engage with.

The Last Resort is clearly Roberto Innocenti's baby. It's the only work I've seen by this illustrator, and I love it. I am completely captivated by every image in the book. I find myself sinking into the pictures and feeling stirred by the hints of story woven into them. The resort he has illustrated is so well realised that I want to jump into his pictures like the chalk drawings in Mary Poppins.

Every now and then I see a picture I wish I'd seen as a child, because I would have loved to let my imagination roam through the image the way I used to when I was a kid. I haven't lost the ability completely, but I know I'm not as good at it as I used to be. The Last Resort is full of images that I want to bubble through my dreams.

But then... But then the story itself is oddly distancing. I don't know what it is, but I just can't sink into the story (as written) the same way I sink into the story as illuminated in the pictures. It's as if the text is moving at a different rhythm to the illustrations.

I've noticed this a few times, when I've found a book that was clearly driven by the illustrator, but not written by him. It's almost as if the writer cannot catch the illustrator's fire the same way the illustrator can catch the writer's. While the story is obviously Innocenti's story, the text is by J. Patrick Lewis. I don't know if it consists of Lewis' original words, or if he translated much for Innocenti, but it seems oddly hollow - as if it is skimming across the surface of the story without diving in.

There's something odd about the way the story is told. It's as though the book is trying to be poetic and prosaic at the same time - inspiring a sense of wonder and mystery, but revealing the answers almost as soon as it poses the questions. There are points where you feel like saying: "No, wait, let me play with this a bit more", but then the story has moved on to something else...

Some of that will be Innocenti's story, and some of it will be Lewis' words - it just always feels as if there's something missing. Some lost opportunity. There are riddles posed at the end of the book that should have been posed at the beginning. There are clues that seem to be delivered almost out of order. In the end, you can't quite work out if it was magical and wondrous, or just a strange little story.

Speaking of the story - it is a little bit magical and wondrous. An artist (Innocenti) has lost his imagination and decides to go on a trip to find it. On a whim, he pulls off the main road onto a dirt track and drives to the end of it - where he finds The Last Resort.

This is a magical beach-side resort (it seems to have the ability to grow rooms at whim and - TARDIS-like - is bigger on the inside) with an odd assortment of guests - all of which have lost something. They seem to have found their way to the resort, and now they are waiting for whatever they've lost to come and find them there. Once they've found it (or it has found them), they have to leave to make room for new guests.

If these characters seem a little familiar, that's probably because you may have read about them before. They are characters from books, writers, historical figures, actors - and there's even one archetype.

The mystery of the book is in working out who these guests are... or is it? The artist doesn't seem to take long puzzling over it. And while some characters are quite obvious, some are never clear.

The mystery of the book is working out how these characters are connected to each other... or is it? There are a few moments, but nothing that actually feels like a story, as such. You find out that one character was looking for another character barely a moment before he finds her.

The mystery of the book is in working out what each character needs to find... but then, you don't learn the other half of each matching set until the very end.

Ah, but what's not to love about a magical sea-side resort run by a parrot in which guests can come from every corner of fiction or history to search for something they've lost?

It's uneven, yet marvellous. I'm not sure I enjoyed reading it the last time, and yet I want to read it again. It will push you and pull you and take you to a place that is so very much worth visiting, yet leave you with a sense of unfinished business.

An odd bingdingle of a book, indeed.

Epic Theatre... and Hitler Dancing

The thing about Brecht is that he was a man on a mission. Two missions, at least - as far as I can tell.

His primary mission was, originally, to shake up theatre. He wanted to take it out of it's fusty, late 19th/early 20th century 3-Act-Drawing-Room structure and make it magical. No longer would a play be penned in by some antiquated "form"! No longer would a playwright be required to use such antediluvian concepts as "beginning", "middle" and "end"! No longer would it be some academic exercise for the elite, but it would become fun - like sport! Throw open the doors and let anything be possible!

Quite admirable, really, and modern theatre owes so much to Brecht and his contemporaries that it's impossible to measure is influence.

His second mission came later but became equally as important, to him, as his first: to use theatre to "show the way". That "way" was, of course, Marxism. Brecht was one of the Bourgeoisie converts to Marxism who thought it was their duty to be the "voice" of the Proletariats until they could rise up and speak for themselves. Not that he really tried to speak for the Proletariat, but rather he wanted to be a beacon for the cause.

No longer was it enough for a play to be "free" from the constraints of the theatre of the past - it had to be a clarion call to the audience, teaching them how dire the world is, so that they would feel the need to change it.

"The word we know is deeply flawed - what are you going to do about it?" That was the drive of his plays in a world faced with the double threat of capitalism and fascism...

... which brings me to Hitler dancing.

I've been researching Brecht for an assignment (the first real literature assignment I've done for many long years), and I borrowed a book compiling his journals for the years between 1934 and 1950.

As I was looking for his comments on Der Gute Mensch von Setzuan, I stumbled across some pictures of what I first thought was a man dressed as Hitler on a film set.

Turns out these were actually stills from a newsreel featuring the man himself - dancing.

Hitler had just been given the news that France had capitulated, and he was so happy he danced a little jig.

Brecht had obviously clipped these pictures and some associated text out of a newspaper or magazine that had printed them, so they were included in his diary and therefore reprinted in this book.

I have to admit that I don't really watch any of the 350,567 documentaries on Hitler that seem to fill the viewing schedule on SBS of a Friday night, but I wonder how many of them show Hitler dancing. Most of the footage I have seen just seems to focus on him pointing a lot and spitting as he talks.

It should probably be noted that Brecht didn't particularly like Hitler. Nor did he like what Hitler was talking the German people into doing. He was so keen on Communism saving Germany from Fascism that he never quite noticed it tipped into Totalitarianism.

Or, at least, he tried not to. His diaries showed that he was reasonably aware that the new order of things wasn't quite right, but he had faith that it could be fixed if everyone just stuck at it.

I wonder what he would make of this new world, where most people remember Communism as a failed experiment that caused more harm than good? The Socialism he (and others like him) advocated was not the same Socialism that caused so much damage to Eastern Europe. The philosophy they dreamed of was hijacked and converted into something else. Would he still be trying to change the world? Would he still be using theatre to do it?

A Prince of Denmark

When I picked up the DVD for the RSC's 2009 production of Hamlet, my first thought was: "David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius? This should rock!"

Sometime later I thought: "Wait a minute, one of those two has already done this..."

It turns out I was right - Patrick Steward played Claudius opposite Derek Jacobi's Hamlet in the BBC film version back in 1980. I had largely blocked that from my memory, due to the fact that it was extremely boring.

Maybe it was the video quality of the tape I watched in high school, but it seemed too dark and muted to be able to really understand what was happening on screen half the time, and the actors were all so... "actorly" that it was hard to actually engage with the drive of the story. Plus, as a teenager, I couldn't quite forgive or accept the fact that Jacobi was clearly around the same age (maybe older) than the actors playing his "parents".

I get that Hamlet is the ultimate "actor's role", and everyone who has every played him wants to be imortalised as one of the definitive Hamlets. I realise that's why it is so tempting for an actor who played Hamlet on stage in his 30s to have a crack at the role on screen twenty years later... but it's just not good. Hamlet is a young man's role, and needs youthful engergy rather than mature gravitas.

This can be a bit odd, in the grand scheme of things, because I felt Branagh was too old for the role when he filmed it at the age of 36, but Tennant seemed to carry off the youthfulness much better, even though he was 38. Olivier was 37, and seemed more "wet" than "youthful", and Gibson was 34 but looked like he was trying to hard to act young and reckless. Branagh didn't really try to act youthful, which is guess is better than trying and failing.

Jacobi, though, was just too old. He should have let someone else play the role on screen. Same with Ethan Hawke. Not because he was too old for the role (at 29 he was the perfect age), but because he was terrible.

I thought the Hawke film would have been worth watching just to see Julia Styles in the role of Ophelia. She wasn't half bad, but the rest of the film was rubbish. It was really only interesting for the fencing scene on the rooftop. Apart from that, it just gave you the opportunity to note that Ethan Hawke belongs with Keanu Reeves in the catagory of "actors who should never be allowed to perform Shakespeare again".

There were, oddly, a few similarities between the Hawke version, which I didn't like at all, and the Tennant version, which I quite enjoyed. Both shifted the play out of it's original historical setting to something more "nowish" - which allowed Hamlet to dress like a modern slob at points. The way both Hamlets used hand-held cameras was also a similarity. Another was the way some scenes just didn't fit at all in this new setting.

The fencing scenes were strangely disjointed in both films because of the modernisation. In a historical context it makes perfect sense for the young men to all be involved in sword sports. It would have been a fairly common thing for men of their station to do. But when everything has been moved up to the 21st Century, fencing becomes more of a specialty activity and it's oddly surprising to have them suddenly put on white jackets and start waving swords around.

I felt as if it was a bit of a deus ex machina moment in both films. "Oh, we need to stab people with poison things now so... tada! They fence! Isn't that neat?"

I don't know why, but I would have preferred to see the fencing gear earlier in the piece. Someone should have been playing with a sword, or practising some moves, or polishing their fencing trophies... anything. It just needed some forshadowing in the modernised version to make it seem less contrived.

Mind you, it's been so long since I saw the Hawke version that I can't say for certain they didn't do this. I just remember feeling the scene was so out of place in a modernisation that it should have been replaced with some other activity - a game of pool or something.

I did enjoy Tennant's portrayal of Hamlet, - he was the first actor I've seen who made me understand that Hamlet was actually sad (grieving the loss of someone he loved very much) and not just depressed - but I also felt the film was lacking something. I can't put my finger on it.

Maybe I've just seen too many version of Hamlet. They all have different strengths and weaknesses and you will never find one that hits every mark for every viewer.

Wonder who'll be in the next one?

He said: "She has a lovely face..."

Tennyson rocks my world a little bit. He's a great poet, and he likes writing about the same things I like reading about, so it all works out quite well, really. The fact that I haven't read more of his poems than I have always befuddles me - I know I will enjoy them, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I must fix that one of these days.

I have always loved his version of the Lady of Shalott. Mallory's version is just depressing (and part of the reason behind my undying hatred for Launcelot), but Tennyson's is incredibly beautiful... and depressing.

Well, they both end with the main character both a) dying and b) experiencing unrequited love that directly lead to the dying, so you can't really get away from the depressing aspect of it. But where Mallory's version of the tale is all about Launcelot being a jerk, Tennyson's is this sweet, lyrical character study in which Launcelot is an innocent bystander - the tale is more tragic and less obnoxious the way he tells it.

And then Loreena McKennitt put it to music.

By all that's bright and colourful, McKennitt's setting of the poem is one of the most gloriously beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard. It doesn't matter how often I've heard it, I still get shivers down my spine when she sings the lyric:

She left the web, she left the loom
She made three paces through the room

It's hard to explain if you've never read the poem (or heard the song), but that's the moment where a young girl's yearning to see something real for the first time in her life seals her doom. McKennitt's vocals ever so subtly draw attention to that - three paces were all that had separated the girl from her window. Three paces that she had never walked before for fear of some nebulous curse (that turned out to be true).

It's just the perfect complement - a brilliant match between an excellent poet and a fine musician. Maybe you won't quite find it as inspiring as I do, but I feel I should share it anyway:



God, in his mercy, lend her grace...