tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39019807334630686982024-03-18T19:17:30.791+00:00The little white attic Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.comBlogger1451125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-43678978212579191682024-03-13T18:00:00.002+00:002024-03-13T22:10:41.216+00:00Characters and images in Primo Levi’s The Truce <p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Truce</i> is sequel to <i>If This Is a Man</i>—the two books should be read together—but it is a rather different book: depicting Primo Levi’s journey from Auschwitz back to Italy, it is more life-affirming and exuberant; and Levi writes more about the people he met. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Jadzia was a small and timid girl, of a sickly-rosy colour; but her sheath of anaemic flesh was tormented, torn apart from inside, convulsed by a continual secret tempest. She had a desire, an urge, an impelling need of a man, of any man, at once, of all men. Every male who crossed her path attracted her; attracted her materially, heavily, as a magnet attracts iron.” (ch.2) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(translated by Stuart Woolf) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The people he describes are all fascinating, sometimes rather grotesque. A few strokes, and they appear so vivid. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“… But Gottlieb was there, as sharp as a knife; there was no bureaucratic complication, no barrier of negligence, no official obstinacy which he was unable to remove in a few minutes, each time in a different way. Every difficulty dissolved into mist in the face of his effrontery, his soaring fantasy, his rapier-like quickness. He came back from each encounter with the monster of a thousand faces, which lives wherever official forms and circulars gather, radiant with victory like St George after his duel with the dragon, and recounted the rapid exchange, too conscious of his superiority to glory in it.” (ch.8)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The main characters of the book (the Greek, Cesare) are full of life, but the passing characters, the ones we meet only once, are also striking. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“In the Moor’s chest, skeletal yet powerful, a gigantic but indeterminate anger raged ceaselessly; a senseless anger against everybody and everything, against the Russians and the Germans, against Italy and the Italians, against God and mankind, against himself and us, against day when it was day, and against night when it was night, against his destiny and all destinies, against his trade, even though it was a trade that ran in his blood. He was a bricklayer; for fifty years, in Italy, America, France, then again in Italy, and finally in Germany, he had laid bricks, and every brick had been cemented with curses. He cursed continuously, but not mechanically; he cursed with method and care, acrimoniously, pausing to find the right word, frequently correcting himself and losing his temper when unable to find the word he wanted; then he cursed the curse that would not come.” (ch.7) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Primo Levi is a wonderful writer. If that doesn’t make you want to pick up <i>The Truce</i>, I don’t know what can. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sometimes he picks a single image to characterise someone and it’s so striking that it’s imprinted on your mind, such as this image about a man who has given up: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“… Since then, Ferrari had not been at all enterprising. He was the most submissive and docile of my patients; he undressed immediately without protest, handed me his shirt with the inevitable lice and the morning after submitted to the disinfection without putting on airs like an offended lord. But the following day, the lice, heaven knows how, were there again. He was like that; he was no longer enterprising, he no longer put up resistance, not even to the lice.” (ch.4) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Later on, Levi mentions lice in another passage and it makes you think of Ferrari: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“The disinfected clothing presented interesting phenomena; corpses of exploded lice, strangely deformed; plastic pens, forgotten in a pocket by some plutocrat, distorted and with the cover sealed up; melted candle ends soaked up by the cloth; an egg, left in a pocket as an experiment, cracked open and dried out into a horny mass, but still edible.” (ch.12) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sometimes he creates a character sketch so outlandish, so absurd that you feel as though reading a Dickens novel: </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Then we saw that it was a car all of us knew well, a Fiat 500A, a Topolino, rusty and decrepit, with the suspension piteously deformed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It stopped in front of the entrance, and was at once surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive people. An extraordinary figure emerged, with great effort. It went on and on emerging; it was a very tall, corpulent, rubicund man, in a uniform we had never seen before: a Soviet General, a Generalissimo, a Marshal. When all of him had finally emerged from the door, the minute bodywork rose a good six inches, and the springs seemed to breathe more freely. The man was literally larger than the car, and it was incomprehensible how he had got inside. His conspicuous dimensions were further increased and accentuated, when he took a black object from the car, and unfolded it. It was a cloak, which hung down to the ground from two long wooden epaulettes; with an easy gesture, which gave evidence of his familiarity with the garment, he swung it over his back and fastened it to his shoulders, with the result that his outline, which had appeared plump, became angular.” (ch.14) </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But Primo Levi doesn’t stop there—he goes further: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Seen from behind, the man was a monumental black rectangle one yard by two, who strode with majestic symmetry towards the Red House, amid two rows of perplexed people over whom he towered by a full head. How would he get through the door, as wide as he was? But he bent the two epaulettes backwards, like two wings, and entered.” (ibid.) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It is delightful! Levi doesn’t mention Dickens—he references Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Dante, a few others—I wonder if he likes Dickens or just shares a liking for the grotesque. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But the best, the most interesting image in <i>The Truce</i>, if I have to choose, would be this moment when Caesar tries to get a woman named Irina to buy his fish: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“… Now it is Cesare’s turn to grow angry; he brandishes the fish (‘untreated’), dangles it in the air by its tail with an enormous effort, as if it weighed a hundredweight, and says: ‘Look at the size!’, then runs its entire length under Irina’s nose, and while doing this closes his eyes and draws in his breath deeply, as if inebriated with the fragrance of the fish. Irina takes advantage of the second in which Cesare’s eyes are closed to snatch the fish from him as quickly as a cat, to bite off its head cleanly with her white teeth, and to slap the flaccid mutilated corpse in Cesare’s face, with all her considerable strength.” (ch.12) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">What even is that? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Primo Levi is such a magnificent writer. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-4336227952693186802024-03-13T12:15:00.012+00:002024-03-14T09:40:56.034+00:00Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (or Survival in Auschwitz) <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Having just finished reading <i>The Truce</i>, Primo Levi’s memoir about his journey home from Auschwitz, I shall, I suppose, need some time to recover from Levi’s writings. But I’d like to write a bit about <i>If This Is a Man</i>, also known as <i>Survival in Auschwitz</i>. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“… I understand that they are ordering me to be quiet, but the word is new to me, and since I do not know its meaning and implications, my inquietude increases. The confusion of languages is a fundamental component of the manner of living here: one is surrounded by a perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders and threats in languages never heard before, and woe betide whoever fails to grasp the meaning. No one has time here, no one has patience, no one listens to you; we latest arrivals instinctively collect in the corners, against the walls, afraid of being beaten.” (ch.3) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(translated by Stuart Woolf) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>If This Is a Man</i> perhaps does not appeal much to readers—the Holocaust is a heavy, depressing subject and the book itself is said to be indispensable and essential—but Primo Levi is a wonderful writer. “A perpetual Babel”, for instance, is a great way to distil his experience at Auschwitz. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog, was built by us. Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, téglak, and they were cemented by hate; hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel, and it is this that we call it: – Babelturm, Bobelturm; and in it we hate the insane dream of grandeur of our masters, their contempt for God and men, for us men.” (ch.7) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The chief strength of Primo Levi’s writing is that it doesn’t scream of anger, nor self-pity—as Paul Bailey writes in the Afterword, “[there] isn’t even a hint of hysterical recrimination”—he adopts the cool, collected tone of a witness. But in a cool, collected way, he describes the horrors of the Holocaust; depicts the things done to the prisoners, especially the Jews; and exposes the way the Nazis treated them like beasts and tried to turn them all into beasts. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“When this music plays we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills. There is no longer any will: every beat of the drum becomes a step, a reflected contraction of exhausted muscles. The Germans have succeeded in this. They are ten thousand and they are a single grey machine; they are exactly determined; they do not think and they do not desire, they walk.” (ch.4) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Buna is desperately and essentially opaque and grey. This huge entanglement of iron, concrete, mud and smoke is the negation of beauty. Its roads and buildings are named like us, by numbers or letters, not by weird and sinister names. Within its bounds not a blade of grass grows, and the soil is impregnated with the poisonous saps of coal and petroleum, and the only things alive are machines and slaves – and the former are more alive than the latter.” (ch.7) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The Holocaust is invoked all the time now, but I can’t help feeling that most people today don’t know, don’t understand the full extent of its horrors. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Here, momentarily far away from the curses and the blows, we can re-enter into ourselves and meditate, and then it becomes clear that we will not return. We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labours, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz.” (ch.4) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But <i>If This Is a Man</i> is a great book because Primo Levi doesn’t simply recount his own experiences and describe the atrocities of Auschwitz—he also makes one think about what it means to be human, as he writes about the prisoners, including himself, striving to retain their humanity. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“… precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.” (ch.3)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Primo Levi also writes about the humanity he saw whilst in the camp, he writes about what Vasily Grossman </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">in </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">Life and Fate</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> calls the senseless acts of kindness</span><span style="font-family: georgia;">. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“... In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians. They think, more or less explicitly – with all the nuances lying between contempt and commiseration – that as we have been condemned to this life of ours, reduced to our condition, we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many different languages, which they do not understand and which sound to them as grotesque as animal noises; they see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without hair, without honour and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never see in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">[…] </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Now nothing of this sort occurred between me and Lorenzo. However little sense there may be in trying to specify why I, rather than thousands of others, managed to survive the test, I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.” (ch.12) </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That is one of the memorable passages in the book. Another one is when, after the Germans evacuated the camp together with all the healthy prisoners on the way to their death, leaving behind all the ill and dying ones, Primo Levi and two Frenchmen go in search of a stove and food, and cook for others, and one of the other prisoners suggests that each person would share their bread with Levi and the Frenchmen as they have been working: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.” (ch.17)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This is why<i> If This Is a Man</i> must be read by everyone: it’s not just a witness’s account of one of the greatest horrors of the 20th century, it’s an examination of what it means to be human. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>PS: </b>I have also seen <i>The Zone of Interest</i>. Disturbing film, a very different approach to the subject of the Holocaust. I like the red frame and the sound design. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-47459951424154701472024-02-29T22:43:00.006+00:002024-03-13T11:01:20.156+00:00Things I read and saw in February <p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Films </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In February, I watched <i>Past Lives</i>, <i>The Holdovers</i>,<i> Maestro</i>, and<i> American Fiction</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It probably says something about me—I know not what—that people say the biggest films of 2023 are <i>Oppenheimer</i>,<i> Barbie</i>, and <i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i> and I either dislike them or, at best, feel indifferent (in the case of <i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i>). My favourite film of 2023 is <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>, followed by <i>The Holdovers</i>. What is wrong with those people who sneer at <i>The Holdovers </i>and call it a cosy film? Most modern films exasperate me with their badly written dialogue, probably resulting from dismissive attitudes about dialogue in film (hello, Denis Villeneuve), so it’s refreshing to watch something with such good dialogue. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Past Lives </i>mostly has boring and mundane dialogue except for one great scene, between the main character and her husband in bed. About 2-3 good scenes, and one great scene. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Maestro </i>I can only comment on as a pleb—for I have not seen much of Leonard Bernstein to critique Bradley Cooper’s performance—but perhaps ignorance is an advantage in that, not distracted by the differences between the actor and the man he portrayed, I could judge the film as a film and I thought it was a mess. Why is it called <i>Maestro </i>when it’s more about the wife? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>American Fiction</i> is funny and enjoyable, though sometimes a bit ham-fisted. I like though that the main character is named after Thelonious Monk and Ralph Ellison. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But my favourite is <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>, a film I still think about long after. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Books</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In February, I read Primo Levi’s <i>If This Is a Man</i> (also known as <i>Survival in Auschwit</i>z), then read G. Wilson Knight’s <i>The Imperial Theme</i> on my work trip, and returned to Primo Levi with <i>The Truce</i>, the sequel. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>If This Is a Man</i> is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, not just because of its importance as a testimony and a record, but also because of Primo Levi’s talent as a writer and insights about people. Reading the book, I thought of the differences between it and a famous memoir by a Vietnamese man who was imprisoned by the communists—both wrote about their own experiences, but if the Vietnamese writer was a storyteller and no more, Primo Levi got one to think about what it meant to be human. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">G. Wilson Knight’s book is brilliant, especially for those of you who love <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Museums </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">My favourite museum in Geneva is the Patek Philippe Museum, followed by Musée Ariana. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire and Maison Tavel in Geneva were not without interesting things, but they made me realise how lucky, how spoilt I was, living in London. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Play</b></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-weight: bold; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFoeASKF38SwznldOggyD49wXrRcr5NWPSaYGM1VjLIV3UQP1UvFhV-OujMJyEsi6qQx47Tk-qJ1SIhCFQbi7sWl0ndyNuV0Xd6oMVNs1Pb3rxWnFdqL_o_RIXEVkTb33wYVSwfkmA5M8R9gcLiDEU4_waPL7K3_HFH6gLoTEVOcvedikBRudY18NygO4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFoeASKF38SwznldOggyD49wXrRcr5NWPSaYGM1VjLIV3UQP1UvFhV-OujMJyEsi6qQx47Tk-qJ1SIhCFQbi7sWl0ndyNuV0Xd6oMVNs1Pb3rxWnFdqL_o_RIXEVkTb33wYVSwfkmA5M8R9gcLiDEU4_waPL7K3_HFH6gLoTEVOcvedikBRudY18NygO4=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Today I saw my first Shakespeare production onstage: Simon Godwin’s </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">Macbeth</i><span style="font-family: georgia;">, with Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma as the Macbeths. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That would be the fourth version, after Trevor Nunn (Ian McKellen – Judi Dench), Joel Coen (Denzel Washington – Frances McDormand), and Orson Welles (Orson Welles – Jeanette Nolan).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It’s too early to comment at length. My immediate reaction is that it’s very different from Trevor Nunn’s production, which to me is perfect as a Shakespeare production can be. I did enjoy it, and I liked the comic touch in Ralph Fiennes’s performance as Macbeth—I hadn’t seen the potential for something comic, darkly comic, in the text and in the other performances—but it worked.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">One complaint is that the porter scene is removed. Another complaint is that Simon Godwin increased the presence and significance of the witches, but they didn’t look right—they didn’t look striking, frightening, unnatural, like they’re not the inhabitants of the earth—compare them to the witches in Trevor Nunn’s production, or Kathryn Hunter in Joel Coen’s film. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But I need to think some more about the play. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-19865537128654959842024-02-28T21:21:00.002+00:002024-03-13T13:21:15.602+00:00My film Footfalls: 5-year anniversary of RTS Student Award <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Facebook has just reminded me that 5 years ago, my experimental short <i>Footfalls</i> won the Royal Television Society Student Award – Short Form. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That also reminds me that I have never made the film public online. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So here it is. </span></p><div style="padding: 56.25% 0px 0px; position: relative;"><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" frameborder="0" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/272267773?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" style="height: 100%; left: 0; position: absolute; top: 0; width: 100%;" title="Footfalls"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-56649348645353870152024-02-14T11:45:00.004+00:002024-02-14T11:45:41.906+00:0025 types of men on Tinder <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">As Blogger would make you sign in to verify your age, I have decided to publish <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gyg-k4iFfW-LzexwxTXBnKm93uq9PMPk/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100058658190657280694&rtpof=true&sd=true">the list</a> on Google Docs. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Enjoy! </span></p><p><br /></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-19788978136360613982024-02-04T11:46:00.002+00:002024-03-13T11:01:31.377+00:00Primo Levi and King Lear <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’m currently reading<i> If This Is a Man </i>(known in the US as <i>Survival in Auschwitz</i>), a memoir by Jewish Italian chemist/writer Primo Levi. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I don’t need to tell you that the book is full of horrors. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” (ch.2) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(translated by Stuart Woolf)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">How could people do this to other human beings? Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? The Holocaust is invoked a lot these days—unfortunately I have seen a lot of Holocaust inversion—but I think people cannot imagine, till they have read such an account, the awfulness, the enormity of what the Nazis did to the prisoners at the camp. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgement of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp’, and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: ‘to lie on the bottom’.”</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That paragraph makes me think of a key passage in <i>King Lear</i>, when Lear sees the disguised Edgar:</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on’s are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as thou art.” (Act 3 scene 4) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But the power of <i>If This Is a Man</i>, at least it’s my impression so far, is that Primo Levi writes about how the prisoners strove to retain their humanity, even in the most inhuman conditions of the camp: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“… precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.” (ch.3) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That is a powerful passage. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-85251506176804438862024-01-30T12:36:00.005+00:002024-01-30T14:09:46.083+00:00King Lear (1971, dir. Peter Brook) <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">At its most basic, my measure of a <i>King Lear </i>production or film adaptation is rather simple: does it make me cry at Lear’s reunion at Cordelia, and at the final scene? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Peter Brook’s film doesn’t—but why? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’m going to quote <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/king-lear-1972">Roger Ebert</a>: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“It is important to describe him as Brook's Lear, because he is not Shakespeare's. "King Lear" is the most difficult of Shakespeare's plays to stage, the most complex and, to my mind, the greatest. There are immensities of feeling and meaning in it that Brook has not even touched.” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>King Lear</i> is severely cut. A standard production of <i>King Lear </i>is about 3 hours (my favourite version, featuring Don Warrington, is 3 hours 10 minutes) and Peter Brook’s film is 2 hours 11 minutes on Prime (though IMDb says it’s 2 hours 17 minutes). Apart from removing many lines from the main plot and reducing the Gloucester subplot to its minimum, he rearranges lines and changes many details in the story. Above all, he reduces—or flattens out—the extremities of the play. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Shakespeare’s <i>King Lear</i> is a play of extremes. On one side are the extremely evil, beyond comprehension: Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Edmund. On the other side are the extremely good, equally incomprehensible: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the unnamed servant who kills Cornwall. We are constantly told—and rightly so—that people are not black and white, that we shouldn’t create characters who are wholly evil or wholly good. But Shakespeare pulls it off as he knows that there is unmotivated hate, just as there is senseless goodness, and he pushes to the extreme these two concepts in <i>King Lear</i>, to powerful effect.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEizYC6SYMQ_mXgFCjsm7fTZldOcisKZsbXz0zEEeWN3avnsbVDctyE-gUl9fa0kBetSMzc8pa_XB6H45NYwGWGHdl3wGXy14sXaXuEYgD6ePL5vSI1IIrk9QEygbdjnbmtUqTx1yBVDxfpQ661jaxLIPLmYQH11nN1kQm1hTjiZEKaGXfgTQL4AvmJODFs" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="775" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEizYC6SYMQ_mXgFCjsm7fTZldOcisKZsbXz0zEEeWN3avnsbVDctyE-gUl9fa0kBetSMzc8pa_XB6H45NYwGWGHdl3wGXy14sXaXuEYgD6ePL5vSI1IIrk9QEygbdjnbmtUqTx1yBVDxfpQ661jaxLIPLmYQH11nN1kQm1hTjiZEKaGXfgTQL4AvmJODFs=w400-h271" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In the film, Peter Brook makes Cordelia (Anne-Lise Gabold) more ambiguous as he omits her reasons for saying “Nothing”; presents Kent (Tom Fleming) as a hothead; and reduces the villainy of Goneril (Irene Worth) and Regan (Susan Engel), making them more sympathetic at the beginning as he gets Paul Scofield to play Lear as an erratic, irrational man, increasingly difficult to live with. Portraying Lear is a delicate balancing act: in some way, his hateful, misogynistic curses are awful, revealing something dark in his character; but at the same time, there is a reason that Cordelia loves him and Kent remains loyal to him; Lear is a figure of pity, but sometimes also a figure of greatness. I don’t quite see that in Paul Scofield’s performance in the 1971 film. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Roger Ebert argues: </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“[Brook’s] approach was suggested by "Shakespeare Our Contemporary," a controversial book by the Polish critic Jan Kott. In Kott's view, "King Lear" is a play about the total futility of things. The old man Lear stumbles ungracefully toward his death because, simply put, that's the way it goes for most of us. To search for meaning or philosophical consolation is to kid yourself. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">[…] the Brook-Kott version of "Lear" is certainly fashionable and modern. But it gives us a film that severely limits Shakespeare's vision, and focuses our attention on his more nihilistic passages while ignoring or sabotaging the others.” </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That perhaps is why the film doesn’t quite work for me. I also think that the final scene loses much of its impact because Brook quickly kills off Edmund (Ian Hogg), cutting the speech “Some good I mean to do/ Despite of mine own nature”, and gives us a flash of the hanged Cordelia before Lear appears with her dead body. It is an incomprehensible thing about art that even though we all know the story of<i> King Lear</i>, even though we all know what happens at the end of the play, we still get that feeling akin to hope when Edmund reveals his plot—as though this time Cordelia would be saved—and we still feel shocked when Lear appears carrying her body and saying “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you men of stone/ Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so/ That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever!”. All of that effect is lost in the 1971 film. It also doesn’t help that Brook makes lots of jump cuts in that scene, perhaps aiming for a sense of fragmentation like the state of Lear’s mind, but to me it breaks Lear’s speeches and the scene into pieces, destroying their emotional impact. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">What do you think about the 1971 film? </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-83009385386843663552024-01-28T14:12:00.000+00:002024-01-28T14:12:49.964+00:00Types of characters in Shakespeare <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Aren’t you amazed at the range of characters in Shakespeare? I mean not just a range in backgrounds, identities, personalities, viewpoints, but also a range in types of characters? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Shakespeare can create both larger-than-life characters (the Macbeths, Lear, Othello) and small, ordinary characters (Juliet’s nurse, Celia, Hero); both complex, multifaceted characters (Hamlet, Hal, Cleopatra) and caricatures (Pistol, Dogberry, Perdita’s adoptive father). He can create utterly charming characters (Rosalind, Beatrice). He can depict, convincingly, wholly good characters (Desdemona, Kent, Imogen) and wholly evil characters (Goneril, Regan, Iago). He can delineate characters who are charismatic and lovable despite their bad traits (Falstaff) or sympathetic despite their villainy (Shylock), as well as characters who are repulsive despite their intelligence (Portia) or deeply unpleasant despite their virtue (Isabella). He can get you to dislike a character then feel ashamed for having laughed at their humiliation (Malvolio). He can create a two-dimensional comic relief character then, with a single line, give him depth (Sir Andrew Aguecheek). He can depict an utterly ordinary character then transfigure her in the last act (Emilia), or elevate her into a quasi-mythological being (Cleopatra). He can create characters who continue to puzzle, who continue to be analysed and discussed centuries later (Hamlet, Iago). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It’s astonishing. (Most) other writers don’t have such range.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">At the risk of being accused of denigrating other writers in order to praise Shakespeare, let me explain what I mean. I think, for example, that Chekhov can’t create larger-than-life characters and Tolstoy can’t really write caricatures (except for Napoleon), not for lack of talent but because of their sensibilities. Dostoyevsky probably can’t write small, ordinary characters. George Eliot and Edith Wharton can’t portray a charming character, especially if they themselves disapprove of them, as Jane Austen (Henry and Mary Crawford) and Thackeray (Becky Sharp) can. Jane Austen, like Shakespeare, can depict a two-dimensional foolish character and then make us feel ashamed when we realise they have feelings (Miss Bates), but she doesn’t create a character whose name becomes a byword for something, the way Shakespeare (Othello, Shylock) and some other writers can (Melville: Bartleby, Ahab; Nabokov: Lolita; Dickens: Scrooge). Dickens, like Shakespeare, can give us a caricature and then in last few chapters give them complexity and depth (Sir Leicester Dedlock), but readers tend to complain about his wholly good characters, something very few writers can convincingly pull off. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Shakespeare’s genius is miraculous. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-22154390321577431892024-01-05T17:05:00.006+00:002024-01-05T22:03:20.746+00:00Chimes at Midnight and the BBC 1979 productions of the Henry IV plays<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Before commenting on these productions, let’s talk a bit about the plays. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I love <i>Henry IV, Part 1</i>. I also love <i>Henry IV, Part 2</i>. It seems that many people only like, or much prefer, Part 1—an exciting play, full of banter and witty exchanges between Hal and Falstaff—whereas nothing seems to happen for a large part of Part 2. It is a play of disease and decay and death. The jokes are stale. The jester is jaded. But I love them both, and love the <i>Henry IV </i>plays as one unified thing, inseparable. In Part 1, Shakespeare depicts the friendship, the bond between Hal and Falstaff. In Part 2, he depicts each one alone, their wit unmatched and unappreciated by other companions, and builds it all up for Hal’s reconciliation with his father and banishment of Falstaff at the end of the play.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">From the tetralogy, we can separate <i>Richard II</i> or even<i> Henry V</i>, but the <i>Henry IV</i> plays must go together.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi6Wsxu7yssOPEpzJBMuC3pyEuxEy9Ilazc5amcNhsJ4BmUmTKfpF7jkhDZ46hANuy1O8f5JA6jdjasDxxEZqGV0VrGpG2OO5agilAZN6RKtIDtleb8QRiwSnCa7mRep7eC1y1RYHudctIKy0CIro6zJL8kqjzePXvv-4mIClTEgrfs5vO1d7xecEbzhl4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1552" data-original-width="2760" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi6Wsxu7yssOPEpzJBMuC3pyEuxEy9Ilazc5amcNhsJ4BmUmTKfpF7jkhDZ46hANuy1O8f5JA6jdjasDxxEZqGV0VrGpG2OO5agilAZN6RKtIDtleb8QRiwSnCa7mRep7eC1y1RYHudctIKy0CIro6zJL8kqjzePXvv-4mIClTEgrfs5vO1d7xecEbzhl4" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">At the heart of the <i>Henry IV </i>plays is the Henry IV-Hal-Falstaff triangle. <i>Chimes at Midnight</i> is a Falstaff film. Orson Welles uses material from the <i>Henry IV</i> plays (about 5 hours), with some bits from <i>Richard II</i>, <i>The Merry Wives of Windsor</i>, and <i>Henry V</i>; moves things around, changes the order of some scenes, gives some character’s lines to another; and creates a 2-hour film focusing on Falstaff. Perhaps I may have liked it if I hadn’t known the plays, but I know them. <i>Chimes at Midnight</i> is essentially an Orson Welles film with lots of supporting actors. The BBC’s <i>Henry IV</i> productions from 1979 have all the characters fully developed and well-acted. </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">I especially love David Gwillim as Hal, Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Tim Pigott-Smith as Hotspur, and Jon Finch as Henry IV. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The only case in which I prefer a performance in <i>Chimes at Midnight</i> is Michael Aldridge as Pistol. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I also think that Keith Baxter and Orson Welles don’t have chemistry as I see between David Gwillim and Anthony Quayle, and Keith Baxter isn’t very good as Hal (though to be fair, he doesn’t have much to work with).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhv4Wdr7K2KnzwmDgq4ZDAYzbl8od1Zy7VPIAlY5FFVvBmTk1vD_SvOruh-v7OWlbhIBhIpk6sXgX6EPjrFTEjkZ4W7yrovWjChzDm4gHUMuvNprMgtVRwsHiTB6eGiviIh8P0Gor-hXQi77w42wMz_EHGyWNJfYAounM5bjpI1325RR5KpR7TevSb-mbI" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="608" data-original-width="1080" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhv4Wdr7K2KnzwmDgq4ZDAYzbl8od1Zy7VPIAlY5FFVvBmTk1vD_SvOruh-v7OWlbhIBhIpk6sXgX6EPjrFTEjkZ4W7yrovWjChzDm4gHUMuvNprMgtVRwsHiTB6eGiviIh8P0Gor-hXQi77w42wMz_EHGyWNJfYAounM5bjpI1325RR5KpR7TevSb-mbI=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;">More importantly, the greatest flaw of <i>Chimes at Midnight</i> is that Orson Welles sentimentalises Falstaff, removing much of his nasty side and turning him into a harmless fun-loving old man. Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations: he is full of life and warmth and charisma, with lovable qualities, but he’s also a robber, a braggart, an alcoholic, a coward, a man of no principles. The greatest challenge of staging or adapting the <i>Henry IV</i> plays is conveying that Hal’s banishment is necessary and inevitable, but at the same time showing why Hal is so fond of him and how much it costs Hal to reject him. It’s a delicate balancing act. I do think the 1979 productions succeed at it, largely thanks to Anthony Quayle and David Gwillim. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">David Gwillim is brilliant in the scenes with Anthony Quayle, Hal and Falstaff exchanging insults and witticisms at lightning speed. He is also brilliant in the scenes with other characters, showing Hal’s ability to adapt to different environments, to adopt the lingo of different interlocutors, to transform. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I especially love the banishment scene. I watched <i>Chimes at Midnight</i> first and thought the banishment scene was perfect—the best part of the film—the look on Orson Welles’s face was haunting. But the scene in the BBC <i>Henry IV, Part 2</i> is even better: the look of pain and shock on Anthony Quayle’s face is heartbreaking, as Hal says “I know thee not, old man”, you can understand why Falstaff would later die of grief and heartbreak, yet at the same time you can see on David Gwillim’s face that he’s killing a part of himself as he banishes Falstaff. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Wonderful, wonderful productions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It baffles me that the <i>BBC Television Shakespeare</i> from the 70s-80s is not widely available to the public. Is this not Shakespeare’s country? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: courier;">A darker note: I increasingly feel at odds with modern culture. I’m indifferent to contemporary music, contemporary literature, contemporary art, most contemporary cinema. My interest in Shakespeare feels like a niche. And when people now stage or adapt Shakespeare, they either fuck with the plays and impose some trendy ideologies, to be “inclusive” and “subversive”, or butcher the plays, removing vast chunks of text, to be “more accessible” to “modern audiences”. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: courier;">I’m afraid that the kind of things I love will no longer be produced, and the things I love from the past will one day be lost. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-3341715316633879042024-01-01T19:13:00.005+00:002024-01-02T12:45:59.467+00:00 Hamlet at Elsinore (ft. Christopher Plummer) and the different approaches to Hamlet <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjQVG_IYiVjKx9ecKDva7Dgh1kYWv04DHV-liJ-n1g1CHp_Ic0zTyKexZCW34N3qZht6M3iu08JPuElW3JDbJjA7qlRW0-SxNp74W-J41x3jHsk2n73WhO087DgZzB6tDF9RQNZett3SmYzXP_rQjkQiZ9guYiq3KDOmbirCVDU3MmpAry9EiRjYf5WyQU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjQVG_IYiVjKx9ecKDva7Dgh1kYWv04DHV-liJ-n1g1CHp_Ic0zTyKexZCW34N3qZht6M3iu08JPuElW3JDbJjA7qlRW0-SxNp74W-J41x3jHsk2n73WhO087DgZzB6tDF9RQNZett3SmYzXP_rQjkQiZ9guYiq3KDOmbirCVDU3MmpAry9EiRjYf5WyQU=w400-h225" width="400" /></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">Michael Caine as Horatio and Christopher Plummer as Hamlet</span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There are different ways of approaching and interpreting the character of Hamlet. For simplicity, I would roughly divide people into two camps: the A. C. Bradley camp or the G. Wilson Knight camp*.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I spent the last day of 2023 watching <i>Hamlet at Elsinore</i>, and Christopher Plummer, in some ways, is similar to Kevin Kline in his portrayal of Hamlet. They both approach the role with a comic touch, and both convey very well the humour and sharp wit of the character. Christopher Plummer’s Hamlet is a mimicker, a performer, an actor, especially amusing in the “Words, words, words” scene and the scene welcoming the actors and the “O wonderful son that can ‘stonish a mother” scene. He is charming. And above all, Christopher Plummer and Kevin Kline both play Hamlet the way A. C. Bradley sees the character—with warmth and a sense of nobility—and they give us a glimpse of what Hamlet once was before finding everything weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In contrast, Andrew Scott’s approach is more like G. Wilson Knight’s: he plays Hamlet like a psychopath, cold, violent, dangerous, almost inhuman. It’s no wonder that Claudius must get rid of him for the sake of Elsinore. There is no sense of nobility in the character, therefore no sense of loss at the end of the play. That’s not how I see Hamlet. The tragedy of Hamlet, in my view, is the tragedy of one disillusioned with life, the tragedy of one who had ideals and now sees that life is an unweeded garden that’s gone to seed, things rank and gross possess it merely. Hamlet hates his mother so intensely because he loved her, because she disappointed him and made the whole world collapse for him because of her frailty.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">A good actor should give us a glimpse of the sweet prince that Hamlet once was. Andrew Scott doesn’t.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">At the same time, Hamlet is no longer a sweet prince. He is sardonic and volatile and unpredictable, and he can be cruel. Christopher Plummer’s Hamlet is nicer, warmer than Kevin Kline’s. It is perhaps the choice of the director, Philip Saville. The speech “Do you think I’m easier to be played on than a pipe?” is much shortened, for example, softening Hamlet. Kevin Kline is more volatile in the role: he’s funny and often charming, but sometimes he’s terrifying, such as in that moment, or in the “Get thee to a nunnery” scene.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That is more like the way I see the character.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But I love <i>Hamlet at Elsinore</i> and Christopher Plummer’s performance. I watched it, and then saw some clips of Kenneth Branagh in the role. Kenneth Branagh seems to me to just recite the lines he has memorised, whereas Christopher Plummer seems to feel every word he utters. His delivery of the key speeches, like “To be or not to be” or “What a piece of work is a man”, is excellent. Deeply felt, not overacted like Andrew Scott. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I also like Philip Saville’s decision not to show the ghost—we hear him, but don’t see him—when Gertrude doesn’t see the ghost in her bedchamber, is it because he only shows himself to Hamlet, or because Hamlet hallucinates things in a frenzy?—we cannot know. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Hamlet at Elsinore </i>is also particularly good because Robert Shaw is the most striking and unsettling Claudius I have seen so far. He has a striking presence from the very beginning, putting Hamlet down, calling him unmanly and unschooled before the whole court. Throughout the production, he portrays very well Claudius’s disregard for everybody except himself and Gertrude, especially in that moment when Ophelia runs away in humiliation—the look on his face then is unforgettable.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Strange that it’s not better known.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Hamlet at Elsinore</i>, which is the only Hamlet production with sound to be filmed at the castle in Helsingør (Elsinore), Denmark (setting of Shakespeare’s play), is available on Youtube, and available with subtitles on BBC iPlayer. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">*: See A. C. Bradley’s <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i> and G. Wilson Knight’s <i>The Wheel of Fire</i>. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-65670001347223183312023-12-29T18:45:00.003+00:002023-12-29T18:57:54.484+00:00My 30 favourite Shakespearean performances<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgG8t3ObKxVn3kmUm7p9iEzwWHIphrZfKxg4KF8yyITI9B-SsHswyqfdl36H91fdXD2Zs0ztPDdIWUsNeVjuLD17TSEKvvR18GbLCQAV0UncWWGWx_AbPqo-levL5ayUdajiZ-_28yMGyXlycMUhX7Xf7C4gOJd7JTe1lTMtZkZTE0IrG0KeEtWGti2XqE" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgG8t3ObKxVn3kmUm7p9iEzwWHIphrZfKxg4KF8yyITI9B-SsHswyqfdl36H91fdXD2Zs0ztPDdIWUsNeVjuLD17TSEKvvR18GbLCQAV0UncWWGWx_AbPqo-levL5ayUdajiZ-_28yMGyXlycMUhX7Xf7C4gOJd7JTe1lTMtZkZTE0IrG0KeEtWGti2XqE=w400-h400" width="400" /></span></a></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In chronological order. </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Olivia Hussey as Juliet in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> (1968) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Leonard Whiting as Romeo in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> (1968)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Laurence Olivier as Shylock in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i> (1973) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Jeremy Brett as Berowne in <i>Love’s Labour’s Lost</i> (1975) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Marc Singer as Petruchio in <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i> (1976) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Ian McKellen as Macbeth in <i>Macbeth</i> (1979) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth in <i>Macbeth</i> (1979)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Kate Nelligan as Isabella in <i>Measure for Measure </i>(1979) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Bob Hoskins as Iago in <i>Othello</i> (1981) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Michael Hordern as Lear in <i>King Lear</i> (1982) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Anton Lesser as Edgar in <i>King Lear</i> (1982) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Robert Lindsay as Edmund in <i>King Lear </i>(1983) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Diana Rigg as Regan in <i>King Lear</i> (1983)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Cherie Lunghi as Beatrice in <i>Much Ado About Nothing </i>(1984) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Robert Lindsay as Benedick in <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i> (1984)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Richard Briers as Malvolio in <i>Twelfth Night</i> (1988) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Kevin Kline as Hamlet in <i>Hamlet </i>(1990) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Ian McKellen as Iago in <i>Othello</i> (1990) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona in <i>Othello </i>(1990)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia in <i>Twelfth Night </i>(1990) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Antony Sher as Leontes in <i>The Winter’s Tale</i> (1999) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Ian Hughes as Autolycus in <i>The Winter’s Tale</i> (1999) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Ralph Fiennes as Coriolanus in <i>Coriolanus</i> (2001) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia in <i>Coriolanus</i> (2001)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Amy Acker as Beatrice in <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i> (2012) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Don Warrington as Lear in <i>King Lear </i>(2016) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Miltos Yerolemou as the Fool in <i>King Lear </i>(2016)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Thomas Coombes as Oswald </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">in </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">King Lear </i><span style="font-family: georgia;">(2016)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Mark Quartley as Ariel in <i>The Tempest</i> (2016) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Kathryn Hunter as the Witches in <i>Macbeth</i> (2021) </span></div></div>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-41236908921368396132023-12-20T12:01:00.000+00:002023-12-20T12:01:21.967+00:002023 in reading and film-watching<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">1/ The greatest novel I’ve read this year is easily <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i> by Dostoyevsky. Sometimes I look at the suffering around the world, and around me, and think about the “I’ll return the ticket” chapter. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Not hard to see why some people think <i>The Brothers Karamazov </i>is the greatest novel ever written. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">2/ The greatest non-fiction book I’ve read this year is Gary Saul Morson’s <i>Wonder Confronts Certainty</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The book was a birthday present from Tom of Wuthering Expectations and it was just my thing, exploring Russian literature and history of ideas—from the period leading up to the Revolution, to the Stalinist years—and the big questions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Gary Saul Morson also wrote about intellectuals’ bloodlust and love of violence and embrace of revolution for the sake of revolution, which I didn’t expect to see playing out across the West just a few months later. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">3/ 2023 has been a strange year. Things fell apart. My life took a new turn.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Looking back at my reading and viewing in 2023, I realise that I didn’t read many novels, nor watched many films. Busy with work. Unable to concentrate. And all that. So I mostly binged on <i>The Mentalist</i> and watched <i>Inside No.9</i> and read short stories.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The writer who has meant the most to me this year, on a personal level, is Chekhov. Tolstoy continues to be the prose writer I admire the most—<i>Anna Karenina </i>and <i>War and Peace </i>are part of my mental furniture—but Chekhov is the writer to whom I feel the closest. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And yet here’s a paradox: Chekhov brings comfort in difficult times but might also make me pessimistic. Tolstoy and Shakespeare don’t have that effect. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">4/ I read <i>Hamlet</i> for the third time this year and finally something clicked, finally I grasped something that had previously eluded me. I love the play, and love the Kevin Kline production. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">5/ In 2023, I discovered Mishima Yukio, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, and Isaac Babel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Flannery O’Connor is one of the few short story writers about whom I do not think “not quite Chekhov but…”. I think that when reading Alice Munro or Isaac Babel or Balzac, but not when reading O’Connor. She’s her own thing. And she is a great writer. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">6/ For a long time, my idea of Russia was either Tolstoy’s Russia or Soviet Russia. Isaac Babel’s Russia, now Ukraine, is very different as he wrote about Jews, Jewish gangsters, and pogroms. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I was reading <i>Odessa Stories</i> on my Prague work trip: it was strange, and horrible, to read Isaac Babel’s depiction of the 1905 pogrom, then see the memorial to Holocaust victims in Bohemia and Moravia, and then look at the internet and see the antisemitism taking hold of many people and institutions in the West today. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Now reading <i>Red Cavalry</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’d like to read more Jewish literature. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Anyway, thanks for reading my blog, and thanks for all the interesting conversations here. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!</span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-28213950201886195592023-11-15T20:20:00.009+00:002023-12-29T21:34:32.803+00:00My 10 favourite episodes of Inside No.9<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I have just finished watching <i>Inside No.9</i>—it is brilliant! It’s a British black comedy series, written by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, and each episode is a self-contained story, almost all starring one of them or both (usually both).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Ingenuous plots, clever twists, good dialogue, good attention to detail. Also, both Shearsmith and Pemberton have a great range. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhAFIBhO_VNn3in5dUFquvFINtV75N7CruDfjtFo0B4ta1Gl5RMvWtIe_PR0FCtoY99pDikpy0OR4W7OglCdfFVbNyU93g6QZCC-ze_WX47WdJjThi2FUWKvBmt0KVxVsQlZTDdR2FR2oJbi3IaQ7AQaC8YfF7pMwljM3n1CyovoopZXdo6NcjD8E7fxWc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="980" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhAFIBhO_VNn3in5dUFquvFINtV75N7CruDfjtFo0B4ta1Gl5RMvWtIe_PR0FCtoY99pDikpy0OR4W7OglCdfFVbNyU93g6QZCC-ze_WX47WdJjThi2FUWKvBmt0KVxVsQlZTDdR2FR2oJbi3IaQ7AQaC8YfF7pMwljM3n1CyovoopZXdo6NcjD8E7fxWc" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Here are my 10 favourite episodes (in chronological order): </span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>A Quiet Night In</i>: two hapless burglars trying to steal a (postmodernist?) painting whilst the couple in the house argue; almost entirely without dialogue. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Understudy</i>: about a production of <i>Macbeth</i>, and inspired by <i>Macbeth</i>. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The 12 Days of Christine</i>: 12 days from 12 years of Christine’s life; great drama and emotion packed into just half an hour. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><i>The Bill</i>: </span>simple premise (four men arguing over a bill), simple location (for most of the episode, around a table); the entire plot driven by characters and dialogue. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Riddle of the Sphinx</i>: one of the most ingenuous episodes in the series; revolving around a cryptic crossword. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Zanzibar</i>: a Shakespeare mash-up; the whole dialogue in iambic pentameter. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room</i>: double-act Cheese and Crackers reuniting after 30 years to perform in front of an audience. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Once Removed</i>: a removal man arriving to help a woman move house, leading to bizarre circumstances that unfold through reverse chronology; one of the cleverest episodes. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Misdirection</i>: a battle of wits between magicians, years after a stolen trick. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Wuthering Heist</i>: a heist film in the style of Commedia dell’arte and inspired by <i>Reservoir Dogs</i>. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Bones of St Nicholas</i>: a professor camping in a church that is said to be haunted and contain the bones of St Nicholas. </span></li></ul><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">All right, I know, that’s actually 11. But you can’t make me get rid of one. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">One of my favourite jokes from <i>Inside No.9</i>: </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Jesus! What a blue-cock!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What’s a blue-cock?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A tight-fisted wanker.</span></p></blockquote>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-20505968297535241052023-11-11T00:18:00.002+00:002023-11-11T08:45:03.989+00:00On Hannah Arendt and antisemitism <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I always wanted to read Hannah Arendt’s<i> The Origins of Totalitarianism</i>—now seemed like the perfect time. Very interesting book, at least so far. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’m just going to jot down some thoughts. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">1/ “This situation was an important factor in the early rise and continuous growth of antisemitism in the nineteenth century. Which group of people would turn antisemitic in a given country at a given historical moment depended exclusively upon general circumstances which made them ready for a violent antagonism to their government. But the remarkable similarity of arguments and images which time and again were spontaneously reproduced have an intimate relationship with the truth they distort. We find the Jews always represented as an international trade organization, a world-wide family concern with identical interests everywhere, a secret force behind the throne which degrades all visible governments into mere facade, or into marionettes whose strings are manipulated from behind the scenes. Because of their close relationship to state sources of power, the Jews were invariably identified with power, and because of their aloofness from society and concentration upon the closed circle of the family, they were invariably suspected of working for the destruction of all social structures.” (P.1, ch.2)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Still true today, this is something I see on both the left and the right. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">2/ “It is an obvious, if frequently forgotten, rule that anti-Jewish feeling acquires political relevance only when it can combine with a major political issue, or when Jewish group interests come into open conflict with those of a major class in society.” (ibid.)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Over the past few years, I have seen anti-Jewish sentiments expressed among the anti-immigrant crowd, the anti-woke crowd, the “Covid is a hoax” crowd, and other groups, but the biggest political issue adopted by antisemites at the moment is the Palestinian cause. To clarify, I don’t mean that every single pro-Palestinian person hates Jews, or wants to destroy the state of Israel, but I would argue that lots of antisemites hide behind the Palestinian cause and mask their Jew hatred by replacing the word “Jews” with “Zionists” when saying something antisemitic. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Regarding the pro-Palestinian (or more accurately, anti-Israeli) protests in the West and especially in London, I have no doubt that many people genuinely care about the Palestinians and want the suffering in Gaza to end, but it’s a fact that many others in the marches hate Jews, support Hamas, and want Israel to be destroyed “from the river to the sea”. You can’t deny it. You too have seen the signs. You too have heard the chants. You too have seen people openly supporting Hamas. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">3/ “Many of these bankers were Jews and, even more important, the general figure of the banker bore definite Jewish traits for historical reasons. Thus the leftist movement of the lower middle class and the entire propaganda against banking capital turned more or less antisemitic, a development of little importance in industrial Germany but of great significance in France and, to a lesser extent, in Austria.” (ibid.) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Interestingly, Hannah Arendt points out that Karl Marx, himself a Jew, was anti-Jewish. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">4/ “Friedrich Engels once remarked that the protagonists of the antisemitic movement of his time were noblemen, and its chorus the howling mob of the petty bourgeoisie. This is true not only for Germany, but also for Austria's Christian Socialism and France's Anti-Dreyfusards. In all these cases, the aristocracy, in a desperate last struggle, tried to ally itself with the conservative forces of the churches—the Catholic Church in Austria and France, the Protestant Church in Germany—under the pretext of fighting liberalism with the weapons of Christianity.” (ibid.) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">As I have said earlier, there are antisemites across the political spectrum.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The thing I find fascinating is that there are elements of antisemitism in both of the two worst ideologies of the 20th century: Nazism and communism. There are also such elements in some of the worst ideologies at the moment. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">5/ “… the German Liberal Party, under the leadership of Schoenerer, was from the beginning a lower middle-class party without connections or restraints from the side of the nobility, and with a decidedly left-wing outlook.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It never achieved a real mass basis, but it was remarkably successful in the universities during the eighties where it organized the first closely knit students' organization on the basis of open antisemitism. Schoenerer's antisemitism, at first almost exclusively directed against the Rothschilds, won him the sympathies of the labor movement, which regarded him as a true radical gone astray. His main advantage was that he could base his antisemitic propaganda on demonstrable facts: as a member of the Austrian Reichsrat he had fought for nationalization of the Austrian railroads, the major part of which had been in the hands of the Rothschilds since 1836 due to a state license which expired in 1886. Schoenerer succeeded in gathering 40,000 signatures against its renewal, and in placing the Jewish question in the limelight of public interest. The close connection between the Rothschilds and the financial interests of the monarchy became very obvious when the government tried to extend the license under conditions which were patently to the disadvantage of the state as well as the public.” (ibid.) </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That reminds me, I should pick up a book about the Rothschilds and the conspiracy theory. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">6/ “It is well known that the belief in a Jewish conspiracy that was kept together by a secret society had the greatest propaganda value for antisemitic publicity, and by far outran all traditional European superstitions about ritual murder and well-poisoning.” (P.1, ch.3)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Jews run Hollywood”, “Jews own the media”, “Jews control the world”, etc.—it is depressing to read Hannah Arendt’s book from 1951 and recognise many things discussed. Are Jews over-represented in certain fields? Yes, it’s undeniable. But if Jews were controlling the media and controlling the world, they’re doing a pretty bad job—the media, the UN, the WHO… have for a long time been strongly biased against Israel. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">7/ “Not the Dreyfus case with its trials but the Dreyfus Affair in its entirety offers a foregleam of the twentieth century. As Bernanos pointed out in 1931 "The Dreyfus affair already belongs to that tragic era which certainly was not ended by the last war. The affair reveals the same inhuman character, preserving amid the welter of unbridled passions and the flames of hate an inconceivably cold and callous heart." Certainly it was not in France that the true sequel to the affair was to be found, but the reason why France fell an easy prey to Nazi aggression is not far to seek.” (P.1, ch.4) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Is this the case? I have no idea. But the chapter about the Dreyfus affair is interesting.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Emile Zola was indeed a true intellectual, who stood up for the truth and for justice, putting himself at risk. In contrast, many members of the intelligentsia now pretend to stand up for justice and to side with the oppressed, but they sympathise with terrorists, condone atrocities, and unthinkingly repeat slogans and received opinions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But then that’s nothing new, I guess. It’s only a few months ago when I read <i>Wonder Confronts Certainty</i>, in which Gary Saul Morson wrote about the educated class’s bloodlust and love of violence, and their embracing of revolution for the sake of revolution. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">8/ “It was against the rich and the clergy, not for the republic, not for justice and freedom that the workers finally took to the streets.” (ibid.) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That’s a good observation, speaking as someone from a communist country. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">9/ “While the mob actually stormed Jewish shops and assailed Jews in the streets, the language of high society made real, passionate violence look like harmless child's play.” (ibid.) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And that is happening again now. On the streets of London and other Western cities, there have been people chanting genocidal phrases and calling for jihad and calling for intifada; in the West, there have been intimidations of and attacks on Jews, or Jewish businesses; but some people still pretend or perhaps convince themselves that antisemitism is overblown, that there’s no cause for concern, that the chants are all harmless.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I can’t help fearing that we’re reliving the 20th century. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">10/ “The case of the unfortunate Captain Dreyfus had shown the world that in every Jewish nobleman and multimillionaire there still remained something of the old-time pariah, who has no country, for whom human rights do not exist, and whom society would gladly exclude from its privileges. No one, however, found it more difficult to grasp this fact than the emancipated Jews themselves.” (ibid.) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The shocking responses to the 10/7 massacre, which I never would have expected—remember that the first protests were immediately after the massacre and before Israel’s retaliation—truly opened my eyes. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-86123802902230975722023-11-01T00:35:00.004+00:002023-11-09T11:07:42.456+00:00100 latest films I've watched<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">From July 2023 to November 2023</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In bold: films and TV episodes I think are good. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>1/ The Mentalist: Strawberries and Cream - Parts 1 and 2 (2011) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>2/ The Mentalist: Blood Money (2010) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>3/ The Mentalist: Red All Over (2010) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>4/ The Mentalist: 18-5-4 (2010) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>5/ The Mentalist: Scarlet Ribbons (2011) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>6/ The Mentalist: Little Red Book (2011) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>7/ The Mentalist: Pretty Red Balloon (2011) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">8/ The Mentalist: Ring Around the Rosie (2011) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">9/ Barbie (2023) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>10/ The Mentalist: Blood and Sand (2011) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>11/ The Mentalist: Where in the World is Carmine O'Brien? (2011)</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>12/ The Mentalist: Blinking Red Light (2011) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>13/ The Mentalist: Pink Tops (2011) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>14/ The Mentalist: The Redshirt (2011) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>15/ The Mentalist: Always Bet on Red (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">16/ The Mentalist: My Bloody Valentine (2012) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>17/ The Mentalist: Red Is the New Black (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>18/ The Mentalist: At First Blush (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>19/ The Mentalist: War of the Roses (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>20/ The Mentalist: His Thoughts Were Red Thoughts (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>21/ The Mentalist: Cheap Burgundy (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>22/ The Mentalist: Ruddy Cheeks (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>23/ The Mentalist: Pink Champagne on Ice (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>24/ The Mentalist: Something Rotten in Redmund (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>25/ The Mentalist: Ruby Slippers (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>26/ The Mentalist: So Long, and Thanks for All the Red Snapper (2012)</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">27/ The Mentalist: The Crimson Hat (2012) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>28/ The Mentalist: The Red Glass Bead (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">29/ The Mentalist: Devil's Cherry (2012) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>30/ The Mentalist: Not One Red Scent (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">31/ The Mentalist: Blood Feud (2012) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">32/ The Mentalist: Cherry Picked (2012) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>33/ The Mentalist: If It Bleeds, It Leads (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>34/ The Mentalist: Red Sails in the Sunset (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>35/ The Mentalist: Black Cherry (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>36/ The Mentalist: Panama Red (2012) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">37/ The Mentalist: Days of Wine and Roses (2012) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>38/ The Mentalist: Little Red Corvette (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>39/ Indiscreet (1958) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">40/ The Mentalist: The Red Barn (2013) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>41/ The Mentalist: Red in Tooth and Claw (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>42/ The Mentalist: Red Lacquer Nail Polish (2013)</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">43/ Ida (2013) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">44/ The Mentalist: There Will Be Blood (2013) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">45/ The Mentalist: Red, White, and Blue (2013) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>46/ The Mentalist: Behind the Red Curtain (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">47/ The Mentalist: Red Letter Day (2013) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">4<b>8/ The Mentalist: Red Velvet Cupcakes (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>49/ The Mentalist: Red and Itchy (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>50/ The Mentalist: Red John's Rules (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>51/ The Mentalist: The Desert Rose (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>52/ The Mentalist: Black-Winged Redbird (2013)</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>53/ The Mentalist: Wedding in Red (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>54/ The Mentalist: Red Listed (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>55/ The Mentalist: The Red Tattoo (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>56/ The Mentalist: Fire and Brimstone (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>57/ The Mentalist: The Great Red Dragon (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">58/ The Mentalist: Red John (2013) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>59/ The Mentalist: My Blue Heaven (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>60/ The Mentalist: Green Thumb (2013) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>61/ The Mentalist: White Lies (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>62/ The Mentalist: Golden Hammer (2014)</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>63/ The Mentalist: Black Helicopters (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>64/ The Mentalist: Grey Water (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>65/ The Mentalist: White as the Driven Snow (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>66/ The Mentalist: Violets (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>67/ The Mentalist: Silver Wings of Time (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>68/ The Mentalist: Forest Green (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>69/ The Mentalist: Brown Eyed Girls (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>70/ The Mentalist: Il Tavolo Bianco (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>71/ The Mentalist: Black Hearts (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>72/ The Mentalist: Blue Bird (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>73/ The Mentalist: Nothing But Blue Skies (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>74/ The Mentalist: The Greybar Hotel (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>75/ The Mentalist: Orange Blossom Ice Cream (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>76/ The Mentalist: Black Market (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">77/ The Mentalist: The Silver Briefcase (2014) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">78/ The Mentalist: Green Light (2015) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">79/ The Mentalist: Little Yellow House (2015) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>80/ The Mentalist: The Whites of His Eyes (2015) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>81/ The Mentalist: Copper Bullet (2015) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">82/ The Mentalist: Nothing Gold Can Stay (2015) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>83/ The Mentalist: Byzantium (2015) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>84/ The Mentalist: Brown Shag Carpet / White Orchids (2015) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>85/ The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">86/ The French Dispatch (2021)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">87/ Panorama: Downfall of the Crypto King (2023) - extended version </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>88/ Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>89/ Inside No.9: Zanzibar (2018) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>90/ Inside No.9: Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room (2018) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>91/ Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>92/ Inside No.9: Sardines (2014)</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>93/ Inside No.9: A Quiet Night In (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">94/ Inside No.9: Tom & Gerri (2014) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>95/ Inside No.9: Last Gasp (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>96/ Inside No.9: The Understudy (2014) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">97/ Inside No.9: The Harrowing (2014) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">98/ Inside No.9: La Couchette (2015) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>99/ Inside No.9: The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge (2015) </b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>100/ Inside No.9: Cold Comfort (2015) </b></span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-54263746664373669192023-10-10T20:29:00.007+01:002023-10-11T10:30:36.993+01:00Marriages of unequal minds in Shakespeare<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Have you ever noticed how often women in Shakespeare’s plays go for men unworthy of them? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In <i>The Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>, Julia and Silvia are both better than Valentine and Proteus. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In <i>Love’s Labour’s Lost</i>, all three women are wittier and wiser than the men. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, Portia is cleverer and more resourceful than Bassanio, and clearly would be the one wearing the pants in the relationship.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In<i> As You Like It</i>, one thinks that Orlando is a nice lad but wonders what Rosalind can possibly see in him. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Similar with Helena and Bertram in <i>All’s Well That Ends Well</i> (though I think both are utterly unpleasant). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In <i>Measure for Measure</i>, I don’t know why Marianna wants Angelo after he has thrown her away. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In <i>Twelfth Night</i>, Viola, intelligent in other ways but foolish in love, willingly a thousand deaths would die for a narcissist such as Orsino.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In <i>Othello</i>, Desdemona is the sweetest innocent, too good for Othello (I have always clashed with A. C. Bradley’s view of him as a noble man). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Same with Hero and Claudio in <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Same with Imogen and Posthumus Leonatus in <i>Cymbeline</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Same with Hermione and Leontes in <i>The Winter’s Tale</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Love is blind indeed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So which are the equal and balanced couples in Shakespeare?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I guess we can say Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra—though in both cases, their love is destructive. I would also say the Macbeths—they’re a happy, loving couple—she does taunt him but I have always thought that people exaggerate her dominance, her control over him—Macbeth already has black and deep desires before she speaks; Macbeth is the one committing the murder, she can’t; Macbeth is the one killing more people, she can’t stop him. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Probably the only great match with a happy ending is Beatrice and Benedick in <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Why does Shakespeare so often depict women going for men unworthy of them? </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-65314474700030619652023-10-04T10:49:00.009+01:002023-11-15T18:44:51.613+00:00A Bardolator’s notes on living in London<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">1/ As other sufferers would understand, once you have caught the Shakespeare bug, it’s incurable—you read the plays and listen to audio recordings and watch productions and watch film adaptations and read centuries of criticism—and if you happen to live in London, you look for the places associated with Shakespeare.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In May, I went on a Shakespeare tour with Declan McHugh, who specialises in Shakespeare and serial killers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjqQ0rSqcbAJdDVz9nUcyY5YrzXDIu989utUbPtbCY7wjTU5SWRtmcjvyZS4xuVFZXAI-Y_UWbnLHqRlTLN8Gg6q9O-m549x0m2vsK4CAY99VqcHFecUnJhcuI9kLctsgDcBwuWh4tU-YTZabq0CP8Z5ALZPufxRN5HwlYz7ZkMDxNAHbXFvJXzW-UI4so" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2304" data-original-width="3456" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjqQ0rSqcbAJdDVz9nUcyY5YrzXDIu989utUbPtbCY7wjTU5SWRtmcjvyZS4xuVFZXAI-Y_UWbnLHqRlTLN8Gg6q9O-m549x0m2vsK4CAY99VqcHFecUnJhcuI9kLctsgDcBwuWh4tU-YTZabq0CP8Z5ALZPufxRN5HwlYz7ZkMDxNAHbXFvJXzW-UI4so" width="400" /></a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi2oTt1nxD_bR2kBA6nnVAxTbG_-yly_EcIGdSSbMNdoHn6NOVuWenPJOCvhlQvbfvCioOEVbPwVQqpKaENgSH0g6CrUUdZwFOHwL-SqZi1WvM9BviwI53dborno7AzPz37ERDpygE0di77kqIjJXC8-Iy5aOaj901Xt3VDG4RcHfXEgI_eSKwzOMTDq5w" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3456" data-original-width="2304" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi2oTt1nxD_bR2kBA6nnVAxTbG_-yly_EcIGdSSbMNdoHn6NOVuWenPJOCvhlQvbfvCioOEVbPwVQqpKaENgSH0g6CrUUdZwFOHwL-SqZi1WvM9BviwI53dborno7AzPz37ERDpygE0di77kqIjJXC8-Iy5aOaj901Xt3VDG4RcHfXEgI_eSKwzOMTDq5w=w267-h400" width="267" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Last Sunday, I went on another Shakespeare tour with Helen Palmer of Elan Walks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(Helen said to me “So you’re the Bardolator in the group.” How did she know? you ask. I’m a show-off, that’s how). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">2/ On 25/9, I was at the Swan at the Globe with Himadri of <a href="https://argumentativeoldgit.wordpress.com/">Argumentative Old Git blog</a>, having won two tickets, for the event celebrating 400 years of First Folio and the new edition by Folio Society.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Three gorgeous volumes, £1000. Limited edition. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgrkIwNiw04X7SOqPO5KsJaaAwvIF4u0NPvWIHvYeXNXY0em9nVa34wp9_H14VYmI75PxJuK8PUvENlVhz1_ZoOQ1Df5UFdG6aWV1wyviTiCR1s_r-jdvIdbGdsIhklTi8_4MoqW3EYk5gKEeWixjwXqg7HDsMAKppCV7bFSPDY0deuY1YTjwAgr0N05MI" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="4096" data-original-width="3072" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgrkIwNiw04X7SOqPO5KsJaaAwvIF4u0NPvWIHvYeXNXY0em9nVa34wp9_H14VYmI75PxJuK8PUvENlVhz1_ZoOQ1Df5UFdG6aWV1wyviTiCR1s_r-jdvIdbGdsIhklTi8_4MoqW3EYk5gKEeWixjwXqg7HDsMAKppCV7bFSPDY0deuY1YTjwAgr0N05MI=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiCq98OhAp7agjMUhTjuysqpOpGIhHhwsxphZE2YGQ81NFbqzaVqPIUupm9s7Xy1p0dKwTYMLuLaF3_oPEuK6mHu30zZOKTUWbcCF47GrZEEuClGmfEQpe1D4Jfvt05I-7rlVbLBgB4mTQvHopEQ9QfXEXR1tzW01RCZdxHtZTi1OGc2_6QIndd2jJUu28" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="4096" data-original-width="3072" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiCq98OhAp7agjMUhTjuysqpOpGIhHhwsxphZE2YGQ81NFbqzaVqPIUupm9s7Xy1p0dKwTYMLuLaF3_oPEuK6mHu30zZOKTUWbcCF47GrZEEuClGmfEQpe1D4Jfvt05I-7rlVbLBgB4mTQvHopEQ9QfXEXR1tzW01RCZdxHtZTi1OGc2_6QIndd2jJUu28=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVHVDOIG4dOtM54xmlUNDpnqlG2RzwusLRCcx-pEqAPX-Jvno_BTTKA4i6xc1SU7XEJIqR4Cbu6H2ih973hGSp6WnBYofTDaxifqYAlxvcNoE-K6Jsj06dgOWn1tyhoRNZPH5Jr4MUJtewf88Ech7vU5y_xekjDxkl-xR0wdpLnCiklJxnlWToFYyOCcQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="4096" data-original-width="3072" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVHVDOIG4dOtM54xmlUNDpnqlG2RzwusLRCcx-pEqAPX-Jvno_BTTKA4i6xc1SU7XEJIqR4Cbu6H2ih973hGSp6WnBYofTDaxifqYAlxvcNoE-K6Jsj06dgOWn1tyhoRNZPH5Jr4MUJtewf88Ech7vU5y_xekjDxkl-xR0wdpLnCiklJxnlWToFYyOCcQ=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I can’t afford them—I’m just a poor girl—but hey, I was one of the first people outside Folio Society to have seen and felt these beautiful books. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">3/ It’s insane to me that souvenir shops in Amsterdam are filled with Van Gogh and those in Vienna are filled with Mozart and Gustav Klimt, but souvenir shops in London just sell <i>Harry Potter</i>, the royal family, and London symbols such as the red bus. No Shakespeare. No Dickens. Rarely <i>Sherlock Holmes</i>. Just contemporary pop culture nonsense.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">4/ I’m currently reading and enjoying Neil MacGregor’s <i>Shakespeare’s Restless World: An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It’s an interesting concept.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">One can enjoy Shakespeare books anywhere, but it feels a bit more personal when you recognise place names (ah, Shoreditch!) or you can easily pop to Bankside and walk around the area where he worked.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(Yep, I’m rubbing it in). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">5/ There is a Shakespeare Museum opening in London next year. I am excited but worried. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">6/ If you’re heartbroken (or planning to be), I recommend London. Lots of attractions to see, things to do, places to visit.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Since moving to London, I have seen only two copies of the First Folio: the one at British Library and the one at the Globe. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKih6lvTiEuqlpvZUW3lxpzTq05d-3tdaFwvJ0hM0wIAIwWFCExAAPrJfI43IpF769T8D4ECNH5gV0dfC0guEP8FnDgg-0ZKe8vnUNx1fq2FfPW_MJ8a-O4PrASaZFVg1WgBk4O8aVfb9Hyin6gXw7HduePa6dJmtaVcFG9H1uhSbudFmLmbbx48OroZo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3456" data-original-width="2304" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKih6lvTiEuqlpvZUW3lxpzTq05d-3tdaFwvJ0hM0wIAIwWFCExAAPrJfI43IpF769T8D4ECNH5gV0dfC0guEP8FnDgg-0ZKe8vnUNx1fq2FfPW_MJ8a-O4PrASaZFVg1WgBk4O8aVfb9Hyin6gXw7HduePa6dJmtaVcFG9H1uhSbudFmLmbbx48OroZo=w267-h400" width="267" /></a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiJSW8NT9AHoaahiESkhVGMmpRztURnKd8eL2QRrrd5ojHjvAJWwiek3bsNPW7bUkhOq-mf3TdYv8U96pLAcr7DIC14v1weNxWX9QVIqwLiO3LFhyv0S2EJJryT8VkGIcK60on6DHDCDDeBfWJ17NCjztj8Dy445D_MnEvUODfZczEeYobX-KJsfB7HCec" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3072" data-original-width="4096" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiJSW8NT9AHoaahiESkhVGMmpRztURnKd8eL2QRrrd5ojHjvAJWwiek3bsNPW7bUkhOq-mf3TdYv8U96pLAcr7DIC14v1weNxWX9QVIqwLiO3LFhyv0S2EJJryT8VkGIcK60on6DHDCDDeBfWJ17NCjztj8Dy445D_MnEvUODfZczEeYobX-KJsfB7HCec" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">This year is the 400th anniversary of the First Folio so, you’ve guessed it, I’m gonna go hunt them: </span></span><a href="https://folio400.com/first-folios-on-show-in-2023/">https://folio400.com/first-folios-on-show-in-2023/</a></div></span></div><p></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-11383779940515271842023-10-02T21:37:00.005+01:002023-10-03T09:49:41.851+01:00Cleopatra and Shakespeare’s characters’ ability to surprise <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">If asked to pick the greatest line in Shakespeare, I would go with “I was adored once too.” <a href="https://www.berfrois.com/2017/10/book-stage-gathering-plunder/">Virginia Woolf</a> also thinks that when Sir Andrew says that line in <i>Twelfth Night</i>, “we feel that we hold him in the hollow of our hands; a novelist would have taken three volumes to bring us to that pitch of intimacy.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Just five words completely change our perception of Sir Andrew. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Also in <i>Twelfth Night</i>, Shakespeare does something brilliant with Malvolio: Malvolio first comes across as self-satisfied, holier-than-thou, and insufferable, so we laugh along when other characters play a prank on him, but then the prank goes too far and turns into something much darker and crueller, and as we see Malvolio abused and beaten and humiliated, we not only feel sorry for him but also feel complicit in the humiliation of the pitiful man.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It is excellent, and Jane Austen later does something similar with Miss Bates in<i> Emma</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">When people talk about Shakespeare’s understanding of human nature and powers of characterisation, they understandably talk about Iago and Othello, together with Hamlet, Macbeth, Rosalind…, but the most surprising character in <i>Othello</i> is Emilia. For a large part of the play, Emilia comes across as ordinary and earthy, contrasting with the saintliness and naïve childlikeness of Desdemona, but in the final scene, she is transfigured. Iago has seen through everything and manipulated everyone, but Emilia’s love and self-sacrifice and fearlessness is the one thing he has not anticipated. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“EMILIA […] Thou hast not half that power to do me harm</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">As I have to be hurt…” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(Act 5 scene 2) </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The intensity! The rage! It is Emilia who defends Desdemona’s honour, who exposes Othello, who brings down Iago. It is a powerful scene—she is transfigured. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But there’s nothing like the surprise of Cleopatra, the infinite variety of Cleopatra. A. C. Bradley thinks that in Shakespeare, there are four characters that are inexhaustible: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, and Cleopatra.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For a large part of <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, she is depicted as lascivious and tempestuous and dramatic and manipulative and shallow and an irresponsible ruler, and yet in the final Act, she is transformed. In the large part of the play, Antony and Cleopatra, both irresponsible rulers and in some ways very ordinary people, are both turned into quasi-mythological beings. It’s largely Cleopatra who mythologises Antony and herself. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“CLEOPATRA Think you there was or might be such a man </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">As this I dreamt of? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">DOLABELLA Gentle madam, no. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">CLEOPATRA You lie, up to the hearing of the gods, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But if there be nor ever were one such, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It’s past the size of dreaming; nature wants stuff </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">To vie strange forms with fancy, yet t’ imagine</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">As Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Condemning shadows quite.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(Act 5 scene 2) </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Her death is one of the most striking, unforgettable deaths in Shakespeare (and in literature in general). But unlike the death of Desdemona or Cordelia, it doesn’t feel tragic—instead, there’s a strange beauty and nobility in Cleopatra’s death. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“CLEOPATRA Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Immortal longings in me. Now no more </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip,</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Yare, yare, good Iras; methinks I hear </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Antony call; I see him rouse himself</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">To praise my noble act. I hear him mock</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Now to that name my courage prove my title! </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I am fire, and air; my other elements</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I give to baser life…” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(ibid.) </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">How does a pleasure-seeking, manipulative, and essentially shallow woman like Cleopatra transform into such a quasi-mythological being in the last Act of the play? How does Shakespeare do it? I don’t know—I’ve reread the play recently and still don’t know. It’s miraculous. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-2827864971908041862023-09-21T12:53:00.006+01:002023-09-21T15:53:51.351+01:00More and more puzzled by Measure for Measure <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">1/ I still think the Duke goes around pulling all the strings because he wants to test everyone in Vienna. Some readers and viewers of the play complain that the final two acts drag on for too long when the Duke could easily remove his disguise and set everything right, but I don’t think he’s just interested in justice, in setting everything right—I think he wants to experiment, to test everyone to their very limit.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The question is, of course, why? Perhaps he’s bored, never having had much interest in governing. Perhaps he wants to study human nature. Perhaps he wants to play God. Perhaps he turns everything upside down and begins anew when he returns to power, having given the citizens of Vienna a taste of tyranny. Perhaps he wants to demonstrate to everyone, especially those in power, the danger of bias and the impossibility of establishing the truth when we’re in a “he said, she said” situation. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">2/ Barnardine is the minor, seemingly inconsequential character in Shakespeare that interests me the most, because he’s the only character in <i>Measure for Measure</i> that the Duke cannot control. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“BARNADINE […] I will not consent to die this day, it’s certain.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(Act 4 scene 3) </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For all his game of playing God and manipulating everything, the Duke also cannot control Lucio’s mouth, but in the final scene, Lucio inadvertently plays into the Duke’s game when he slanders Friar Lodowick (the Duke’s disguise) and thus puts Escalus to the test as a judge (which he fails, coloured by his misjudgement about Angelo). And later, the Duke can punish Lucio by forcing him to marry a prostitute.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Barnardine on the contrary cannot be controlled, cannot be swayed. He refuses to get pulled into the Duke’s elaborate plot. He would prefer not to. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">3/ When I reread <i>Hamlet</i> or <i>King Lear</i>, I saw more layers of meaning and understood them a bit better.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But when I reread <i>Measure for Measure </i>recently, it puzzled me even more—I’m still in the dark—it’s a baffling play. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For example, people tell me that <i>Measure for Measure</i> is about mercy. But do you notice the absurdity of Isabella’s call for mercy for Angelo? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“ISABELLA […] My brother had but justice, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In that he did the thing for which he died. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For Angelo, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">His act did not o’ertake his bad intent, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And must be buried but as an intent </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Intents but merely thoughts.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(Act 5 scene 1)</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">How is it justice that Claudio has to die for “fornication”? How is it just intent when Angelo forces Isabella to trade her virginity for her brother’s life—which doesn’t become “action” only because the Duke intervenes and gets Marianna to change place with Isabella—and then deceitfully lets Claudio be executed anyway? What kind of mercy is this? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">We can imagine what Shakespeare would have thought about Claudio’s “crime”—Anne Hathaway was pregnant on their wedding day. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">4/ The Duke is, in his way, also a tyrant. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Look at the resolution.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">He makes Angelo marry Marianna: Angelo doesn’t want her, and she ends up with someone who doesn’t care for her.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">He makes Lucio marry the prostitute who has a child with him: Lucio doesn’t want her, how do we know if she wants him? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">He “proposes” to Isabella: she never says yes, and we all know she wants to become a nun.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Isn’t that tyrannical? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This is not me imposing a modern perspective on the play—Shakespeare depicted over and over again forced marriages, in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, in <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i>, in <i>The Merry Wives of Windsor</i>—we can deduce what he must have thought about them. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-2609098429966487602023-09-15T18:21:00.003+01:002023-11-15T18:53:37.865+00:00Chekhov and shame <p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I prefer Chekhov’s later and longer stories, naturally. But many of his earlier stories, though just sketches, are very good.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In Volume 8 of Constance Garnett’s Chekhov, shame is the theme in most of the stories: Chekhov depicts an encounter, a confrontation, or a confession, and pinpoints a moment of shame, of the realisation in some character that they have wasted their lives or been unkind to others. And it’s very moving. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For example, in “The Chorus Girl”, a chorus girl named Pasha is with a man when his wife suddenly appears and asks about him: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Pasha felt that on this lady in black with the angry eyes and white slender fingers she produced the impression of something horrid and unseemly, and she felt ashamed of her chubby red cheeks, the pock-mark on her nose, and the fringe on her forehead, which never could be combed back. And it seemed to her that if she had been thin, and had had no powder on her face and no fringe on her forehead, then she could have disguised the fact that she was not “respectable,” and she would not have felt so frightened and ashamed to stand facing this unknown, mysterious lady.”</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It is similar to a moment in “A Gentleman Friend”: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“The staircase impressed her as luxurious, and magnificent, but of all its splendours what caught her eye most was an immense looking-glass, in which she saw a ragged figure without a fashionable jacket, without a big hat, and without bronze shoes. And it seemed strange to Vanda that, now that she was humbly dressed and looked like a laundress or sewing girl, she felt ashamed, and no trace of her usual boldness and sauciness remained, and in her own mind she no longer thought of herself as Vanda, but as the Nastasya Kanavkin she used to be in the old days. . . .” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">To go back to “The Chorus Girl”, the wife screams at her, curses her, begs her whilst the husband is hiding and hearing everything. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Pasha shrieked with horror and waved her hands. She felt that this pale, beautiful lady who expressed herself so grandly, as though she were on the stage, really might go down on her knees to her, simply from pride, from grandeur, to exalt herself and humiliate the chorus girl.” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">A large part of the story is about the chorus girl’s shame and humiliation—because of it, she does an impulsive act that she later regrets—but then the wife leaves and the man appears, and now what we see is his shame. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“At a Country House” is also a sketch, but different from “The Chorus Girl”, shame is not a feeling that runs through the entire story but a moment of sudden realisation: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Rashevitch was fearfully confused. Dumbfoundered, as though he had been caught in the act of a crime, he gazed helplessly at Meier, and did not know what to say. Genya and Iraida flushed crimson, and bent over their music; they were ashamed of their tactless father. A minute passed in silence, and there was a feeling of unbearable discomfort…” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That moment changes the colour, the tone of the rest of the story. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“When he reached his own room, Rashevitch sat down on his bed and began to undress. He felt oppressed, and he was still haunted by the same feeling as though he had eaten soap. He was ashamed. As he undressed he looked at his long, sinewy, elderly legs, and remembered that in the district they called him the “toad,” and after every long conversation he always felt ashamed.” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It also changes the way we perceive the character. Rashevitch is the kind of man Chekhov might not have liked in real life, for he speaks of blue blood and disparages the working class, but Chekhov humanises him—through shame—and makes us feel sorry for him. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The subject of shame is even more developed, and better handled, in “Rothschild’s Fiddle”. Look at the moment when Yakov notices the look of joy on his dying wife’s face: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Looking at the old woman, Yakov for some reason reflected that he had not once in his life been affectionate to her, had had no feeling for her, had never once thought to buy her a kerchief, or to bring her home some dainty from a wedding, but had done nothing but shout at her, scold her for his losses, shake his fists at her; it is true he had never actually beaten her, but he had frightened her, and at such times she had always been numb with terror. Why, he had forbidden her to drink tea because they spent too much without that, and she drank only hot water. And he understood why she had such a strange, joyful face now, and he was overcome with dread.” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Chekhov doesn’t use the word, but it’s a moment of immense shame. The feeling becomes stronger after the funeral: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“He wondered how it had happened that for the last forty or fifty years of his life he had never once been to the river, or if he had been by it he had not paid attention to it. […] But nothing of this had happened, even in his dreams; life had passed uselessly without any pleasure, had been wasted for nothing, not even a pinch of snuff; there was nothing left in front, and if one looked back—there was nothing there but losses, and such terrible ones, it made one cold all over. […] Why do people always do what isn’t needful? Why had Yakov all his life scolded, bellowed, shaken his fists, ill-treated his wife, and, one might ask, what necessity was there for him to frighten and insult the Jew that day? Why did people in general hinder each other from living? What losses were due to it! what terrible losses! If it were not for hatred and malice people would get immense benefit from one another.”</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Now connected with shame is the subject of waste—something that occupies Chekhov throughout his career, in both short stories and plays—the idea that we waste our lives and hinder each other from living. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I shall end my blog post with a quote from Edmund White, as <a href="https://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-right-things-in-right-order.html">quoted on Anecdotal Evidence blog</a>: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“But surely the stories of Chekhov or the paintings of de Chirico move us not only because they are so well done, but because in each case the artist has arranged exactly the right things in the right order. The choice of subject matter has been at least half of the achievement. Of course, if the rendering were less accomplished, its inaccuracies would distract us or stand between us and what was going on; but the aptness of the rendering alone could never explain the mysterious hold those words in the dark have over us.”</span></blockquote><p></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-76042147103867667352023-08-30T23:30:00.002+01:002023-08-31T14:31:13.442+01:00On Turgenev’s Virgin Soil <p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Virgin Soil</i> is one of Turgenev’s lesser-known works. Not hard to see why. It is, as Tom of Wuthering Expectations has put it, formless. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But if you’re interested in 19th century Russian society and politics, like I am, especially now that I have just read Gary Saul Morson’s <i>Wonder Confronts Certainty</i>, it is an interesting novel. It is probably Turgenev’s most political novel, or the novel where his stance is most clear: the revolutionaries are not psychopaths but naïve idealists who want to “serve the people” but know nothing about “the people”; the ideal is someone like Solomin, who introduces gradual changes and makes actual positive impact on people’s lives. If only the likes of Solomin had triumphed instead of the Bolsheviks! </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There are also some good bits in <i>Virgin Soil</i>. My favourite part is the chapter about the old couple, Fomushka and Fimushka—it does nothing to advance the plot, it even feels incongruous, but it’s striking and full of life. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The characterisation of Nezhdanov and the depiction of his doubt and struggle are good. He is the most, or perhaps the only, fully developed character in the novel. Like Tolstoy always writes about the Man Who Searches for Meaning, Chekhov always writes about the Man Who Wastes His Life, Dostoyevsky always writes about the Spiteful Man, Turgenev always writes about the Superfluous Man.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tom <a href="https://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2015/08/unutterably-stupid-and-even-meaningless.html">wrote</a>: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“The generation of Nihilists replaces the Superfluous Men, only to discover that they themselves were superfluous, and now the more violent, conspiratorial, anarchistic Populists elbow out the nihilists, finding, to their despair, that they are entirely superfluous.” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Nezhdanov is another Superfluous Man. But it doesn’t feel boring—the doubt, the struggle, the gulf he feels between himself and the peasants, the feeling that “it’s difficult for an aesthete to engage with real life”, the despair and self-loathing—all that is well depicted.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There are some good moments, some good scenes throughout the book. The confrontation between Valentina Sipyagina and Marianna, for example. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Marianna left hastily, while Valentina Mikhailovna jumped up from her armchair, on the point of shouting and bursting into tears. But she did not know what to shout and the tears did not come. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">[…] She recognized a certain portion of truth in what she had heard. But how could she be judged so harshly? “Can I be so evil?” she thought, looking at herself in the mirror which was placed between the two windows directly in front of her. This mirror reflected a delightful, somewhat distorted face, with prominent red patches, which was nevertheless charming, and remarkable, soft, velvet eyes. “Me. Am I evil,” she thought again, “with eyes like that?”…” (Ch.26) </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(translated by Michael Pursglove) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I like that. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The scene where Sipyagin tricks Paklin into revealing the whereabouts of Nezhdanov and Marianna is also good, especially the moment Paklin realises what he has done and tries to justify himself, in vain. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Some other good bits in <i>Virgin Soil</i> are when the characters leave things unsaid. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Marianna wanted to ask for an explanation of these words, but did not, and anyway, at that moment Solomin came into the room.” (Ch.36)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That scene between Nezhdanov and Marianna is very good. I don’t particularly like the romance in the novel, but that particular scene is excellent. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Solomin went out and caught Marianna up on the stairs. He had intended to say something to her about Nezhdanov, but remained silent. And, for her part, Marianna realized that Solomin had intended to say something to her, about Nezhdanov in particular, and that he had remained silent. And she too remained silent.” (ibid.)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I like it when a writer depicts those moments when people leave things unsaid; when they don’t say, or can’t say, something. Chekhov and Henry James are the masters of those silences, Turgenev also does it. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Turgenev depicts another silence in the final chapter of the book: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Mashurina merely nodded. She wanted him to continue speaking of Nezhdanov, but could not pluck up the courage to ask him.” (Ch.38) </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The entire chapter is poignant. I like that Turgenev ends the novel not on Marianna and Solomin, but on Paklin and Mashurina: we’re in a way moved further away from Nezhdanov, but we can see the impact of his death on somebody.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There are indeed some very good bits in the book. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-32774815421181033062023-08-22T20:56:00.003+01:002023-08-23T09:49:40.548+01:00Virgin Soil: Fomushka and Fimushka <p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Virgin Soil </i>seems like the right book to read after Gary Saul Morson’s <i>Wonder Confronts Certainty</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Perhaps at some point I will write about Turgenev’s revolutionaries, but right now I’m interested in the old couple: the Subochevs, Foma Lavrentyevich (Fomushka) and Yevfimiya Pavlovna (Fimushka). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This is how Paklin describes them: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">““No politics, no literature, nothing modern gets a look in there. […] The smell there is antique; the people are antique, the air is antique. Take anything you like and it’s antique. Catherine II, powder, hooped skirts, the eighteenth century! […] They’re awfully like one another, only she wears a mobcap and he a nightcap—with the same ruches as the mobcap, but minus the ribbon. If it wasn’t for this ribbon, you wouldn’t know who was who…”” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(translated by Michael Pursglove) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Personally I think not much of interest has happened before this point. Nezhdanov, an illegitimate son of an aristocrat, and a Red, is employed as a tutor by the privy councillor Sipyagin; there he meets a few progressive people who want to “do something”—Marianna (Sipyagin’s niece), Markelov (Sipyagin’s brother-in-law), Solomin (a factory owner), etc. Paklin, one of the revolutionaries Nezhdanov has known from before, visits him, gets introduced to the others, and then takes them to the Subochevs, who gave shelter to his sister. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“The Subochevs’ coachman, too, was an extremely ancient man, redolent of train oil and pitch; his beard began near his eyes and his eyebrows fell to his beard in a little cascade. He was so slow in all his movements that he used up a whole five minutes to take a pinch of snuff, two minutes to stick his whip into his belt and over two hours to harness Moveless alone.” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Doesn’t that sound more like something out of Gogol? </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“When together, they were never bored, so they were never apart and did not wish for any other company. Neither Fomushka nor Fimushka had ever been seriously ill, and if one of them had some slight indisposition, they both drank an infusion of lime blossom, had warm oil rubbed onto the smalls of their backs or hot fat dropped onto the soles of their feet, and it soon passed.” </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The episode with the Subochevs is unlike anything that came before. It is—I wouldn’t say out-of-place—incongruous. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I like it though. The old couple. The house. The servants in the house. The whole scene. It is lively, and unexpected. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-88166495585223653112023-08-19T11:03:00.001+01:002023-08-20T09:58:37.010+01:0015 films I hate<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Curious, aren’t you? I generally avoid blogging about things I hate, but today let’s stir shit up.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Note that I will only name films which are highly acclaimed, or which are with a huge fanbase and considered iconic—the sacred cows, so to speak—it’s no fun mentioning something popular but slammed by critics and relatively recent (such as <i>Twilight</i> or superhero rubbish). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Here’s the list: </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Lolita </i>(dir. Stanley Kubrick) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Shining</i> (dir. Stanley Kubrick) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Tree of Life</i> (dir. Terrence Malick) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Shape of Water</i> (dir. Guillermo del Toro) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Mank</i> (dir. David Fincher) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri </i>(dir. Martin McDonagh) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Back to the Future</i> (dir. Robert Zemeckis) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Jojo Rabbit</i> (dir. Taika Waititi) </span></p><p><i style="font-family: georgia;">Roma</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> (dir. Alfonso Cuaron) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Anything I have seen by Jean-Luc Godard, except <i>Vivre sa vie </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Oldboy </i>(dir. Park Chan-wook) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Rope </i>(dir. Alfred Hitchcock) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Emma </i>(dir. Douglas McGrath) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Emma</i> (dir. Autumn de Wilde)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Jane Eyre</i> (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The list has just got updated on 20/8. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com70tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-23276499646520886552023-08-18T10:47:00.005+01:002023-08-18T10:47:53.736+01:00My 10 favourite films (2023 list)<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">One film per director. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Persona </i>(dir. Ingmar Bergman) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Sunset Boulevard</i> (dir. Billy Wilder) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Ran</i> (dir. Akira Kurosawa) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Casablanca</i> (dir. Michael Curtis) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>A Star Is Born </i>(dir. George Cukor) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Conversation</i> (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Phantom of Liberty</i> (dir. Luis Bunuel) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice</i> (dir. Yasujiro Ozu) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Raise the Red Lantern</i> (dir. Zhang Yimou) </span></p><p><i style="font-family: georgia;">F for Fake</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> (dir. Orson Welles) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3901980733463068698.post-562450426715023922023-08-15T22:50:00.007+01:002023-08-17T13:52:49.748+01:00Chekhov’s “The Letter” and “A Nightmare”<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Not enough is said about the great value of Constance Garnett’s 13 volumes of Chekhov. I like her prose, I also like the way she organises the stories—for example, Volume 7 has “The Bishop”, “The Letter”, “Easter Eve”, “A Nightmare”, “The Murder”, “Uprooted”, and “The Steppe”—she groups together several stories which have a religious theme or setting and which can be read together, and adds some different stories so it’s never boring. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Volume 7 begins with “The Bishop”, one of his finest stories, and possibly Vasily Grossman’s favourite, as he mentions it in both <i>Life and Fate </i>and <i>Everything Flows</i>. The story is Chekhov’s answer to <i>The Death of Ivan Ilyich</i>: oppressed by illness and overwhelmed with work, the bishop has no time to think about death or God, and when he thinks about his life, he doesn’t ask himself if he has lived a good and worthwhile life, but thinks about his mother and his childhood. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Bishops and priests in Chekhov’s world are perfectly human—there are no saints—that’s what I love about Chekhov. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“The Bishop” is followed with “The Letter”. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a lie. But Father Anastasy perceived it clearly, and realized that his presence was burdensome and inappropriate, that his Reverence, who had taken an early morning service in the night and a long mass at midday, was exhausted and longing for repose; every minute he was meaning to get up and go, but he did not get up, he sat on as though he were waiting for something.”</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In the story, Chekhov moves between different perspectives, depicting both the “feeling akin to hatred” in the exhausted host, and the mind of the unwelcome guest who knows he has to leave but somehow doesn’t go. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">“His Reverence believed in people’s reforming, but now when a feeling of pity had been kindled in him it seemed to him that this disgraced, worn-out old man, entangled in a network of sins and weaknesses, was hopelessly wrecked, that there was no power on earth that could straighten out his spine, give brightness to his eyes and restrain the unpleasant timid laugh which he laughed on purpose to smoothe over to some slight extent the repulsive impression he made on people.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The old man seemed now to Father Fyodor not guilty and not vicious, but humiliated, insulted, unfortunate; his Reverence thought of his wife, his nine children, the dirty beggarly shelter at Zyavkin’s; he thought for some reason of the people who are glad to see priests drunk and persons in authority detected in crimes; and thought that the very best thing Father Anastasy could do now would be to die as soon as possible and to depart from this world for ever.”</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Who else but Chekhov would write a passage like that about a priest? It is so good. In “The Letter”, he writes about two priests and a deacon, and depicts them with such keen insight, such compassion and humanity. His characters are all human. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In “A Nightmare”, there’s a priest named Father Yakov, and he’s seen through the eyes of Kunin, a member of the Rural Board. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“With his short figure, his narrow chest, his red and perspiring face, he made from the first moment a most unpleasant impression on Kunin. The latter could never have imagined that there were such undignified and pitiful-looking priests in Russia; and in Father Yakov’s attitude, in the way he held his hands on his knees and sat on the very edge of his chair, he saw a lack of dignity and even a shade of servility.”</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Writing from the perspective of Kunin, Chekhov doesn’t hold back: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Father Yakov was so absorbed in drinking tea that he did not answer this question at once. He lifted his grey-blue eyes to Kunin, thought a moment, and as though recalling his question, he shook his head in the negative. An expression of pleasure and of the most ordinary prosaic appetite overspread his face from ear to ear. He drank and smacked his lips over every gulp. When he had drunk it to the very last drop, he put his glass on the table, then took his glass back again, looked at the bottom of it, then put it back again. The expression of pleasure faded from his face. . . .”</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">As it is Chekhov, there would be a turn in the story, but I won’t go into detail—all I’ll say is that I love the way he writes about the indignity of poverty, and the pride of a poor person who desperately tries to hide his poverty—it is so moving. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">__________________________________________</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I have finished reading Gary Saul Morson’s <i>Wonder Confronts Certainty</i>. If you’re interested in Russian literature and history, ideology, and big questions, this is the book for you. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I love that Morson ends the book with Chekhov. He too is my hero. </span></p>Hai Di Nguyenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230670162621139739noreply@blogger.com2