man karatono didam , vaghean mahsharan !
ehtemal dare ye order pisheton dashte bashim !

mikhastam ghablesh gheimate 2 chizo bedonam
tarahi psd hosting ( only psd va bedon code )
tarahi kol ( graphic o code )

lotf konid ba takhfif begid hatman !
chon karaye ziadi darim age ke enshalla biaym mozahemeton shim
pas rah biayn :)

tanx

(via email, in comic sans)

I’m still reading about Victorian women tramping in exotic deserts in search of antiquities to crate up and ship back to their “civilized” countries (where most remain to this day, but only the citizens of the original countries will call it “looting”). But in the meantime, in honor of the winter winds:

Avoid the month Lenaeon, wretched days, all of them
fit to skin an ox, and the frosts which are cruel when Boreas blows over
the earth. He blows across horse-breeding Thrace upon the wide sea and
stirs it up, while earth and the forest howl. On many a high-leafed
oak and thick pine he falls and brings them to the bounteous earth in
mountain glens: then all the immense wood roars and the beasts shudder
and put their tails between their legs, even those whose hide is covered
with fur; for with his bitter blast he blows even through them although
they are shaggy-breasted. He goes even through an ox’s hide; it does not
stop him. Also he blows through the goat’s fine hair. But through the
fleeces of sheep, because their wool is abundant, the keen wind Boreas
pierces not at all; but it makes the old man curved as a wheel. And it
does not blow through the tender maiden who stays indoors with her
dear mother, unlearned as yet in the works of golden Aphrodite, and who
washes her soft body and anoints herself with oil and lies down in an
inner room within the house, on a winter’s day when the Boneless One
gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home; for the
sun shows him no pastures to make for, but goes to and fro over the land
and city of dusky men, and shines more sluggishly upon the whole
race of the Hellenes. Then the horned and unhorned denizens of the wood,
with teeth chattering pitifully, flee through the copses and glades, and
all, as they seek shelter, have this one care, to gain thick coverts or
some hollow rock. Then, like the Three-legged One whose back is
broken and whose head looks down upon the ground, like him, I say, they
wander to escape the white snow.

–Hesiod, from Works and Days (via Project Gutenberg).

It’s my favorite kind of sky—the kind that blows dark clouds across slanting sunlight and you can just feel the rain coming on. It’s hard to do anything but walk and look, so that is mostly what Ray and I did, with Tacitus in the earphones as a kind of sound track to the weather. I’m coming back to Tacitus, actually, having gone through the Histories at some point last year. I think when I was trying to come to terms with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus—which was a struggle. Tacitus was among his source materials, and therefore I decided to read him. Because lately I’ve been reading with the idea that context is everything, and because I’ve always been willing to be blown (like the clouds above me this afternoon?) across literature from book to book to book.

Tacitus, it turns out, is better than Hesiod for gardening. Especially the kind of gardening that requires attacking last year’s recalcitrant weeds and clumps of grass and digging them out of the beds with nothing more than a hoe and a pair of hedge clippers. He’s all mutinies and violence, murder and machinations and dreadful punishments, is Tacitus. But he still manages to bring out the character and the nature of the men he writes about. It sounds like absolute madness from my perspective (as I hack hack hack away), but there is virtue there. And I can almost believe it when Edith Hamilton writes that the great gift of the Romans to civilization was the rule of law.

I’ve been in the garden, obviously. Sawing up old trees with the pruning saw mom and dad bought me, and feeling profoundly grateful for the leather gardening gloves they bought me as well. The beds are laid out, now I just need the extra dirt and compost.

I was listening to Hesoid, Work and Days, while I raked, sawed, hoed, pruned, clipped and cleared. I thought it would be appropriate. I went through it twice, but I think I’m going to give up on him. I like the notion of these long poetical works on practical and scientific subjects—Hesiod on farming, Lucretius on science (“the nature of things”), Virgil’s Georgics. But while Virgil is very beautiful, filled with vivid pictures of working the lands in season, and while Lucretius still manages to sing-song his way to a theory of an infinite universe (I love that his “proof” that all matter contains empty space is contained in the fact that you can hear sounds in another room, even if the door is closed), Hesiod is none of these things. His poem is pedantic and dry. It may be the translation that is wanting, but since the translator of the version I’m listening to is Richmond Lattimore, I think not. Mostly it is—at least on agriculture—a collection of directives: “On this day, sow your corn. On this one, harvest your grapes.” Useful, no doubt, but a far cry from Virgil, who tells us how birds fly up all of a sudden when they sense an oncoming storm, and how the light from the oil lamp in front of the girls working at their looms will gutter without warning, in portent of the same. Or how to tell if the soil of the land is light and good, or sour, by filling a leaky basket with the dirt and pouring water through, so that you can taste the run off for bitterness or salt.

If I had an ounce of poetry in me I’d write something like Georgics for my garden, which is, at the moment, a collection of raked and empty beds. Like my empty bookcases from last week, they are all potential and possibility.

Oddly enough, King John is nearly the least interesting character in it. He doesn’t really come into his own until Acts IV and V, when things are going seriously downhill for him. But I suppose that’s par for the course in Shakespeare. It is our disintegrations that most interest the Bard.

In the BBC production, the show was stolen by Mary Morris (Queen Elinor), Claire Bloom (Constance) and the guy who plays Philip Faulconbridge, also known as Richard, “the Bastard.”  In fact, in terms of roles he’s the most interesting guy in the play. He’s kind of a running jester/cynic/commentator on what’s going on, although his cynicism gradually gives way to actual sense of purpose. He’s the only person in the whole play who develops as a character.

Mary Morris did a great job as Elinor, coming across as self-possessed and ambitious, and a bit scary–not above using seduction if the occasion calls for it. (Some really strange scenes there between her and the Bastard, who becomes, in effect, her knight). Shakespeare has a knack for writing impressive older women.

So the play was fascinating and frustrating by turns. The best parts and best lines went to characters who just vanish between one Act and the next. Through all of Act III Elinor and Constance rail at each other (and its a thing of beauty), then suddenly, they’re gone. Died, off stage, erased from the story. And suddenly too, the Dauphin–when introduced one might think a wet blanket had more personality than he–suddenly he’s front and center, leading invasions into England, sneering at all and sundry.

I know alot of my complaints are based on a modern sense of narrative and character development, but really, the whole story is so fractured, it’s hard to think about it in its entirety. I keep focusing on small scenes and actions instead. Lovely little bits like Hubert’s description of the civil unrest–of a tailor, in such haste to tell the news to his friend the smith that he put his shoes on the wrong feet before he ran out into the street:

I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news;
Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,
Told of a many thousand warlike French
That were embattailed and rank’d in Kent

I love stuff like that in Shakespeare. It makes you realize that he must have absorbed life like a sponge. Nothing seems too small to be unworthy of notice or comment.

King John, then, is a drama where the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. In this play, the men are mostly foolish, the women mostly wise, and the children all are sacrifices.

Conversation

The tree said to the sunlight:
How is it I do not grow tired?

The sun said to the evergreen:
You are what I turn into

When I want to touch the earth.

The Soul Tree ended up as an Okra Pick from Southern indie booksellers, despite its list price of $49.95. (We used soy ink and environmentally-friendly printing methods, said the author, because we couldn’t do a book celebrating nature and destroy it in the process). But what I like about the poems is their immediacy, against the eternal feeling of mountains and old trees.

Some of the plays, however, are proving elusive. As it turns out, Pericles is not high up on anyone’s list of Shakespeare-that-must-be-performed. So to help keep my resolution, I procured for myself a copy of the Arkangel Shakespeare, a massive box of full audio productions of each play on CD.  And I’m going through them one by one, approximately in order of when they were written.

I’ve already written about some of them:

Henry VI, parts i, ii, and iii

Richard III

Richard III may well be my favorite Shakespeare play, my distressing introduction notwithstanding.

But now I am onto A Comedy of Errors, which after Richard seems positively fluffy.  And I made several discoveries:

First, in the Arkangel production David Tennant plays Antipholus of Syracuse, and even just listening to the performance, without actually seeing it, it was awfully hard not to think “That’s the Doctor!”  For a few scenes I amused myself with wondering where they would put the TARDIS in the set.

More importantly, though, was the discovery that Comedy of Errors relies heavily on visual cues and mistaken impressions and what my friend Lev calls “smart staging.”  I had already had trouble deciphering the fight scenes in the Henry VI plays, so you can imagine my confusion here.

Nevertheless, the play had its moments–the point where Dromio (of Syracuse) is describing to his master the “beauties” of a kitchen wench that is convinced they are to be married is pretty hilarious:

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

Then she bears some breadth?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE

No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip:
she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out
countries in her.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

In what part of her body stands Ireland?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE

Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.

Antipholus finds this a great joke, and goes on to name all the countries, to which Dromio responds with some awful insult against the lady’s looks for each.  America, “…embellished with/ rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich/aspect to the hot breath of Spain; who sent whole/ armadoes of caracks to be ballast…” is to be found on the poor woman’s nose. I’m sure by the end of the bit Shakespeare’s audiences were howling.  (You can read the full exchange here)

I did get to see an actual production of the play, put on by our Youth Shakespeare Company for our local outdoor “Shakespeare on the Green” festival. Everyone in the company is under 18. The actors playing the two Dromios were around 12. This took some getting used to–especially since the actors playing the two Antipholus’ were closer to 16 or 17. (And the girl playing the ugly kitchen maid was at least this old). So the physical comedy was a little strange. And the play had been edited slightly to get rid of some of the more salacious inuendos (including the entire exchange above), which did little to alleviate the oddity of the scenes in any case. But perhaps it was in keeping. Certianly in Shakespeare’s time many of the parts–especially the female parts–would have been played by young pretty boys.

In any case, I was glad to actually see the performance, and to have a visual in my mind for when I listened, for the second time, to the audio.  After becoming so involved with Richard III, Comedy of Errors was perhaps doomed to pale. But the ready wit, and the clever, playful language was still very much in evidence. I was not moved, but I was certainly entertained.

He, or rather his wife, actually once inspired me to write a poem–an impulse that is about as rare in me as the moon traveling with Jupiter and Venus is in the night sky. So here, in honor of Jack Alford, is the poem:

What’s beautiful

Mary Lou stands, round-shouldered,
frail fingers tearing
bits of bread and tossing
them as far as bits of bread
can be tossed.

Gulls sail down white-winged
alighting only long enough
to snatch a crust and lift away–
as if the ground flung them
back into the air.

Beauty is not in the waves of white birds
wings bright in the sunlight
of a perfect morning.
Their beating wings and open beaks
frighten her.

Beauty is in her tremulous hands,
holding out scraps and crusts.
In the good money she spends
on bread she won’t eat
to feed birds she doesn’t like

because Jack–after sixty years
of providing for her–is laid flat
from knee surgery, drowning
his pain in glass after glass of scotch.
Because he likes to feed birds
and can’t.

When he can walk, he’d walk
to the ends of the earth for her.
And beauty is in her quick, forced tosses,
the frightened way she snatches
back her hand and ducks
under the wings, flinches
under their cries, stands
at the ends of the earth
for him.

And what a surprise and delight. This book is no mere attempt to corral language and bend it to Johnson’s will. It is like a million jumping off points for philosophical argument and debate. How did I miss this? The cheap Penguin classics copy of the Dictionary–horribly abridged and therefore all the more tantalizing and titillating–is now my constant companion. And when I need a distraction I find myself opening it to random words:

IN’JURY: 1. Hurt without justice.

I find myself thinking that “justice” –its presence or lack–is no longer so obviously an aspect of the word.

Then there are the words that have been lost, and sadly so:

To QUOB [a low word] To move as the embrio does in the womb; to move as the heart does when throbbing.

(I’m mourning the loss of this word)

To GRU’BBLE. To feel in the dark.

For which Johnson’s example is this, from Dryden:

Thou hast a colour;
Now let me rowl and grubble thee:
Blinkd men say white feels smooth, and
black feels rough:
Thou has a ruffed skin; I do not like
thee.

And then there are the words whose meanings have altered until they are almost foreign to us:

NICE: adj. 1. Accurate in judgement to minute exactness; superfluously exact. It is often used to express culpable delicacy.

There are eight different definitions ranging from delicate and refined to squeamish and fastidious.  But the one definition that is NOT present is “kind” or “sweet” or “civil.”

Of the Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and the the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.