King Lear
Shakespeare
Obviously one of the greatest plays ever written, & probably my favorite among Shakespeare's tragedies (I'm too much like Hamlet to have that as my favorite!). I'll just restrict myself to one thing here: my standard Shakespeare since I started reading him decades ago has been the Signet Classic edition. I bought myself each volume, long ago, until I had all 40, even having to ask a local bookstore owner to order for me the ones I could not find on occasional trips to the mall's B Dalton or Walden books (remember those?). I have, & have read, other editions, but Signet Classic was my basic. Time is taking its toll on everything & my copies are starting to fall apart. This time around my copy of Lear literally split in two, just like his kingdom. I sure did get my 75 cents worth out of that purchase, though.
All's Well That Ends Well
Shakespeare
I've actually already re-read this one! I'll tell a little story about the one time I saw it, on a far too rare trip to London, long ago. It was at the Royal Shakespeare Company, & the director made the brilliant choice to set it during the First World War, a time of great social upheaval, particularly in the roles of women, which put Helena's work as a doctor in a social perspective. Peggy Ashcroft played the Countess Rousillon, in her last stage appearance. I knew who she was & was excited to get a chance to see her on stage. And she was absolutely extraordinary. She was lambent, & I mean that literally: she seemed to glow with an internal light. Her performance is what I mostly remember from that long-ago staging. I have never seen anything like her luminosity, before or since. For a while I cynically, briefly, thought that it was just stage lighting. But then I realized that that couldn't be the case – if it were, everyone would have themselves lit that way. If you had enough money, you'd have the proper lighting follow you around wherever you went, from soiree to drugstore, the effect was that extraordinary. So I bow to the shining memory of the great Peggy Ashcroft.
The Two Noble Kinsmen
Shakespeare & John Fletcher
This one is also a bit static, at least in reading, though I've seen a DVD from the Globe & it seems to work quite well on stage. It's difficult not to feel that at points probably Fletcher is playing off his collaborator's previous work (specifically, the madness of the Jailer's Daughter, which hearkens back to Ophelia's), & of course the whole thing is working off Chaucer. It does have one line that has reverberated in my head for years: "On the sinister side the heart lies". This is on the one hand simply a factual statement: sinister means left, & the heart is on the left side of the body. On the other hand, sinister has some obviously threatening connotations, & lies also does double-duty as "location" & "telling untruths". A haunting set of puns.
The Tempest
Shakespeare
Another work whose familiarity may disguise for us how enchanting & very strange it is.
Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History
Yunte Huang
A very interesting biography/cultural history centered on Anna May Wong, a brilliant performer whose career was limited by, guess what, American racism. Huang has also written books about Chang & Eng, the original "Siamese" twins (now usually called conjoined twins) & about Charlie Chan; he conceives of this book as part of a trilogy about the Chinese-American experience as seen through these particular lenses. I found it an absorbing read, though occasionally there were some assertions that threw me: one that sticks in my mind is that the Supreme Court ended Prohibition. It took a constitutional amendment to do that, not a Court decision. That's a relatively minor point. I'd be interested in reading his other books.
Time Regained
Proust
There's always the feeling, each time one finishes something like In Search of Lost Time & puts it on a list like this, that there should be some sort of profound summation. Instead I've realized that this novel has seeped so deeply into my viewpoint & even personality that it is impossible to dismiss it with a summation, no matter what profundities I manage to throw in there. It is simply one of the books of my life. As I assume I mentioned earlier, I've read it about every ten years or so, since back when it was regularly referred to with Scott Moncrieff's evocative & Shakespearean but inaccurate title Remembrance of Things Past. When I finished this time I will admit I wondered if maybe I was now done with reading & re-reading Proust, but lately I find myself referring to different themes & scenes & pondering different elements & I'm thinking now it will make its way back into the rotation at some point, & I will see how I have changed since our last encounter, & how it has shifted its prisms during my time.
Cymbeline
Shakespeare
I have the feeling this play used to be a lot more popular (maybe just on stage) than it is now (I'm basing this on the delightful collection of Shaw's Shakespeare reviews, which I read avidly many years ago). I've always loved it, partly for its mishmash of different times & places & partly for the amazingly convoluted finale, which step by step unravels the absurdly complicated plot (& as if it weren't complicated enough, right before Act 5 begins Shakespeare throws in some more, completely gratuitous, complications in the form of a dream sent to Posthumus in prison).
Radical Hollywood
Paul Buhle & David Wagner
An encyclopedic look at attempts to convey leftist political messages in Hollywood films. Not surprisingly, despite the political hay made by right-wingers over Communist (or generally leftist) influence on American entertainment, it was a constant, often unsuccessful struggle against timidity & the self-interest of capitalism. The progressivism was generally economic (rather than, say, concentrated on civil rights), which may have made it more suspect. For popular entertainment, Hollywood sure doesn't push for the people (or The People, to use the lingo, which of course refers only to some of the people). Nice to see some respect paid to these idealists, who often suffered for their attempts to bring some thoughtful political depth to mass entertainment.
Coriolanus
Shakespeare
This is another one that gets more fascinating each time I encounter it (which is often enough so that, again, my copy is falling apart). The complex portrayals of both aristocrats & plebes is just endlessly prismatic. Since I mentioned seeing Peggy Ashcroft on stage, I will name-drop seeing Ian McKellan in the title role of this play, also on a trip to London. As I was leaving the show, I overheard two old ladies, one telling the other that she wasn't sure about McKellan's looks, as she had always pictured Coriolanus as "a big, rough, hairy fellow". No idea where she got this, or what she got out of the play, but considering his complicated relationship with his formidable mother, a certain dependent boyishness seems essential to the role.
What Is Remembered
Alice B Toklas
I had read this many years ago, & reread it last year as I was thinking about it in the context of all the other Stein & Stein-related books I've been reading. It's quite poignant, evocative & often rather poetic, but also cagey: Toklas tells what she wants to tell, & the book ends when Stein's life does. An interesting sidelight into a relationship that was more complex than it sometimes seems. (I think I first read this in high school – on my own, of course, not as part of a class – & it's linked with the memory of my French teacher mentioning once the days when he worked in a bank in Paris & one day a fellow teller drew his attention to a dried-up old lady at another window: "That's the famous Alice B Toklas," he informed my future teacher. I wonder if anyone in the class besides me was dazzled by this glimpse of a vanished world.)
The Book of Revelation: A Biography
Timothy Beal
This book is part of a fascinating series published by Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, which are basically reception histories of some of the world's key spiritual texts. This is a relatively brief book that covers a lot of ground: the background of Revelation, its strange & sometimes controversial fit with the rest of the approved books of the Bible, the ways it has been interpreted, not just theologically but politically & cinematically, & the some of the author's own history as someone who grew up in an evangelical Protestant household that believed in the end-times. In addition to the words of John, Beal also covers visual interpretations of the book (& it is one of the more vividly visual books of the Bible), from the famous woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer to movies of the sort that play not at the cineplex but at evangelical churches. Rich & engrossing.
Measure for Measure
Shakespeare
I've always found this one of the most fascinating plays in the canon. I had read it a couple of times before going to college, but I read it again of course for more than one class; I recall one discussion session in which the opening topic was whether Isabella was "frigid" or not (I will mention right now that the professor was a woman, & a self-described feminist). Something about this approach –starting off with Isabella's presumed sexual peculiarities – struck me as wrong-headed, but I wasn't quite able to formulate my objections (&, being fairly timid about speaking in class, I'm not sure I would have said anything anyway). The point, to me, was that it didn't matter what Isabella's sexual make-up was: she was being coerced by Angelo into having sex with him, & that's rape, regardless of what was going on with her (& she was, of course, planning to enter a strict order of nuns). I'm not saying that the class was defending Angelo, but they were starting with "what's the deal with Isabella?", which struck me as t he wrong way around. What's the deal with Angelo, who, in a city overfull with sex workers, has to single out & victimize the one woman who, in austerity & integrity, most resembles him? Why does he need to humiliate this mirror of himself? Years later, during the notorious confirmation hearings for the notorious Clarence Thomas, I read an editorial that compared him to Othello. That struck me as a stretch, & a comparison prompted mostly by their mutual skin color (at this point I have no idea who the writer was or what newspaper or magazine I read it in). I remember thinking, no, he's like Angelo: why is he singling out a woman who is a mirror of his own experiences? (Yes, clearly, I believed Thomas's word against his.)
The Winter's Tale
Shakespeare
This is one of the plays that has become hugely popular in our own time. I don't think it was big on the 19th-century stage. I love the artificiality of it, the very sophisticated use of the simplest theatrical tricks: someone dressed as Time enters as announces that 16 years have passed. OK! Given the way many of us experience time, I find something like that in a way more realistic than the painfully mundane "kitchen sink" dramas. The telescoped portrayal of Leontes's jealousy is a dramatic & psychological tour de force. I saw one performance that brought out the boyishness of the King (meaning also a sort of sexual immaturity & insecurity, & an almost romantic attachment to his friend Polixenes) that made it all quite convincing (in fact the character reminded me of someone I knew who was struggling with various sexuality issues). Another interesting role is Paulina. She always goes too far, she's even a bit of a nag, but she has a good & generous heart in many ways. I've seen performances that didn't bring this out, which was a mistake: in the scene in which she persuades the guards to let her through with the baby, she harangues the man but at the end realizes she's maybe gone too far with someone who is essentially powerless & she assures him she'll protect him from the consequences of his action. In this particular performance, she sniped those lines at him contemptuously & with condescension. What a mistake. I knew then it would be a fairly long evening.
The World of Christopher Marlowe
David Riggs
With the end of Shakespeare's plays approaching, I decided I'd reread Marlowe, so this was prep work. Marlowe had a short & not always well documented life; this book is an excellent survey, as its title suggests, of the world in which he grew up: how a poor boy went to University on a scholarship, what he would study there, how he would try to make a living, the sort of intellectual currents he would have come across, & how those are reflected in his plays. Riggs suggests that Elizabeth I had knowledge of the plan to murder Marlowe: a far greater mark against her, if so, than the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
Camera Man
Dana Stevens
About Buster Keaton. Stevens had the clever idea of using Keaton's life, through vaudeville, cinema, & television, & his experiences with writers, studio executives, & others, as an angle on a sort of media-centered history of the 20th century. Entertaining & thoughtful, though I value his film College more highly than she does (maybe it just hits home more for me) & I disliked her rather trendy criticisms of Chaplin, which are mostly based on his sexual history (there's no indication that any of his female friends was unwilling, even if we find some of them, as did some of his contemporaries, a bit young for him).
Hamlet
Shakespeare
Saved this one for last. In the odd way in which certain artists or artworks, while retaining their high position, get put slightly out of the spotlight by other artists or artworks – for example, a few years ago, I stopped hearing about Beethoven as the pinnacle of Western composers, & while he wasn't cast aside, the top spot was increasingly assigned to Mozart, at least by some –I have a feeling that the play now considered the height of tragedy is King Lear rather than Hamlet. Perhaps its almost nihilistic bleakness & absurdity speak more to our century.
Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s
Ethan Mordden
This was an unexpectedly solid history. I had picked up the notion (from where I don't know) that Mordden was mostly going to offer anecdotes of a bitchy/amusing variety, but the knowledge is detailed & wide-reaching. He did a similar volume for the ensuing decades, up until I think the 1970s, & I've added them to the relentlessly growing TBR pile. This one made me want to find recordings of all the works he mentioned.
A Drifting Life
Yoshihiro Tatsumi
I was wandering through the Biography/Autobiography section of the library & saw a thick paperback volume that stood out as it looked like manga rather than a regular biography, so I took it out. I was not familiar with Tatsumi before I read this, but he is indeed a manga artist, one who helped create an audience for darker stories. This is a wonderful book: a history of manga, a history of post-war Japan, a history of a family, & a history of a young man finding his way in the world & discovering his path as an artist, all evocatively written & drawn, with a sense familiar to readers of Japanese literature of this world as evanescent & in many ways puzzling.
OK, enough for this round.
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