A metaphor:
The glory of God no man or angel shall know, preached Thomas Shepard; "their cockle shell can never comprehend this sea"; we can only apprehend Him by knowing that we cannot comprehend Him at all, "as we admire the luster of the sun the more in that it is so great we can not behold it." (in Perry Miller's essay "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity")
"their cockle shell can never comprehend this sea" — I like that.
Around the same time, Andrew Marvell's father wrote, in a request for funds for a school library, "Scholers are like other tradesmen, they cannot worke w'thout tooles, nor, spider like, weave their web out of their own bellyes." (quoted in Nicholas Murray's biography of Marvell)
Monday, January 29, 2007
Sunday, January 28, 2007
I was reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence over most of the vacation, and specifically The Grey King, the day I went to see The Magic Flute. At first I was struck by the similarities: two boys on a quest, helped by a magic instrument; mazes leading to vast halls where men in robes sit in chairs and ask riddles. (OK, no riddles in TMF; but it feels like an omission.) One boy committed to abstractions, the other not. I could go on, but really the similarities are all archetypes, so (on further thought) they don't seem so striking. But the comparison did make me realize that Cooper's Papageno/Sancho Panza/Dr. Watson is not true to type: he's an orphan, an albino (much is made of his startling appearance), and a prickly character; everyone's slightly afraid of him at first. This means that when he complains that the quest entails too much suffering, his protests have an authority that the protests of the jollier sidekicks lack. (Or maybe not? Sancho Panza is a man of the world compared to Don Quixote, isn't he?) And Cooper allows her hero to be outrageously tactless — it's extraordinary that when faced with the forces of evil he knows exactly what to do and say, but is tone deaf to human grief. Or at least very clumsy. I thought it was well done.
Reading these books I remembered my childhood obsession with Old English and Welsh. There's actually a line of Old English in The Dark Is Rising, and now that I've taken a course in Old English, I can read it!
Reading these books I remembered my childhood obsession with Old English and Welsh. There's actually a line of Old English in The Dark Is Rising, and now that I've taken a course in Old English, I can read it!
Fifth grade sentences:
Agnes:
We exchanged glances as the sub walked in.
Sam:
Wealth can make you cruel.
Fashion is boring and useless.
John:
Patience, little ones.
(That's my favorite.)
(In case you're wondering, "Why are they writing these sentences? Where are the hard words?" This was in an exercise on consonant blends and consonant digraphs. "Isn't that stuff for first graders, not fifth graders?" Yes it is, but occasionally I have to do what the office says I should do.)
Agnes:
We exchanged glances as the sub walked in.
Sam:
Wealth can make you cruel.
Fashion is boring and useless.
John:
Patience, little ones.
(That's my favorite.)
(In case you're wondering, "Why are they writing these sentences? Where are the hard words?" This was in an exercise on consonant blends and consonant digraphs. "Isn't that stuff for first graders, not fifth graders?" Yes it is, but occasionally I have to do what the office says I should do.)
Kaveri subbed for me. When the sixth graders found out that she knows me, they asked, "Have you heard Ms — sneeze?" "Yes." "And have you noticed that she doesn't just sneeze once, but does ten, fifteen little sneezes at a time?" "Indeed I have. Ahem, moving on now…"
(Maybe this is too trivial to mention on this blog. But —.)
(Maybe this is too trivial to mention on this blog. But —.)
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Recommendation:
Cluny Brown, Lubitsch's 1946 film. More playing with forms so familiar that they can be stretched and parodied to ridiculous extremes. Here's the premise:
Lovely Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is the niece of a London plumber; when her uncle is indisposed, Cluny rolls up her sleeves and takes a plumbing job at a society home, where she meets a handsome refugee Czech author (Charles Boyer). Hoping to cure her of her unladylike obsession with plumbing, Cluny Brown's uncle finds her a maid's position in a fancy country home, where she once more meets the Czech author, who is a house guest.
This is accurate, but it doesn't hint at the film's high silliness. Here's an exchange between two men in love with the same standoffish woman and commiserating:
__What are you going to do?
__I'll propose to her once or twice more, and then I'm washing my hands of her!
Many of the jokes revolve around the freedom to be outrageous rubbing against convention, and what happens when convention allows or requires one to be outrageous. It reminded me of Samuel Johnson:
It has been observed, I think, by Sir William Temple, and after him by almost every other writer, that England affords a greater variety of characters than the rest of the world. This is ascribed to the liberty prevailing amongst us, which gives every man the privilege of being wise or foolish his own way, and preserves him from the necessity of hypocrisy or the servility of imitation.
I had to root around in Johnson for a while to find that, and it occurred to me that "A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage" attempts the same kind of trick that Erasmus tried in In Praise of Folly, but is more successful (funnier, more coherent).
In fact it's brilliant, everyone should read it! I hope this link works.
Cluny Brown, Lubitsch's 1946 film. More playing with forms so familiar that they can be stretched and parodied to ridiculous extremes. Here's the premise:
Lovely Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is the niece of a London plumber; when her uncle is indisposed, Cluny rolls up her sleeves and takes a plumbing job at a society home, where she meets a handsome refugee Czech author (Charles Boyer). Hoping to cure her of her unladylike obsession with plumbing, Cluny Brown's uncle finds her a maid's position in a fancy country home, where she once more meets the Czech author, who is a house guest.
This is accurate, but it doesn't hint at the film's high silliness. Here's an exchange between two men in love with the same standoffish woman and commiserating:
__What are you going to do?
__I'll propose to her once or twice more, and then I'm washing my hands of her!
Many of the jokes revolve around the freedom to be outrageous rubbing against convention, and what happens when convention allows or requires one to be outrageous. It reminded me of Samuel Johnson:
It has been observed, I think, by Sir William Temple, and after him by almost every other writer, that England affords a greater variety of characters than the rest of the world. This is ascribed to the liberty prevailing amongst us, which gives every man the privilege of being wise or foolish his own way, and preserves him from the necessity of hypocrisy or the servility of imitation.
I had to root around in Johnson for a while to find that, and it occurred to me that "A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage" attempts the same kind of trick that Erasmus tried in In Praise of Folly, but is more successful (funnier, more coherent).
In fact it's brilliant, everyone should read it! I hope this link works.
Recommendation:
The Met's current production of The Magic Flute. The music is, of course, wonderful, but the costumes and choreography were almost as good. (which is saying a lot!) I haven't been so delighted by visual humor since, oh, I guess since I saw Miyazaki's Spirited Away a few months ago. Many scenes had a quality of sublime silliness, as if to say: "This is obvious," and then, "This is so obvious we can play with it." For example, Sarastro's men wear triangles, circles, and squares to signify their embodiment of reason.
My favorite moments were of Papageno eating: he tries to catch huge fruits, drumsticks, dumplings, etc, which are hovering in the air above him (a bit like Tantalus), and of Papageno singing "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen": a bevy of ballerinas with goose necks and heads ("ein sanftes Täubchen") do a careful, mysterious, ridiculous, awkwardly graceful dance around him. Papageno is almost a bird himself, but a ruffled, garrulous, earthy kind of bird. These stylized Papagenas of his imagination are smooth, white, silent, dainty — a different species from Papageno. Luckily the real Papagena is just as comical and colorful as Papageno.
The Met's current production of The Magic Flute. The music is, of course, wonderful, but the costumes and choreography were almost as good. (which is saying a lot!) I haven't been so delighted by visual humor since, oh, I guess since I saw Miyazaki's Spirited Away a few months ago. Many scenes had a quality of sublime silliness, as if to say: "This is obvious," and then, "This is so obvious we can play with it." For example, Sarastro's men wear triangles, circles, and squares to signify their embodiment of reason.
My favorite moments were of Papageno eating: he tries to catch huge fruits, drumsticks, dumplings, etc, which are hovering in the air above him (a bit like Tantalus), and of Papageno singing "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen": a bevy of ballerinas with goose necks and heads ("ein sanftes Täubchen") do a careful, mysterious, ridiculous, awkwardly graceful dance around him. Papageno is almost a bird himself, but a ruffled, garrulous, earthy kind of bird. These stylized Papagenas of his imagination are smooth, white, silent, dainty — a different species from Papageno. Luckily the real Papagena is just as comical and colorful as Papageno.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
