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(Part 1 was my review of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, a dissembled and reknitted telling of King Lear.)

The story of Lear digs way back, way way back, centuries before the version brought forth by Shakespeare. Back then he was Leir, one of the legendary ancient kings of Britain. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Leir’s father Bladud was an adventuresome king who pursued magic and necromancy. He built a pair of wings which, Geoffrey explains, simply did not work. The king plummeted to an ugly death on ancient London’s temple to the god Apollo.

In contrast, Leir had sixty years of good times as King but his problems began when he decided to step aside, divide the kingdom betwixt his daughters, and travel among them in his retirement. Why someone with sixty years of absolute monarching under his belt was so subject to empty flattery, I can’t say — it speaks to the privileged relationship between fathers and daughters, or perhaps to the communication gap and mutual lack of understanding that can color the same relationship.

Shakespeare begins with the same framework: youngest Cordelia resists her older sisters’ examples of empty flattery, pragmatically assuring her father she feels exactly the appropriate levels of love, respect, and loyalty. He drives her out of the family and lets the older two inherit Britannia in halves. When the Earl of Kent supports Cordelia’s doubts and asks Lear to reconsider, the good king throws Kent out. Kent goes undercover and comes back to defend Lear from what he views as the inevitable attacks of the two oldest daughters.

In the meantime, another family drama plays out with the Earl of Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund, one legitimate and one illegitimate. Edmund double-agents his way into Gloucester’s favor and gets his well-meaning brother Edgar thrown out. After that, Edmund turns on his father and has him arrested and effectively exiled. In the process, Gloucester is blinded and left to wander. Then people start to get killed.

Edgar is my favorite character in the play. When Gloucester turns him out as a traitor, Edgar smears mud on his face and in his hair, dresses up in rags, and plays a madman. This, Richard Hornby explains in the summer 2007 Hudson Review (PDF), adds to the play’s visceral engagement:

Yes, the play is sad — it is a tragedy, after all — and it presents a view of life as ultimately meaningless, but when I first read the ravings of Edgar as the pretend madman, I did not feel I was getting a philosophical message. [The ravings are] a shock wave to be experienced.

In fact, the vivid descriptions of Edgar’s faux madness and Lear’s incubating, very real madness stand side by side and intensify the impact of each. As Lear’s daughters treat him more and more badly, you can see it confusing him to the point that it breaks his mind: The oldest daughters belittle and mock his retirement plan into oblivion. They kill Lear from the brain outward by instantly becoming people he never expected to find where his family once had been.

In contrast, Edgar’s manufactured crazy helps him to pass invisibly through a world in which he’s no longer welcome and monitor the behaviors of the people he still cares about, including his father. After exiling Edgar himself, Gloucester is also ousted. Blind Gloucester is left to wander the countryside and Edgar finds him, saves him, in the play’s most serious and eloquent moment. Edgar is a decent, empathetic, and sincere human being. I felt satisfied at the end of the play because he was rewarded, in a way, for his quiet but critical acts of kindness.

For the eponymous exiled king, we find a champion in the form of youngest daughter Cordelia along with her husband, the king of France. But of course, it being a tragedy and all, very few characters emerge unscathed. In fact, there is mild to moderate scathing for even those left less dead at the end.

I love the following passage from Roger Ebert’s review of the 1971 movie version of Lear because it explains how I felt about Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and the original Lear:

He omits or rearranges dialogue and scenes in order to make the evil daughters, Regan and Goneril, ambiguous in their villainy. He gives us a Cordelia who is not as perfect as she should be. He gives us a Lear who is only a figure of pity, not (as he was in Shakespeare) also sometimes a figure of greatness. He gives us a world so grim we might as well be dead.

Ebert criticizes the movie’s (male) maker for his choices, but I don’t hold any ill will for Smiley’s creative license. Her rewrites don’t bear out badly in the updated version of the story; they wantonly alter its tone to unrecognizability. This is testament both to the power of Shakespeare’s play and Smiley’s place as a profoundly gifted contemporary writer. I also give her major credit for using her source material graciously and simply: to frame her own story, tell a side she felt was not represented, satisfy her own creative itch by building on Shakespeare without presumption or pretension.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

This weekend, Speaking of Faith reran a 2008 interview with John O’Donohue, Irish poet, former priest, and Hegelian (What an array of descriptors!), done shortly before his death. This moment took me aback:

Yeah, I feel like in the book I wrote on beauty, I was trying to say that one of the huge confusions in our times is to mistake glamour for beauty. And we do live in a culture which is very addicted to the image, and I think that there is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward. And I feel that there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times. And that we need to draw back inside ourselves and that we’ll find immense resources there.

We have largely evacuated interiority, at least in my portion of the Western world, and I can’t think of a better way to phrase the situation. One of history’s favorite literary zingers is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

We are all large and should contain multitudes, which is, I think, why O’Donohue suggests we “draw back inside ourselves” — plus, a nice Hegelish note there when Whitman expresses himself as the combination and synthesis of his own contradictions and dualities.

Stanley Fish really stirred up some murk last week with his column advocating a limit on curiosity. Fish himself is a source of controversy and I find it hilarious and awkward that anyone accuse this bastion of individual thought and intellect as a curiosity-hater — seriously? Someone widely revered or reviled as the best or worst kind of rhetorician or theorist, who makes his living in the world of higher education?

This is Fish’s thesis in the column, an idea originally situated in the Garden:

The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything.

I think that Fish views destructive curiosity as the end of wonder and humbled awe, the kind of smug quest for “understanding” that characterizes literary examples Faust and Frankenstein, among others whom Fish does not cite. It is the product of two competing but parallel forces: First, that we are not grounded enough by our families, communities, or otherwise to ever have reason to stop the quest for new knowledge; and second, that we arrogantly assume this quest will lead us to something better, bigger, greater.

But more importantly, as Fish’s weekly column is aptly titled, he simply encourages us to Think Again, to not evacuate our interiority.

From Bernard Malamud’s A New Life:

“The more I tried — I hope you don’t mind hearing this — the less I could. There were days when I almost didn’t think of you, when I felt I had killed you in me, but the very thought renewed my feeling of loss so profoundly that sometimes I felt I had left drops of blood where I was standing when I had thought of you last.”

Compare this passage back to the feelings I expressed in my post on (500) Days of Summer and you’ll see why I found meaning in seeing and reading them at the same time.

I will probably post a few more passages from this novel in the next few days. The writing is so lush and expressive without being over the top, which is one of Malamud’s great gifts.

17-year-old Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a letter to her sister:

I’m glad you’re not here, Norma, so that I’d have to show you I’m neither a pickled lime nor a pants-button.

I hope we are all able to say the same, unless some of you are indeed pants-buttons.

During this time in her life Ms. Millay signed her correspondence “Vincent,” which is wonderful.

Ernest Hemingway friend-cum-memoirist and allaround talented good guy A.E. Hotchner has an ethically shocking editorial today. Apparently the new edition of Hemingway’s final (posthumous) book A Moveable Feast contains extensive edits by a family member:

[Hemingway's] grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

Hotchner presents a narrative about his friend Hemingway working on the book over time, sending manuscripts to his publisher, and so forth. The San Francisco Chronicle tells the story flatly without mention of the editorial wherewithal of son Patrick or grandson Sean Hemingway. The Boston Globe criticizes the rearrangement of and additions to the text but in a less pointed way.

So who has the higher ground? The children and grandchildren of Hemingway’s second wife, who began as a mistress and, Hemingway wrote in the original Moveable Feast, homewrecker? Or Hemingway’s peer who seeks to do honorably by his friend’s memory and legacy?

Andrew Sullivan linked to this post I devoured and loved. The role of the educated, reasonable theologist has been marginalized by those whom Andrew appropriately labels “Christianists,” wielding carefully parsed scripture and quotations as weapons of intolerance or self-congratulation.

Governor Mark Sanford claimed recently to be a King David figure, or at least to draw significant parallels between this parable and his situation. From the WaPo:

And that King David analogy surely is understandable for Sanford, since it makes the governor’s errant ways seem exceptionally minor.

Father Stephen gets to the heart of the matter:

The problem with such use of Biblical imagination is that it simply has no controlling story. Nothing tells us which story to use other than our own imagination (which is generally a deluded part of our mind). [ . . . ] The gospel is not preached – souls are not saved – the Bible is simply brought into ridicule.

One of the problems inherent to our soundbyte-obsessed culture is that people don’t feel the need to acquaint themselves with context before they speak or cite. Recently, Sarah Palin tweeted an out-of-context remark from Walter Cronkite on the “liberal” nature of the media. Of course, Kronkite’s whole conversation involved a more literal definition of liberal rather than political, and he was encouraging the evenhanded and voracious acquisition of knowledge and viewpoints.

Palin acting a fool is no big news, and I think she’s too ignorant to understand the way she manhandles information. But she represents a larger movement toward a people who love quotations more than books, who pull lines from websites and use them as “Favorite Quotes” when they don’t even know who the speakers were or what they represented.

From the mediocre 2004 U2 single All Because of You:

I like the sound of my own voice
I didn’t give anyone else a choice

Don’t we know it, buddy.

After I glimpsed Pekar at the book fair (see previous post), I stood at attention for the next hour and a half knowing he’d eventually be back. The coordinator came back to ask if I wanted to be rotated, but of course I was waiting to see Harvey Pekar again. She said, “Oh, come upstairs and meet him!”

Pekar and his editor, Paul Buhle, were in the hospitality room and we talked for a few minutes before they had to go downstairs for their panel discussion. I also met Bucky Halker, a Wisconsin-born singer-songwriter and labor academic who reminds me of Jeff Bridges circa Fearless (tall, thin, runaway hair, piercing blue eyes) and serves on the Woody Guthrie Foundation board.

At past Printers Rows, Studs Terkel presented his own program, but at this first one since his death in October they invited Pekar and Buhle to discuss their recent graphication of portions of Terkel’s most famous book, Working. Really, Pekar and Terkel are cut of the same cloth: both are magnetic personalities (though Pekar has great social anxiety) who spend their lives discussing the overlooked “ordinary” people who populate most of the world. By holding these people’s stories up to the light, we can give them the attention they deserve — not by romanticizing, or making them unhealthily famous (Cough . . . Susan Boyle?), but by acknowledging that everyone plays a part.

Because of the draw of Studs Terkel (especially in Chicago) and Pekar’s elevated profile since 2003′s great movie adaptation of American Splendor, CSPAN’s Book TV broadcast the panel live. In this context I felt more self conscious as the loudest laugher. Whoops.

Seong Moy (b. 1920s) is a modern artist and printmaker whose work is atraditionally gestural:

Having never seen the man himself, I found it charming when the Smithsonian Flickr feed posted this photo, demonstrating that indeed Seong May was conservative in appearance — excepting, of course, his sly Mona Lisa smile.

But those browline glasses! My goodness.

While looking for a particular Gary Snyder poem to show Scotty I ran across this perfect description:

You have to be careful writing about Gary Snyder, because he’s such a Zen guy you get the feeling anything you write will be vastly inferior to silence.

keep looking »