Elizabethan Sci-Fi, except not

Shakespeare's Game - William Gibson (Atheneum, 1978)


I'd like to have someone to blame for this. Somewhere along the line, I came under the impression that cyberpunk doyen William Gibson started his publishing career with an early novel that somehow brought in Shakespeare and would be tame enough for someone like me to actually dip my toe in the genre. This is totally wrong (unless Neuromancer is somehow about the Bard). The Gibson above is an older Gibson, a playwright, who offered a structural and textual analysis of Shakespeare's plays based on years of teaching graduate students. So I guess I need to talk about him and that book, although I maintain that "Shakespeare's Game" would be a fantastic title for some sort of science fiction-esque work (or it sounds just like Da Vinci Code... one of those).

Anyway, this work. Look, 200 pages of analysis is not going to be exciting, no matter how much Shakespearean iambic pentameter you include.Well, not exciting to me at any rate. And so I may not have been the close reader that this book deserved. Even so, I found things to learn, having not studied Shakespeare since high school. I think - think - Gibson argued that the climax of the plays tends to occur at the end of Act III (of V); everything else from this point is essentially pre-ordained, and thus tidying up to get to the inevitable conclusion. He also talked quite a bit about how deftly Shakespeare presents false antagonists, who stand in or draw attention from the real conflict. (On this note, I wish he had spent some time with Julius Caesar.) And how sloppy and nonsensical Shakespeare can be in service of other goals (chiefly entertainment); for the life of me I couldn't tell whether Gibson considered this a failing or not.

Lots of Hamlet (which will forever be the Reduced Shakespeare version to me... below) and King Lear. And then Merchant of Venice and Othello. What I realized: I don't know Shakespeare as well as I'd like. Goal: watch more. :)

Sense and Sensibility, updated

The Three Weissmanns of Westport - Cathleen Schine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

I decided to read this modern retelling of S&S after hearing about it here and there, and then having it pop up on Slate's Double-X Book Club. I held off on listening to the podcast for 4 months until I could read the book, and finally it's all come to pass.

I found myself underwhelmed both by the book and the discussion (more on the latter later). It's clever, and I loved identifying the characters who pop up and remembering their Austenian counterparts. Marianne and Elinor as 5o y.o. women is an interesting twist, and Betty Weissmann is a far more fun Mrs. Dashwood. But then things get all wonky in the second half - and I can't even discuss it here without engaging in major spoilers.

And this is what I wanted to hear about on the book club podcast. How much can you change the template of Austen's original? Does it matter if the original seems utterly implausible in today's world? Or is Schine arguing that there might have been a better way to plot Austen all along? I don't know, and the Double-X ladies skirted around this, when for me it was the central point. Oh well. Also, they referred to the novel as chick-lit - or rather "hen lit" (clever) - which jagged me off on a tangent about genre fiction and the very specific potential definitions for women's genre fiction. For me, this is definitely a woman's novel, but it's not chick lit, which has very specific conventions about the female protagonists as well as the plot.

Oh well. The novel was still a fun read, even if occasionally infuriating, and it was often funny. A couple memorable moments:
Miranda the literary memoir agent has a client who writes about her (fake) childhood in Rhodesia. This was entirely too close to Alexandra Fuller for me and I was confused as to what Schine might have been trying to say (the Slate ladies noticed this too).

Annie the librarian through her sister's eyes: "Miranda sometimes thought of Annie as a kind of desiccated opium addict, stretched out in a smoky, sweet-smelling den with her fictional strangers, cut off from the noisy circus of life, uncaring, inaccessible, eyes closed in someone else's dream." Harsh.

There are young twins named Juliet and Ophelia. NO. No matter how pretentious you are, you do not name both of your girls after Shakespearean heroines that go a little (or a lot) crazy and off themselves.

But mainly I was caught up with trying to work out how I felt about the plot.

Interred with their Bones, or the Da Vinci Code for Shakespeare

I was mainly writing papers last weekend, but somehow I also found time to read a fun little mystery a la Dan Brown about Shakespeare. I had heard about this book on a podcast so figured when I saw it at the library that I deserved a change from library science, political blogs, and teenage vampires. (Seriously, what do I read these days?) (Edit: just wrote another two paragraphs without noticing that I hadn't given any other info on the book. It's Interred with their Bones (or "The Shakespeare Secret" outside of the US apparently) by Jennifer Lee Carrell.)

Like with Da Vinci Code, as well as I can remember it, there are two major plots tracking together. The first is the historical treasure hunt, with information that threatens to blow up everything we thought we knew about a historical figure. In this case, it's about a missing Shakespeare play... oh, and his very identity. The second is the willingness of someone to kill to keep the information safe.

I like to think I'm decently perceptive. But when I read or watch mysteries, I really don't get it sooner than the average person. I like to think this is because I enjoy the discovery process more than being right all along, but really, I have no idea if this is true. What is true is that I figured out the twists on the murder plot pretty quickly, and wasn't convinced when Carrell starting throwing up new misinformation. That was a suprise. On the other hand, I didn't mind all that much, because the far more interesting part was trying to follow her and her characters as they march through Elizabethan, Jacobian, and Shakespearean history, plus an overview of the major controversies of Shakespeare scholarship. It made me realize that I totally do not know my Shakespeare well enough. Have I read any of the English king plays? I don't think so. Or Lear? Have I read Lear? (Why, in my "Shakespeare's England" course in college, did we only read Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus? It was a history course, but still...)

I digress. The book is fun, but still sufficiently intelligent. And nicely creepy for curling up in bed at night.

Oh dear lord

From My Name is Will:

He probably would get laid at the Faire. He'd been to a Renaissance Faire once before, near L.A., a few month ago - May, was it? - and he'd gotten lucky, way lucky. Jesus, he'd fantasized about it dozens of times since. There was this game, Drench-a-Wench, that involved sling-shotting a wet sponge at an array of wanton maids sitting on a little bleacher of hay bales. If you hit one, you got a kiss. He'd wondered how long that game could possibly last with a new STD being discovered every day. Just for fun, he'd played. [He hits and kisses some blonde, and that was fine and then notices an exotic brunette checking him out, and she says...] "Truly, I am shocked, sir. Paying for thy kisses when thou couldst surely get them free."

Lovely. Just lovely. Anyone wondering how I came to exist, there's your answer right there.

Sunday reads - with lots of links

Every Sunday, the newspaper takes up much of my day. I have to sort it, and then read through it, spending more time with certain sections than others. For some reason, I save the Opinion/Book Review until the end. This doesn't really make sense, b/c by then I am tired of reading the paper, but yet I haven't seen fit to change my ways.

So today, I took that section out for coffee and discovered a few happy coincidences:

Professor Gordon Wood thinks about history. I don't usually have regrets about leaving academia, but articles on the state of academic history always leave me with a little longing. Reviewer and historian Douglas Brinkley (best known to me for his appearance in Spike Lee's masterful "When the Levees Broke") briefly explains the predominance of social history in the academy, and apparently neither Wood nor Brinkley like it too much, b/c it gets rid of the storytelling aspect of history and turns off the masses. (I don't really understand this sentiment - b/c can't it be both more interested in race, gender, and class and tell a good story????) Anyway, there is a nice little summation of Wood making perhaps a similar argument:

the incendiary warfare between the popularizers and academics must stop. Whether it's a bestselling Albert Einstein biography published by Simon & Schuster or an esoteric university press case study on the Watts riots using deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and structuralist Michel Foucault as gurus, the historian's mission should be the same: to communicate the past to everyday people. To Wood, an audience is essential if historians are going to influence the consciousness of our times. "We Americans have such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it," he writes. "What we need more than anything is a deeper and fuller sense of the historical process, a sense of where we have come from and how we have become what we are."

Well, amen, I guess.
Ben Ehrenreich talks about more books about the Odyssey. He's a good one to write this review, b/c he wrote this really wacky book loosely based on the Odyssey as well. This is a good reminder that maybe I should read the original one of these days (like apparently we should have in 10th grade).

A guy my parents knew when I was little is in the Opinion section. I love brushes with fame. And editorials in the paper are among my favorite kinds. Okay, so this guy Jess Winfield was one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, an oddly important part of my youth. (Their Hamlet - hey Mom, did Jess play Hamlet? Or no, he was Ophelia, right? - is almost key to an understanding of who I have grown up to be. Here's a video of it - but it's really not the same as seeing it outdoors sitting on hay bales with the original cast.) But I digress, b/c this article is about how Shakespeare would view the presidential candidates, and in what ways they do or do not resemble characters from the Bard's histories and tragedies. Really good stuff.

Tessa Hadley is interviewed on the NYTimes Book Review podcast. Um, technically this has nothing to do with reading the paper, but I was listening on the way home from the coffeeshop and grocery store, so am lumping it in. She is awesome. I like her bunches.