My Life in 100 Anecdotes

I write slowly, I know it. But as I look back on the almost five years that I’ve had this blog, I am grateful that, slow as I was, I did write.

Today I close Czardoz Contra World with my 100^th post. With this nice round number, it’s time to conclude this blog and start another (link pending).

I believe that lives are lived in anecdotes, not necessarily in days or years. And though it is tempting to think of “the best day,” a la City Slickers, I don’t remember full days, only moments. And that’s why I made my blog a collection of anecdotes about my life.

Over the years, there were many things I wanted to write about but never got to. Some articles were begun but never made it to the blog, usually because I couldn’t find out what I was trying to say, or because it took me so long to sort through my thoughts that they were no longer timely. Some articles got close but died for lack of some kind of relevance that would make them more than just self-indulgent words. Sometimes, I realized that I just didn’t have anything to say.

For this last post, I’ve included some anecdotes that mattered to me, and though I didn’t know then what to say, and may not know much better now, I found in each of them something about my life that I wanted to remember.

If I die tomorrow, I hope these items and the 99 posts that came before will be sufficient to explain who I was and what I valued.

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February 2009: In Defense of Grimlock

I was luridly fascinated by the DVD audio commentary for Transformers: The Movie, perhaps because it matched the shambling mediocrity of the animated film itself. The hilarity began when director Nelson Shin started talking. He seemed to have only the barest command of English, and his comments, ranging from bemused to befuddled, had me doubting the level of control he had over the movie. He seemed only dimly aware of what was going on and why. Here’s Shin explaining a scene near the beginning of the movie where Unicron is shown sucking up a planet:

“Inside of the Unicron, this is organic, he gets the juice out and he’s getting lights [life], so he’s now the uh, he can survive, he can activate.”

Fun fact: Shin is now president of a Korean animation company that supplies animation work for numerous American shows, including The Simpsons. 

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August 2012: How many guys does it take to throw away a perfectly good hamburger? (Answer: Five Guys!)

Regular readers of my blog will probably think that I eat fast food way too much. To that, allow me to emulate a charming Southern gentleman and say, “Guilty as charged!” (Yes, I know it’s a stale joke now, but trust me, this was a big deal back in August!)

In August, I went to a local Five Guys that I had been to a few times. Five Guys, to me, was the new kid on the block, an aggressive challenger from the East Coast that had made significant inroads in Southern California over the past few years. I think it had gained a sort of cult following based on complimentary all-you-can-grab peanuts in the store, messy burgers wrapped in foil, and that magazine article of Lebron James endorsing Five Guys that seems to be framed and posted in every store.

They make good burgers, and seem like sort of a more expensive cousin to In ‘N’ Out, bigger and sloppier, but with just as much hipster cred and everyman authenticity.

So on this occasion, I mistakenly grabbed someone else’s order, which I only realized when I had returned to my seat and peeked into the grease-stained bag. I brought the bag back to the counter and explained my folly. The server told me, “Oh, well we can’t take it back.” Fair enough. As a customer, I wouldn’t want to feel like I had to accept a plate of food that had previously been handed to someone else. She and the store manager exchanged some words to the effect of, “Make a new one for that customer, STAT!”

And then the three of us, the manager, the server, and I, we all just walked away, as if the bag contained a time bomb. I sat down and glanced somewhat uncomfortably at the bag of perfectly edible food that had been abandoned for the moment on that counter.

And here the questions began. Did they mean for me to take the bag, as a bonus, since they couldn’t? Were they going to retrieve it and maybe give the food to an employee later? Were they going to follow the most likely possibility and just throw it away? Should they have at least offered it to me? Or should I have said something, even though it seems sort of presumptuous to claim a free burger after my mistake had rendered it unservable to the rightful purchaser? What exactly was the right thing for me to have done?

Even though I told my brother as we sat there, “They’re just going to throw that away,” I somehow wasn’t prepared for the sight of the store manager chucking the entire bag right into a trash can not three feet away from me.

Even though I figured this was just store policy, and probably the policy of almost every restaurant you could name, I was dumbstruck. It was obscene. Children are still dying in Africa, aren’t they? I should hope so. Well, not “hope,” but I should think so.

When I was very young, there were often television commercials in the afternoon and evening for various outreach programs, asking for donations to help poor people in Africa and South America. You know the type, “just 48 cents a day will feed a child like Maria, and provide her with clothing, medicine, and a good education.” One time, according to my mother, I was watching one of these commercials, and I asked my mother, “Can we give them some food?” Apparently, I thought it was possible to just grab some delicacies from our refrigerator and pass them through the television screen to the rapturous enjoyment of these children. Or maybe I didn’t really believe that, but what I wanted was about as much a fantasy as that would have been. I wanted to help those other kids, and I thought that if I wanted it badly enough and spoke up about it, then every child in Africa would get three square meals a day, a pair of Nike sneakers, and a beautiful new schoolhouse.

Everyone had a good laugh over my naïveté and presumably we moved on with our lives. Hopefully those children in the developing world are moving on with theirs as well. The next time this happens, perhaps my choice is simple: I’ll speak up and say, “So can I keep this one, since it seems a shame for you to just throw away all this food?” I’d like to see them throw it in the garbage in front of me then.

And so, a noble burger was sacrificed so that I could learn a lesson, right? Not on your life. As soon as the manager’s head was turned, I reached into that trash can and nabbed that rudely discarded bag. And did I eat the food inside? Of course. And how was it? It tasted great. Like justice. 

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August 2012: “a Tony Scott joint”

I wanted to add a few words to the funeral mound of observances of Tony Scott’s death, something different from the consensus in the media, which intoned, somewhat condescendingly, that we had lost an energetic maker of films that were critically unremarkable but commercially viable. I really don’t see why every critic had to chime in if they were all going to say the same thing. I guess keeping all these movie critics on staff saves the country’s unemployment figures from going even higher.

I never saw Tony Scott’s magnum opus, Top Gun, but I was a big fan of Man on Fire (which, along with Hide and Seek, had me convinced that Dakota Fanning was one of the very few child actors who could “bring it”). Undoubtedly, when you watch a lot of Scott’s films, you start to think they were all basically the same film, but the same criticism could be leveled at critical darling, Wes Anderson.

Scott’s movies had panache without the pretension. He managed to navigate a treacherous middle path between the Scylla and Charybdis of earnest self-seriousness and smirking irony. And with mild apologies to Spike Lee, I believe that if any filmmaker should have been using the word “joint” to describe his films, it was Tony Scott.

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August 2012: The Bamiyan Buddhas

Around this time, I read a news item about the preservation status of the Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. Sadly, “preservation” is generous, as there hasn’t been much left to preserve since the giant Buddha statues (the largest two were some 53 meters and 35 meters tall, respectively) were dynamited into the afterlife by the Taliban regime in March 2001.

I first learned about the Bamiyan Buddhas when they made international news in 2001, as talk grew about the Taliban’s intent to destroy the statues, which had been crafted in the 6^th century. I was affected by the notion that a work of art, though admittedly a work of religion in the eyes of those who hated it, could be treated so callously by a government. I thought to myself that any government, any people, who could do something like this would be capable of even more astonishing crimes against the living. 

Indeed, the Bamiyan Buddhas were close to my mind after the crimes of September 11, 2001. I’m not saying that 9/11 would have been averted if the “civilized” nations of the West had just bombed the hell out of Afghanistan and the Taliban, and saved these Buddhas early on. But no one should be surprised that these were the monsters who harbored Osama bin Laden. Destruction of artifacts, art, and cultural objects is perhaps the bellwether of genocide and murder. The Taliban were all too eager to destroy something that a competing culture held dear, if only because it was easier than hunting down every last person who still held those things dear.

I’m not a Buddhist, and I’m not sure I even know anyone who is a serious adherent to Buddhist ideas. But I recognize the value of religion and spirituality as an impetus for human creativity. No matter how strong one’s adherence to secularism, it would be hard to deny the glorious artistic achievements that were influenced, financed, or otherwise directly attributable to the existence and vehemence of religion.

No matter how technically impressive or aesthetically beautiful, I am aware that many monumental human artistic achievements, whether religious or secular or somewhere in between, were created by blood money and slave labor, and devoted to oppression in kind. After all, the Colosseum, so revered today, was but a temple to carnage and the institution of murder as entertainment. And as Thoreau said about that last remaining of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

– Thoreau, Walden

Nevertheless, the objects exist, and they represent a past and a people who can no longer represent themselves. As a humanist, I am appalled at any wanton destruction of the irreplaceable works of a past culture.

Today, I hear snippets of a similar rampage against art, culture, and human life in Mali. I know next to nothing about the ancient glories of Timbuktu and the present conditions of life in Mali. But I know that anything that can rile up fanatics so desperately that they go out of their way to destroy it is probably something worth saving. At the very least, the destruction of a statue or a manuscript or an entire library is a sign of worse things to come.

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September 2012: To “pull a Goran”

When Andy Murray won the 2012 U.S. Open tennis tournament, I wondered if he had divested himself of the title of “best active player who hasn’t won a Slam” only to take on another dreaded title – was this Slam the first of many for him, or would it be the career highlight of a man destined to become a “one-Slam wonder”? Rather like Homer Simpson shedding the “stone of shame” only to be shackled to the even larger “stone of triumph.”

And much like Andy Roddick, whom I had lauded during his last, anticlimactic run at that same U.S. Open. In the journalistic aftermath of Roddick’s career-ender, I stumbled upon this informative slideshow of all the tennis players in the Open era who have won only a single Grand Slam tournament.

Looking at the names, I realize that it’s sort of a compliment when certain pundits cackle that Roddick underachieved or that he needs to have won more Slams to be considered among the greats. After all, do you think such a debate even comes up in reference to a Thomas Muster? Roddick wasn’t a fluke Slam winner, like Richard Krajicek or Anastasia Myskina. After his U.S. Open victory in 2003, he appeared in four more Slam finals over the next six years, and for some of those years, it was not outlandish to think he might win another big one. I doubt anyone looks at a Thomas Johansson and says, “What a disappointment. We expected a few more Slams from him.”

I think Roddick will be remembered very favorably alongside Michael Chang, a fellow American who won his Slam early, gave hope to every Chinese immigrant mother that her American-born son could become a big man in this country (okay, this part is not so similar to the Roddick career arc), then trailed behind the legends in his wake, all the while winning many lesser tournaments, keeping his nose clean, and contending well enough to make fans think a second major was probable, perhaps inevitable.

Roddick also calls to mind another player on the list: 2001 Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanisevic. I mentioned in a previous post that my favorite Slam final was the Federer-Roddick Wimbledon 2009, but Ivanisevic’s 2001 Wimbledon ride was just as memorable.

I remember it primarily because I was traveling in China at the time, riding down the Yangtze River on a cruise ship, watching Wimbledon on the tiny television in my room, because I was waylaid from some local disease brought on by a bug bite. With my head woozy and my hand swollen to roughly the size of an inflatable raft, I lay in bed watching tennis and listening to the lilting accents of a couple of announcers named Alan and Vijay who squandered no opportunities for hyperbole (“Too good!” “He’s playing like a shattered man!”).

Ivanisevic was a three-time Wimbledon finalist with a game tailor-made for grass, but he had never won, and though an eventual victory once seemed inevitable, by 2001 it seemed like his chances had passed him by. Having dropped in rank to 125^th in the world and no longer considered an effective full-time contender, he only got into the tournament because he was granted a wild card. What he did with that wild card was unprecedented, winning the championship and giving his career a storybook capstone.

Wimbledon 2001 had no shortage of drama. It saw Justine Henin reach her first Grand Slam final, losing in three sets to Venus Williams. A 19-year-old Roger Federer upset defending champion Pete Sampras in the fourth round, a loss that more or less sent Sampras into a downward spiral into irrelevance until he finally emerged with a surprise victory in the U.S. Open 2002, after which he wisely retired.

This tournament was probably top British player and favorite son Tim Henman’s best chance at making a Wimbledon final, as he took a two sets to one lead over Ivanisevic in the seminfinal. However, rain delays turned the match into a three-day ordeal and seemed to wash away Henman’s rhythm and resolve; Poseidon had thrown his godly weight behind Ivanisevic.

Ivanisevic beat four Grand Slam winners on his way to the championship (though, like Goran, victims Carlos Moya and Andy Roddick are also one-Slam wonders, and Marat Safin and Patrick Rafter each won but two).

I remember watching Ivanisevic demolish Roddick, who at the time was a young gun known primarily for his cannon of a serve. Here he was, still quite green, and getting schooled by an over-the-hill wild card who simply fired ace after ace at him. It was a performance not just overpowering but distinctive, and I remember uttering “Roddick got Goran-ed!” for some reason.

Sadly, Roddick did not “pull a Goran” in his last tournament. I haven’t followed any tennis since the 2012 U.S. Open. The Australian Open just happened in January, and I couldn’t find it in me to care; I didn’t even look up highlights. First went team sports, and now perhaps even tennis holds no appeal for me any longer. 

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November 2012: Fire the Critics

For a long time, I wanted to write a post about Pixar films, because they’re kind of a big deal, and for a long time, I held out because I didn’t think it was particularly useful, and indeed, it felt obnoxiously self-indulgent, to disparage any particular product or company just because I could. But there is something even more obnoxious about movie critics, as an industry, regarding their reviewing of Pixar films. This at least is worth a cursory dissection (vivisection? evisceration?).

A sampling of online reviews and editorials about Pixar and, primarily, their latest release, Brave:

“When it comes to Pixar, the worst is still so much better than most of the other junk being churned out by Hollywood.” (IGN)

“Still, Monsters, Inc. is fun and better than most of its non-Pixar peers (how many times do we have to make that distinction today?).” (IGN again – and to answer your question, you didn’t have to make that distinction at all)

“Arguably the worst of the best, the film [Brave] is simply decent (which ranks better than half the animated films released in a year).” (Screenpicks.com)

“If the Walt Disney Studios logo were the only one on Brave, this film's impeccable visuals and valiant heroine would be enough to call it a success. But Brave is also a Pixar Animation Studios film, and that means it has to answer to a higher standard.” (LA Times)

“Pixar’s own history of excellence has effectively painted the studio into a corner. If Brave were a straight-up Disney release, people would be hailing it, at the very least, as an end to the princess movie as we know it. Because it’s Pixar, they get to whine, ‘What? Princesses again?’” (Slate)

I’m quite tired of this blandly uncritical view that insists on starting with the premise that Pixar films must be judged by some rarified standard that eludes all other animation. If the role of the movie critics is merely to tell us that the gum that gets stuck to the soles of John Lasseter’s shoes is more beautiful than even the finest film that any other studio could produce, then really, what is the point of having the critics?

To praise Pixar’s track record is justified, but to go out of their way to defend the studio against any serious criticism is to undermine their own critical judgment. This seems to me a kind of moral cowardice, and moreover, it ignores the reality that other studios have started to make some very good movies that stand up well to what Pixar is dishing out.

To take one example, to my mind, Brave is not nearly as good as the Disney movie it most resembles – Tangled. For more examples, I’d rank Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs alongside the best of what Pixar has made.

Richard Corliss’s Time magazine review of How to Train Your Dragon offers a historical perspective. While he acknowledges Pixar’s edge in box office, awards, and prestige, he has the audacity to compare the Pixar-DreamWorks rivalry to an animation rivalry of yore: Disney vs. Warner Brothers:

“‘Each year I do one DreamWorks project,’ actor Jack Black told the crowd at the 2009 [Oscars] ceremony, ‘then I take all the money to the Oscars and bet it on Pixar.’

That was also the case 60, 70 years ago, when Disney shorts had a monopoly on the Oscars, while the funnier, livelier cartoons from Warner Bros. – which today are treasured – were ignored. In that sense, Pixar’s features are closer to the old, elevated Disney style, while DreamWorks’s films are flat-out cartoons, proud to carry on the fast, cavorting Warner tradition.”

Not just DreamWorks, but Fox, Sony, and all the other companies that delve into animation have tended to shy away from the “elevated” epics that have become Pixar’s signature. This certainly feeds into the perception that Pixar makes “prestige” movies, while its competitors are making the animated equivalents of Michael Bay’s Transformers.

Moreover, we are meant to believe that animated movies by DreamWorks or Fox are churned out by wage slaves in a Korean factory (perhaps Nelson Shin's), whereas animated films by Pixar are willed into existence by an auteur, whose vision is rendered by a handful of artistic true believers. But whatever happens behind the scenes, the results don’t indicate such a strong ideological divide.

The Kung Fu Panda, Ice Age, and Madagascar franchises can be just as sentimental and (sigh) heartwarming as Pixar films, and Pixar’s movies are just as heavily laden with slapstick and low-brow comedy as their counterparts from the wrong side of the tracks.

My goal is not to heap scorn on Pixar for its well-earned success, but to argue that the divide between it and its competitors is narrow, and getting narrower. And though perceptions of Pixar’s superiority persist, especially in the critical community, these perceptions are not always supported by evidence. Pixar is the Apple of the film industry, and fittingly so, since it inherited its creative ethos from its founder, Steve Jobs. But that doesn’t mean that other companies aren’t making products that are just as intricate and enjoyable. 

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January 2011: Grand Theft Auto IV

I basically inaugurated this blog with an anecdote about Grand Theft Auto III.  It seems fitting that I should end it with an anecdote about Grand Theft Auto IV. 

When I jumped back into Liberty City with GTA IV, I thought I’d get a few chuckles from driving over pedestrians, maybe roughing up some unwitting innocents in the street, and in the process find out if the Grand Theft Auto experiment had gotten more playable since my last foray into this urban wilderness.

The good news is that the addition of interior spaces, a speaking role for the player’s character, and “life” scenarios like going on dates with a girlfriend do enrich the feeling of “play.” The bad news is that driving is still an ordeal with no happy medium. Either you’re crawling slowly to grandmother’s house, or you’re zigzagging down straight roads and sideswiping pedestrians and lampposts with every turn. Shooting while aiming still requires a finesse I’ll never master. And committing random crimes will once again have the police hounding your ass very quickly, and you are never a match for their killing prowess.

Despite its flaws, I got a lot of enjoyment just from exploring the game’s possibilities, the many “what if” scenarios. What if I kill the bowling alley attendant? What if I kill the girl working at Burger Shot? What if I join the stripper on stage at the strip club? What if I run over some fools while driving Michelle home from our date? What if I kill someone on the street, wait for the ambulance to come, then kill the paramedic after he gets out of the ambulance – will another ambulance show up?

And on and on until I realized the irony of the GTA games: there is ultimately no liberty in Liberty City. In attempting to create the illusion of freedom and seamless immersion, the game ultimately draws attention to the limitations of its technology and all the restrictions imposed on the player. I can kill a hot dog vendor, but then I can’t take any of the hot dogs he was just selling? That don’t make no sense.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the artificial boundaries imposed on the game map. As in previous games, you are stuck on one island in this fictional world, and only after meeting a set of achievements do you open up access to the next island. Funny thing is, there is a bridge to the neighboring island, and it exists the whole time you’re playing, but access to the bridge is blocked by concrete barriers and a fierce police presence, all under the guise of, I don’t know, construction or an investigation or martial law or some similarly ludicrous excuse. And yes, these coppers would unleash a lethal torrent of bullets if I stepped foot on that bridge.

Days passed. Days filled with the monotony of blowing off steam at the pool hall with my brother Roman. Going on dates to the bowling alley with Michelle and “trying my luck” when I took her home. Muscling low-level hoods and capping rival gangsters. And every day I’d drive by that bridge and those badge-wearing pigs and think to myself, “You don’t own me.”

What was on the other side? What was so important that they went to such extreme lengths to keep me from it? This was Shell Beach in Dark City. This was the painted sky at ocean’s end in The Truman Show.

There is a freedom out there, true freedom that exists without structures, and beyond artifice. The bubble world they created for me was not the world I wanted to live in, so I would make my own world, or die trying. “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”

I became convinced that if only I could get on the bridge and drive to the other side without getting shot to pieces, then that island would exist, just like the one where I was standing now. It would be real, with real people, and a real life. I just had to survive.

And so, I decided that, come heaven or hell, I would cross the bridge.

There was no sense in trying to drive through a concrete wall, so I knew my only chance was to run through the gaps in the barricade and steal a squad car that was already on the bridge. Once in, they couldn’t stop me. So I ran, taking heavy fire when the astonished goons realized I was actually going for it. Hot lead pierced any flesh that wasn’t covered in body armor, but I made it to the car, pulled the driver to the ground, and immediately I was flying!

Everywhere around me, I heard voices yelling, “Yes, yes! He made it! He can get through!”

The bridge felt like it went on forever. The first few hundred feet were breezy, with a few lights and sirens giving pathetic chase, but then the fuzz lowered the hammer. One after another, black police vans barreled head-on toward me at top speed on the threadlike bridge, trying to block me or crush me. They would take me dead or alive, so long as they ended my run.

But for the first time, my driving skills attained a sort of blissful elegance. It was as if I were controlling my car with my mind, not my hands and feet. Armored van on my left – I dodged right. Another van trying to squeeze me against the wall – I hit full throttle and drove past him straighter than I ever knew I could. I had attained automotive nirvana and eluded them all!

My supporters renewed the rallying cry, “Yes, yes! You did it! They can’t stop you!”

The bridge’s end drew into focus, with the massive skyscrapers of my destination coming into view. And then I saw the wall. There was never just one barricade. The police had a second one waiting for me this whole time, at this end of the bridge.

Every fiber of my being told me to stop the car and end this madness. But it was too late. This was my Thelma and Louise moment. At full speed, my speedometer about to crack from the strain, I slammed headlong into the concrete, the impact shooting my limp body through the windshield like a rocket, sailing past the front lines of cops and cars and landing like a broken doll tossed by a wailing infant. I had made it this far only to collapse under shattered glass and pitiless mortality.  

And yet my eyes opened!

I stand up, pat myself down, amazed. I had been shot, I had flown, I had crashed, and yet I live! And then I look about me and realize that I have crossed the bridge and am on the new island. It is real. And it is beautiful. I had made it. My dream was not in vain.

All I have to do now is grab the nearest police cruiser, as I had at the beginning of my escape, and drive. Always drive. And then I am free.

At least, that’s what I was thinking when my vision turned murky white, and my knees disappeared beneath me. I felt a warm moistness all over my chest, like I was bathing in salty water. And then the world went dark and I felt . . . nothing at all.

. . .

It was probably ten years ago that I played GTA III, but I still remember the Great Siege of Ammo-Nation. Ten years from now, when the many sordid misadventures of Niko Bellic in GTA IV have faded from memory, all we’ll remember is one glorious moment when I hurtled through a police barricade, jacked a squad car, and hightailed it across a facsimile Manhattan Bridge, crossing the Rubicon, making my own freedom.

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Here we are at the Ides of March. As Caesar goes, so goes Czardoz, dying today, only to live forever . . .

Reading Notes #5 – The Waste Land

Title: The Waste Land

Author: T. S. Eliot

Publisher: Norton

Form: Hardcover/cloth (included in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6^th Edition, Volume 2)

Pages: 14 (434 lines)

Date of Publication: 1922

Source: Purchased new

Dates of Reading: January 29, 2013 – February 6, 2013

The List: #17

I decided to give myself a short reading week by tackling a long poem, and though objectively, The Waste Land is not very long, it is certainly dense enough to qualify for my week’s “book,” as there is as much to unpack in its 434 lines as there is in many books of 200 pages or more, and as I write this, I continue to struggle to understand it as a whole work, as its fragmentary nature seems to create rifts with only fraying rope bridges to span them, Indiana Jones-style.

T. S. Eliot simply won’t go away. I read The Hollow Men in high school, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in college, and now in my one-student schoolroom, The Waste Land. Though these poems aren’t even a hundred years old, they seem to have that quality of literature that endures – the words sound both old and new at the same time, the technique both shocking and classical.

At first I didn’t enjoy reading The Waste Land, though I’m almost certain that “enjoyment” was not T. S. Eliot’s primary concern in writing it. I couldn't see myself reading it for any other than purely academic purposes, going slowly, line by line, in the hopes of some kind of, I don’t know, revelation?

I was reminded of something that a colleague once said to me about reading James Joyce’s Ulysses: “It’s the kind of book where, you first have to learn everything else there is to learn, then you can read Ulysses and understand it.” I felt a bit of this helplessness before the opaque mass of The Waste Land. Much of it consists of hopelessly obscure and self-consciously erudite literary references, things like the Upanishads, St. Augustine, Grail lore and the Fisher King, Buddhist texts, and so on. The fact that Eliot himself appended footnotes to the published poem suggests his awareness that he was plumbing some deep waters, and I may be forgiven if I detected a smug self-indulgence on Eliot’s part that seemed to say it would be well worth the reader’s time to try to understand all this stuff.

But in the end, as with The Hollow Men and Prufrock, the words, and thus the greatness, seem inevitable, and I did begin to enjoy the poem altogether, and not just isolated lines, during my second reading. As academic as it is, the poem is not purely cerebral; it is a highly emotional response to the metaphorical wasteland of Eliot’s culture and times, where the soul finds no water, no respite, no nourishment whatsoever. And yet when water comes, it is “death by water,” as if even that singular element which sustains hope is ultimately antithetical to human flourishing. Themes of isolation, death, the feeling of being trapped inside your consciousness – it all spills out even if you’ve never read the Upanishads (which I haven’t) and have no interest in listening to a Wagner opera (which I don’t).

The Waste Land begins with the famous line, “April is the cruelest month,” which, aside from its quotability and coolly nihilistic irony (see its inclusion in The Big Lebowski), doesn’t really mean anything in itself. When you continue on a few lines, an idea begins to cohere:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

(1-4)

I first encountered lilacs in Chicago, where they bloom sometime in the spring, a sort of brightly colored affirmation that winter doesn’t actually last forever in the Windy City. Lilacs have a wondrous and unmistakable scent, a “perfume strong,” as Walt Whitman put it; but as readers of Whitman know, they don’t bloom for very long, and when they die, the little purple flowers turn brown and shriveled. Perhaps Eliot found something cruel about the way spring beckons life to sprout out of the comfort of hiding in the ground, only to bloom briefly and perish in the sun and air.

Like a lot of poetry, The Waste Land can seem terribly contrived, as if Eliot’s just dishing out a slew of images and telling us to make sense out of them. He uses a variety of styles, bits of dialogue, short ditties, scraps of what look to be gibberish and/or bird sounds, several lines in foreign languages. He even manages to insert a perverse sonnet into the poem to describe a banal seduction (what was once perhaps called a “courtship”), in effect subverting Shakespearean love using Shakespeare’s preferred form:

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavors to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defense;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronizing kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

(235-248)

I only seriously considered the problem of contrivance after having read the poem twice and written a few pages about it. One of the great annoyances of bad acting, particularly on the stage, is that you can see the actors “acting.” It’s entirely unnatural and takes me out of the performance.

As I mulled over Eliot’s pruned images and manicured technique, that thought occurred to me, that a reader would see the ink and paper equivalent of “acting.” But for me, at least, the effect is like riding that neatly stitched seam that hides the ragged edge underneath. I knew that some maniacal effort went into the making of this object, and I was perhaps just on the cusp of seeing that effort, when I realized that I was so deep into the finished effect that any considerations of  how it was made became, well, purely academic. Despite its footnotes and literary allusions drawing attention to the places it came from and the places it wants you to go, Eliot’s poem just seems to exist.

The following passage ends with my favorite line from the poem:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(19-30)

Ashes and dust, shadows and death. It’s been a somber year for literature. So next week, “something different,” something fun! 

Ode on a Circus Animal

I first encountered the work of David Grene, translator of my copy of Prometheus Bound and co-editor of the University of Chicago Press edition of the Complete Greek Tragedies, when I was in high school. We were assigned to read Oedipus the King, by Sophocles, in the long-lived Grene translation.

I didn’t know it at the time, but one day, I would be a student at the College of the University of Chicago, Grene’s stomping grounds. He was already an emeritus by this time (some fifteen years ago), and as far as I had heard, he spent most of his time on his dairy farm in Ireland, and taught the occasional graduate seminar class when he was in Chicago.

At the beginning of one quarter midway through my college career, I noticed in the time schedule that he was teaching a class, entitled simply, “Poetry.” It was a graduate class, every Friday, for three hours from 6PM to 9PM. I thought, here is a chance to learn from one of the giants of academia, a guy who knows more about Greek tragedy than probably anyone in the world, a guy who probably did his undergraduate work side by side with Euripides. I imagined all the brilliant insights he would teach me about poetry.

So I gave him a call.

On the other end of the line, David Grene sounded like a rusty saw going through tree bark. I knew he was old, but he sounded like someone who had actually sailed with Odysseus or berated Oedipus at the head of a Chorus. It was charming. And confounding.

I asked if I could add his class, despite my lowly undergraduate status. He sounded like he was inviting me to come. Certainly his manner of speaking was encouraging and surprisingly energetic, even if I could barely comprehend the words. And then he said something that perplexed me for the whole week before I attended his class:

“(garble garble) circus animals (grumble grumble)!”

Circus animals. Everything else was static, but those two words came in loud and clear. Circus animals. What on earth was he talking about? Lord forgive me, I thought maybe he was slightly senile. I asked him to repeat himself, and once again, I heard “circus animals,” the words seemingly spat out from a coffee grinder.

“Okay. Thank you very much,” I said.

That Friday, I went to his class. I had never seen a picture of the man, but I don’t think any picture could have adequately encapsulated him.

He was large, not very tall, but he had something of the look of a portly professional wrestler. He wore faded blue overalls, and his shaggy gray hair grew down past his shoulders in a wild profusion of wisps. His eyes smiled behind a clutch of skin and brows.

He was old. I could well believe that this was Very Old McDonald just arrived from his farm in rural Illinois. Sitting in his chair, he didn’t look like he’d be able to stand up without help. I didn’t expect this to be a peripatetic exercise, and it wasn’t.

I didn’t say a word all through the class. I thought any student who spoke would be mercilessly hushed for stealing oxygen away from this man who resembled a revivified Sophocles, brought back for just one evening to sing his mysteries.

I suppose I need not have worried so much. As far as I knew, most of the other students were graduates, but seasoned though they were, they were much in the same position as me. They had come for a curiosity, a revered name in the academy, and once there, they really didn’t know what to say to him without sounding, not stupid, but simply young. I mean, what could anyone say that David Grene hadn’t heard a thousand times before? There were one or two graduate students there who were clearly Grene’s acolytes and/or personal valets, but aside from these lieutenants, everyone else seemed to sit with a mixture of subdued delight and hushed discomfiture.

At the time, as a budding English major with little to recommend me beyond the ability to attend every class, the thought of spending three hours every Friday night in a room with David Grene and about fifteen graduate students, frankly, terrified me. Too ignorant to see past the legend, yet incapable of understanding the man, I left that night, never to return.

I wish I could say that even this one class with Grene was a revelation, but it wasn’t. I had hoped for his words to enlighten me, but I’ve forgotten them. All I remember is the overalls, the hair, the voice like a storm-beaten crag.

That, and the circus animals. It turns out that on the phone, he was informing me of the reading for the week: a poem called “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” by William Butler Yeats. And here I was imagining a man plagued by dementia, a once brilliant professor, now a veritable mummy drooling bits of animal crackers out of his stroke-addled mouth.

And yet, this somehow makes sense when we read the poem itself, wherein Yeats sees himself as “a broken man,” ambling through a literary gallery of the now-departed “circus animals” that were his former glories, bemoaning his lack of a new “theme” in his “old age.” This is one of Yeats’s last poems, published in 1939, and in it, he reflects on three of his previous works, verses steeped in mythology, heroism, and romance. He seems to conclude that however much he loved the fantastical artistic worlds he had created, and however airy and elusive they seem now, they were born out of real emotions that are not lost to him: “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Though I never really knew David Grene, perhaps it is almost as well that I know him through his work, which continues to teach me after his death. His translation of Oedipus the King was (along with Shakespeare’s Othello) one of the treasures of my literary adolescence, and his Prometheus Bound has brought me back into the lavish yet stern bosom of Greek drama. A little way into his Herodotus, it is quickly becoming one of my favorite books. And now, all these years later, I come to Yeats’s poem, and I see why Grene thought it worth reading and teaching. 

I sing thee, Prometheus: fire-bringer, light-bearer, teacher. 

Reading Notes #4: Frankenstein

Title: Frankenstein

Author: Mary Shelley

Publisher: Everyman’s Library

Form: Hardcover/cloth

Pages: 231

Date of Publication: 1818*

Source: Purchased new

Dates of Reading: January 19, 2013 – January 29, 2013

The List: #67

"Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! you may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains – revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict." (Chapter 20)

From antiquity’s Prometheus we go to “the Modern Prometheus,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s subtitle to her scary, sad, somewhat insane novel evokes the creation of man out of clay, the disastrous consequences of overreaching our destiny, the irresistible urge of a creation to become a creator, the frightful power of science and civilization, the curse of the outcast, and much, much more. Larded over this is the Christian analogue, specifically Milton’s Christianity as dreamed up in Paradise Lost, concerning the fall of an angel and the rise of a devil, the fall of man and the rise of civilization; and I think the parallels between Christianity and Greek mythology that I noted in my article on Prometheus Bound are not such a stretch.

Books upon tomes upon folios have been written about Frankenstein, and there seems paltry little I can contribute, in a brief essay anyway, to the unraveling of its horrifying and mysterious layers. The book is also further removed from unadulterated critical analysis by the plethora of film and pop culture adaptations, as society has put its stamp on the story over and over again, in an almost 200-year parade of variations on a theme.

As of this writing, I haven’t carefully watched any movie versions of Frankenstein, but the Halloween-ready, Karloff-cum-Munsters iconography has become pervasive enough for me to realize that the apples have fallen quite far from the tree. The fearsome but silly, wrathful but bumbling Frankenstein of pop culture bears little resemblance to Shelley’s “hideous” monster, who, of course, isn’t actually named “Frankenstein.”

Nomenclature notwithstanding, every child in America knows what a Frankenstein is, so it can be a shock to read Shelley’s founding text and find the monster capable of delivering speeches like the one at the beginning of this article. Eloquent, existential, and sensitive, Shelley’s monster has read Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch; he has observed human kindness, but received only human fear and hatred.

I was further surprised by the monster’s creation story, or rather, the lack thereof. How many times have movies and television shown the creature being brought to life on a stormy night by lightning summoned by a mighty apparatus, and sent surging through this unholy mishmash of humongous body parts? And yet none of that appears in the book. There is certainly the implication of lightning: a scene where a thunderstorm breathes inspiration into our desperate scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and the allusion to noted lightning specialist, Benjamin Franklin, in the name “Frankenstein.” However, it is never explicitly stated that a lightning-channeling apparatus is used to vivify the creation, nor even that any apparatus is involved beyond Frankenstein’s “chemical instruments.” And many people perhaps read into the book by assuming that the monster is created from portions of cadavers, but all we hear about are unidentified “materials.”

Frankenstein himself, as he dictates his story to us, insists that the secret of creation, the method he used to bring the monster to life, will go to the grave with him:

I see by your eagerness and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be. (Chapter 4)

And furthermore:

Sometimes I endeavored to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation: but on this point he was impenetrable.

“Are you mad, my friend?” said he; “or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a daemoniacal enemy? Peace, peace! learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own.” (Walton, In Continuation)

What a tease! Methinks the lady doth protest too much, as Shelley really goes out of her way to justify denying the reader this juicy morsel. But the withholding of such details was not an uncommon technique in early science fiction, where the writers were less concerned about dreaming up the machinations, and much more concerned with the social implications of the nightmare scenario.

And indeed, the monster is basically your worst nightmare. Fearless and highly intelligent, and using all that fearlessness and intelligence to destroy your life. As I read, I imagined the creature as a combination of a nimble sasquatch, the Incredible Hulk, and the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, though I would conjure for this description the most terrifying iterations of each of these creatures.

I was perhaps most surprised that there is just so much moral and formal complexity in Frankenstein. Shelley uses multiple narrators, epistolary sections, lengthy passages that read like a travelogue, a smattering of quotes from contemporary writers, including her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a bedrock influence for Mary Shelley.

Often, readers express surprise that Frankenstein was written by an 18-year-old girl. But Mary Shelley was born into great expectations, the daughter of two heralded radicals and intellectuals, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and surrounded all her life by the intellectual and literary elite of Britain, as well as notable luminaries who would visit her family from America and Europe. At the age of sixteen, she married a bona fide poetic genius and scandalous reprobate, Percy Shelley, whose influence she effusively credited, and whom she idolized long after his death.

If I am surprised at her as a person, it is because of what she wrote in her 1831 introduction to a new edition of Frankenstein, thirteen difficult years after her book was first published:

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more.

In 1818, when Frankenstein was published, Shelley had already had two children, the first of whom died shortly after birth. She grieved the recent suicide of a half-sister, and certainly endured some guilt when Percy Shelley’s first wife, from whom Mary had essentially stolen him, drowned herself and her unborn child. So to speak of those as “happy days” where “death and grief were but words” perhaps speaks to just how much she suffered afterward – the death of two more children, a near-fatal miscarriage, the death of her husband, the decline of her health.

It is appropriate that Frankenstein is the creation of some mix of joy and sorrow. Duality is at the heart of the story (as it was for Robert Louis Stevenson in his later story of monster and man, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). The monster is born of man, man who harnesses and manipulates nature, but ultimately cannot control it.

Through his literary education, in particular, reading Paradise Lost; through his months spent in hiding, secretly watching the kindness and magnanimity of a poor rural family, and the mere seconds it takes for the family to attack and hate him once he reveals himself, the monster identifies and condemns the hypocritical duality of humanity:

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing. (Chapter 13)

The monster is isolated despite his hunger for companionship, and we watch his anger and self-loathing grow as his repeated attempts at human contact are violently rebuffed:

And what was I? . . . When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? (Chapter 13)

Having received utter rejection when he solicits human compassion, he orders Frankenstein, who owes him at least the chance for happiness, to create for him a female counterpart. Though understandable, this ambition is arrogant, as arrogant as anything his creator pursued, and when this creative ambition is stymied, the enraged creature embraces the other part of his duality – his ability to destroy.

And so the creature’s anguish comes back around onto Frankenstein. When the monster ensnares him, framing him for the murder of his best friend, Frankenstein is made to understand what it feels like to be shunned and hated by all. To feel what his creation feels. And though it seems that his isolation and punishment is complete with the loss of all his loved ones, whom the monster murders one by one, agonizingly slowly, it is not truly complete until Frankenstein, like his monster before him, finally comes to condemn mankind as savagely as the monster did. He addresses a magistrate, exhorting him to help him hunt down his wretched progeny:

My revenge is of no moment to you; yet, while I allow it to be a vice, I confess that it is the devouring and only passion of my soul. My rage is unspeakable when I reflect that the murderer, whom I have turned loose upon society, still exists. You refuse my just demand: I have but one resource; and I devote myself, either in my life or death, to his destruction. . . . Man! . . . how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! (Chapter 23)

“Man!” In one word, Frankenstein becomes his own creation, who had earlier cried, “Man!” at Frankenstein, enraged at the heartlessness and cruelty of humankind. Up to this point, Frankenstein has been motivated by ambition, and then fear. Now he is a creature of “rage.” Now, finally, Frankenstein becomes one with his monster, outcast from society, hopelessly miserable, just as the monster wished to make him.

So it makes quite a bit of sense that the monster himself has come to be called “Frankenstein.” The monster is like the scientist who made him, alike in sorrow and isolation, both helpless as creatures, both thwarted as creators.

We, too, are both Victor Frankenstein and his monster, both creator and creature. And as Mary Shelley noted in her own life and in the society around her, we are desperately alone, as was the monster, as was the man.

*          *          *

For my first month of this year of reading, I have unintentionally chosen to read four books in a row that are, in some sense, fantasies. I don’t mean “fantasy” in the genre sense (as epitomized first by Tolkien and currently by legions of his spiritual scions), though this is what the word has become. I am not primarily concerned with this generally underappreciated genre, though it is peculiar that in our times, literary esteem is typically lavished upon more realistic fiction, whereas fantasy writers are consoled, if at all, by filthy lucre and the hopes of selling something to Hollywood.

Yet most of humanity’s literary history has been dominated by tales of the impossible, or at least improbable. I suppose two thousand years is enough to transform fantastical stories about Greek gods and demons into “literature,” so perhaps science fiction and fantasy writers of today can hope for similar vindication from generations to come.

Perhaps the most useful label, should one be required, for Frankenstein is “romance.” Reveling in elements of the supernatural, shrouded in mystery, and elaborating its ideas through astonishing visions that have not and probably cannot happen, Frankenstein is the very model of the romance as described by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, writes that the romance allows its author “to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material.” And though there is a risk that the romance “may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, [it] has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”

Frankenstein is also called “Gothic,” and Mary Shelley surely owes a debt to the Gothic literature that was so popular at the time. In turn, her book’s influence, direct or indirect, can be seen in many of her kindred artistic spirits of the 19^th century. The ominous atmosphere of living nightmares is highly reminiscent of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

There are shades of Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, as well, in the physical and psychological isolation of Victor Frankenstein, and in his desperate hunt to kill his massive, elusive quarry.

And of course there is Hawthorne, whose many stories of phantasms and shattered ambitions seem to be a direct descendant of Shelley’s vision. Frankenstein was born in a dream, as Shelley describes in her 1831 introduction: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” This is the very archetype of many a young man who finds himself the unfortunate protagonist of a Hawthorne story.

Furthermore, this now makes four out of four books that seem deeply invested in exploring death in its various shades of horror. Slaughterhouse-Five is a meditation on death. The action and ideas of the Oresteia are pursued through the consequences of acts of murder. Though no deaths occur in Prometheus Bound, the title character is punished because he has saved the entire human race from death, so mortality should be very much on the mind of the reader.

I must admit, it doesn’t take a long walk or a far throw to touch upon death in literature. What else would an artist explore, but the greatest of mysteries, and the deepest of sorrows? There is also love, I suppose, but love is incidental – a happy, if confusing, accident. Death, on the other hand, is a certainty; thus its centrality in art.

Perhaps one could say, “All art is about love and death, for the two are irrevocably intertwined.” The Romeo and Juliet hypothesis.

*          *          *

A few notes on the edition I read, published by Everyman’s Library. This is a much-storied imprint that currently exists as a series of classic titles presented with a uniform look and style. Frankenstein is a rather lovely volume that includes such niceties as Smyth-sewn bindings, thick, cream-colored paper, dark green buckram covers, a silk ribbon-marker, and even a note describing the history of the typeface. This makes for an enjoyable reading experience, though I perhaps would have traded these luxuries for a moderately extensive set of annotations. More troubling is the omission of Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition, even though this copy uses the 1831 text.

It speaks to the experience that one wants when reading. Do you want a clean, uninterrupted text, where you are free to read without being distracted by outside interpretation? Perhaps a book with fine bindings, pleasant to the touch, like the books that Mary Shelley herself might have pulled from her parents’ estimable library? Or do you want as much knowledge as possible – information about the author’s life and influences, critical commentary, supplementary materials like contemporary reviews, and most relevant to me: explanations for every now-obscure reference (without having to dash to the computer every time)?

None of this information would have changed my reading, but it probably would enhance it more than the physical qualities of the volume. There is however, a trade-off – I have read books in the form of pure digital text, with the option of looking up anything and everything online, but I find that the reading experience on a computer or smartphone lacks the intimacy of having all the details I want in one volume, or perhaps one volume and a separate volume of annotations. It increases my respect for the curating process, and really the artistry, that goes into the creation of a book, whether physical or digital.

*          *          *

*I read the 1831 edition. According to Shelley, the changes are “principally those of style. I have changed no portion of the story nor introduced any new ideas or circumstances.” However, commentators note that the changes suggest a growing conservatism on Shelley’s part, particularly with respect to the characterization of Elizabeth Lavenza.  

Bonus Notes: Slaughterhouse-Five

 “You want to know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”

“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’” What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

This passage from Slaughterhouse-Five is not one of Kurt Vonnegut’s more prescient moments. It’s terrifying that some forty years after Vonnegut wrote these lines, we live in a world where warfare is as healthy as ever, yet glaciers are terminally ill.

*          *          *

I’ve thought that, where available, I would supplement my readings this year with film adaptations. To my knowledge, what film versions may exist of the Oresteia or Prometheus Bound are hopelessly obscure. (There is at least one film regarding Iphigenia, and perhaps Prometheus is depicted in Clash of the Titans or something like that? And no, the recent Ridley Scott opus, Prometheus, does not count.)

However, there was a movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five released in 1972, just three years after the book was published. I was surprised at the mere existence of such a film.

I’ve heard some people say that this or that book is “unfilmable,” for example, Lord of the Rings. But why would this be so? It’s just a bunch of orcs and men fighting each other, right? Before the age of the special-effects extravaganza, perhaps genres like high fantasy would come off as cartoony rather than compelling.

But I’m persuaded that it’s the more conceptually challenging books that are most difficult to turn into films. Something like Slaughterhouse-Five, because of its frequent time shifts and disjointed narrative, as well as potentially staggering pitfalls like how to play violence and mental illness for comedy (without trivializing the biting social satire), and how to portray the alien Tralfamadorian race, is an example of a book that could turn into a disastrously silly movie.

Indeed, in many ways, the film is laughably dumb. The Tralfamadorians, described by Vonnegut with whimsical physical details, are portrayed as invisible to Billy Pilgrim and his mistress, Montana Wildhack, and even creepily prurient, with very little of the four-dimensional perspicacity they displayed in the book. The Paul Lazzaro character, relatively minor in the book, chews up an undeserved preponderance of screen time, and the actor is much too tall and world-weary to capture Vonnegut’s description of an ugly, rat-like, resentful sociopath.

And yet the movie is not as bad as I expected. I was rarely bored, which is something of a feat for a now forty-year-old movie that has little action. They picked the perfect dumbass-looking actor to play Billy Pilgrim, and events and details are largely faithful to the novel, though the tone seems off, maybe because it plays everything too straight.

Where the book reveals the lack of human connection among soldiers thrown together in a sanity-deprived prison camp, the movie earnestly attempts to create relationships among these characters. In trying to provide conventional motivations for the key events of the story, the movie seems to betray the book’s pervasive anxiety formed by terrors that have no clear explanation.

Movie rating: 2.5 stars out of 4 on its own merits; 3 stars in terms of its fidelity to the book

Final word: It’s a curiosity that’s worth watching if you’re a fan of the book, but don’t expect to love it. 

Reading Notes #3: Prometheus Bound

Title: Prometheus Bound

Author: Aeschylus (translated by David Grene)

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Form: Trade paperback (part of larger volume, Aeschylus II)

Pages: 49 (including Introduction)

Date of Publication: 5^th Century BCE

Source: Purchased from used book store

Dates of Reading: January 16, 2013 – January 17, 2013

The List: #244

Prometheus:

As soon as he ascended to the throne

that was his father’s, straightway he assigned

to the several Gods their several privileges

and portioned out the power, but to the unhappy

breed of mankind he gave no heed, intending

to blot the race out and create a new.

Against these plans none stood save I: I dared.

I rescued men from shattering destruction

that would have carried them to Hades’ house;

and therefore I am tortured on this rock,

a bitterness to suffer, and a pain

to pitiful eyes. I gave to mortal man

a precedence over myself in pity: I

can win no pity: pitiless is he

that thus chastises me, a spectacle

bringing dishonor on the name of Zeus.

Chorus:

Of iron mind he must be, must be made of stone

who does not sympathize, Prometheus, with your sufferings.

Myself, I would not have chosen to look on them;

now that I do, my heart is full of pain.

Prometheus:

Yes, to my friends the sight is pitiable.

Chorus:

Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?

Prometheus:

Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom.

Chorus:

What cure did you discover for that sickness?

Prometheus:

I sowed in them blind hopes.

Chorus:

That was a great help that you gave to men.

Prometheus:

Besides, I myself gave them fire.

Chorus:

Do now creatures of a day own bright-faced fire?

Prometheus:

Yes and from it they shall learn many crafts.

(Lines 230-256)

I decided to give Aeschylus an encore, as I had always been interested in the myth of Prometheus, the fire-bringer, the light-bearer, and Prometheus Bound was on my list. Prometheus Bound is the sole survivor of a Prometheus trilogy that is assumed to have existed, and is generally attributed to Aeschylus. It consists primarily of a series of speeches by the chained title protagonist and the visitors to his lonely rock. Though this prevents any true “action” from occurring in the play, it does not limit the dramatic tension.

The traditional telling of the myth has Prometheus lashed to a storm-blasted rock, punished by Zeus for stealing fire from the smith-god, Hephaestus, and giving it to man. Here, a giant eagle comes every night and eats his liver in most gruesome fashion, only to have it grow back the next day to be eaten again:

Hermes:

Then Zeus’s winged hound, the eagle red,

shall tear great shreds of flesh from you, a feaster

coming unbidden, every day: your liver

bloodied to blackness will be his repast.

(Lines 1022-1025)

Other aspects of the myth include the notion that Prometheus originally created man from clay, and that the punishment for the gift of fire also included the creation of the first woman, Pandora, who is sent by the Olympian gods to sow discord and evil gifts among men. These latter ideas do not figure into Prometheus Bound.

In some ways, I enjoyed this play more than any of the Oresteia plays. Some of this may be due to the lucid and stately translation by David Grene, who renders a Prometheus who is both weary and defiant, an almost modern portrayal – like something you’d see in a movie – of the wily veteran undergoing torture, laughing through his tears. The Titan does not so much argue in his own defense (this play has not the litigious quality of The Eumenides), but rather rails against the injustice of a Zeus who wields unchecked power, and moreover, who forgets those who have shown him loyalty (for Aeschylus’s Prometheus had sided with Zeus against his fellow Titans):

Prometheus:

Now look and see

the sight, this friend of Zeus, that helped set up

his tyranny, and see what agonies

twist me, by his instructions!

(Lines 307-309)

The chief appeal of Prometheus Bound lies in the weighty drama of a god tormented and punished because of his love for humanity. Prometheus is a Titan, and thus a god more ancient than Zeus and the Olympians, but he has little power in the face of Zeus’s overwhelming force. Power enough, though, to save humankind from obliteration by the supreme god’s lightning bolts. Why Zeus wished to destroy the human race, and how exactly Prometheus stopped this, are not clear in this play. What is clear is that his gifts to humanity are extensive, and the enlightenment they represent is perhaps the greatest threat the new gods have to fear.

Beyond the gift of fire mentioned above, Prometheus goes on to describe a litany of gifts he has brought to human society: the knowledge of construction, written language, sailing, agriculture, medicine, prophecy, religion:

Prometheus:

In one short sentence understand it all:

every art of mankind comes from Prometheus.

(Lines 504-505)

And for this, his recompense is an eternity of miseries:

Prometheus:

I knew when I transgressed nor will deny it.

In helping man I brought my troubles on me;

but yet I did not think that with such tortures

I should be wasted on these airy cliffs,

this lonely mountain top, with no one near.

(Lines 268-272)

The analogies to the story of Christ, though imperfect, are enjoyable and unmistakable. A great figure, part-god and (symbolically) part-man, and the savior of mankind, is affixed to a towering height, tormented by the powers that be, his only crime – his love for humanity.

Two thousand years later, the stories still exist – both the myths of Greece and the words of Scripture – but their status in our culture is markedly different. Why do the Olympians exist primarily as fodder for academic study and fanciful books and movies, while the legacy of the Hebrews endures as the preferred mysticism and superstition of human beings?

Of the various options available to the western world, was there something more true about the Abrahamic religions? Perhaps in the sense that benevolence and love, the hallmarks of Christ and Islam’s Allah, are more attractive in the long run than caprice and willfulness, as embodied in the Greek and Roman gods. By this measure, it’s no surprise that the former survive as doctrine, while the latter are the stuff of fairy tales.

Presumably, such echoes were not available to Aeschylus or his original audiences, nor were the impact that Prometheus Bound and its source myth made on Milton and, later, the Romantic poets of 18^th and 19^th century Britain. And when the spirit of Prometheus was conjured as a guiding light of the revolutionary era of the late 18^th century, well of course that’s also a universe apart from the small local world that the ancient Greeks understood.

But surely, attendees of the Great Dionysia watched Prometheus Bound and heard in its words a rebuke of tyrants, of men like Pisistratus, who only a generation or two ago had seized power over Athens, and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus, whose overthrow had led to the beginnings of Athenian democracy.

Though the other plays in the trilogy are lost to us, and lost is whatever evolving view Aeschylus had of the relationship and potential reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, taken on its own terms, Prometheus Bound is clear – Zeus is a tyrant, and his actions are inexcusable. Prometheus berates Zeus’s messenger, Hermes:

Prometheus:

Your speech is pompous sounding, full of pride,

as fits the lackey of the Gods. You are young

and young your rule and you think that the tower

in which you live is free from sorrow: from it

have I not seen two tyrants thrown? the third,

who is now king, I shall yet live to see him

fall, of all three most suddenly, most dishonored.

Do you think I will crouch before your Gods,

– so new – and tremble? I am far from that.

(Lines 954-961)

Though the Greek word, tyrannos, does not have the negative implications of our word, tyrant, given the pains the Athenians had taken to remove their tyrants and replace them with a democratic system, as well as the reverence bestowed on the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, it seems justified to think that most Athenians would not have welcomed any attempt to revert to despotic rule.

Prometheus is a powerless captive, but he is on the side of the right, and that is enough to sustain him until the day of his deliverance (he has foreseen his own rescue by Heracles some thirteen generations hence). His words also contain the one threat that Zeus fears; his gift of prophecy holds the secret to Zeus’s downfall. Prometheus alone knows that an ill-fated amorous conquest will lead to “a son greater than his father.” Implicit is the sense that tyranny, by nature, is fleeting, and leads to its own demise:

Prometheus:

Worship him, pray; flatter whatever king

is king today; but I care less than nothing

for Zeus. Let him do what he likes,

let him be king for his short time: he shall not

be king for long.

(Lines 937-941)

The myth goes (not mentioned in the play) that the sea nymph, Thetis, is destined to bear a child who will be greater than the father. Eventually, Zeus will learn this and dodge the bullet by not coupling with her, and instead marrying her off to the mortal king, Peleus. The child of Thetis and Peleus is, of course, Achilles, greater than his father by far, but no threat to Zeus.

*          *          *

What we have inherited from antiquity is but a fraction of the plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and this is perhaps a source of endless anguish for classicists, philologists, and lovers of literature the world over. Aeschylus is thought to have written at least seventy plays, and among the lost are the two plays that would have completed our picture of his Prometheus (though the authorship of Prometheus Bound is debated).

Looking just at the play we have, however, we may set aside issues of what Aeschylus was trying to say, which may forever elude us, and focus more on what we actually hear.

In this incomplete story of a defiant old god and a merciless new god, I take away a message that if there is to come a time when Zeus is king no longer, his undoing will be humanity, educated and nurtured by Prometheus and the arts of civilization. It is reason that turns humanity away from religious superstition, as well as its inherent despotism of ignorance and dogmatic force. We are indebted to myths, but we are not enslaved by them. We rightly celebrate not the fantasies of Olympus or Golgotha, but rather the symbols.

For we are indeed “creatures of a day,” and if there is any future, any immortality, for us, it is only because we pass on our scraps of reason and knowledge to those that follow us. The ideals of the American Revolution and the French Revolution were not accomplished with the setting down of the Declaration of Independence or the storming of the Bastille, respectively. They continue to be accomplished, and humanity continues to crawl toward enlightenment, one candle at a time.