Strauss Binge

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I’ve been on a Richard Strauss listening binge the last few weeks, including spending some quality time listening to Tod und Verklärung, which I hardly know at all, and Don Quixote, which I don’t know well enough. Dave provided me with several recordings I hadn’t heard before, including a wonderful, wonderful recording of Don Quixote with Jacqueline du Pré on cello. (DQ is loosely in the form of a theme and twelve variations, and the main theme, representing DQ himself, is on a solo cello; some of the variations also use the solo cello to portray him. So, while the cellist is not exactly a featured soloist in the manner of a concerto, he or she gets a lot of opportunity to stand out.) Du Pré poured an astonishing amount of depth of emotion and thought into her solo passages. No other recording I’ve heard so far comes anywhere near it in that regard.

Reading of the First Act

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I’m having a reading of the first act of the play I’m working on, on Monday, September 20, at 8 pm.

Here’s the description I just posted on Facebook:

Time
September 20
8:00pm – 9:30pm

Location
The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore
3264 Adeline Street (two blocks south of Ashby BART)
Berkeley

This is a reading of the first act only of The Jade Stalk, a play in progress by David Scott Marley, based on the novel by Jonathan Fast.

The play takes place in seventh-century China and is based loosely on historical people and events. It’s a dark, sexy comedy about Empress Wu and a young, lowborn swindler she takes as her lover and elevates to high rank.

The first act contains a lot of frank sexual situations. This is just a reading, with actors standing and reading from the script, so there won’t be any actual nudity (unless the actors get really carried away). Still, you may not want to bring young children or anyone who would be shocked.

PLEASE EMAIL ME (David Scott Marley) if you’d like to come! Space is limited and I want to be sure to have a chair for you. You can send me a message through Facebook or email me at scratchings at mac dot com.

We’ll read through the first act, which I expect to take about 40 to 45 minutes. (If it takes longer than that, then I’ll know I have some trimming to do!) We’ll take a short break, and then I will invite you to share with me your reactions. I’m most interested in these things: what you enjoyed, what didn’t work for you, how you feel about the intermission being at this point in the story, and what you’re expecting to happen next. I expect that to take another half hour or so. We’ll probably be finished by 9:30 pm.

Easiest Listener Puzzle Ever

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I finished this week’s Listener puzzle (“Double Devilry”) during my 45-minute lunch break, with time left over to blog about it. Nice enough puzzle, but not all that much to it. Only twenty clues to solve. At first it looks like the clues won’t give enough information to fill the grid. But by the time I solved eleven or twelve of them, I tumbled to what was going on, and the rest of it fell apart fairly easily.

Housman and Swinburne

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I left work early, at 3:30 pm, with a fairly bad headache that it had become obvious was not going to be departing from my skull any time between then and 5:30 when I ordinarily get off. My bad headaches, if I’m not successful in catching them early and fending them off before they have a chance to get settled in, tend to last about six hours. There wasn’t anything so vitally urgent on my desk that it would have been better to get it done poorly today than done well tomorrow morning, so I cashed in a couple of hours of my accumulated Paid Time Off and headed home.

The headache was still pounding when I got home, so I drew a hot bath and looked for something I’d like to read that wouldn’t require extended concentration. I picked A.E. Housman, thinking I’d reread some of my favorite poems of his. I have several old volumes of Housman, not terribly valuable (I’m much more likely to own a 14th printing than a first) but which I’d hate myself for if I accidentally let drop into the bathwater; and so I took with me my copy of the Penguin paperback A.E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, which I can always replace if I need to.

After rereading a dozen or so poems, I flipped to the back of the book to look for what notes there were, and as I flipped, I caught a glimpse of Housman’s essay “The Editing of Juvenal”, his preface to the edition of Juvenal that he edited. Although I’ve read pretty much all of Housman’s poems at least a few times by now, I’ve read very little (in fact, probably nothing, as far as I can remember) of the selected prose in the second half of this book. But this essay looked interesting, dealing with issues of how he decided which reading to follow when ancient manuscripts differed, so I started in on it.

OMG! Funny! The man was brilliant scholar and a total bitch at the same time!

Open a modern recension of a classic, turn to the preface, and there you may almost count on finding, in Latin or German or English, some words like these: “I have made it my rule to follow [ancient manuscript] a wherever possible, and only where its readings are patently erroneous have I had recourse to b or c or d.” No scholar of eminence, even in the present age, has ever enunciated such a principle. Some, to be sure, like Mr Buecheler in his Juvenal, have virtually assumed it in their practice, as a convenient substitute for mental exertion; but to blurt it out as a maxim is an indiscretion which they leave to their unreflecting imitators, who formulate the rule without misgiving and practise it with conscious pride.

Either a is the source of b and c and d or it is not. If it is, then never in any case should recourse be had to b or c or d. If it is not, then the rule is irrational; for it involves the assumption that wherever a‘s scribes made a mistake they produced an impossible reading. Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

And:

The task of editing the classics is continually attempted by scholars who have neither enough intellect nor enough literature. Unless a false reading chances to be unmetrical or ungrammatical they have no means of knowing that it is false. Show them these variants,

molliaque {inmittens/inmites} fixit in ora manus,

and they cannot tell which is right and which is wrong; and, what is worse, they honestly believe that nobody else can tell. If you suppose yourself able to distinguish a true reading from a false one, — suppose yourself, that is, to be a critic, a man capable of what the Greeks called κρίνειν, — they are aghast at your assurance. I am aghast at theirs: at the assurance of men who do not even imagine themselves to be critics, and yet presume to meddle with criticism.

And:

But there are editors destitute of this discriminating faculty, so destitute that they cannot even conceive it to exist; and these are entangled in a task for which nature has neglected to equip them. What are they now to do? Set to and try to learn their trade? that is forbidden by sloth. Stand back and leave room for their superiors? that is forbidden by vanity. They must have a rule, a machine to do their thinking for them. If the rule is true, so much the better; if false, that cannot be helped: but one thing is necessary, a rule.

Near the end of the preface:

Truth and wisdom have never been the fashion, no more than virtue; and for the same reason, because they are not easy to attain.

After finishing that essay, I flipped through the other prose selections and happened on an essay about Swinburne; I’m not sure on what occasion he wrote it, but it’s a hoot.

The poems [in Swinburne’s best and most successful book Poems and Ballads] were largely and even chiefly concerned with a thing which one set of people call love, and another set of people call immorality, each set declaring that the other name is quite wrong, so that people who belong to neither set do not exactly know what to call it; but perhaps one may avoid extremes by calling it Aphrodite. Now in the general life of mankind Aphrodite is quite able to take care of herself; but in literature, at any rate in the literature of that Anglo-Saxon race to which we have the high privilege and heavy responsibility of belonging, she wages an unequal contest with another great divinity, who is called purity by her friends and hypocrisy by her enemies, and whom, again to avoid extremes, one may perhaps call Mrs Grundy.

And:

Those to whom this work appealed by its subject and contents, as distinct from its form, were of two classes: there were the simple adherents of Aphrodite, and there were many of those grave men, correct in behaviour and earnest in thought, who regard the relations of the sexes as the most serious and important element in human life. It was the irony of the situation that Swinburne himself belonged to neither class. He was not a libertine, and he was not an earnest thinker about life: he was merely a writer in search of a subject, and a tinder-box that any spark would set on fire. When he had written his book upon this subject, he had done with it, and it hardly appears again in the twenty volumes of his later verse: he was ready for a new subject.

The subject of his next volume, wrote Housman, was Liberty. And, he continued,

The fact is that, whatever may be the comparative merits of the two deities, Liberty is by no means so interesting as Aphrodite, and by no means so good a subject for poetry.

I’m only two or three pages into the essay, and it goes on for ten or so, but I’m enjoying it.

Headline of the Day

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Headline and subhead from the Christian Science Monitor:

Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts

Japanese macaques will completely flip out when presented with flying squirrels, a new study in monkey-antagonism has found. The research could pave the way for advanced methods of enraging monkeys.

There are monkey-annoyance experts? Doing research into advanced methods of enraging monkeys?

Trainyard

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My favorite iPhone game lately is Trainyard, a puzzle based on getting trains of various colors to their proper stations. Trains come in six colors, and depending how you set up the tracks you can merge, say, a red train and a blue train into one or two purple trains, or split a green train into one blue and one yellow. As you get into the more difficult puzzles, there are usually several specific things you need to make happen, often in a particular order, to get to the right combination of colored trains, and the puzzle is how to make them happen and then get the trains to their stations, when you have what seems like nowhere near enough space for laying down the track you need to accomplish all these things. The key is often finding ingenious ways of having trains use the same track to get to different destinations without interfering with each other.

I’ve solved all the original puzzles and am now about two-thirds through the new batch of forty bonus puzzles — I’m working on them in order and the next one to tackle is “Trinidad”.

Half-Thyme

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At first, this week’s Listener crossword — called “Half-Thyme” — seemed like it was going to be fairly easy. The instructions were fairly straightforward for a change, and actually explain what is going on instead of dropping cryptic hints that you can’t understand until you’ve filled in 85% of the grid. I understood what’s going on by the time I’d solved a half dozen or so clues, and even now that I’m within a half dozen or so clues of finishing, that understanding still seems to be holding up.

Nevertheless, filling in the grid has been a slow battle, though a fair and a satisfying one (at least so far!). Lots of very nice, clever, well-written clues.

(At least one, though, that clues a word by breaking it up into parts, one of which is a closely related word. That sort of thing seems to be acceptable in a lot of British cryptics, though I don’t think it would get by the editor in most American cryptics. It always seems a bit lame to me — to make up an example off the top of my head, somewhat exaggerated in its lameness, but not by that much, such a clue might be “Bride-to-be makes groom-to-be full of energy” as a clue for FIANCEE, made by putting E for energy inside FIANCE.)

I don’t like to say much that’s specific about whatever Listener puzzle I’m working on at the time, in case I spoil the fun for someone who is working on the puzzle and hasn’t made some discovery yet. So I’ll just say that the puzzle grid represents an herb garden in which you must discover the names of a certain number of herbs. I’ve found about two-thirds of them, and I know what a few of the others will be even though I haven’t completely located them yet. There’s also a “thematic phrase” that you’re supposed to be able to reveal; I have a strong idea about how that will happen but don’t have quite enough of the grid solved yet to know what the phrase is.

Moments later: I just did a Google search on a hunch, and now I think I know what the phrase is. That should help me a lot in finishing up the grid!

Still later: Stayed up another half hour or so and finished the puzzle at about 2 am Sunday morning.

Mrs. Warren’s Profession at CalShakes

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Dave and I saw Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession Thursday night at CalShakes. The production is really good. Stacy Ross is terrific as Mrs. Warren, Anna Bullard holds her own very well as her daughter Vivie. Dan Hiatt is very endearing as Praed. The whole ensemble is delightful — the direction, the pointedly ironic set (pointed and ironic both literally and figuratively), the supporting roles, the colorful costumes.

It’s still Mrs. Warren’s Profession, though. It was Shaw’s second play and it has always seemed to me with this play that he hadn’t yet figured out how to make his lecture-hall points and tell a good story at the same time. There are too many times where the lectures cause the story to stop in its tracks for too long. Mrs. Warren seems to me to be a well-drawn character, but the same isn’t true of Vivie, who often seems to me to be who she is, and to do what she does, not so much because she’s a woman in a story as because she’s a symbol in the equation Shaw wanted to construct to describe the world as he saw it.

Still, this production made the play work better for me than it’s ever worked before, and I think it’s mostly because of the approach taken toward Vivie. A reviewer of this production harshly criticized the way Vivie is presented in this production, saying that it wasn’t worthy of Shaw’s character,

… the brave young woman who makes a hard choice to go it alone, at a time when conventional wisdom — and hindsight — declared a woman couldn’t.

Well, that’s one of my big problems with the play, right there: By the end of the play I don’t think Vivie is brave. I think she makes the easy, selfish, heartless, and ultimately cowardly choice, choosing to pretend to “go it alone”, when the really brave thing to do would be to admit that she knows she is only equipped to do well in the world because of the countless advantages that she’s received from her mother. But she doesn’t want to have to acknowledge them or admit any gratitude for them, because that would require her to give up her black-and-white, this-is-good-and-that-is-evil view of the world.

I understand that Shaw makes her that way because she’s his representative for the privileged world’s conventional attitude toward prostitution, loudly condemning it and staying aloof from it while in a state of carefully preserved denial about all the ways in which the world quietly profits by it. But that’s not a living character, that’s an allegorical statue. The few productions I’ve seen have tried to present Vivie in a positive light, her and Mrs. Warren as equally strong-willed women who have opposite and incompatible, but equally valid, points of view. It’s always managed to make the play about as compelling to me as a problem in long division.

What I’d really like to see is for Vivie to struggle her way toward some new understanding and acceptance and wisdom about her situation and her mother — not to give us the usual conventional, sentimental attitude about motherhood and/or prostitution, but to show us how Shaw wished that people like Vivie could change, rather than showing us how they don’t change. Shaw did take just that approach in so many of his plays, letting one or two of his central characters come to new and more complicated understandings of their worlds, even as the more conventional supporting characters around them held fast to their conventional, sentimental, black-and-white attitudes. But Shaw hadn’t tumbled to doing that yet with Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which was only his second play.

This production, though, does something that I don’t remember seeing before or remember ever occurring to me before in reading the play, and that is to make us see Vivie’s inflexibility as her way of coping with her profound fear of the world, of its sensuality, and of her own feelings. The production shows us that she is not so much going out into the world on her own as she is locking herself up tightly in a fortress she’s building higher and higher around herself. I still didn’t completely believe in Vivie as a human being, but the approach in this production came closer to making the play work for me than I can remember it ever doing before.

I thought Timothy Near’s direction contained a great many memorable and telling moments, maybe the most powerful of all being the sequence at the very beginning, all done silently before a line of dialogue is said, as we watch Mrs. Warren and Vivie, each in her own home, getting dressed in the morning. Vivie dresses herself in comparatively simple and lightweight clothing, while Mrs. Warren puts on layer after complicated layer with the help of two maids, starting with a corset (trying stoically not to wince as a maid puts a knee to her back and gives a firm tug to tighten the laces just another tiny bit) and a bustle and ending with a jacket and full skirt in a rich, beautiful, and very heavy-looking fabric. Her day hasn’t even begun and already she’s breathing a little harder just from getting dressed — but by God, she has created exactly the effect she wants and needs to create. It’s a brilliant opening, and Stacy Ross’s acting through it is brilliant, too — she seems to do very little, just stands and looks at herself in a mirror as she is dressed by her maids, and yet by the end of the sequence we know, before a word has been spoken, a great deal about Mrs. Warren, her character, her position in the world, her attitude toward it. And about the differences between her and her daughter.