Summer Reading: Inferno (intro)

Why Dante's Inferno? Lady Hotspur & I plan to visit Florence in October. And I enjoy laying a foundation for trips by exploring the literature of my destination. So it seems like the perfect excuse to read the masterpiece, written c. 1305-20, at the dawn of Florence's Renaissance heyday. I'll be reading and reporting on a canto each day for the next month, at about a 100 words per entry. But first, an introduction.

Narrative poems have a push-pull rhythm that combines the momentum of storytelling with the careful parsing of poetry. The rhyme scheme of The Divine Comedy mirrors this rhythm: ABA BCB CDC DED EFE…. Dante introduces a third rhyme then moves back to resolve the second. The content also shifts constantly between realistic observations, vivid metaphors, emotional self-reflection, mythic/historical allusion, Christian allegory, metaphysical inquiry, & Florentine current events. It makes for an incredibly dense epic, but it's also remarkably accessible.

FYI, I'm reading the Hollander translation,  published in 2000 AD. It prints the original Italian on the left leaf & the English translation on the right. I like the option of breaking down Dante's phrasing to compare it with the translation, and my knowledge of Latin languages is just good enough to recognize some word roots. The Hollanders don't bother to rhyme their translation (I approve, as English isn't nearly as good as Italian for rhyming).

What else should you know? Cantos are about 110-150 lines long, the perfect length for one a day. The Hollanders include notes at the end of each canto rather than at the foot of the page. I read the canto then skim the endnotes for the allusions & political references. Inferno has 34 cantos; the subsequent volumes are 33 cantos, making The Comedy an even 100 cantos.

I hope you enjoy playing Dante to my Virgil as I guide you through the Inferno! See you tomorrow!

Arthur and George (Julian Barnes)

By any yardstick of literary measurement (except experimentally, I guess), Arthur and George is superb. Setting the novel in early 20th century England, Julian Barnes simply follows that era's writing style: smart, ironic, unobtrusive, and in the habit of peering into his characters' psyches. The linear plot, taken from actual events, is propelled by a mystery—which fits, since the titular “Arthur” is Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. It's George, however, who's the center of the book. Half-Indian by blood and yet completely English by nature, he's accused of a gruesome series of cattle slayings. The case turns into a Dreyfus-like miscarriage of justice, which, in the telling, gives you a visceral reaction of disgust. It's also what makes the novel so forward-looking: by placing racism within the context of history, Barnes not only shows how provisional definitions of race and culture are but how complex the factors are that define individuals. Excellent reading.

Sci-Fi novels: We

I stopped reading sci-fi around age 15. But I've returned to the genre recently, playing catch-up on works like Dune. I just finished We, a very early Soviet sci-fi novel (1921) written by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It's not just a brisk, zesty read, it's got artistic substance beyond most sci-fi. George Orwell cribbed a lot from We: the mechanics of his dystopia as well as a few big plot points—including the climax! Basically, We is the prototype for dystopic sci-fi: the protag awakens to his home culture's injustice, joins the revolution, and dies.

It's the 26^th century. The OneState is a domed city of glass, a beautiful image subverted by its reason: to more easily spy on citizens. Free love is enforced by bureaucratic forms; people have alphanumeric IDs rather than names, like Star Wars droids. D-503, the protag, has designed the first interstellar rocket. Maybe that's why he's drafted into an anarchist cell by erotic I-330, drawn into despair by her dagger lips (it may be a lefty book, but it's not enlightened).

And so on. Part of the novel's fun is seeing sci-fi tropes in their raw state—you can get the same primitive futurism when you watch Fritz Lang's Metropolis. But We also works as a novel, probably better than 1984. Zamyatin gives D-503 a vivid inner life: the novel's arc is D's breakdown, caught between the anarchist and the state. His insanity is electric in a Dostoyevsky-like way, oscillating between obsessive hyperclarity and fevered ravings. And that climax that Orwell lifted? Actually, both scenes are riffs on the Grand Inquisitor: the State's torturer justifies totalitarian measures by citing his love for the populace.

If We is a sci-fi riff on Dosteyevsky, it's is some cackling-scientist version, a trip to the future in HG Wells' time machine. Zamyatin is ironic to his core: the book ends with anarchy threatening to topple the OneState (yes!), but the hero's been lobotomized (umm…). Still, there's a dashing element of romantic adventure to We. Check out this descrip of the femme fatale, who's been smuggled aboard the rocket:

“[T]he huge blue sparks above, over the radio antenna, seemed to come from her, and the faint, lightning smell of ozone, also from her.”

That's right out of Buck Rogers!

We's not a great novel, but it's brisk & engaging. The reason to read it isn't its vision of the future (which is dated) or its investigation of totalitarianism (which, yeah, Orwell did better). It's the mad vivacity that Zamyatin infuses D with. He puts us in D's head then sets it spinning into insanity. Poor D, driven mad by lust, scientific abstractions, and the State. A weird, Soviet electric fantasy.

Wedding & honeymoon

It's been waaay too long since I posted here. I only caught a few shows in July, and reviewed Anne Hathaway in Twelfth Night for Metromix (as well as posting regularly on their blog). But I also got married and honeymooned, & that's what left me no time to sit on the Fifth Wall.

Of course, the wedding was a show in itself. Lady Hotspur & I held it at the Hudson Theatre, an old Broadway house that got renovated in the mid-1990s, along with the rest of Times Square. I satisfied Lady Hotspur's lifelong desire for an outdoor wedding by dressing the stage as a NYC park. We borrowed a forest backdrop from MTC, rented some potted trees, laid down astroturf bought at Home Depot (& returned a day later) and swiped a couple chairs from Bryant Park. My sisters-in-law constructed a elegant, simple chuppah. It's the first set I've designed in a decade, & it looked magical!

I enjoyed the mingling of theater and ritual; for me, it took the edge off the more religious aspects of a Jewish wedding. The rabbi helpfully noted drama's origins as a religious observance in her speech. And my friend Sweet Pea reminded me that I'd once hoped for (demanded?) a future when all houses of worship would be repurposed as venues for art.

Post-wedding, Lady Hotspur and I spent ten days in Turkey. We saw no theater, or even a perf of dervishes (more religion refitted as art: originally the whirling was an ecstatic meditation, but now it's more of a region-specific art form). Instead, we marveled at the mosques and mosaics, ate lots of lamb kebab, and read in the hotel courtyard.

When I travel, I like to read lit & history about my destination. So, instead of 50-100 words on recent shows, here's a few paragraphs on books about Turkey:

A Short History of Byzantium (John Julius Norwich)
Short = 500+ pages, but it's still a highly readable history of a 1200-year empire, if slightly fusty & donnish. The maps, genealogies, & tables of emperors & popes help keep the protagonists straight, but it's easier to just go with the flow of decades and centuries. Norwich approaches history traditionally: it's all political factions, pivotal battles and great men (& women too: Byzantium had several empresses), but it describes economic conflicts & cultural movements too. And he's got an eye for drama: the final chapter, on the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, is riveting and emotional.

Istanbul (Orham Pamuk)
The 2003 memoir of Nobelist Pamuk is a portrait of the artist as a young man: his childhood in a post-Ataturk (ie secular, modern) Turkey with a large family that's slowly falling from the upper class. Pamuk adeptly blurs the distinction betw. himself & his hometown, which he characterizes as deeply melancholy and pathetically picturesque. Though it matches my own vibe of Istanbul, I found its tone a bit adolescent in the way the writer romanticized his depression.

Memed, My Hawk (Yashar Kemal)
Kemal's novel was Turkey's entry in the mid-century explosion of international middlebrow lit. It's thoroughly romantic: a indentured scamp takes to brigandage in the Anatolian hills, and becomes a hero to the downtrodden. There's also a love subplot, natch. The okay style lifts the plot above its pulp-fiction cliches and one-dimensional characters. But if you're looking for a realistic depiction of rural Turkey, you won't find it here.

Shakespeare's portrait, Shakespeare's thoughts

Oh boy, a new pic of my boy Bill! Count me among the skeptics (maybe it's a painting of the Earl of Essex?). Time Out's Helen Shaw has some smart thoughts on the subject.

Anyhow, it dovetails with my most recent reading material: Shakespeare: The Thinker, AD Nuttall's 2007 study. It's fairly accessible, despite being aimed at scholars & dramaturgs rather than audiences, directors, & actors. Nuttall was an Oxford don: erudite, dry even in when witty, fascinated by how Shak uses language for its own sake, and fond of terms for poetic devices. But he avoids academic jargon, & while he's very smart, he's also welcoming.

Nuttall's gist is that Shak's began his dramaturgic journey by exploring the conflict betw. male camaraderie & hetero love.* Soliloquies in Richard 3 and Richard 2 see the protags internalize the fraternal bond to reflect on themselves. So Shak's revolutionary development is when Richard 2 asks for a mirror, which provides a concrete device & onstage metaphor for the doubled self.

However, Nuttall gives short shrift to Shak's women. Billy-boy established his dramatic rep with forceful femmes: Jeanne la Pucelle & Margaret in the Henry 6 plays, Kate in Shrew, Tamara in Titus, & esp. Juliet are the most vital original characters of his early career.** Nuttall could plausibly argue that the crossdressing of Breech Roles (Rosaline, Viola et al) create a dramaturgic mirror for female self-reflection, but he fails to do so.

Still, he pays close attention to the fraternal bond, a theme I'm fond of. Since Freud, it's been hard to read that theme as anything but homoerotic (& that's frequently justified in Shak's work). But male camaraderie can exist apart from sexuality, & Nuttall makes that a key to Shak's dramaturgy: the conflict in a man's movement from fraternal to romantic love.

This shift, I now see, is essential to The Winter's Tale. In the first half, Leontes becomes doubly jealous of his wife's bond with his comrade. In the second half, the rage of the King of Bohemia stems, at least partly, from being replaced by his son's beloved. And Nuttall's mirror is there too: Leontes notes that the young couple resemble his wife & his (former) friend.*** I wish Mendes & co. had played with these relationships, as well as delivering Beale & Hawke's perfs, which were great in themselves but stood out from the rest of the pretty good production.


* Nuttall actually digs how the fraternal bond withstands the attempt of one gentleman of Verona to rape his buddy's girlfriend!

** Richard Crookback & Aaron the Moor are Marlovian, not Shakespearean chars. Nuttall's focus is the playwright's sheer originality, so in this sense that pair is secondary: Bill could synthesize damned well, but it's his innovations we're focusing on. And I'm just plain ignoring Henry 6 & Mercutio.

*** “I lost a couple, that ’twixt heaven and earth | Might thus have stood begetting wonder as | You, gracious couple, do.” (5.1.164-6)

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This novel is simply astonishing. Set in the Mexican-American war around 1849 (& based on a historical incident), it's one of the most violent books I've ever read. A paramilitary band of Americans butchers their way across the American Southwest, paid by the scalp. The main character's the Kid, who's subtly set apart from the rest by a twinge of mercy. The antagonist, the Judge, is an incredible creation: a deeply troubling engine of chaos who gets all the best speeches in the book. It's worth reading just to see this character who stinks of brimstone.



McCarthy takes a lot from Moby Dick: the doomed team on an unholy mission; non-psychological characterization; realism based in the quotidian details of a bygone era; a godless, fatal Nature. The commodious vocab includes specialty words on breech-loading guns & horse riding, but it goes much further too. McCarthy is also heavily influenced by Billy Shakes, Milton, King James as well. The style is wonderful -- tho' not good for subway reading -- with sentences so long & labyrinthine that they need to be read twice.



Okay, so Blood Meridian is terribly dark & even horrifying. It's apocalyptic & vaguely medieval, like a painting by Bosch. It's hard to get through. Its unrelenting pessimism ends on an equivocal note. But despite the noble antecedents mentioned above, it's a unique American novel. McCarthy sustains a level of artistic excellence that kept me reading for weeks. I'm looking forward to reading it again someday.


View all my reviews.