1900

The other day I passed another mile-marker--a marker that seems, in retrospect, barely possible. I uploaded post #1900 on this site. (As years pass, as I age, as I think about so many things, the question that inevitably emerges is, How is this possible?)

So many things ... I graduated from high school 55 years ago; I finished my first year of teaching 50 years ago; I directed my first middle-school play 50 years ago ... I began teaching seventh graders--and now I have a grandson who will be entering seventh grade this fall ... This is getting depressing!

And now ... 1900 blog posts!?!?

My first--"I Am Born" (a theft of the opening line from David Copperfield)--appeared on January 6, 2012 (here's a link to that initial post). As I've written on other anniversaries (I post about the blog every one hundred posts), I've sometimes noted that I thought, back in 2012, that I would be blogging more than I actually have about education and teaching issues. One reason for my declining number of posts in that category is that I have not been a teacher since the spring of 2011 (when I left Western Reserve Academy), and I have not been a public school teacher since January 1997, when I retired from the Aurora City Schools (Aurora, Ohio). I don't really know what it's like now, teaching in this test-mad world. And I'm not really interested in a bunch of sentences that begin Back when I was teaching .... It's time for new voices. And there are plenty--including our son's.

So ... what have I written about? Memories. I've serialized drafts of books I'm working on (for the past couple of years it's been my memoir about my pursuit of Mary Shelley--Frankenstein Sundae, a text I should finish in the next couple of months. Then will come major revisions, for I'm already nearing 500 pages, far too long ...

I've written about odd things I've noticed, about political issues (not all that often--too polarizing), about my ongoing battles with metastatic prostate cancer, about ... well, pretty much about anything that, as they used to say, "tickles my fancy" (an expression, I see, that Dickens used in 1839 in Nicholas Nickleby).

As is my wont, I will right now check how many "hits" I've had (I check this only after each 100 posts).

Pause ...

374,732 hits.

Divided by 1900 = 197.227... hits/post.

Not bad. Not great. I guess I need to be more polarizing.

No thanks. I write mostly for myself here--I often don't know what I think, what I feel or remember, until I write about it. And I now have notebooks stuffed with blog print-outs so that, later, I can remember what was on my mind, what was in my heart. And so can my family members.

I've posted something almost every day. Every now and then I miss--illness, boredom, depression, travel.

But I still seem to find things I want to write about, which, for me, is a Sign of Life. And so we roll on, and I will see you at #2000, I hope.

Frankenstein Sundae, 315

And then … in late April 1844 … news of another death arrived, a death that would transform Mary’s life.

Sir Timothy Shelley, 90, passed away, and his title passed directly to the son of Mary and Bysshe, who was now Sir Percy Florence Shelley. The Shelley family members were not exactly gracious in the transfer of title. They took items from the house (Field Place), made things about as awkward as they could be. Sir Percy attended the funeral; Mary—who had been persona non grata for decades in the family—did not.

But now, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley would be financially comfortable for the rest of her life, a status and stature perfectly alien to her.

A few months later, on August 1, 1844, publisher Edward Moxon brought out—in a two-volume edition—Mary’s final book, Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843. The reviews were kind (for the most part). Some praised her for her knowledgeable narration of her travels; others, for her comments about the political situations in the countries she visited.[1]

The book is epistolary in design and structure, comprising twenty-three letters to an unnamed correspondent. My notes remind me that I read the book between July 28 and August 12, 1997, only months after I’d retired from public school teaching (mid-January 1997). I see, too, that I had acquired a replica edition of the book via interlibrary loan at nearby Hiram College (my alma mater, where my wife, Joyce, was teaching).

In my journal for those days, I see that I was still running five miles per day—unthinkable now, nearly twenty years later—and our son, Steve, had begun his career as a young journalist at the Akron Beacon-Journal, a position he would keep for ten years before heading off to law school (he’d seen the imminent decline of print journalism). His work at the paper was particularly touching for Joyce, who’d grown up in Akron and whose family had subscribed to the Beacon her entire life. As had the generations preceding her and her parents.

---

[1] “Introductory Note,” in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 8, Travel Writing, edited by Jeanne Moskal (London: William Pickering, 1996), 49–57.

Sunday Sundries, 146

1. AOTW: Ah, yes, this morning ... car in front of us at a stop sign. Turned right (no signal), soon turned left into grocery parking lot (no signal), parked in a slot so that the tires were also into the adjacent slot. In other words: Nothing much changes in AOTW Land.

2. I finished two books this week.

     - The first was the latest from Colm Tóibín--House of Names--a re-telling of the stories of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Iphigenia, Electra, et al.  Tóibín tells us at the end that he played fast-and-loose with the details, adding, subtracting, modifying. He divides the tale into sections, each focused on a particular principal; some are in the first person (Clytemnestra, Electra); the Orestes sections are in the third person.

The rough details of the story remain. Agamemnon, hoping to gain a fair wind to take him to battle, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia. Mom--Clytemnestra--does not forgive him, and when he returns, she murders him. Her accomplice, Aegisthus, clears the way by sending away her son, Orestes (just a boy), and pretty much co-opting the other daughter, Electra. Well, Orestes grows up, comes back, blood, blood, blood. You know.

I loved how Tóibín handled the story--the narratives flow smoothly, arrestingly--from first sentence (Clytemnestra says, "I have been acquainted with the smell of death") to the last (about Orestes and his friend/ally Leander: "Almost afraid to look at each other, the two went back into the corridor [of the palace] and stood together without saying a word, listening to every sound") (3, 275).

And along the way we get a lot to think about. To what extent are the gods responsible for all? To what extent are we (for our determination to believe in gods?) What are the consequences of revenge? What does "family" even mean? And "friendship"? And on and on and on ...

     - The second was a 2008 collection of nonfiction (Maps and Legends) by Michael Chabon, whose complete works I've been working through in the order of publication (skipping the ones I've already read).

These pieces--generally from the early 2000s--are some published essays and some texts of speeches he delivered here and there. The title piece is about how--as a boy--he became fascinated, even obsessed with maps, and felt himself become alive to "the power of maps" (30). And, later, he realized how writers are always working with "maps"--of this world, of the world(s) they've created--and other writers work in the blank space on those maps. Such a cool idea. The writer, he says, "goes where the action is, and the action is in the borders between things" (24).

He also writes about his early reading (he loved/loves Sherlock Holmes), of his fascination (which continues) with comics and graphic stories. He notes that writers "should tell stories that we would have liked as kids" (93).

There's also a review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, an essay in which he mentions that "there are story echoes of the Jack London-style adventure" (116), but he does not mention a book of London's that is post-apocalyptic, as well--The Scarlet Plague (1912)--a novel about survival in a dying world.

London's The Scarlet
Plague (1912)

He also talks about the genesis of some of his earlier work--The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) and The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007); I enjoyed this a lot because I'd only just recently read both of those titles.

But my favorite is his last--a modified version of a speech he gave in the mid-2000s, "Golems I Have Known." In it he talks about the borderland between nonfiction and fiction, memoir and fiction, truth and lies--and he does so by seducing his audience into thinking he is telling them a factual story from his boyhood. But it was fiction, he tells us at the end--"lies." It's a gorgeous piece about what he calls "the borderland between these two kingdoms, between the Empire of Lies and the Republic of Truth" (222).

3. We saw (via Netflix DVD) a Stephen Soederberg film, Haywire (2011). I've always loved Soederberg's work, and this title (when I saw it on the Netflix website) did not look familiar. So I ordered it. And it wasn't until, oh, about the last half-hour that I realized we had seen it before. Oh well. There are worse ways to spend your time than to be with Steven Soederberg for a couple of hours!

It's an adventure story about a woman warrior (played by Gina Carano). Here's the plot summary from IMDB:

Freelance covert operative Mallory Kane is hired out by her handler to various global entities to perform jobs which governments can't authorize and heads of state would rather not know about. After a mission to rescue a hostage in Barcelona, Mallory is quickly dispatched on another mission to Dublin. When the operation goes awry and Mallory finds she has been double crossed, she needs to use all of her skills, tricks and abilities to escape an international manhunt, make it back to the United States, protect her family, and exact revenge on those that have betrayed her.

It was fun to watch again--if, that is, you're into the "action thriller'" genre (think: Jason Bourne movies). I don't recall seeing Carano perform before (she was in Dead Pool and Fast & Furious 6, neither of which I've seen), but she's apparently a martial arts expert, and she got to display those talents (some supplemented, of course, by CGI). She even kicks Channing Tatum's butt. And Michael Fassbender's, too! (Link to film trailer.)

4. We finally finished streaming the latest season of Bosch on AmazonPrime. I've read all of Michael Connelly's novels about LA detective Harry Bosch, so it's been fun to watch these--though Titus Welliver, who plays Bosch, is not what I pictured as I read. Still, he's good--once you get used to him.

The season ended on a cliffhanger--thus: hope for another season!

5. Final word--a word I especially liked from my various online word-of-the-day providers;

     - from dictionary.com, with some help from Merriam-Webster

humblebrag  noun [huhm-buh l-brag]

1. NOUN: a statement intended as a boast or brag but disguised by a humble apology, complaint, etc.

2. VERB: to make such a disguised boast or brag: He's humblebragging about how tired he is from his world travels.

QUOTES

The humblebrag—e.g. I'm exhausted from Memorial Day weekend; it’s soooo hard to get out of Nantucket—sits at the center of these competing needs. It is a boast in sheepish clothing, kvelling dressed in kvetch. And, like nearly all forms of multi-tasking, the drive to satisfy two goals at once typically results in double-failure.

-- Derek Thompson, "How to Brag," The Atlantic, May 26, 2015

ORIGIN

Humblebrag was first recorded between 2005 and 2010. It’s a portmanteau combining the terms humble and brag.

Oh, and a portmanteau word (def from Merriam-Webster): a word that is composed of parts of two words (such as chortle from chuckle and snort), all of one word and part of another (such as bookmobile from book and automobile), or two entire words and that is characterized invariably in the latter case and frequently in the two former cases by single occurrence of one or more sounds or letters that appear in both the component words (such as motel from motor hotel, camporee from camp and jamboree, aniseed from anise seed) 

Should you ...?

I think I've posted here before about how--when I was a lad--my teachers worked hard (and generally failed) to make sure we observed the differences between will and shall in our writing. Here are the rules as they appear in one of the earliest usage manuals I have--Plain English Handbook, 1972. I'm quoting directly.

• Use shall in the first person and will in the second and third person for the simple future tense.
• I shall sing this afternoon.
• You will succeed. He will stay at home.
• To express determination, desire, or a promise, reverse the normal order and use will in the first person and shall in the second and third persons.
• I will be there.
• You shall not go.
• In asking questions in the first person, use shall; in the second or third persons use the form that would be correct in the answer.
• Shall you leave tomorrow? (The answer is "I shall.")
• Will John defy me?" (He will.)
• Use shall in all persons in object (noun) clauses after verbs of deciding, wishing, demanding, willing, etc."
• He insists that they shall not follow him.

There's more, but I'm getting bored just typing the stuff. Just as I was bored back in elementary and junior high, doing all those will-shall worksheets ...

I think it's pretty obvious today that in common usage these distinctions are pretty much gone. People who use shall now--even if "correctly" so--tend to sound a bit, you know, elitist. (Which ain't good in these egalitarian days.)

I got to thinking about this the other day because I memorized a poem by Thomas Hardy--"A Thunderstorm in Town"--a short, two-stanza poem in which a man tells about an experience in a cab with a woman in a new red dress. It's raining outside when they reach her destination, so the cab waits a bit. Then it stops; she gets out. And the narrator says: I should have kissed her if the rain / Had lasted a minute more. (Link to the entire poem.)

I put should in boldface because that's the word I want to talk about. Today, we use should principally to indicate ought. In other words, You should study more = You ought to study more.

But ... back in the day ... should had some more subtle meanings.

Hardy's use of should (more below) reminded me of William F. Buckley, Jr. Although he and I were pretty far apart politically (okay, very far apart), I liked to read Buckley; I subscribed to his magazine (National Review--in fact, I once published an article for them that was the cover story on September 28, 1979--see image), watched his long-running TV interview show, Firing Line, on PBS. I admired his facility with language. I even envied it. And ... what a vocabulary! I would look up words he used--and thus learned the definitions of tergiversate and anfractuous and maieutic and many others. (Spell-checker just had a hernia about these three words!) (Can't say that I use them a lot--but I do know them.)

On Firing Line each week Buckley would interview (and often eviscerate) a guest (a political thinker, a politician, a writer), and he would always begin the same way. He'd give a brief introduction of the person and then commence the questioning as he did in this beginning to his interview with Norman Mailer (broadcast on Nov. 4, 1979), an interview concerning Mailer's new nonfiction book The Executioner's Song. I own a copy of the transcript. (Image!)

Anyway, here's how Buckley started: I should like to begin by asking Mr. Mailer whether he intended that his book should be adopted by fundamentalists on the subject of capital punishment.  

Once again, I've highlighted the should. And Buckley said it, every week--the same clause: I should like to begin by asking ...

Sounds odd to our ears today--doesn't it?--because I  think most of us would now say I would like to begin ...

So what's going on with should?

TO BE CONTINUED ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 314

In March 1842, Mary began complaining of headaches, had difficulty writing and reading—two of the great loves of her life. This, of course, was probably the first manifestation of the illness that would kill her nine years later.

Her days became less and less “intellectual” and more and more “social”: visits with friends, journeys, attendance at drama and music performances. In June 1842, she and her son and some others headed off again to the Continent—more fodder for what would become her final book, Rambles in Germany and Italy. She visited Germany, Switzerland, Italy—sites so significant in her youth, in her marriage to Bysshe. They returned via Paris, arriving back in London in late August 1843.

While they were gone, Everina Wollstonecraft (sister of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary Shelley’s mother) died back in England—in Peckham (southeast London). A stroke. As per her request, she would be buried in the same cemetery—St. Pancras—as her sister, Godwin, and Mary Jane Godwin. Everina was born in 1865.

And Mary’s headaches continued.

But by the fall she was working on Rambles and doing some reading—for research and otherwise. Among her favorites—the Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, a longtime friend, who, as you may recall, was the indirect cause of Bysshe’s drowning. Hunt and his family had arrived in Italy in July 1822, and Bysshe and friend Edward Williams and the deckhand Charles Vivien set out to meet the Hunts in Livorno (Leghorn, the English called it). It was on the return voyage that the killing storm arrived.

And then … in late April 1844 … news of another death arrived, a death that would transform Mary’s life.

Render Unto Caesar ...

I've not posted anything--on Facebook or here--about the recent uproar about a current production of Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar at New York's Public Theater/Shakespeare in the Park. Though the show had been running for a while, it was only recently that widespread outrage erupted because of the patent portrayal of Caesar as Pres. Donald Trump. As you can imagine, the assassination scene--senators and "friends' stabbing him to death--caused some alarm.

The murder occurs in Act III, Scene 1, and the rest the play deals with the disastrous fallout. Lots of others die, including Brutus, he of Et tu, Brute? fame/infamy. It's not really a play about Caesar but about the horrors of violent political overthrow.

Caesar was the first play I ever studied in school. Tenth grade. 1959-60. Hiram High School. I couldn't make much sense out of it at age 15, and I vowed I would forever hate Shakespeare and never read another damn word by him again.

Well, like many other adolescent vows, that one didn't work out too well. I ended up reading all the plays, poems, sonnets--multiple times. I taught the Bard to middle- and high-schoolers and college students; I wrote an e-book about him, available on Kindle Direct  ("All the World's a Stage": The Worlds of William Shakespeare), and wife Joyce and I have seen all of his plays performed live onstage. That took many years. (Not a lot of companies produce Henry VI, Part 3!)

And there's no doubt about it: Even on the page Shakespeare can offend. Titus Andronicus features rape, disfigurement (tongue cut out, hands cut off, eyes blinded), murder, slavery, ... and, of course, cannibalism (a mother unwittingly eats a meat pie--and the "meat" is her son, who had raped and disfigured Titus' daughter).

Elsewhere, kings are murdered, wives commit suicide, children are murdered, weddings are disrupted and ruined, wars are fought over little, brothers are killed by brothers, and on and on and on and on. (Sounds like Game of Thrones, eh?)

Since 1616, when the Bard died, the plays have been used for about every political cause there is. As we can with scripture, we can find in Shakespeare's plays just about any meaning we want to emphasize. Joyce and I once saw a DARK production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that emphasized the, well, the darkness of the play (the betrayals, etc.). No one laughed. We have also seen cotton-candy light productions--one of which featured Beatles' music and had everyone dressed up like characters from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Another took place in outer space ... what fun!

Negative portrayals of power always offend the powerful and their allies. (Shakespeare himself had to be very careful about how he portrayed the royals--and many scholars believe that  he wrote Macbeth, in part, to please the new English king (1603), James I (from Scotland), one of whose ancestors, so he believed, was one of the "good guys" in the story.

And Donald Trump is far from the first to be represented on stage in a Shakespeare play--or Shakespeare-related play.

The same year I graduated from college--1966--a new book/script appeared: MacBird, by Barbara Garson. I still have my copy of the play (see image). It's a take on Macbeth and features characters from the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson (Ken O'Dune, The Earl of Warren, The Wayne of Morse, Lord MacNamara).

LBJ (whose wife was Lady Bird, whose daughter was Linda Bird), a Democrat, is the consummate Bad Guy.

The script did more than suggest that LBJ had been involved in the assassination of JFK (offensive, to say the least!), but it opened in New York at the Village Gate in February 1967 and ran for nearly 400 performances. It starred Stacy Keach as MacB, and Cleavon Little played a Witch! (There's an audio cast recording--I just checked on eBay, found one, bought it for $20.99!)

Garson borrows lines and speeches (much altered) from other plays. MacBird has a monologue, "To see or not to see!" And Robert--with some prescience--says: "MacBird permits not critics from within. / He draws the line, and all are forced to toe. / You're with him or against him, get that straight. / Your safety, sir, demands his overthrow" (23).

So, yes, if I were a Trump supporter, I would be dismayed/angry/whatever to see his murder on a New York stage--just as part of me would have been if it had been Pres. Obama. Our political positions are often visceral; our brain stems, dominant.

But there are other parts of our brains we ought to use. I know enough about theater--and about Shakespeare--to realize what's going on. It's just part of the use of theater throughout history.

The wife of Caesar would have been upset to see Shakespeare's play; friends and supporters of Agamemnon would not have sat still for Aeschylus' view of it; allies of Richard III ... you know.

Good plays--like good novels, like good poems, etc.--can jar us. In fact, they should jar us. And sometimes they jar us in ways we'd prefer not to be jarred. We can be offended rather than enlightened. That's the chance you take when you go see a contemporary Shakespeare production, or read a good novel.

And it's one of the principal reasons I often go to the theater--or read a controversial novel. It's good to be jarred, to be offended. It should make us think, though--not rave and rant like, well, like King Lear, foully betrayed by two of his daughters (how offensive!).

As Shakespeare said in The Taming of the Shrew, "'tis the mind that makes the body rich."

Frankenstein Sundae, 313

Throughout 1840–41 Mary continued her adult-long habits of reading and scholarship, visiting with literary friends, yearning, wishing things could have been different. On June 17, 1841, her stepmother, Mary Jane Godwin, died. There is no mention of it in Mary’s journal (there is very little journal material remaining from these years), but in a letter to publisher Edward Moxon on June 28, she wrote only these words about it: poor M Godwin’s death,[1] but there is more in a later letter to Elizabeth Berry, a Wollstonecraft cousin living in Australia:

Last summer my father’s widow died, she wrote on January 14, 1842, after a lingering illness—Poor M Godwin! It seemed strange that so restless a spirit could be hushed, & all that remained pent up in a grave.[2]

Mary and her stepmother had never been close, though Mary had done her duty, attending to Mary Jane later on—never a pleasant task for her. And, as I’ve written earlier, she was interred beneath the headstone for William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in the St. Pancras Churchyard in London. But now—as we’ll see—she lies there alone. Only the names of the other two remain.

*You need to enlarge the photos to see the fading names.

---

[1] Letters, vol. 3, 16.

[2] Ibid., 19–20.