What Were They Thinking
Today, in one of the century’s most stunning what-were-they-thinking moments, Apple decided to name its new e-reader the iPad, despite the fact that they probably want women to buy it. Bad move. I’ll spare you the many possible jokes about feminine hygiene product- related names Apple could have given this thing (just google “ipad” and “stupid name”).
Instead, I would like to discuss the obvious, but endlessly interesting question: what were they thinking? I don’t know what they were thinking, because I can’t read the minds of people who don’t appear to have them, but I’m pretty sure I know what they were saying: ”Great name, Steve.” ”Yeah, great name.” ”Fabulous name, Steve-oh.” I guess it’s obvious that the naming people were all men. And like men everywhere, none of them wanted to talk about .. . well, you know, the time when women (a) often don’t want to have sex and (b) become people men think are crazy. The thing is, I am certain these Apple people are familiar with the maxi-pad, the mini-pad, the scented maxi pad, the unscented maxi pad, and the maxi pad with wings, because they often have to go to the drug store for their wives/girlfriends/daughters to get those PADS. Nevertheless, they let this name be attached to a product that pretty much nobody can ask for without feeling at least slightly contemptuous of the people who named it. I also feel sorry for the people who have to sell it.
It turns out that they don’t conduct market research at Apple, like we always thought they did. They do things because they’re too embarrassed to tell Steve Jobs that he’s a numbskull. Maybe Steve will suggest they lower the price to $4.99 and they’ll all be too embarrassed to tell him he’s being a moron. The only upside I can think of to this is that everyone in America will find it ridiculous — republican, democrat, independent. It will unite us, although it will probably not get a health care bill passed.
Still, really, who among us has not had a “what was I thinking?” moment? And because I know Steve Jobs is obsessively googling “why are they mocking the name of my new tablet computer, the one I could have called iTab if I wasn’t such an idiot”, I’d like to now describe one of mine. It might make him feel better. But probably not, because his mistake is in the New York Times, and other news outlets people actually read, and it will soon be something Jon Stewart talks about and my mistake is one that is buried in a grainy photograph in the Washington High School yearbook from 1976, which isn’t being broadcast or delivered to people I don’t know. I’ve been considering this all day, and have decided that each decade (okay, each year, but who’s counting) of my life has, within it, at least one of these moments. But I’ll start with the 1970s:
During my first year in high school I was that girl who, like Reese Witherspoon in Election, ran for everything, raised her hand even when all the teacher did was yawn, and had recently discovered irony and sarcasm but had not yet discovered that many other people had too. I was also skinny, wore glasses, had a weird sense of humor, and my fashion sense was as undeveloped as I was. The only reason I was the president of our class that first year was because nobody ran against me. And why did they not run against me? No, dear reader, it was not because they were scared I’d win. After all, the year before, I had managed to lose the slam dunk Class Treasurer contest even though I ran on a slate with my friend Debi, who was a goddess and, therefore, likely to get me swept into her new administration just because I appeared to be breathing the same air she was. Also my opponent was someone who, though a nice guy, was often teased for being so very smart. Even more than I ever was. Anyway, I thought I had a lock on it. Plus, we had good signs, because my friend Debi’s sister, Faith, painted them and Faith was a legend in the cheerleading community in part because of her ability to knock out spirit signs (you know, the ones that read GO PATRIOTS!) in enormous quantities. So, I think my point was that if I lost THAT election, there was no election I wasn’t capable of losing. Nobody was afraid of me.
What were they afraid of? Well, being class president wasn’t a very demanding job, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the work load that scared them off. In fact, the only thing you really had to do was organize the student ID card sale, and even that was organized by someone more efficient than me. But what you did have to do was this: If your class lost the contest to see who sold the most of these cards, then you had to submit to being made into an ice cream sundae at an assembly full of jeering students. And that is why this election was uncontested. What was I thinking? Who knows? I remember I wore to the event a construction worker hat (god, I just remembered: I actually wore that hat to school regularly because I thought it made an ironic statement) and overalls. But what I remember most, other than the odd feeling of having strawberry ice cream, nuts, and whipped cream dumped on my head (I was in a wheelbarrow with the guy from the other class that lost while this occurred), was my dad’s reaction when I asked him to come pick me up. My parents never, ever picked me up or took me anywhere. So I never asked them to pick me up. But because I felt I could not walk home with chocolate sauce running down my neck, I called my dad up and said I’d had a little accident with my clothes. He actually agreed to come, possibly because I was a little hysterical by them, in part because the ice cream was melting throughout my overalls. When I got into his car he looked me up and down and said, “Well, that probably wasn’t such a good idea.”
I’ve experienced, on facebook, a sudden influx of people I went to high school with. I’m hoping this memory has faded.
Tune in next time for the 90s moment.
Young Men and Books
It was amazing really, the combined brainpower that went into choosing books for 14 year old boys — and very little of it was actually mine. Okay, truth: the only book I chose was Jim the Boy, and I’m quite uncertain about how that will go over. I also chose the movies. I loved Gran Tornio, although I think Clint Eastwood could have exercised a little discretion about posing himself as a crucified Christ in the last scene and I’m sorry if that spoils anything for you, but it had to be said.
We’re in San Diego tonight, and tomorrow we head across the border to Baja, where some of us will be windsurfing, and others will be writing, and all of us will be reading.
More from Paradise in a few days.
The Wisemen Cometh
The ever-watchful duo: Batman and Joseph
That’s really all I have to say today. Keep an eye out for the wiseguys. Teen bookstacks tomorrow. xo
Bookstacks 2009: H-E-L-P
In book-related news, I’d like to anounce that I’m about to make a bunch of bookstacks, something I’ve done for the last couple of years, and am doing early this year because we are celebrating Christmas on December 17 and leaving the country for sunny Baja the next day. (We did that last year too. We are becoming traditionalists, sort of, in the bloglily household.)
Anyway, the challenge this year is to find good things for a 14 year old boy to read. Biographies of insane rock musicians, stories of horrendous crimes and disasters, entertaining accounts of stuff that happened in the past (aka history), graphic novels (aka comic books), and the novel that you read when you were 14 that you really loved are all possibilities. Trouble is that I don’t know the names of ANY of these books and am hoping that you, dear readers, just might.
And if you have any movie suggestions for 14 and 10 year old boys, well, throw that in too while you’re at it, okay?
xo
Heartbreaker
A friend recently described short stories as “heartbreaking.” I thought she meant that stories themselves — at their best — can break your heart. It turned out that she was really talking about the difficulty of placing stories, even good ones. And she’s completely right — the process of placing my first story was at times so dispiriting that I was reduced to devoting an entire page of my blog to the tales of my submission efforts just to keep my spirits up. When you’re getting floods of rejection slips for what you’re pretty sure are good stories, it’s quite possible to conclude that there must be more short story writers than there are readers. And you might even be right. That’s not really a reason to stop writing stories, though, but it does make you see your stories in a different light — they’re like the beloved child who’s charming, handsome and witty, but can never seem to get a job and move out of the house.
Well, the news today is that one of my stories (it’s called The Centerfold Club, and yes indeed it’s about a couple’s visit to a strip club) actually found itself an apartment – an astonishingly fine one, in a decent neighborhood in Alabama, with some truly exemplary roommates. It’s my first such child to do that — I won’t go into how many are still lying around the house in the equivalent of their underwear playing on the x-box because that would increase the heartbreak quotient too much for such a happy day.
So here’s what I’d like you guys to do, if you are able: e-mail the really terrific Karen at Southern Humanities Review. Subscribe to the journal — you’ll get my story, but you’ll also get the stories, poems and essays of some really amazing writers, including poet/essayist/blogger Emma Bolden, who’s been known to make an appearance there And you’ll be supporting Story Independence and diminishing writing heartbreak in one fell swoop.
You can e-mail Karen at: shrengl@auburn.edu or give her a call at (334) 844-9088 or fax: (334) 844-9027. Tell her I said hello and hope the story is behaving itself.
Make Monday a Sunday, While You’re At It
Filed under: Actual Historical Fact, Franksgiving, Thanksgiving |
Comments (7) 
My Pie Plan (which evolved: I nixed the key lime and pear tart and made apple tart instead)
For a long time, my husband wasn’t aware that Thanksgiving always fell on the fourth (I had to change this — for reasons I’ll explain below) Thursday in November by some predetermined arrangement between the pilgrims and the native people. Apparently, he was under the impression that Thanksgiving was always November 24th, and that date always magically fell on a Thursday. Really, who knows what he thought? He has a fine brain, and maybe the reason he can consistently remember the temperature at which water boils and whether a centimeter is bigger or smaller than an inch, and by how much (same goes for kilometers and miles and liters and ounces) is because it isn’t full of competing information, like this fact about Thanksgiving that I’m guessing every single person reading this knows, unless you’re European, which is fine, because you probably know a lot of stuff we Americans don’t know.
It turns out, however, that his confusion over the actual date on which Thanksgiving can be expected to fall isn’t as weird as it sounds and, in fact, has some historical basis. Thinking that this blog so seldom discusses history, I thought it was high time to demonstrate that I’m actually aware that things happened in the past, and there is some record of them AND they’re actually of some relevance and interest to those of us who live in the here and now. (This is known as history. It is a knowledge seldom put to any use here in the United States because we prefer to go on repeating our mistakes.)
So, here’s the thing: for a very long time, Thanksgiving was celebrated on the last Thursday in November. I mean, who knows when the pilgrims celebrated it, but whenever we got organized as a country and figured out that we should all celebrate the same things at the same time because it was good for us a nation (around about Grover Cleveland’s time, is my guess), well the last Thursday in November it was. Until Franklin Roosevelt, that well-known disrespecter of Tradition and Already Printed Up Calendars, and Previously Organized Football Games, got involved. And so it was that, in 1939, Roosevelt decided that Thanksgiving should be on the THIRD Thursday in November. Did he do this out of mere whim? Was it something he dreamed up because he didn’t like to have to wait for the big bird? Well, no. He did it so there would be more time to shop for Christmas. I swear, that is the absolute truth and I give you this website as my evidence of that historical fact.
What I love about that link, which you really must go check out, is that it reproduces the letters written to Roosevelt and his staff by American citizens who were totally outraged by the shifting of the holiday. There are several notable things about letters written to the president in 1939. First of all, people are super polite. They might think Roosevelt’s a total a-hole for doing this to them and screwing up, as the manufacturer of calendars pointed out, the ENTIRE YEAR’S CALENDAR PRODUCTION SCHEDULE, but they say it with restraint and dignity. Another thing I noticed is that that guy from NYU who was used to his college football team playing on Thanksgiving Day and had apparently reserved Yankee Stadium for the next five years on the last Thursday in November to do that, actually thought he could change Roosevelt’s mind because it was kind of inconvenient for NYU to have to play their football game on a day when no one would be eating turkey.
One thing that has not changed is that, in America, if you don’t like something, you accuse the person who’s doing it of being a communist, (or “communistic” as one person called Roosevelt). Even if he’s making the change so we’ll buy more stuff we don’t need, an idea that, last time I looked, was more a capitalist than communist notion, you still want to be sure to accuse him of being a commie. And, finally, I would simply like to say that the guy who wrote Roosevelt to say that he was really happy about the change, and then asked Roosevelt if maybe he could talk to god and have it be declared ungodly to work on Tuesdays, well, I love that guy.
Happy Thanksgiving Weekend and I’m so sorry that tomorrow is Monday and not Sunday. But if we all write Obama and ask if maybe he can work it out so that the Monday after Thanksgiving remains a Sunday, well, then our votes will not have been in vain.
PS: I’d just like to add that yes, I reported in an earlier version of this post that Thanksgiving falls on the third Thursday in November, which it doesn’t, despite Franklin’s (and my) best efforts. (Thanks for pointing that out, sharp eyed blog reader!) But my sad lack of specific information on this subject is nothing compared to that of my children. This morning, when I asked them what day Thanksgiving falls on, one child said, “The day before Black Friday.” Okay, it’s true that one of them said it falls on the fourth Thursday (NO, I said, it can’t!! FDR changed that.) Well, apparently they changed it back, something I didn’t even notice in my total excitement to be actually posting something in my blog.
No, in fact, the anemia did not kill me
I’ve been back from writer’s camp in Florida for exactly 72 hours and so have been able to gauge whether the massive doses of iron I’ve been taking have actually done me any good. I had to wait to get home to do that because it’s utterly useless to try to figure out if the iron is making you peppy when you are in a setting that would make anyone feel remarkably cheery and alert, because in that setting you don’t have to (a) cook, (b) pick up dirty shorts that have been thrown so they land precisely NEXT TO the laundry basket, or (c) tell people (aka teenagers) to get off Facebook. In that setting — New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in fact, where I’ve been for the month of October, more or less — you can’t feel tired. Well, you can, but that’s only because you stayed up until really late drinking tall gin and tonics and that doesn’t count as tired. That activity falls under the heading of “Fun Things I Did at Writer’s Camp.”
Anyway, I made it home after a night of doing Fun Things At Writer’s Camp, and unpacked. And then I dealt with a number of ordinarily exhausting events, including finding out that some friend of my kids knows the password to my itunes account and has been ordering things like DOOM! version 1.0, apparently under the illusion that I’d think maybe I’D ordered that and just, well, you know, forgotten about it. Also, I made it through a Halloween weekend distinguished chiefly by how much my children would prefer it if I wasn’t around them while they roamed the streets of Berkeley. I’ve also confronted the fact that in my absence at least one child managed to go without eating a single piece of fruit for three weeks (and no, it wasn’t the child who has refused all his life to eat fruit on the theory that he could eat vegetables and leave the fruit eating to his twin and by some magical twin science thing they’d get the nutritional benefits of both, as though they were still in the womb, which they aren’t: see above, regarding not wanting me to follow them around on Halloween). Sound tiring? I know.
The take home here: I’m actually kind of energetic. The iron pills are working.
How have you been?
Bring That Woman a Steak!
Last November, I gave up all the things I don’t really like to do anyway, including eating meat. Unfortunately, my decision to replace meat with cookies turns out to have been somewhat unwise.
I could have guessed that I’d made an unwise nutritional decision, but in fact the extent of my unwisdom was brought to my attention by my doctor, who called the other night to tell me I am severely anemic. (I thought she was calling to tell me that they’d finally voted on a new health care bill and it required all doctors to actually follow up on blood test results that they’ve had since June, but in fact, she managed to stumble on my results without any kind of government mandate. Whether that gives you solace in your concerns about health care legislation I cannot say. All I know is that I’ve been about the same degree of tired for 14 years, and that hasn’t gotten worse since I stopped eating steak.)
When I heard about the severe anemia, my first thought was how I could use THAT news to my advantage. I am here to tell you that in my family it counts for nothing. My husband first checked, of course, as husbands will, to be sure that the chances are zero that the anemia is related to something that will trigger the need to cash in my life insurance policy. After that, well, you still have to do the dishes.
Soon, though, maybe I will be given something that will make me feel totally fired up. And then look out. For one thing, I will beging posting at a rate of greater than .7 blog posts a week. And I will be organizing my bureau drawers and then coming over to your house and alphabetizing your spice rack.
And this is also to say to the fourteen lovely, lovely blog readers who left comments cheering me on in the quicksand also known as revising-your-novel-yet again: I ADORE YOU. And my husband, who really just wants to be sure I am well, I adore him too. And those who read and don’t comment, like the lovely Mari (and her lovely soon to be baby?) but hope for the best in the quicksand? Yup. I ADORE YOU also!
The Neverending Story
You know the novel I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been writing this blog? The one with forty-four (44) chapters? The one I’m revising for my agent? I am just beginning chapter 11.
God.
I have a deadline: October 7. Wish me luck. And know that I am never, ever, ever going to revise this book again. Well, that’s not true. If someone buys it, you’d better believe I’ll revise it again for them.
I don’t know if this much effort goes into every book you pick up at a bookstore or if I am just a slow, sucky writer. But this is one big thing I’ve learned about writing a book: that effortless sentence, that flowing paragraph, that interesting, quick aside? If it’s in my book, you can be certain it took me a really long time to get right.
I suppose that’s one of the great pleasures of your first book, though. I mean, if you get lucky and someone wants the next one, usually they want it faster than forever. But I’m hoping with the second one I won’t need forever to get it right.
Waiting for the Glue to Dry
CalTrans — the mighty California Department of Transportation, home of lighted cones, and hard hats, and workers in reflective vests – promised that the Bay Bridge would be up and running by this morning at 5:00 a.m. That it isn’t ready yet — because they found a crack up there and have to fix it before they let us loose on the bridge — is one of those great moments in steel and glue that, secretly, many people completely love. Me included.
I mean, look — sure, there are 250,000 people who’d like to get their cars across that bridge today so they can go to the airport, or to work, or to visit someone who’s sick. But there are another million or so of us who, like the public informaton officer for CalTrans, are riveted by and can barely contain our excitement at, well, the rivets they’re sticking into all that steel so the whole damned thing doesn’t come falling down into the bay.
Who, exactly, loves this stuff? First, and most obviously, are those who never really grew out of their early devotion to all things construction-related, the people whose very favorite Christmas present was a battery operated crane that they could use to lift pretend girders over the prone body of their father, who’d had a leetle too much to drink at Christmas dinner. For this group, the sight of all that steel being lifted onto the bridge, and the heroic repair effort that’s being undertaken is Christmas Day, only a lot bigger.
The second group are those of us who drive over that bridge — those of us who aren’t engineers, I mean — who really can’t believe the thing works, and stays up, and is so beautiful while it’s at it. I’m in that group.
My feeling is that if they need a little more time for the glue to dry on the crack, well, they should have it. Because I secretly think every time I go over the bridge, “Man, I hope this thing stays up.” And anything they can do to keep it working, well, I’m happy to let them do it.
But wait!!! I just checked the website. They managed to fix it and it’s open!! Yay caltrans.
High School! Musical!
Jack and Charlie, my fourteen year old twins, started high school earlier this week. William, who is 10, started rehearsals for Oliver!, the musical that comes with an exclamation mark at the end, no matter where in a sentence you put it, which is weird, except for the fact that we’re pretty damned excited about the whole thing, so we’ll go with the exclamation mark for now.
Those things — High School! Musical! – have only in common that they’re the beginning of something B-I-G for the boys involved. Lockers! Taking the bus! Open campus! Girls! (for the boy who went to a boys’ school for all those many years before high school.) Orphans! Dancing! Gruel! (But not dancing gruel. Those things are separated by the mighty exclamation mark. Dancing with bowls of gruel in your hands, though, I understand that’s on the menu.)
It just occurred to me that I could write an entire blog post punctuated only with exclamation points, except I also plan to write about my own life, which tonight anyway requires the opposite of the exclamation point, a punctuation mark I just invented called the “downer point.” It looks like a downward facing arrow. I’d add it right here, but I’m no good at that kind of thing. You’ll have to imagine it.
Here’s the downer: the boys are beginning new things. But I am not. I think I said a month or two ago that I found a really great agent to work with. Really good guy. Sells a lot of books. Writes books about how to write books and they make sense and are inspiring. This is so not a downer. This is wonderful and I am thrilled. The downer is that he won’t be selling my book until I revise it. The whole thing. That’s a lot of chapters, blogfriends. All chapters that could be better and all chapters I have to think really hard about in order to make the better. Have I mentioned how this is HARD? Waaah. Plus I’m scared. AND I’m BUSY. I have to drive people places and work at my job and cook and clean and …. you know. I’m whining. I’ll stop.
Also. Finding your locker and not getting egged by seniors and learning how to talk to girls and having to eat a steady diet of gruel and then getting sent out in the snow to be sold to the highest bidder is actually, when you think about it, way way worse than tightening up each and every scene of your book for a guy who’s waiting patiently for you to get on with it so he can maybe sell it for you. Just look at my kids. They get on with it. In fact, they’re getting on with it with so much verve and excitement and mad confidence that a new punctuation mark needs to be invented for their acts of crazy, getting-out-there-in-the-world behavior. Something wild-eyed. That’s how I should revise my book, don’t you think? Like them: full tilt, knowing it’ll all work out one way or another and whatever happens, it’ll be interesting and fun and, if you keep your head down, the chances are pretty good that you won’t get egged by a senior.
Dispatch From The Happiest Place on Earth
Before you check into the Disneyland Hotel, they send you a little informational packet that tells you, among other things, that you should not under any circumstances bring the ashes of your loved one to the Happiest Place on Earth. Ditto firearms, and costumes on those over the age of 10. So, if you feel the urge to scatter the ashes of your beloved off the side of the Matterhorn while you, dressed as a cowgirl, shoot twenty-one rounds from your rifle, this is not the place.
Don’t say I’m not good value in the travel tip department here at BlogLily.
Otherwise, Disneyland’s a pretty good venue for your tenth birthday if you, like William, enjoy half a dozen not too scary rides, a half hour spent exploring Tom Sawyer’s island, a cheeseburger and fries, the chance to watch a little television in your hotel room and then a trip to the movies in Downtown Disneyland, a place that really does exist.
The thing I love about William, by the way, is that he’s not really put off by the immensity of this place. It’s true that you could spend a lifetime here going on all the rides, and watching all the shows, and seeing the fireworks from the perfect spot — and some people (the ones in the lanyards with all the pins, wearing the mouse ears and wishing they’d change that rule about having your ashes scattered near the It’s a Small World Ride), apparently do. But when 3:00 comes around, and it is clearly a blazing 107 degrees out, well, why trudge around trying to see a performance of songs from High School Musical when you could go to your room and drink some ice water, eat grapes, and watch tv?
I learn things all the time, you know. No ashes at Disneyland. No Disneyland after 3:00 p.m.
Hope your summer’s winding down with one or two small learning experiences. xo
PS: I was so sorry to hear about Ted Kennedy’s death. A few years ago, I wrote about his concession speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. It’s here.
All’s Well
Filed under: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare, all's well that ends well |
Comments (14) A few weeks ago, I went to Ashland with some friends and, in what can only be described as a frenzy of playgoing, we saw — over a two day period — a musical (the Music Man), a brand new play about Shakespeare and the Bush administration (Equivocation), and a production of All’s Well That Ends Well that was terrific, but wasn’t actually the play Shakespeare wrote.
This last thing is what I want to talk about today, because I’m still turning over in my head what happened between the time Shakespeare wrote All’s Well That Ends Well and a couple weeks ago, when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival staged it. If all goes well, I’ll actually have a point at the end of this post, and if all doesn’t go well, at least you will know the plot of a lesser-known Shakespearean comedy, which I figure is good value, given that this is, after all, a blog.
Many people (including me) don’t know the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well. This is because it’s a comedy that’s not staged very often, probably because the plot — if believed — isn’t all that comic. Also, very few people read Shakespeare and so why should anybody know the plots of the plays, although there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that the closer you get to Ashland, Oregon, the less true this is. Ashland was teeming with Shakespeare groupies. Everywhere you looked, there they were, proclaiming their love of Will in t-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, hats, and key chains. In fact, so deep does bardolatry run in Ashland, that it has spawned an entire category of theater-goers, people known as “canon clickers.” A little like a train spotter, the canon clicker is unable to die until he has seen one of each — in the case of the canon clicker, that would be a performance of every play in the canon. The festival’s director received two cases of wine this year from a canon clicker because they staged Henry VIII, which is a bad play to stage, but did enable some guy to go to his grave a happy man.
Anyway, the plot. The play’s heroine is named Helena. She’s the daughter of a renowned, and lately dead, doctor. Her guardian is the countess of some French-sounding place, and the countess has a son, Bertram, who ALSO has a guardian, in this case, the King of France. So, there you have it, your lovers are clear from the get-go.
Helena loves Bertram. Bertram is an ass, and does NOT love Helena, because her father was only a doctor. (Clearly, he is not living in the United States in the present time, when doctor’s daughters in comedies generally are perceived of — or were until we elected Obama and ruined our fully functional health care system, if you believe the crazy republicans, which of course, none of us do! — as in high demand. Lots of money there, right?)
Helena is not put off by the fact that Bertram is an ass. She, it turns out, is incredibly resourceful, has made up her mind to have him, and she has a chest full of cures that were left by her father and, apparently, she hasn’t given a thought to them (although they could have cured half of France if she’d been thinking about it) until she decides she wants Bertram for her own.
The King of France, it turns out, is very, very sick. He has an illness Shakespeare calls a “fistula,” which I love because it’s very specific and really disgusting, which you too can discover simply by googling “fistula” (this is what the internet was invented to do, by the way). Anyway, Helena offers to cure the King in return for being able to choose a husband. The King agrees, is cured, and Helena picks Bertram. Bertram is not at all happy to be chosen, but he caves, in an ill-tempered way, and off he goes to the Tuscan Wars (conveniently invented by Shakespeare to allow Bertram to flounce off the stage in an Italian kind of way, and also to participate in a very funny subplot I won’t go into here). Before Bertram flounces off he taunts Helena with how much he hates her — he tells her he won’t treat her as a wife until she gets the ring from his hand and herself with child by him, which isn’t ever going to happen, so there. Now, this is classic comedic bad behavior, which we have little trouble seeing as bad behavior, although of course in real life, what’s wrong with being unhappy about an arranged marriage? But we’re led to believe by the play that Bertram is an ass, and so it’s hard to work up a head of steam about his predicament.
As I was saying, off he goes. Helena, being Helena, packs up her stuff, and goes after him. On the outskirts of Florence, she meets a lady who houses pilgrims and has a beautiful daughter named Diana and immediately offers Helena refuge. Bertram has been wooing Diana (who resists him, of course, because she’s not that kind of girl, and she knows an ass when sees one). Helena convinces Diana (well, actually, she pays her three bags of gold) to pretend to give in to Bertram’s desire to sleep with her, but only if Bertram will give her his ring. They perform what I have recently learned is a literary plot device called the “bed trick,” where a man thinks he is sleeping with one woman (usually someone he isn’t supposed to be sleeping with, like Diana) but in the dark, this woman is replaced by another woman (the one he IS supposed to sleep with, Helena). And that usually works out, believe it or not, which is because in the dark all women are alike to men, something I think might actually be sort of true.
Eventually, everyone gets back to the countess’s palace, Bertram is confronted with his caddish behavior, Helena reveals that she is pregnant and has the ring, and Bertram basically gives in and grumpily agrees to acknowledge her as his wife.
Okay, then. I defy anyone to read this play and find in it any hint of growth on Bertram’s part. He’s caddish and grumpy from beginning to end. And I sort of liked that, because really, isn’t it worth saying that we love who we love, even if they’re not always such fine fish? (Bertram is handsome, good at wars, and going to inherit a dukedom — worse men exist.) And that women will go to great lengths to get the men they have decided they love? And that men are lucky they do, because things usually turn out well for men when women look past their flaws to their better selves, which we all have, even if they aren’t on display at the moment (a truth that turns out to be equally applicable to women)? All these things are true, worth saying, and basically the point of All’s Well That Ends Well. (The title, of course, is another way of saying “the ends justify the means” — Helena’s trickery, though troubling, ends in the marriage she wants.)
So. If you are still reading, and many of you probably gave up at the fistula part, here’s the thing. In Ashland, the play was staged in such a way that you were led to believe that Bertram loved Helena from the very start, but he didn’t know it. Since this isn’t in the text, you see in the way he looks at her, and holds her hand, even, these nascent feelings of love. And we also see him changing, again through non-verbal cues, becoming ashamed of his behavior, until at the end, he behaves as though he embraces his marriage with a full heart, when really, if you read what he says on the page, his heart is hardly full. I think if Shakespeare wanted Bertram to grow and change, he would have given him and Helena a lot of lovely speeches where he does just that. The person who wanted Bertram to grow and change is the play’s director and, of course, us, the people the director staged this play to delight. (It WAS delightful, by the way.)
My point is a small one, but it is a point: apparently, the requirement that characters change and are redeemed is one that has made it impossible for this play to be what it really is. I think modern cinematic romantic comedy is responsible for this staging — in romantic comedy, the lovers who begin the film are stubborn, wrong-headed, silly, headed in the wrong direction, as romantic comedy lovers general are, and they are NEVER the same as the lovers who end the film by recognizing their true love, being chastened by their bad behavior, redeemed into being their finer selves by the power of love. Shakespeare’s point is indeed that we are redeemed by love; it’s just that he also seems to be saying that we don’t actually change that much sometimes during courtship, that love is truly blind, and yet so generous as to be given to us in spite of our churlishness and bad behavior. This is a powerful point, tricky and unattractive though it might seem at first glance. But that’s why we read Shakespeare — to have our thinking challenged, which is certainly what this play does and what this production, though an entertaining and wonderful romantic comedy, does not.
This doesn’t mean that the play wasn’t terrific — it was, featuring as it did, wonderful actors, lovely costumes, and a plot that was entertaining and interesting — it just wasn’t the All’s Well that Ends Well that Shakespeare wrote. No harm in that, in the end. It seems churlish to fault a production for not being faithful to its source, the way people get mad at movies because they’re not like the book. In the end, I was entertained for the two hours I spent in the theater, and that is more than enough for me.
A Day So Happy
Back in the olden days, when this blog was new, I would, without any hesitation, write an entire blog post about why this morning at 10:43 a.m. (which is the time as I write this) I found myself so incredibly happy. But something happened, maybe a year or so ago, and I began to be afraid of my blog, afraid that what I was writing was ridiculous, or not worth anyone’s time, and who was I to give nothing of value to the people who come over here other than a few words about my own personal happiness?
I’m so over that this morning.
I’m happy because the eagle landed yesterday, and because buzz aldrin, a man not known for being poetic, described the moon’s “magnificent desolation” and it was right there on twitter, coming to me over my cell phone in little bursts, like I was simultaneously Houston, the apollo 11 spacecraft and the eagle. I remember when I was a child the summer of the moon landing was such a happy one. My mother rented a television, my father was in Germany, setting up things for our move from Maryland to Bavaria in the fall, and the ordinary rules of the house seemed a little more relaxed. You knew the astronauts were up there, overhead, and that made the sky and the moon look different, more magical and possible. That’s what people like Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury knew and felt and delivered, in the only kind of science fiction I’ve ever read and loved.
I’m also happy because I’ve discovered that tapioca pudding, which I hated as a child, is delicious when you make it yourself, as an adult, and you get to eat it while it’s warm, and also drizzle it on fruit. I discovered this because my neighbor, Helen, who is in her late 80s and dying of cancer, and right now is in a nursing home getting strong so she can come home for her last fall in Berkeley, asked us to bring her some one evening a week or two ago. It is not a happy thing when your beautiful and kind neighbor is dying, but it is an extraordinary gift to be able to be of assistance to her, and to witness how a woman of grace and strength approaches her final illness. It is true that we all die, but as I might have mentioned here before, we die only in a moment and the rest of the time we are here, alive, engaged in life, part of things. And so, just as it did that summer of the moon landing, knowing that while you go about your everyday life, someone else is engaged in a heroic and extraordinary endeavor, makes you reach for, insist on, and recognize the happiness in your everyday life.
Time for Everything in the World
Shakespeare wrote 12 comedies (14 if you count The Tempest and A Winter’s Tale) over the course of 16 years or so, an output that seems even more prodigious when you realize he was also turning out tragedies and histories at the same time.
There’s something about the chronological list of the plays (which I looked up because I’m spending a lot of time reading the comedies, and I keep forgetting which one I’m supposed to be on next) that I find enormously interesting.
It’s clear that Shakespeare’s first preoccupations were with the question of how we learn to love well — an obvious enough first preoccupation. And then (and also at the same time) in the histories his concern is with what is, essentially, the next important thing that comes up in becoming an adult — mainly family, both public and private, which is what drives the histories.
It’s the tragedies, though, where things sort of blow apart. I mean, obviously, the tragedies are linked by the fact that they all end in death rather than in marriage. But they’re each so beautifully and particularly about life itself, and its problems — with love, certainly, but also jealousy, fidelity, and language’s failure — and our own — to say what we mean. In the comedies, and in literature that mirrors the comedies, like Austen’s novels, the curtain falls on marriage. What’s wonderful about Shakespeare is that the curtain lifts again and again on what happens afterwards. Sure, people end up dying, but then don’t we all?
Today, though, I’m still reading the comedies. Maybe because it’s summer, there seems today to be time enough to get to those other preoccupations.
Here’s the list, in case you’re interested:
1589 Comedy of Errors
1590 Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
1591 Henry VI, Part I
1592 Richard III
1593 Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
1594 Romeo and Juliet
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love’s Labour’s Lost
1595 Richard II
Midsummer Night’s Dream
1596 King John
Merchant of Venice
1597 Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
1598 Henry V
Much Ado about Nothing
1599 Twelfth Night
As You Like It
Julius Caesar
1600 Hamlet
Merry Wives of Windsor
1601 Troilus and Cressida
1602 All’s Well That Ends Well
1604 Othello
Measure for Measure
1605 King Lear
Macbeth
1606 Antony and Cleopatra
1607 Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
1608 Pericles
1609 Cymbeline
1610 Winter’s Tale
1611 Tempest
1612 Henry VIII
