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170 posts tagged life
“Censorship is not good for art, and it is even worse for artists themselves. The work of Ai Weiwei survives; the artist himself has an increasingly difficult life. The poet Ovid was banished to the Black Sea by a displeased Augustus Caesar, and spent the rest of his life in a little hellhole called Tomis, but the poetry of Ovid has outlived the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam died in one of Stalin’s labor camps, but the poetry of Mandelstam has outlived the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered in Spain, by Generalissimo Franco’s goons, but the poetry of Lorca has outlived the fascistic Falange. So perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor, and perhaps it often is. Artists, however, are vulnerable.”
Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:
1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable … They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring some great…
Aspirations.
“It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to ‘ideate’ the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself…Among…possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not…To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity…”
From Ortega y Gasset’s London essay, “History as a System” in Philosophy and History, ed. 1936 (“by compulsion” italicized by author), as quoted in Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending, p. 140 - 141)
“This is the big problem for those who feel too much, who understand too much: we might be many things, but we only have one life, and that life requires us to be just one thing: what other people think we are.”
Antonio Tabucchi, from the preface to Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: poesie, appunti, lettere, Feltrinelli, 2010, my transl.
[ “Questo è il grande problema di coloro che sentono troppo e capiscono troppo: che potremmo essere tante cose, ma la vita è una sola e ci obbliga a essere solo una cosa, quella che gli altri pensano che noi siamo.” ]
Tabucchi, the great Italian novelist and critic and translator of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry, died yesterday of cancer in Lisbon.
Oh! l’unica parte importante della vita è il raccoglimento. Quando tutti lo comprenderanno con la chiarezza ch’io ho tutti scriveranno. La vita sarà letteraturizzata. Metà dell’umanità sarà dedicata a leggere e studiare quello che l’altra metà avrà annotato. E il raccoglimento occuperà il…
The incredible Byronic invited to me to recount my Christmas adventures in Ankara last year for No Borders Magazine.
“It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies—not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.”
Kafka, Tagebucher (via kateoplis)
Tagebucheintrag am 18. October 1921.
[“Es ist sehr gut denkbar, daß die Herrlichkeit des Lebens um jeden und immer in ihrer ganzen Fülle bereit liegt, aber verhängt, in der Tiefe, unichbar, sehr weit. Aber sie liegt dort, nicht feindselig, nicht widerwillig, nicht taub. Ruft man sie mit dem richtigen Wort, beim richtigen Namen, dann kommt sie. Das ist das Wesen der Zauberei, die nicht schafft, sondern ruft.”]
(via catherinewillis)
Tree of Life at Tragos HQ
Mrs. Tragos, Baby Tragos and I finally saw Tree of Life last night. Here are a few of my thoughts:
- Malick is the master of making beauty out of menace and menace out of beauty.
- Some of my favorite shots in the movie were during the “nature through time” sequence near the beginning.
- I thought that Malick did such a good job of exploring the themes of Job through cinematic means he didn’t need to mention his Biblical source once, much less twice.
- Mrs. Tragos and I were both annoyed by the whispered series of Jobian questions that permeate scenes exploring both nature and grace. It’s as if Malick’s respectable earnestness undercuts his confidence in his ability to communicate through the art he’s such a master of.
- The actor who plays boy-Jack was incredible. And eerily similar to Sean Penn.
- The multiple scenes of encroaching menace echoed against each other beautifully.
- The final scene where grace is literalized on the shore is just as disappointing as the final, 42nd Chapter of Job.
- The interplay of macrocosm and microcosm was anything but a gimmick.
- People who accuse the movie of pretentiousness don’t understand the meaning of “pretentious”. As in, you pretend to be something you are not. You can accuse Malick of an almost aggressive earnestness, but not of pretention.
- I am getting very tired of Hollywood’s commentary on 1950’s suburbia.
- I’m glad Malick chose to treat Jack’s adulthood with such nimble cinematic short-hand. Anything more would have been too much.
- Malick’s movies have an ancient sort of charisma, the kind that stems from kharis, meaning “favor,” or “grace.” You can’t say that about many movies.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter Scottie at college:
“Once one is caught up into the material world, not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.”
“Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some people deserve to be marginalized and excluded. There are many questions in this world over which rational people can have sensible confrontations: whether lower taxes stimulate or stagnate growth; whether abortion is immoral; whether the ’60s were an achievement or a disaster; whether the universe is motivated by a force for benevolence; whether the Fonz jumping on water skis over a shark was cool or lame. Whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is not one of these questions.”
Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare? - NYTimes.com (via markcoatney)
I agree with the first two lines completely, and as I tend to consider other people’s opinions in this light, I also put my own opinions out there on both sides of the table. Everyone is welcome to their own opinions, but it should be assumed that some opinions are a great deal more well thought-out than others.
(via spytap)
Yes, yes, and yes.
However….
(You just knew there would be a however, right?)
What I’m seeing is a lot of knee-jerk dismissal and blinkered assumptions that because there is
a) a big Hollywood movie about the subject that is
b) directed by a guy who makes a lot of dumb movies where things blow up, that it must follow that
c) this is a stupid idea that the guy came up with on his own, or that
d) this is a stupid idea that low culture “Hollywood” came up with to trash something of high cultural value.
Except that the authorship question is centuries old. People who have professed doubts about the identity of the author have included Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, Orson Welles, and Walt-fricking-Whitman.
Now, just because some websites say some famous people said something doesn’t make it true, obviously. But there has been a lot of serious scholarship devoted to the question. Sure it could all be wrong, absolutely. But there are two things that give me pause:
1) The little bit that I’ve read on the authorship debate, the Oxfordians and the other advocates of alternate authors seem (I know, seem) to be trying to advance an argument based on evidence and logic. Whereas the overwhelming amount of Stratfordian argument I’ve seen have been comprised of ad-hominem attacks dripping with condescension and shot through with the assumption that things are true just because they’ve always been thought to be true and how dare we question the received wisdom. These are usually the rhetorical devices used when a logical argument can’t hold up anymore. It says much more about the rage and closed-mindedness of the people making the argument than it does about the subject being debated.
2) Does the identity of the author of the plays change the value of the plays? Not in the least. Does it rob someone of credit? Maybe, except the people involved have been dead for centuries and don’t really care anymore. What exactly would be lost if it was proven that Oxford or Bacon or somebody else wrote the plays? Nothing, as far as I can see. But the gains would be immeasurable.
At the end of the day, the authorship debate is a fantastic STORY. That’s what I love about Shakespeare - the stories. Which is why I find the debate fascinating and wish that everybody who cares more about mudslinging would just knock it off.
Let the researchers research. Let the storytellers tell stories.
Schedule depending, I’ll be at Anonymous opening night.
(via jaybushman)
Jay Bushman is smart. I’m glad to know and be friends with him.
(via spytap)
Okay, look. I really don’t want to get drawn into this. But I want to say just a few things.
People are not dismissing this debate because it was “thought up by Hollywood” or because they think it’s “low culture” or because they are clinging to the way things have always been. They are dismissing this debate because there IS NO DEBATE. I have studied with professors ranging from the most Ivy League/traditional/white male to the most liberal/willing to question academic tradition (including a professor who was denied tenure because he questioned so many traditional ways of teaching literature), and not one has ever suggested that it would be profitable to question Shakespeare’s authority. I could get into specifics here (there are absolutely “arguments” for Shakespeare’s identity that are not based on ad hominem attacks or illogical rage), but I don’t think this is really the forum for that.
I acknowledge that this is a somewhat hyperbolic comparison, but the Shakespeare authorship “debate” reminds me of the “debate” over global warming. In both cases, the experts in the field are in consensus on the issue, but people pop up here and there saying “it’s a conspiracy!” and “The experts are too liberal/traditional/elitist!” It’s not a conspiracy. There is no debate among people who know the most about this field.
We could ask “What if Dante wasn’t Dante?” We don’t have any photographs of him, right? No exact birthdate, no family tree, no exact date of his marriage, only “speculative” sources on many of the supposed details of his life. But we don’t ask that question. Why?
We don’t question the identity of people like Dante because he was enough among the upper class to have gotten involved in a political faction on behalf of which he was eventually sent to the Pope as a delegate. This brings me to my last problem with the Shakespeare “debate.” Shakespeare, of course, never met the Pope. He was born, married, and died in a town dedicated to slaughtering sheep. He did not go to a fancy school. Wikipedia (yes, even that bastion of false information largely dismisses the authorship question as baseless) notes that proponents of the “Shakespeare-wasn’t-Shakespeare” theory “often portray the town as a cultural backwater lacking the environment necessary to nurture a genius, and have depicted Shakespeare as ignorant and illiterate.”
At its heart, the authorship debate is inherently classist.
The works attributed to Shakespeare contain so much thought, so much understanding of human nature, so much vibrant language! No lower-class man could ever write them!
Needless to say, I have a problem with that.
None of this is to say that I hate the people who wrote the movie, or the people who are going to see the movie. Who cares! Go see it! I have no problem with enjoyment of entertainment as entertainment. I highly doubt the screenwriters or the director or the actors actually believe that someone besides Shakespeare wrote his works—they just see it as a fun story. And that’s great. I read The Guns of the South. I enjoyed it. I like imagining alternate histories. The only reason I felt compelled to respond at this much length is that it worries me when people take these enjoyable fictions as legitimate realities.
(via ewilcox)
MY TWO CENTS
I totally agree with Elizabeth on the classist nature of the Shakespeare authorship debate, and as far as I am concerned, for me personally there is no debate either. I simply do not care who wrote the plays.
However, I have listened with fascination to the arguments put forward by a number of Shakespearean doubters; for years I worked at the Globe under Mark Rylance, and he’s just one of the most eminent - and eloquent - doubters in the world (although I may be wrong but I thought he was a Baconian for a long time, and quite why he’s now jumping on the Oxfordian wagon I don’t know. I will ask.)
Moreover, I’m somebody who watches and writes about a lot of films, theatre, literature and fictions of all kinds. I’m totally willing and prepared to enjoy both big blockbusters and fantasies set in historical periods about which I happen to know quite a lot (Elizabeth is another example; do I need to say Shakespeare in Love? Even Welles’ masterful Chimes at Midnight is pretty silly when it comes to historical accuracy).
Having said all that, I’ve actually seen Anonymous, and I thought it was pretty bad, in a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way. I laughed out loud a number of times, sometimes WITH it, but most of the time AT it. I bet you that in two years’ time, this film will be the one Early Modernists all over the globe play drinking games to.
PS. I should add that if you really want to learn something about Shakespeare in the cinema, Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus is the film you should watch. And I’m not just saying this because I’m a bit partial to the Fiennes who wasn’t Shakespeare.
(via byronic)
Tragos-endorsed thoughts on Shakespeare (and Dante!) by Elizabeth and Byronic.
(via byronic)
