Timon of Athens

We have a special opportunity, right now, to appreciate Timon of Athens, a play not even Shakespeare seems to have cared much about (I think it was never performed in his lifetime). The story is of a guy who spends all his money on gifts for friends and throwing lavish parties for people. When the creditors come calling, he's shocked to find out that he has no money left with which to pay them. He asks for help, but none of his "friends" offer it and he ends up skipping town and cursing Athens and Athenians from a cave until he dies.

No one cares about the play because Timon fails to be very interesting. His curses grow tiresome, like the Queen Mother in Richard III. In the end, his character is little more than an expletive, or a symbolic, negative curse. Like a sign in a forest, giving the world the finger. I quite like that analogy, actually. The play is never performed, so no one ever hears Timon's curses. If a crazy Athenian flips the bird in a forest with no one else around, does it make an offense?

So, it's a shame that the play isn't better. Shakespeare on bankruptcy and financial crisis? How much more topical can the guy get? But I don't think we'll see revivals of this play springing up. For that to happen, someone would have to read the play. I don't think they will, unless they're trying to blog the Complete Works.

Now, I was okay with it, because I can feel myself becoming a cliche similar to Timon. I went in serious debt for a humanities education that does not empower me to pay it back. Like crazy Timon and his treating of his friends. So, I'm holding out the possibility of retreating to a cave, cursing and waiting for Sallie Mae to die. Problem is, no one told Timon when his creditors died and he died an unmoving, lonely death in his suburban cave. Oh well.

The Taste of Chicago is going on. This is one of those things that is wildly famous in the Midwest, but completely unknown to Southerners, whose event calendars are too full of Civil War battle reenactments to notice a food party 800 miles away. So, let me summarize. The Taste, as it is called, is an opportunity for the largest people in the Midwest simultaneously to display and increase their girth. Last night I saw more sunburned, half-inflated-hot-air-balloon breasts than I expected to see in my entire lifetime. I am a big guy myself. Overweight, flabby, cumulus-white, and hairy. So, you know what I do? I clothe myself everyday, even when I'm joining a crowd of several hundred thousand to eat tacos or deep dish pizza in Grant Park. I do this out of modesty, yes, but also out of love for my fellow man/woman. Whenever I'm tempted to expose my midriff or every centimeter of skin above my nipple, I tell myself: think of the children. And, think of your chances of anyone agreeing to have children with you.

Jackie and I watched half of Othello last night and I think I'm going to read it next. The plan to do the Henriad uninterrupted has failed. Much like Shakespeare's plan to write a good play called The Merry Wives of Windsor.

All's Well that Ends Well (Mine eyes smell onions)

This play should have us on our guard from the start, because of the spurious, cynical philosophy of the title. Is all well that ends well? Clearly not. A more worthy statement might be: "A good ending is preferable to a bad ending." But I'm not even sure that we get that, here.

This play reminds me of Measure for Measure for several reasons. Obviously, they're both classified as "problem plays." Both probably deserve more attention than they get, but it's hard to like many of the characters. Helena is virtuous, kind, smart, etc, but her love for Bertram is so strange that we have to question her judgment. In fact, I think we have to question the stability of her character.

You probably don't know the plot of this play. Briefly, Helena, a kind of upper-middle class girl, loves an aristocrat, Bertram. Helena cures the king of an illness and he agrees to ennoble her and compel the man of her choice to marry her. She chooses Bertram, who wants nothing to do with her and takes off for a foreign war with his scoundrel follower, Parolles. There, he woos another lady, who turns out to be in cahoots with Helena, who has faked her own death and is scheming to get Bertram back. Bertram eventually abandons this lady, after having sex with her (though it's really Helena in the bed, in disguise) and goes back to France, thinking Helena dead. Bertram is about to be married to yet another woman, via the king, when everyone shows up to condemn him. The king puts him back together with Helena, whom he accidentally impregnated, thinking her to the lady Diana. And, all's well that end's well.

There are good things about this play. Helena is apparently crazy and possibly masochistic, but she has a lot of virtues. Parolles is a scoundrel, but is fun and ends up with some of the clearest sight in the play. This play isn't quite a moral vacuum, but it is a land without heroes or loyalties. Within that landscape, Parolles is harmless, blithely betraying people who deserve no loyalty and getting caught doing so. Everyone ends up happy without "deserving" it, but I don't think we should begrudge them that. As I said before, it's not a moral vacuum, but it is a place with no moral center or poles. All morality is relative here. If that is so, maybe Parolles, who shifts loyalties and betrays whomever with the wind, is wiser than Helena, who doggedly pursues a worthless husband and ends up pregnant by him, destined to life with a cad who accepted her only when neither war nor the civil law would kill him.

Two important notes about the conditions in which I read this play. First, I no longer have access to $2 copies of each individual play, so I'm reading out of a Complete Works that has truly tiny print. Second, I read the first two Acts with a terrible toothache and the last three on Vicodin, after having that tooth pulled. Let me tell you about how they pull an adult's tooth. They shoot you up with painkillers, take a metal stick, and push on your tooth until it breaks. Then they pull out the shards. I had made a joke when I got there about tying a string around the tooth, connecting it to a doorknob, and slamming the door. The method they use is actually more primitive.

USA beats Spain! Bring on Brazil or (please!) South Africa.

Henry IV, Part Two--2 (gravy, gravy, gravy)

My little sister got married this weekend in Georgia. We drove down. Yes, drove down from Chicago. She married a great guy named Derek and they're on an Alaskan cruise right now, which sounded pretty freaking good in the 90 degree heat with some kind of obscenely unmeasurable humidity. But then, Chicago's mid-70's isn't too bad, either.

There are no weddings in Henry IV, though there is one in Henry V. I started out liking this play even better than the first, but it tailed off for me. It's a kind of continuation from the first play, with no new elements introduced, but missing the two elements that made the first play so compelling. These are Falstaff's interactions with Hal (they barely see each other in this play) and Hotspur, whom I don't like, but who is at least interesting.

Falstaff is still good, still kind of an emblem and embodiment of life. He's like life come to life. His soliloquy in the first play on honor is unparalleled. All the court characters worship power, Hotspur comes pretty close to worshiping death. Falstaff unabashedly worships life and it's wonderful. The thing here is humor. I'm beginning to distrust anyone who fails to have a sense of humor. These people aren't just boring, they are dangerous. They are the fanatics, those who are willing to die for abstractions, those who are willing to kill for abstractions. They are the ones we have to fight, but fight through irony, through humor, through sheer love of life.

Boy, I'm turning preachy. But Shakespeare goes on and enshrines this Hal, in the rip-roaring patriotic rant Henry V. Don't get me wrong, the St. Crispin's Day speech is stirring. But it's only "Bring it on" done very very well. It's empire, in the name of what? For Harry, England, and St. George! Bullshit. As Falstaff says: "gravy, gravy, gravy."

Henry IV, Part One--3, Henry IV, Part Two--1

Prince Hal has me thinking about black sheep, particularly those of political families. Well, I say he has me thinking about them, but really he has me trying to think of some. We hear more about politicians themselves who should be black sheep, except that we've already elected them. Take, for instance, Ted Kennedy and the whole Chappaquidick (sp?) thing. Actually, we can probably put the entire Kennedy family in this group. You can divide them by should have been black sheep who ran the country and black sheep who didn't run the country. And then there's Mr. Bush, who makes such a good analogy with Hal that I'm going to break my ill-advised rule and do some straight up comparison.
I think that we can all say, now, that W was not a model political son as a kid. Whether he dodged the draft or not, he certainly was careful not to go to Vietnam. A coke head. A drunk. Owned a really terrible baseball team. This all matches Prince Hal's youth, minus the coke and plus wit. And, Hal took England into a long and costly war (with France) with no real prospect for a clean end. Another difference, though, is that the war went well while Harry was still alive.

Better black sheep, though, are folks like Billy Carter, who endorsed a beer that might have been named for him while his poor brother was in office. Now that is good stuff. But this political stuff isn't all that interesting to me, now I've written it. I'm more interested in what's going on this weekend and what has been going on this week. This weekend my little brother's coming into town and we're going to see the USA soccer team play a World Cup Qualifier against Honduras. I've never been to a game anything like that. Can't wait. Also, my neighborhood is having its annual book fair this weekend, now called The Printer's Row Lit Fest. Dave Eggers is going to be here. It's supposed to be the biggest book event in the Midwest. C-Span's Book TV is parked across the street right now. Seriously.

And, perhaps most importantly, my job search is deteriorating. Yesterday I found myself writing in a cover letter: I am applying to the position of copyeditor because I believe that the world will be a slightly better place when trade magazines are free of grammatical mistakes. AND: I will proofread with passion and discretion. I don't know how low this can go, but I have a bad feeling that I'm going to find out.

Henry IV, Part One--2

Now that I'm home all day, you might think that I'd be reading more Shakespeare, blogging more, also getting the stuff done that everyone always thinks they'd get done if they only had the time. Instead, I've mostly been watching Saved by the Bell, five episodes of which TBS plays every morning.

As a kid, my favorite character of course was Zack. Now, however, it's Mr. Belding. This change happened when I was in college near Chattanooga. You see, Dennis Haskins lives, or at least lived, near Chattanooga. At least, I heard that once. There's also a slight chance that I am the one who told myself that. So, I had this brilliant idea that I would meet Mr. Belding, impress him with my knowledge of his acting career (this assumed that he had no career outside of Saved by the Bell), and eventually convince him to hold a cast reunion barbecue, where I would chow down on burgers and hot dogs with Mark Paul Gosselaar, Dustin Diamond, Mario Lopez (this was well before Dancing with the Stars, back in the days of that bicycle cop show), Lark Voorhies, Tiffani Amber Thiessen, and Elizabeth Berkeley. It was a brilliant plan.

Three distinct societies in Henry IV. You have the court, centered around the usurper Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV. This group is pretty boring. Henry IV is contemplating a Crusade at the beginning of the play. First, he supplants the rightful tyrant of England, then decides in God's name to go supplant whoever the hell was in charge of Palestine (I assume it was the Moslem hordes, but I think it's important to state my ignorance upfront). Then you have the rebel camp, which is centered around Hotspur and is, appropriately enough, characterized by betrayal and so forth. And then the good group, centered on Falstaff and containing Prince Hal. Here you have drinking, cursing, highway robbery, light-hearted treason, a bunch of jokes I don't get because I neither live in the late sixteenth century nor read the footnotes, and some jokes that I do get.

When I'm not watching Saved by the Bell, I walk around Chicago, sometimes trying to squeeze people into this Henry IV schema, based on how they're dressed or what they're yelling on the street (either just yelling because they're crazy, or yelling into their cell phone head piece things). Along those lines, here are some thoughts about the class struggle in Chicago:

What's that Jackie? You need some cheese shredded? Alright. Sorry, folks, I'll have to hook you up with an in-depth study of the class system in Chicago some other time.