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...